Cracked, Costly Fantasies

Dan O’Sullivan traces the legacy of right-wing ideologies in California.

By Dan O’SullivanJune 28, 2025

• Politics

• History

“BELIEVE IT OR NOT,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted on June 9, “California used to be a paradise. Mass migration has brought us to where we are now.” Even had I not turned on the news that day to more scenes of Los Angeles police forces brutalizing protesters and journalists in the streets over ICE sweeps across the city, it’s unclear when, exactly, California was the sort of white, Anglo-Saxon paradise Miller is alluding to. Ever since Mexico ceded half its territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, California has posed a challenge for America’s nascent fascists. How, wondered slave-state politicians, could they acquire California’s riches without conceding to its abolitionist tendencies? By the time of the state’s admittance in 1850, President Zachary Taylor—“hero” of the Mexican-American War—had kicked the can down the road, admitting California as a free state while also expanding its transport links to the rest of the country. It was urgent, after all: the year before, gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill. The decision, part of the aptly named Compromise of 1850, set the tone for California’s relationship to the rest of the country up to today: desired, envied, essential. Resented.

With its physical beauty, fertile land, and sunny climate, it’s no surprise that California attracts people from all over the country, and the world. (“They say all native Californians,” opines Fred MacMurray’s murderous insurance agent in Double Indemnity, “come from Iowa.”) Perhaps more surprising is that, despite the state’s reputation for liberalism—and, more recently, as a punching bag for our strongman president—California has been arguably the most important laboratory in the country for the development of extremist far-right, xenophobic, and racist ideologies. The fact that a Santa Monica–born white nationalist like Miller loathes the current state of his homeland is not shocking: what has always frustrated the Right is that for all of California’s purportedly Edenic qualities, its potential as a utopia of conservative power to be replicated nationwide, it has always proven stubbornly resistant to such designs. As the late Mike Davis wrote in his epochal study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), the tension between the “sunshine” of Stephen Miller’s fabled, long-disappeared white paradise and the “noir” of black-clad police battling resistant Mexican Americans is the conflict here.

Iterations of this conflict—the sunny sales pitch versus the shadowy reality—stretch back to the state’s earliest days. As a fresh wave of Chinese immigrants settled in California en masse following the gold rush, an 1850 law levied a $20 per month tax exclusively on “foreign miners.” The Long Depression of the 1870s produced an even more striking reaction: “THE CHINESE INVASION! They Are Coming, 900,000 Strong,” screamed the headline on an 1873 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, warning in positively Trumpian terms of an existential threat to the country and asking readers, “What are you going to do about it?” An 1871 mass lynching of 19 Chinese Angelenos punctuated a terror campaign by the Ku Klux Klan across the state, which had targeted Chinese immigrants in at least a dozen violent attacks. By 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act had been passed, barring Chinese nationals from immigrating to the United States for a decade (to be duly renewed as needed).

Such a crackdown was not taken quietly. Chinese Americans organized and resisted, facing not just racist violence but also the fanning of a familiar moral panic around their supposed introduction of crime to the US. And as Chinese laborers greened California’s Central Valley, turning it into the nation’s market garden, they grew more insistent on higher wages and labor rights. The threat posed by this newfound assertiveness, combined with labor shortages following the 1882 act, prompted California growers to rely increasingly on Japanese immigrants to fill the need for cheap workers. Exploited in much the same fashion as their Chinese predecessors and legally barred from owning land, Japanese Americans nevertheless further transformed California into the agricultural powerhouse it is today—until, of course, they were met with their own xenophobic backlash in the form of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, “a federal law that effectively barred Japanese migration to the U.S. and created a national quota system for European immigrants.” This act laid the groundwork for the eventual internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, as well as their subsequent forced resettlement outside of California; it also sharply curbed the ability of Eastern European Jews to immigrate to the United States during the Holocaust. Per Stephen Miller’s own uncle, David Glosser, this resulted in the murder of all 74 members of their family who were unable to escape Belarus.

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If the goal of so much of the political class was, as Senator James D. Phelan vowed in his 1920 reelection campaign, to “keep California white,” religion was a more nuanced (yet no less significant) arbiter of right-wing thought in the state’s early days. Certainly, the Southern and Midwestern settlers who came to California in the late 19th century—Ohioans and Indianans like Frank and Hannah Nixon, respectively, parents of Richard M.—brought with them the pieties, mores, and religion of the heartland. Hollywood itself, developed in the 1880s in parcels sold for $350 an acre, was mapped out as a planned Protestant community, packed with churches and free of vice. Additionally, the former Alta California harbored a Catholicism uniquely strong compared to many other sites of westward expansion. And while Evangelical Christianity certainly made its presence felt, as Sandra Sizer Frankiel writes, “traditional Protestantism evolved so differently [in California] that it may not be appropriate to speak of evangelicalism there as a distinctive and coherent system.” Rather than a homogeneous statewide narrative, “a diffuse California mythology arose, emphasizing the state’s uniqueness and offering a liberal religious outlook.”

Religious conservatives who wanted to find stable footing had to contend with this diffuse, liberal outlook: Aimee Semple McPherson—who, broadcasting from an Echo Park megachurch in the 1920s, would become a prototype for the first modern mass media televangelists—offers one especially notable demonstration of this split dynamic. A twice-divorced female leader of a racially integrated congregation, McPherson nonetheless welcomed 2,000 Klansmen to one 1932 revival, while also publishing the work of Kansan evangelist Gerald B. Winrod, the “Jayhawk Nazi.” (Alongside other, largely Californian extremists like Wesley Swift, Winrod helped shape the racist Christian Identity ideology.) At the same time, as Chris Lehmann recounted in 2011 in The Nation, “many of the white Southern migrants who resettled in Southern California either arrived as or evolved into fervid champions of the New Deal,” with progressive Evangelicals even going so far as to join the “Ham and Eggs” movement, a 1930s pressure campaign to secure a $30 per week pension for those over the age of 50. But if many in this new cohort had a progressive streak, others answered a more typically conservative call—finding themselves, as Lehmann borrows from historian Darren Dochuk, “burdened with the responsibility of evangelizing and civilizing, initially on the godless borderland of the western South, then in the dark, secular reaches of Southern California.”

Secularism was not the only supposed spiritual enemy lurking in California. By the early 20th century, the first Jewish showmen and movie producers relocated to California, eager to gain 300 sunny shooting days and escape the long arm of Thomas Edison’s “Patent Trust” (an attempt to monopolize the production, distribution, and screening of films across the country). Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan revived itself in Southern California. A bizarre 1922 incident in Inglewood, in which dozens of Klansmen raided an alleged bootlegger, resulting in the shooting death of a police officer among the raiders, shedding light on the Klan’s infiltration of L.A. society, with at least one future L.A. city councillor, J. C. Barthel, among those questioned. And while relocated Jews—discriminated against and barred from the WASPy downtown institutions—built their own parallel structures in Boyle Heights and on Los Angeles’s Westside, antisemites and Nazi sympathizers attempted to stir sympathy and unite (plots included attempts to lynch Hollywood moguls including MGM head Louis B. Mayer). As Anna Diamond writes: “No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world.”

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Amid this fraught early 20th-century West Coast landscape, as mere decades before, the state’s boom, first as an agricultural and then an industrial power, required more labor than could be supplied by domestic migrants. Then, as before—as now—foreign laborers might be tolerated in good times, or in times of extreme need, only to be viciously cast out when the worm turned. Then, as now, Mexican Angelenos were among the first targets.

Los Angeles had, of course, once been Mexico. But as the Great Depression took hold, as many as 1.8 million individuals of Mexican descent were deported from the city and country under Herbert Hoover. Then, as now, the deportations occurred with scant regard for legal status, no due process, and the cruelty of rounding up hundreds at gunpoint and shipping them off to a country they’d never known—take the events of 1931 in La Placita Park, where the deportees included native-born American citizens. Despite Hoover’s scapegoating and vows that the Mexican repatriation would help white laborers seeking employment amid a tanked economy, recent research indicates that—human atrocities aside—this proto–America First strategy was wholly ineffective.

World War II started with yet another increased demand for home-front labor, and the cycle of inclusion and exclusion continued. The Bracero Program permitted guest workers to enter California for decades—until it was interrupted by 1954’s so-called Operation Wetback, in which hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were once again forcibly deported. Nor were the many Black Americans drawn to Southern California factories welcomed: the freeway system, in concordance with racial covenants, conspired to confine them to South Los Angeles. As Chester Himes, the masterful crime novelist, recounts in his memoirs:

Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear. I had lived in the South, […] I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional […] But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I had become bitter and saturated with hate.

The postwar conservative breakthrough in California came white-hot. This was the conservatism of the John Birch Society; of Orange County and its “suburban warriors”; of easy Hollywood extremists like John Wayne and Walter Brennan; of elected lunatics like “B-1 Bob” Dornan and Jack Tenney; of relatively obscure but influential agitators like John G. Schmitz, Gary Allen, and William Dannemeyer; of out-and-out neo-Nazis like ex-defense industry worker Tom Metzger. It’s the conservatism of horrifying ballot initiatives and anti-immigrant groups. It’s the conservatism of the Claremont Institute, providing the intellectual bunting to Trump’s election fraud, and Evangelical megachurches. It’s the GOP takeover of Shasta County (a chilling reenactment of prewar democratic erosion), as well as the blueprint for a racist conservatism, the Southern strategy sketched by Whittier’s own Richard Nixon, further refined by the state’s only governor-turned-president, Ronald Reagan—and still used to electoral success today.

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The history of California is one of heartbreak after heartbreak, of mass deportations, families fractured, homes and livelihoods and lives lost. The febrile California Right imposes their noxious ideology on some target or other, laughing all the way. Decades later—if we’re lucky—the governor issues an apology. Yet the true, human cost of these cracked fantasies remains, most often, unacknowledged.

This cost has only increased under the new administration. An influential cadre of Trump loyalists and boosters originate from California. Peter Navarro, crank professor emeritus at UC Irvine, has graduated from the humiliation of five failed NIMBY nativist political campaigns in San Diego to Trump tariff czardom. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, best known for his urging of “herd immunity” butchery during the COVID-19 pandemic, now leads the rapidly dismantling National Institutes of Health. Californian sycophants are trusted by Trump to run his social media company, remake the Kennedy Center, investigate troublesome online trolls, and formulate his crypto policies—to say nothing of the scads of Silicon Valley money sloshing around Trumpworld. Californian think tank staff comprise the administration, going so far as to prepare ready-made destructive policy, and the state’s Christian extremists pray at Trump’s feet.  

Still, with every advantage, the Right’s contemporary legacy in California reeks, as it always has, of failure. Models of far-right propaganda transmission that originated from California and were workable as recently as the last election—those of Steve Bannon–era Breitbart, of dim bulb podcasting, of ex-Angeleno Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire—are either already exhausted or showing signs of serious wear. Miller’s quotas for ICE can never be filled; the cowardly, masked secret police just can’t do the job, and certainly not without stiff resistance on the streets. The appalling deportations of the past few weeks are not popular with anyone beyond partisan Republicans; victims and protesters have been met with support nationwide.

The history of California has thereby always been one of resistance as much right-wing reaction. No matter how radical the Right’s efforts, their attempts to dominate are undercut by steadfast resilience. For all its Steve Bannons and extremist groups, California has also produced Fred Korematsu, the Black Panthers, the Zoot Suiters, and Harvey Milk. The state’s deeply rooted tradition of resistance continues right up to the No Kings protests, which, on June 14, swamped Trump’s vanity birthday parade (turnout in Los Angeles was estimated to be over 200,000). The Right’s overwhelming outcry against the events of this month have only served as further proof of their precarity on Californian soil. To hear Trump describing Los Angeles these days is to hear desperately manufactured war stories—would-be heroic tales of a stout-hearted protector, standing astride the forces of anarchy and wrestling them to the dirt. “Los Angeles will be set free,” vowed 45/47 on Truth Social, from the “Illegal Aliens and Criminals” who forcefully resisted ICE raids earlier this month in the majority-Latino city of Paramount. With the California National Guard and the marines still deployed under the president’s aegis at the time of writing, Trump is taking no chances in his quest to, as he put it, “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.”

For all their big talk, one has to wonder if the Right is beginning to learn their lessons on the Golden Coast. Indeed, little remarked upon amid the various coverage of protests and statements from parties on both sides has been a notable concession by Trump: ICE sweeps are to no longer target people working in hospitality, agriculture, or a few other critical industries—leaving whom, exactly, to be deported? Whatever the adherence to this directive, it’s an admission: this is and will always be a land of immigrants, whatever their status. So says even Trump, tacitly confessing the game plan unfurled against Los Angeles is madness.

And yet, per Trump, it’s not going to stop. The administration’s campaign of terror is going to be expanded to other Democratic-leaning cities, with ICE sweeps visited on urban centers including Chicago and New York City (in large part to punish state and local leaders who have spoken out against him). But if the Right insists on replicating their mistakes in Los Angeles, let California be a leader once again: stop ICE in the streets. After all, we have a long history on our side. Recent history too: Recall that no matter how much he fought it, Donald Trump eventually agreed to a settlement over his golf course (whose 18th hole once slid into the ocean) in Ranchos Palos Verdes, allowing public, protected hiking trails to cut through his tacky greens. It’s a Californian tale as old as time: Trump may have his country club, but we get the right of way.

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Featured image: Photo of Downtown L.A. No Kings protests by Sam Bitman.