A City Full Of Insane Communists Is Experiencing A Financial Crisis

The night after President Donald Trump’s tough and confrontational State of the Union Address, I drove over to Downtown Los Angeles and spent several hours walking laps around an office building. The FBI was supposed to be inside, serving search warrants on the office of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, while other agents searched his home. No one has said yet what the FBI is investigating, but there are theories.

The LAUSD has been nosediving like a broken airplane. Ten years ago, the district had almost 650,000 students. Today, enrollment has fallen below 400,000. In one decade, a major urban school district lost a quarter of a million students. With sociopathic shamelessness, district leaders blame ICE raids — you knew that was coming — and Donald Trump, the shiny orange object that blue states and cities always use to mask their failures. But the decline was already well underway during the Biden years, obviously preceding the return to the enforcement of immigration laws.

Shedding hundreds of thousand of students, the LAUSD has plummeted into financial crisis, recently sending out thousands of layoff notices. Aggressive budget cuts land precisely as the district struggles to finance the settlement of a long series of sexual misconduct claims.

All of these problems have to be solved in the face of a daily flood of radical politics. Remember the list of demands the United Teachers of Los Angeles submitted to the district when the school board proposed to return to in-person learning during the pandemic. They weren’t coming back to the classroom, teachers said, until America defunded the police, imposed punitive taxes on the rich, implemented Medicare for all, gave free homes to all of the homeless, and eliminated all forms of standardized testing. Weirdly, an institution full of hallucinatorily insane actual communists is experiencing a financial crisis.

While federal agents searched district headquarters and school staff contemplated their layoff notices, members of the school board were inside the building, working on the crisis. Sorry, I’m not being clear: They were working on the climate crisis. The LAUSD’s “Climate Resilience Committee” met on Wednesday afternoon, hashing out agenda items like “climate literacy” and “green schoolyards.” The meeting was staffed by the district Eco-Sustainability Office, led by Chief Eco-Sustainability Officer Christos Chrysiliou. On a base salary last reported a couple years ago at $221,894, his total pay and benefits hit $286,394 in 2024. On a positive note, apparently he’s the guy who’s finally going to stop the climate from changing, so maybe drop him a thank you note.

Walking around LAUSD headquarters on Wednesday, I never found the FBI. And I never found Carvalho, who wouldn’t have answered my questions anyway. But I passed the school campus that sits just up the street, and I passed the decrepit RVs that people live in next to the campus. And I stepped through the piles of garbage that the residents of the RVs throw onto the sidewalks. Signs on a school fence warned that the RVs were parked in a “SAFE SCHOOL ZONE” where there would be special penalties for breaking the law. I watched a shirtless dude with an interesting amount of fidgety energy spraypaint a wall near one of the signs, possibly signaling that he wasn’t concerned about the warning. The great thing about Los Angeles is that the contradictions are never so subtle that it takes a lot of energy to find them.

This pile of garbage from homeless people and drug addicts sits outside the back end of the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, by the way, where students can attend several different specialized high schools, including the School of Social Justice.

Driving home, I passed through Skid Row, where hundreds of dogs live in tents with drug addicts. A particularly aggressive animal rescuer named Joey Tuccio — an activist solving problems local government won’t bother with — recently found eleven dogs on Skid Row trying to chew their way out of their cages, because they had no food or water. The homeless woman caging the dogs threatened to stab anyone who tried to let them out.

Blue states, and blue cities, have gone floridly and relentlessly insane. Blue institutions can’t do anything useful, and don’t try to do anything useful. There is no problem they can solve. Blue state leaders have meetings about demanding that the climate not be allowed to change anymore, surrounded by homeless people dying of drug overdoses in piles of garbage. (Their dogs also overdose, by the way, because they’re surrounded by drugs.) Places run by Democrats aren’t going to change course. They don’t know how. They’re lost.

Even if the Trump administration doesn’t choose to intervene to address a serious list of the problems blue cities have brought on themselves — and remember that just under 1.2 million people voted for Trump in 2024 in Los Angeles County — the madness and depravity of blue states and cities is a political liability that has to be tied around the necks of Democratic Party politicians. Everything in the blue cities is failing. It’s a death cult. Noticing the widespread fraud, as Trump said on Tuesday night, is only a start. Nothing here works. Say so.

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.