..."callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

...One of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming.

...To walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate, inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold. Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of Thucydides or Procopius.

...In California’s upside-down morality, what is ethical is allowing thousands to live in fetid filth and to endanger their own health and that of an entire city, or waving in millions of foreign nationals without health audits, background checks, or legal permission. The Silicon Valley moralist at coffee seethes that Trump “put people in cages,” while in private is relieved that there are not caravans of tens of thousands headed his way from Central America—in the age of the coronavirus.

What is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S. residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new home.

Instead, opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English, money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts.

Fewer experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without licenses, insurance, and registration.

No moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients.

...Those legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950 never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop, especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously less than $950 in loot.

California has become a cruel and unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion.

Read more here.