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The ‘California Values’ That Ruined California

Supporters cheer as conservative commentator and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Hilton waves the California State flag as he announces his campaign for California governor at the Pier Plaza in Huntington Beach Tuesday, April 22, 2025. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Drew Thomas Allen is a columnist for The Daily Signal, a conservative author, and publicist who hosts The Drew Allen Show. He is the author of America’s Last Stand, For Christ and Country: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, and his latest book, Clinton Hoax Obama Coup: the Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion.

President Trump’s endorsement of Steve Hilton for governor of California earlier this month has sent the Democratic establishment into predictable convulsions.

Katie Porter, one of the leading Democratic hopefuls, declared that the race now boils down to a stark choice: “California values against MAGA.” Others called Hilton a “Trump puppet.” The implication is clear: Any candidate endorsed by President Trump is a dangerous interloper foisting flyover-country extremism on the enlightened progressive utopia that is modern California.

One wonders what these “California values” actually are. The term is invoked with the same pious certainty once reserved for the Ten Commandments, yet the state it supposedly defines is America’s poster child for policy-induced decline.

Under one-party Democratic rule (with legislative majorities dating back decades and a full trifecta since 2011), California boasts the highest state income tax in the country, the highest gas prices, and among the most punitive regulations on business and housing. It leads the nation in homelessness while spending billions with little visible result. 

Sanctuary policies shield illegal immigrants from federal law enforcement, even as American citizens in working-class neighborhoods bear the brunt of the resulting crime and strained social services. 

California’s aggressive green energy ambition has delivered rolling blackouts, sky-high utility bills, and dangerous dependence on foreign oil — all while the state’s own refining capacity collapses. 

Businesses and middle-class families flee by the hundreds of thousands to Texas, Florida, and Nevada, voting with their U-Haul trailers against the very “values” Democrats insist define the state.

These are not the values that built California. The Golden State was forged by pioneers, Dust Bowl refugees, Okie farmers, aerospace engineers, and Hollywood dreamers who understood that merit, risk, and reward — not redistribution and guilt — were the engines of prosperity. 

It was the state of the Gold Rush, the great Central Valley farmlands, and the Southern California defense plants that helped win World War II, and the Silicon Valley garages where tinkerers became titans. 

Those California values prized self-reliance, law and order, affordable energy, secure borders, and the right of ordinary people to raise families without being priced out or preyed upon. They were, in short, what we now call MAGA values — though the acronym is new, the principles are as old as the Republic itself.

Steve Hilton, a naturalized American citizen who has lived and worked in California for years, has spent the better part of the last decade documenting precisely how far the state has fallen from those founding virtues. A former advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, he is no carpetbagging ideologue but a clear-eyed observer of progressive governance in action. 

He has watched, as Trump noted, while this once-great state “has gone to Hell.” Hilton’s platform — lower taxes, housing deregulation, crackdowns on crime and vagrancy, energy realism, and an end to one-party complacency — represents a return to the practical, results-oriented governance that made California the envy of the world, not its punchline.

Democrats’ frantic reframing is less about substance than self-preservation. Their “California values” are the values of coastal elites ensconced in gated enclaves in Atherton, Malibu, or Beverly Hills — people who send their children to private schools, employ private security, and lecture the rest of us about compassion while the working poor and middle class absorb the consequences of their experiments. 

The same politicians who champion open borders fly private jets to climate summits. The same officials who decry “systemic racism” oversee cities where Black and Hispanic residents suffer the highest rates of violent crime. The rhetoric of “values” is simply the latest euphemism for preserving a status quo that has enriched the few while beggaring the many.

Trump’s endorsement signals that the fight for California is now a national priority. A state that produces more than a tenth of the nation’s GDP, that once symbolized American dynamism, cannot be written off as a lost cause.

If Hilton prevails in the June top-two primary and carries the fight into November, he will do so with the explicit backing of a president who has already begun reversing the national decline Democrats spent years accelerating. Federal partnership on border security, energy production, and infrastructure —precisely what Sacramento has rejected — could begin the long work of restoration.

The Democrats’ panic is understandable. For years they have governed without serious opposition, confident that demographic destiny and cultural inertia would keep their machine humming. 

Trump’s intervention and Hilton’s candidacy threaten to expose the hollowness of their claims. The real choice before California voters is not between “California values” and some alien MAGA ideology; It is between the values that are emptying the state of its people, businesses, and hope, and the values that once made it the greatest state in the Union. 

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Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE

Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.

The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.

In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.

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