'Circling the drain': California has become a warning to the nation

California once stood as the symbol of American innovation and unity — but today, it has become the warning sign for a nation in decline.

Harmeet Dhillon and BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan both live in California, and while it remains one of the most aesthetically beautiful places to live, policy and unity-wise, it is anything but beautiful.

“Some younger folks may not remember the time when people would be giving speeches on the opposite sides of something in Congress, and then they would play basketball together afterwards,” Dhillon tells Shanahan.

“That doesn’t happen any more in D.C., and it doesn’t happen any more in Sacramento. I mean, Sacramento has become like the paradigm of, you know, just sclerotic inefficiency over there. It’s just a one-party state, with terrible results for the consumers because of that,” she continues.

“If we had a vibrant two-party state here, we would have some compromise, and we would have some solutions,” she says, noting that instead the state is just “circling the drain” and has become “unlivable here for most people.”

And despite the way Silicon Valley and other densely populated areas of California may vote, Dhillon points out that when “you look at the map, California is a red state.”

“There’s a thin slice of blue on the coast, where there’s a population overload, but most of the state ... you just drive an hour into the interior of our state, and there’s Trump signs everywhere, and there’s people working with their hands, and there’s people involved in their communities, and there’s nature, and there’s beauty,” she says.

“It is really two states in that sense. … But, you know, it’s sort of with self-interested line-drawing and the so-called independent commission, which isn’t independent. It really defines a ceiling for Republicans right now, until that system changes,” she continues.

“We’ve had Republican leaders in the state when the state was great, and I don’t think other states want to emulate California’s infrastructure, its schools, its, you know, health care system,” she says, adding, “We are not a paradigm of anything positive right now, and that should change.”

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