➡ Chris Moritz, author of “Failed State: A Portrait of California in the Twilight of Empire,” discusses the decline of California, attributing it to harmful policies and corruption within bureaucracies. He suggests that the state’s issues, such as increasing crime rates and homelessness, are not due to incompetence but are a deliberate design. Moritz also criticizes the state’s handling of forest fires and blames the influence of interest groups. He believes that Governor Gavin Newsom is part of a political machine more concerned with power than the welfare of the state.
➡ The text discusses the perceived opportunistic behavior of Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, and his reactions to various events in the state. It also touches on the issues of crime, drug use, and immigration in California, and the manipulation of language in politics. The text criticizes the decriminalization of certain crimes and drug possession, and the impact of these policies on the state. It ends with a discussion on the deadly drug fentanyl, and its prevalence in California.
➡ The text discusses issues in California, including border control, homelessness, corruption, and cartel influence. It mentions that during Biden’s term, cartels had significant control over the border. The state spent a large amount of money on housing for the homeless, but corruption led to overspending. The text also talks about the influence of cartels in California’s criminal economy and the shift in crime patterns from the 1990s to now, with violence spreading beyond certain neighborhoods. The author’s personal experience with crime in Santa Monica is also shared.
➡ The speaker discusses a criminal case in North LA and Ventura county, where the offender received a light sentence, sparking an investigation into the city’s justice system. The speaker suggests that California prioritizes criminals over civilians, which he believes is a strategic and engineered approach. He also mentions a book called “Failed State” available on Amazon, which further explores these issues.

Hi, folks. Welcome to Nino’s Corner tv. I’m with Chris Moritz, author of Failed State A Portrait of California in the Twilight of Empire. Chris man, thank you for joining me. Oh, delighted. So we’re all watching California right now. If it’s not burning, it’s having riots, protests, violence. What is going on with California? I mean, there’s so many things wrong with it. What is this book about? Well, this book is an autopsy on how you take what was once the crown jewel of the United States and turn it into the Third World. And that’s exactly what is happening now.

Does that mean walking down Rodeo Drive or a nice high street in Santa Monica it’s going to look like the Third World? No, but in terms of terms of very basic qualifiers, in terms of our quality of life, in terms of the uncontrolled crime wave, we are heading towards what can only be described as a. As a failed state. And the basic reason, the basic measure of what is a failed state, in my view, because this is a book about crime, is can the government protect you from violence? Theoretically, we give up our freedom in the Social Contract because the government is supposed to have that monopoly on violence.

And even where they cannot prevent some kind of harm from outside forces, from criminals, whatever, in this case foreign criminals, at least there should be an expectation of justice. But in California, there’s neither. So I’ve been to Santa Monica many times. I love Santa Monica. I’ve gone there many times. And this last time, I couldn’t believe I saw homelessness everywhere. People drugged out on fentanyl all over the streets. Businesses shutting down. All the big businesses were shut down. Yeah, and upscale retail stores, all of that. It’s just in massive decline. And I have friends out there that are now thinking of moving.

This has been done by design. I don’t believe that in any way, shape or form this was incompetence. Maybe at some levels it was incompetence, but this is the takedown of California was done by design, right? Yeah. Look, I think that. I think that at some level you’re right. Like there is incompetence within bureaucracies, but there’s also corruption within bureaucracies. There’s corruption within unions, obviously, state government unions that control Sacramento, the legislatures, the legislators, I should say, in Sacramento are for sure, like, ideologically extreme as well as incompetent. But if we. If we peel this back further, we.

And this is sort of the cuts to the core of my book, which is that laws were and policies were put in place starting about 2010 that have systematically resulted in the mass release of criminals, decriminalizing much of the penal code, unleashing gangs upon cities like Los Angeles by way of district attorney policies that eliminate things like what’s called an enhancement, whereby if you commit a crime and you’re in a gang, you get extra, extra penalty. That was all done away with in the era of George Gascon. Hopefully that we’re coming back from that. But the point that I make in the book is that these policies, and we can get into the details of them, but these policies were so foreseeably dangerous that you could not come to any other conclusion as long as you are a rational, reasonable person.

As we say in like torts law, if a reasonable person would have come to the conclusion that when you release dangerous criminals into the county system, but ultimately out back into the streets under the auspices of being, let’s say non violent, when they are not, in fact nonviolent, in fact, they have an entire criminal history that is not taken into account when making that designation. And there’s some specific laws I’m referring to here that this is going to result in harm upon the citizens. And so I could only come to the conclusion, if these laws were so foreseeably dangerous, then why are they doing them? Because it’s not just incompetence.

You cannot just place that on. Oh, we, we got, you know, carried away. I don’t think so. And I don’t think Gavin Newsom is. He is not himself a like the leading, like this, this collapse in some sort of concerted way per se. But I do think he is part of a political machine that is concerned only with its power and part of their power comes from the fact that the cities are in such disarray. I think he’s promised a run at the 2028 presidential. I believe that he’s going to be running for the 2028 presidential position.

That’s what I think is going on here. I think it’s happening right now with Trump. He’s openly defying Trump at every turn. He. Karen Basses. Karen Bass at will. They did it with, in 2020. Did it with the fires. Yeah, they’re doing it with the illegal immigrants, embolding and even empowering them. If National Guard wasn’t there and the military wasn’t there, LA would once again be in fire. Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear. I think it’s pretty clear. I was here during the 2020 riots when downtown Santa Monica was firebombed. And I watched as the police, police were ordered to stand down and, you know, blocks away from me and in the kind of commercial area, really nice part of Santa Monica, everything is boarded up like something is wrong.

Like there’s something really wrong here. And to suggest that, oh, well, it’s just been these exogenous events that have result that we’re responding to the fires. Right. That’s a natural disaster. This is result of the federal government. It’s an outside force. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party is always looking to shift the blame to the, to some outside force, when in fact it’s all of their policies that have resulted in this. Man. I mean, the fires are a great example. Like the fire should never have happened, even though we were experiencing. And by the way, I live one block away from the evacuation zone.

I watched like my neighbor’s houses burned down with holding water. I mean, wasn’t that a. Correct. The Santa Ines reservoir. That’s more than incompetence right there. In that case, it may just be incompetence. But I think where it does not become incompetence is when we talk about, let’s say controlled burns. Controlled burns in the state of California take seven years to get approved. In Montana, it happens within a week. In the rest of the western United States where they have significant forest fire issues, like there is a management in place that is not occurring here. Now.

Why is it not occurring here? Well, because California is captured by the, the green lobby. Right. It’s more of a cult at this point. But that’s one of the interest groups that controls the state. They control Gavin Newsom. So the political, the operators of the political machine have to respond to those pulling the levers. It’s not Gavin pulling the levers. Do you think it’s people involved with the ccp? Do you think it’s the, the globalist? Do you think it’s basically, you know, there’s theories that come out that, you know, these people are very controlled, the higher ups control them.

Such as, you know, the deep state, you know, ccp. What’s your thoughts on that? Honestly, they’re taking their marching order. CCP was involved. I think we’d have a much more orderly society. Okay. I used to live in China for two years. I worked for a state owned enterprise actually before I was in the Trump administration. After that, but prior to that, in 2016-18, I lived in Shanghai, worked for state owned enterprise. I mean, Shanghai is pristine, relatively. And there, there is no crime now, like Grant, that’s a police state. But like it’s also the case in across Asia.

There is, there is something obviously fundamentally beyond dysfunctional in this state. I think it’s a kind of a look, I call it in the twilight of empire because on the one hand it was a reference to the American empire. Are we in the twilight of that? But beyond that, it’s sort of looking at California in the context of other civilizations that have committed. And California is in that process. So if they’re not taking their marching orders from CCP or, or could they be taking it from people like who, who are they taking their orders from? Because I.

Incompetence. Sure. Obama, is it Soros, what special interests? Yeah, good question. Different ways to answer this. I think if we, if we look at first at Gavin Newsom, like that’s not the same. Not, that’s not the same constituency that let’s say the, the legislature is sort of taking their direction from. But looking at Newsom, we find that he has effectively been owned as a product by the Getty family starting his career, introducing him to San Francisco society. Their parents go back, way back. Their grandparents go way back. The Browns are involved in this. The Pelosi’s are related.

They’re all related. They all live in Pacific Heights, which is a posh neighborhood in San Francisco. And they have more or less jockeyed between controlling the governor or controlling some level up right before the governor since the 1940s, with, you know, a few, a few breaks in between. But Gavin Newsom was. I, I don’t think there’s any way to think of him as anything except a product of the people that fund him because he’s not ideological. I think that that would imply that he had some kind of level of agency. I don’t think that’s the case.

We can agree that he’s owned. He’s owned. Yeah, he’s. Look, Gavin Newsome is reactive to everything. So I don’t even like particularly cast him as the villain of this story. He simply is a, is, is, is reacting to the events that he, that occur in the, in the dysfunctional state that he is the titular head of. But you know, everything he does is about personal opportunism. I don’t think there’s any, there’s, there’s nothing else. Right. That’s it. That is, that is his core being because he’s a product. He is literally like a lab made product. And you’re right, like he is going to run like there’s no question about that.

And he’s salivating. I’m sure. At this whole mayhem in L. A Because, again, it’s his opportunity. And other Democrats in other. Other jurisdictions, like New York City, are now also taking this as an opportunity. Like show their. Themselves as tough guys against the administration. Senator Padilla getting thrown out and arrested a few days ago. Oh, I saw that. Right. It’s kind of like outrage, right? Yeah. And they’re all indulging in it. Yeah. Yeah, they are. So let’s, let’s fast forward to now. Let’s, you know, from 2020, the things that happened with 2020. The big boogeyman where everyone’s scared, everyone’s sick, and then you go into the fires.

And now here we are with the LA protests that we’re trying to ignite into riots. Yeah. To ignite into 2.0. You know, Newsom, along with the MSN, will have you believe that with this deceptive rhetoric that the military is being used against Americans, against Americans. Right. But this is like igniting division within America. Miswording and sending mixed messages that they’re being used against Americans. No, they’re being used against violent protest and illegal. The ICE is being used for illegal immigrants. Big difference than American citizens. Correct? I mean, I think so. I think that. I, I don’t.

It’s so funny that. It’s not funny. It’s. I mean, it’s perfectly. Some of this is comical. It’s not. It’s also like, perfectly predictable. Like the, The. The response of a Gavin Newsom or a Karen Bass or other law. Other California Democrat leaders. It’s perfectly predictable how they were going to respond. But the, the fact of the matter is that Los Angeles has been in, In a way, occupied by. By the machine. I. I don’t know what. How else to describe it. It is the machine that controls California. It’s been occupied by this machine. This machine has unleashed criminality upon the entire city.

And I’ll tie it back to a personal anecdote in a moment. But when I saw ICE come into the city and when I saw the National Guard support them, I felt like it was truly. This was Liberation Day. We are being liberated from these people. And it is a city held hostage. It is a city held hostage by ideology, by corruption and other forces. I’ll read you a headline. It said, marines to deploy on LA streets within two days with authority to detain civilians. Now they use the word civilians. So this is how they’re playing word games with.

And title games with the public. But civilians, citizens, illegals are not American citizens. That, that’s. See, that’s the disconnect here. People need to understand you. You break the law coming into this country illegally, you can do it legally. There’s a big difference here. And. Yeah, good. Where was that headline from? Just curious. I do not know. I just put it in here. I don’t have the source, but. Oh, no worries. I was just wondering was if that’s a California heading around. I scoured through the Internet for liberal headline. Yeah, well good because. Because actually you touch on a really important theme that I address in my book, which is the manipulation of language.

Correct. Right. So that’s what California politicians are really adept at this. And it, it’s, it’s, it’s led to very deadly consequences. So. But that’s how liberals get triggered. Yeah, they don’t re. They just see that, they glance at a headline and they go, whoa, right. All hell breaks loose. So like you probably have heard of Prop 47, which was the, the decriminal. Effectively decriminalization of stealing. In other words, recognizing reducing $900. $950 would be the threshold between a misdemeanor and a felony. So anything under 950 is a misdemeanor. But these misdemeanors are not even being prosecuted in any way.

So Effectively you commit $949 worth of theft every single day with zero consequence. But here’s a little known fact that’s not very well known, but the way the bill that Prop 47 was sold to California and it was done so by the marketing efforts of a very elite powerhouse Democrat PR firm called Bear Star Strategies that’s run Gavin Newsom’s entire career by the way, and Kamala’s. But they called this proposition the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. Right, right. In. In 2011 we passed a law called AB109 that was the first of a series of so called criminal justice reform laws that have resulted in the crime wave we’re seeing now.

And the, the idea behind this law was they’re trying to reduce prison populations. Because the Supreme Court had ruled a year prior to that that California state prisons were in violation of the sec. Of the 8th Amendment. Cruel Unusual punishment due to their overcrowding. So we had to respond to this ruling. And a series of laws ostensibly to address that were put into place starting with AB109. And AB109 was the basis of it was that non violent, non serious offenders would be transferred from state prisons to local county prisons to reduce that, you know, that, that, that reduce that ratio in the state prisons to Be more in compliance with Supreme Court.

But here’s where I think it, It’s a great illustration of the language. Manipulation. Non violent, non serious meant only the last crime for which you had been incarcerated. It did not take into account your entire criminal history. So you might, right? You might, you might do have a horrendous track record. But if the last crime that you were put in jail for was shoplifting, that would be a basis to get transferred to a county jail. And by the way, the county jails couldn’t handle this. This influx was, I think it was 15,000 prisoners, they couldn’t handle it, so they just got immediately released.

And within three years, I believe the stat is within three years of, of being released, like 66% are, are rearrested and then 43% are convicted. So I was in San Francisco not too long ago, and I went, you know, I used to be a professional heavyweight boxer and I went out there to go look at, see the place I fought before. It was a Fisherman’s Wharf. And I saw on the phone, on the app, it was like permanently closed. And I was like, wow. I was with my friend, I was like, let’s just go check it out.

I don’t know why it’s permanently closed. I have no idea. Let’s go check it out. Well, we win at night. Big mistake. Big mistake. So we’re driving over there and it’s skid row. I mean, the whole place is just overrun with people defecating on the streets. People drugged out fentanyl use all over the place. Dude. We got out of the car, saw a needle laying on the, on the sidewalk. And then there’s a restaurant. Then there’s a, a pretty nice restaurant adjacent to us where a couple was coming out and they were just like, not even paying attention to the people defecating on the street.

People screaming the insanity. And I’m looking at my friend going, wow, they’re like used to this. They’re like. And we’re just looking around going, this is insane. Yeah. How lenient are the. I mean, I mean, they just got it blocked off like an, on a 1 mile radius or what’s going on here? What’s the drug scene like in California? Because what are the drug laws like fentanyl, all these drugs that are killing people. I mean, they seem very lenient. Yeah, well, actually another facet of Prop 47 was decriminalizing possession. So that I think exacerbated this problem significantly.

But there’s a couple different angles to this one. 60% of the fentanyl that enters the United States comes in through California. Percent. 60%. Wow. Yeah, wow. And fentanyl is on everything is in everything. The way it was described to me by the police officers I interviewed for my book was that fentanyl is like salt. If you get a pill off the street, it will have fentanyl in it to kill a person. Right, right. It’s, it’s, it’s. I don’t remember the exact statistic on, on how deadly is, but it’s obviously like the most deadly drug we’ve ever seen.

Like a grain of rice. That amount is enough to kill this. Do we know if Trump’s policies, border policies, has cut to 60% to 40%, 30%? I don’t know. Number or is that. I don’t know. But it is clear that under the Biden, in the Biden years, the cartels completely owned the border. Every single person that, that crossed the southern border during that time did so with the. Basically having paid the cartels to bring them over. That, that’s what Tom Holman told me when I, for, for the, when I was researching for the book. So, so we effectively abnegated our sovereignty on that and California paid the price.

I will tell you that as far as the homeless situation goes, there’s 75,000 homeless in LA County. 75,000? Yeah. Yeah. We spent like one and a half billion dollars to build some like tiny houses that were so over, over budget and it was like a, what is it? Cost plus or whatever that it ended up that each house costs like, and these are tiny, like mini houses. Each house costs like half a million dollars, something like that. The corruption is very, very endemic and there’s already fraud. Yeah. Is that what you’re getting at? Pardon? Mortgage fraud? Is that where you’re going with this? Oh, no, it’s more fraud in terms of like what we typically see in California.

NGOs that are politically connected, consulting firms that are politically connected. Take, get on, get these no bid contracts from the city or from the state. I mean, how do you get a, the, the train to nowhere? Like, people don’t realize how the, the gravity of that. It sounds funny, but it’s, it’s like a world historical disaster in terms of transportation infrastructure. And, and you know, it’s, it’s now they’re talking about $138 billion which, to complete it and the reason it has gone so badly is because just like with homeless, just like with all these issues, the environment with, with, you know, environmental stewardship, it’s outsourced to politically connected consulting firms or NGOs, ideological NGOs and, and, and corrupt entities.

And this is why nothing changes, because we live in a one party state. Democrats control 75% of the legislature. They have controlled that to that degree since 2012, continuously. And so really the only thing that Democrats are concerned with is preservation of the status quo. And that means the preservation of their power indefinitely or in perpetuity, I should say. You can’t get change, you cannot get responsibility in a, in a, in a monopoly. I mean, it’s just like it’s not, it’s not hard to figure this out. Like if there is no competition, if there’s no, there’s no accountability, then you’re going to result in mismanagement and corruption and an echo chamber where you’re increasingly radical because it’s kind of one upmanship within the legislature who can come up with the more progressive idea.

Meanwhile, you have, you know, billionaires like, you know, like Soros, I, which I always sort of say cautiously because you know, I don’t. He has become like this, this like obviously like cliche boogeyman. But it’s true. I mean, he funded George Gascon, he funded Pamela Price in Oakland, he Chesa Bodine in San Francisco. They were all his people. But you know, there are other institutions as well, you know, like the Ford foundation, like the Arnold foundation. Like it goes on and on and on, that it put tens of millions of dollars into policies and politicians that have resulted in a explosion in crime and a degradation in life for most Californians.

You know, I live here in El Paso, Texas. I’m right here on the border. So I’ve seen a lot of stuff growing up here on both sides of Ciudad Juarez and in El Paso. So I’ve always been told that the two biggest, the two most corrupt states really are California, Colorado and California. I’ve always heard. I mean, every state is corrupted to a degree, obviously, but cartels run everything. And they’ve taken hold of the political system. They’re even in our police force. They’re in everything. How much of the cartel influence do you think is, is in California? I have a whole chapter on it.

It’s called cartelization. And the presence of the Mexican drug cartels in California is profound. I was truly shocked when I learned the details of it talking to law enforcement. What emerges is the following picture and sequence of, of encroachment. Sometime in the late 2000s, it appears that the Mexican drug cartels made a move into California, Southern California in particular, to take over the distribution business. Right. They already were the suppliers, but now they wanted to handle distribution that had had, prior to that time, had been more or less controlled by legacy black gangs like the Bloods and the Crips.

And it was neighborhood kind of based, territorial, street corner to street corner. The cartels industrialized this. And they said to the black gangs that if you sell dope without our permission or without paying us a tax, we will cut your heads off. And they meant it. They meant it literally. No. And so fast forward to today and the entire criminal economy of California, at least organized crime appears to be controlled directly or indirectly by the drug cartels. And the reason they’re able to exert this power is because they essentially are the final authority over the major, frankly, Latino gangs in the state.

They may be American, like Latino American gangs, but like, nevertheless, there is an alignment across all of these different, even previously, rival gangs who report to prison gangs. So prison gangs actually rule the street, as it was told to me by multiple law enforcement officers who would know. And. And because the prisons rule the street and the. And the cartels kind of run the prison gangs, you can see that the cartels ultimately control the streets. But aren’t they hand in hand with the Chinese? With the Chinese as well? Well, the Chinese are supplying the cartels with precursor chemicals that are used to produce the fentanyl.

The manufacturing of it? Yeah. So the Chinese are not manufacturing fentanyl. The Chinese are actually using, like, money laundering and like, trade laundering to get greenbacks, to get dollars in China, because there’s controls on how much US Currency you can hold in China and how much you can take out of the country. So there’s all these black market economies that exist to get around the capital controls. And so they are selling the precursor chemicals to the cartels in exchange for dollars. The cartels are using it to make the fentanyl. And then the fentanyl ends up almost.

Almost entirely in the United States. And to the black gangs that sell it. Well, it’s actually, it’s. Yes, but it’s mostly the Latino gangs because the black gangs have gotten pushed out. In fact, as the black gangs got pushed out of the drug market, they had to start finding other lines of revenue. So they turned up residential burglary, they turned to retail theft. Flash mob. Yeah, flash mobs. Those are all gangs. They’re not like, it’s not Les Miserables, Right? Like, they’re all gangs. And all of these, like, most of these residential burglaries that have Become so prolific in, in places like Los Angeles are organized, you know, there’s a, it’s actually called flocking, where a crew will like scout neighborhoods that are very far away from their sort of, you know, territory, if you will.

So are they going to suburbia? Suburbia and doing this? Yeah, suburbia, yeah. Really? The gangs are going there and what, doing a house jacking? Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. I mean, and that’s, that’s what has been so different in the crime, in the, in the nature of crime now compared to, let’s say, the 1990s. So as it was described to me, the 1990s was a very violent time, probably more violent in terms of just raw numbers of homicides than today. But the difference between the 90s and today is that whereas in the 90s, the violence was contained to certain neighborhoods, even just blocks within neighborhoods, today the violence and the criminality has spread well beyond the.

Sorry, well beyond the, the confines of like South LA and into the rest of the city because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s ripe for the taking. And so as, as it was said to me, like the difference between the 90s and now is that now they’re targeting all of us all the time. And that has never happened before. So Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills, right, exactly. Beverly Hills. Like a lot of people migrating out of Beverly Hills now. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people are just getting the hell out of California. Obviously we’ve all heard that.

I have friends in Santa Monica that are leaving. I mean, I’m sure Beverly Hills people are just. Man, that used to be such a magical place. Yeah, yeah, magical place. Look, so the reason I wrote, I wrote this book was because in, in 2023, my house in Santa Monica was home. Invaded burglary, hot prowl burglary two nights in a row by an Ms. 13 gangster, convicted felon, illy, who had been deported by Trump and came back into the country under Biden and went on a crime spree committing dozens of these kind of very aggressive burglaries in which people were home at the time.

And ultimately he was not charged for a single count of one of these, of these hot proud burglaries in Los Angeles county. Because it’s like, what’s the point? That’s how the cops view it every year. Like, what’s the point? And it was only to the north of LA and Ventura county that he was charged for two counts of these crimes and he got a two year sentence. He’ll probably serve Less than that and a $300 fine. So when I learned about all this, like, and the details in particular about this. About this individual, I was just so blown away and shocked that it began an investigation into what actually was going on in the city.

And I. I started talking to law enforcement, but also extensively in the. In the DA’s office. And one of the first deputy DAs I talked to, I described the story to her, and she said to me, well, what. So she said, what’s so remarkable about your story is how relatable it is. And I was like, relatable? Like, how could this be relatable? And that changed my whole way of thinking about California. If this is relatable and there’s no expectation of protection or justice. Right. Like the guy coming into your house. Right. You can’t. In Texas, we can.

Right. In California, you do that, you’re going to jail. Yeah, exactly. So just let them house jack you. Right, right. And the reason we’ve gotten to this point. Yeah. California prioritizes criminals above. Above. Above civilians, to use the word. Right. That’s. That’s engineered, bro. That’s. That’s something to me that you can’t. You can’t turn a blind eye to. That. That’s strategic and engineered. Yeah. Chris, where do people get your book, man? Failed state. Yeah. Amazon’s probably best place. And you can check my. My writings. Also on X at. Chris G. Moritz. Chris Moritz. Thank you so much, Chris, for joining me.

While you shed a lot of light on this, I’m gonna have a good time figuring out a title for this one. I appreciate you coming on. Oh, yeah, delighted. It was fun. Yeah, awesome. Gave me some insight on all of this. God bless you, sir. And now I’m gonna get your book. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
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