Lots of people are fleeing California now.  More left than came in last year, even with the illegal alien inflow.

We have an impression as to who they generally are — Republicans, productive middle-class people, companies looking for greener pastures.

The Hollywood crowd is fleeing, too.

James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal (subscription) has an interesting piece describing how the Hollywood characters who are fleeing and why they are doing it:

Last year brought an entertaining series of dispatches in which departing residents and their media interlocutors avoided discussing the monumental and expensive failures of so-called progressive governance. But now it seems even in the world headquarters of trendy leftism, public acknowledgments of reality are on the rise.

He notes a subtle detail about it: in the past, people who fled California from Hollywood could never admit as to the real reason why they were doing it.  That was six months ago.  Today, they are saying it out loud.  Then he quotes from a piece in The Wrap about a Hollywood functionary who admitted the naked truth about why he was leaving the state:

"A growing chorus of Hollywood executives are talking about leaving the city," one entertainment industry insider tells TheWrap[.]

Ryan Kavanaugh, founder and CEO of the video-sharing app Triller, grew up in Los Angeles — Brentwood to be precise. But now he's ready to pack his bags and move his family and his business headquarters to Florida.

For Kavanaugh, such a major move represents a mix of concerns — including being closer to his parents, who already left Brentwood for a penthouse condo in the Sunshine State in January. In an interview with TheWrap, Kavanaugh said the main reason he's ready to leave is his increasing disillusionment with L.A.'s rising crime, homelessness and what he considers California's anti-business policies that are driving him away from the place he has called home for 47 years.

"I grew up here, I grew up in Brentwood and I was allowed to be on the streets," Kavanaugh said. "I would never let my kids walk (alone) in Brentwood[.] ... How many times do you have to be out in Los Angeles and see feces in the streets before you just don't want to be here anymore?" he said.

The problem was not just feces, or stolen mail flung around the train tracks near Union Station, but problems like murder.  Murder and extremely violent crime have been hitting the Hollywood elites, and coming from the same random criminals who plague the rest of Los Angeles, what with a Soros-financed district attorney named George Gascon at the helm who lets them out.  Like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, he faces a recall and is likely to be thrown out.

"A new tipping point emerged late last year with the murder of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant in her Beverly Hills home," said Gene Del Vecchio, adjunct professor of marketing at USC's Marshall School of Business. "It so shocked the protected community that even the liberal Beverly Hills city council voted to recall the liberal Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón. When crime hits home, it becomes personal, and people act by either fighting, as with the Gascón recall, or by leaving."

In the past, they hemmed and hawed as to why they were leaving and cited phony reasons.  Today, they are admitting it out loud: socialist blue-state policies with Soros D.A.s have been a disaster for the state and are making even Hollywood liberals want out. 

The Hollywood character Freeman describes is not the only one.  Recall that Hollywood "comedian" Seth Rogen was scored on Twitter and across Hollywood itself for expressing his indifference to violent crime when a YouTube star, Casey Neistat, complained on Twitter about feeling 'violated' after his car was broken into. Rogen came off as a pig and was upbraided by angry Hollywood types.  Neistat came off as another Hollywood type who has seen the light.  It's possible to see which way the wind is blowing here.

Another former Californian of the gilded set, Elon Musk, who was never recognizably conservative, is getting very clear about what the problem is:

.@elonmusk is suggesting to vote them out? #UPElection2022 pic.twitter.com/BVaMWRur8m

— Amit Mehra (@Amit8Mehra) January 28, 2022

The topic here was the Canadian truckers' strike over vaccine mandates, but the target of his wrath could have just as easily been California, which is all about vaccine mandates.  He's starting to admit the obvious about the failures of blue state–type regimes.

And that's very interesting, because Musk is a new billionaire.  He wasn't around a few years ago.  Most of the characters who are today's billionaires, who uniformly defend the status quo in California, have been around for at least two decades.  Musk, in other words, is on the cutting edge, which sees unsustainable problems and wants to get away from them.  Old-line establishment billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, or even the newer Silicon Valley billies, have been fixtures defending an establishment, same as the Vanderbilts of old might have done.  Musk, though, still smells the fresh air and knows which way the wind is blowing.  And now he's getting obvious about what is going on with blue-state tyrannies, just as Hollywood minions are getting obvious about what is going on in California and why they are fleeing.  They all are some kind of wave of the future, quite unlike the older characters who continue to defend the status quo of California even as it turns into a suppurating disaster. 

The rebel voices are getting louder, let's say, and that signals some kind of Götterdämmerung for the sheer retrograde wretchedness of California on its blue state model.

Image: PXHere, CC0 public domain.