California continues its collapse into ‘third worldism’

 by Andrea Widburg

America was once a high-trust, low-crime country. That’s changed in Democrat-run cities, which have deliberately opted for third-world-style policies: No policing, no consequences, and no Biblically-based values saying theft is wrong.

One of the hallmarks of the third world is that urban areas are low-trust, high-crime communities, where policing is invisible, and gaming the system, rather than supporting it, is a virtue. These societies also reject our Western reverence for private property, which sees policing it as being as important as policing life. The Western world figured out a long time ago that supporting the former supports the latter.

Rampant crime inevitably spells the end of infrastructure. If thieves can steal the infrastructure's prerequisites with impunity—the wires, fittings, valves, metals, etc.—the system collapses. It’s a downward spiral because more people turn to crime when they can’t access electricity or water, which leads to food shortages, since all of those things depend on a functioning infrastructure.

As an example of what I mean, look at what’s happened to South Africa. No matter how morally wrong the old Afrikaners were, they maintained modern policing standards, and their cities had strong infrastructure. That’s all collapsed, so much so that huge swaths of Johannesburg, South Africa, which is that nation’s equivalent of New York, are dysfunctional:

Theft is a significant part of the problem:

There’s always a temptation to say, “That can’t happen here. We’re too rich, powerful, well-managed, modern...” But of course, it can happen here. South Africans would have said the same two decades ago.

And here’s the thing, it is already happening here in California’s grossly mismanaged Democrat cities. In Oakland, California, which has had Democrat mayors for 49 years (and with each mayor more radical than the one before), copper theft is destroying internet connections:

Copper theft, a persistent problem across the Bay Area that has disrupted 911 service and closed a DMV office, is now knocking out internet service in Oakland, officials say.

 

Since the start of the year, thieves have been targeting copper cables used for telecommunications in the Oakland Hills, specifically on a roughly 8-mile stretch of Skyline Boulevard from Evergreen Avenue to the northeastern edge of Knowland Park, according to the Oakland Police Department. OPD did not detail exactly how many instances of copper theft occurred in recent months but said there have been multiple reports going back to late January.

AT&T spokesperson Chris Collins confirmed to SFGATE that an outage on Tuesday was caused by copper wire theft. The company also reported back-to-back outages, on April 15 and 16, he added.

 

That’s third worldism, a culture of theft because policing is broken, leaving criminals to operate with impunity. The city has erased respect for property rights.

It’s just as bad in Los Angeles, another leftist city that’s embraced third-world values and is losing its electricity:

Copper wire thieves stripping streetlights of the expensive strands have plunged residents of a Los Angeles neighborhood into darkness — as the toll to taxpayers reaches into the millions, a city official revealed to The Post.

Bandits most recently targeted Mar Vista, leaving several blocks of the leafy enclave without lighting and forcing locals to carry flashlights.

[snip]

Copper has become gold for bandits who rip into the bottom of street lamps to swipe the wiring inside and sell it for scrap. The cost of their crimes has skyrocketed to seven figures, with thousands of poles across LA in need of attention, the official said. A single pole can cost up to $2,000 to repair.

The thieves then sell the lucrative wiring for cash, no questions asked, with buyers often turning a blind eye to its origins, the official claimed.

It’s all a matter of priorities, of course. While Oakland can’t keep its phone lines working, it has the money for expensive “social justice,” non-white high school field trips:

Yesterday Steve Watson at Modernity News reported that Albany United School District, which is in the Oakland area, recently took a bunch of high school students on a very spendy and very exclusive “social justice” field trip across the country—so exclusive in fact that the white kids were barred from joining in, as this was only for “young men and women of color.”

Third-world policies quickly create third-world environments. And once those environments are in place, the rich white liberals who voted for these policies pack up and leave, with poor people of all colors left in the resulting pre-modern, savage hellholes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/california_continues_its_collapse_into_third_worldism.html