What the Hell Happened to California?

Today we’re bringing you the second episode of Breaking History, our brand-new podcast, in which Eli Lake goes back in time—to make sense of the present. The first episode was about the seventh president, the 47th president, and America’s occasional craving for an anti-elite elite.

In this episode, we travel to San Francisco in the 1970s, when a new, radical set of leaders took over the West Coast. This is when progressives first took root in California, where they remain supreme to this day—even though their policies have burned the state more than once.