After a week of vacation on an Alaskan cruise out of Vancouver, my adorable wife, along with two other couples that are very good friends returned to Southern California Sunday. We had not seen a lick of news, the first time I’ve unplugged like that in years. We saw orca whales, humpback whales, dozens of otters, a leopard seal feasting on the remains of one of the first salmon returning home to Ward Creek in Ketchikan, three glaciers, one that was calving a little bit, and all sorts of fun and food.
We spent most of the day Saturday back in Vancouver waiting for the flight home, and hadn’t had a burger all week. So I Googled the best burgers in the city, and the top two were immediately ruled out. They were both hotel restaurant brunchy burgers, not a true burger joint. In third place was DownLow Burgers in a joint called the American Hotel. If there was a hotel there, I didn’t see it. It looked like a pool hall that made burgers to help wash down the beer. But we decided to be adventurous and took the Sky Train a couple stops east, and walked a couple blocks. We definitely were on the seedier side of town, but kept our eyes on the prize. And we hit paydirt. The burgers were out of this world, our waitress was absolutely adorable when we told her we came all the way from California to try these burgers. She was astounded, until I admitted truthfully it was the burgers…and an Alaskan cruise.
On the way back to the train, we passed a couple cannabis dispensaries, which seemed to be the congregation point of some of Vancouver’s residents without access to either housing or bathrooms. Urine has a familiar smell in all seasons, but takes on a special pungency above 70 degrees, which is normal for the city this time of year. We meandered over to the Gastown district, featuring the world’s first steam-powered public clock by the waterfront, and noticed that it was also not as gentrified as previously advertised, because of the predictable results of the ubiquitous cannabis stores on every other street.
Which brings me to California. The societal decay from the legalization of pot is on display in the Golden State, along with every other state that has decided to legally partake, despite what federal law has to say about it. There is simply no place in America that has legalized pot that can honestly report that crime, drug use, and homelessness has gone down. It hasn’t. In the decade preceding legalization of pot in California, homelessness statewide decreased from 140,000 to 110,00. But post-2016, when the Golden State began going up in reefer smoke, there has been a 42% increase in people living on the streets. Mental illness cases have skyrocketed, and there are 53% more emergency room visits that are cannabis-related. Youth use of pot has increased, and the black market legalization was intended to wipe out has more than doubled. It’s been a disaster everywhere you look by any measure, unless you’re Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrats. It’s been pretty good for business and political donations.
When Border Czar Tom Homan began appearing on television during the transition period of President-Elect Trump in late 2024, he promised he was going to do three things beginning on January 20th – he was going to close the border, he was going to round up and deport the most violent and dangerous of the illegal aliens Joe Biden let wander all across the country, and he was going to begin to locate the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors the Biden administration lost. Many of those minors were feared absorbed into the illicit sex trade, while others were being used as forced child labor. Here’s what Homan said was coming back in December.
Homan has already accomplished the first mission. The border is closed as tight as Sheldon Whitehouse’s club membership committee. And felons by the planeloads are being returned to countries of origin, third-party countries willing to accept them if their home countries won’t take them, or to prisons domestically until their path out of the country can be arranged.
On Friday, a national story out of a couple marijuana fields in Camarillo put a face on the rescuing children part of the operation. With warrants in hand after a federal investigation, Glass House Farms was raided Friday, with as many as ten minors here illegally working the fields.
Gavin Newsom was pissed. Okay, he was in South Carolina, one of the three early primary states in 2028, running for president. But he was still angry, and posted this video in a desperate move to frame the government as coming there to seize the children.
The problem, of course, is that the feds were not removing kids from their poor mothers in the fields. They were rescuing kids smuggled into the country that somehow had became slave labor. Even under California’s very relaxed marijuana laws, there still is a law on the books that says you cannot work in this industry under the age of 21. Some of the kids rescued were as young as 14.
Newsom, along with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and most of the other elected Democrats in this state, have been at the forefront of resistance against enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. They demand, and continue to encouraging protests, to maintain the Golden State’s sanctuary status. Democrats continue to F around, and now they’re finding out. And so are we.
Let me put on my shocked face to discover that the owner of the child labor camp growing and harvesting pot, Graham Farrar, is a major donor to both Newsom and Democrats up and down the state. You have to ask the question, if Newsom was this exposed to such an obvious violation of child labor law, and yet he still poked the bear, believing he was going to out-bully the President of the United States, what did he think would end up happening?
Donald Trump has now added another notch to the belt of things I did not believe he could get Democrats to do. Now, they’re in favor of keeping the status quo on cannabis farms. They are defending forced child labor. This is Oxnard Mayor Luis McArthur:
Jimmy Gomez is a Democrat Congressman from Los Angeles, currently serving on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Tom Homan reminded people that kids were being saved here, and it’s not the first time some of Biden’s missing children have been found.
“Look, we’re looking for over 300,000 missing children. We’ve already found 10,000 Have you heard that anywhere?”—Tom Homan on the weed farm raid and finding 8 unaccompanied children.
Credit: @KarluskaP pic.twitter.com/4Db7AqZhw1
— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) July 11, 2025
Remember former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her mission for the children…that is, those children that don’t get aborted on demand up to the point of delivery?
Nancy Pelosi: “My whole mission in politics is about the children.”
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) May 23, 2025
It’s always about the children for her.
Nancy Pelosi calls to vote no on the OBBB — “and throw a punch for the children.” pic.twitter.com/UR5Var2Yvp
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 2, 2025
Unless, of course, they’re not out in the fields picking buds where they belong and harshing her mellow in front of a TV camera.
Nancy Pelosi ELBOWS the little daughter of new GOP Congresswoman Mayra Flores — what a witch. pic.twitter.com/nTLrUhEJbp
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 26, 2022
Pelosi in a 2020 House COVID recovery bill defended her cannabis carveout as “therapy”.
PELOSI on cannabis provisions in House coronavirus bill:
“I don’t agree that cannabis is not related to this.”
House Democrats are continuing to try and push unrelated COVID-19 wish-list items. All of them should be taken out. pic.twitter.com/3yYf8QSv0r
— Senate Republican Communications Center (@SRCC) July 31, 2020
I suppose she doesn’t see these unaccompanied minors being forced to work the pot crops as child labor. She sees them as generational therapeutic facilitators.
There you go. Democrats are now the official sponsor of child labor camps. They refuse to dignify the term illegal with a response, so legal child labor, illegal child labor, what difference at this point does it make? How long before Democrats become the conduit for Uyghur relocation from China’s Xinjiang Province to the States so that we can pick up the slack in the Mary Jane supply chain?
I’m sorry I came back from Alaska. Oh, sure, the politics up north are just as goofy as down here in the lower 48, and they have their share of problems from loco weed fallout as well. But it’s such an enormous state that the stupidity index, like their population, is much less dense. Alaska is just not as concentrated in dumb as it is in Southern California.
