Pretty Boy Becomes Ugly | The American Spectator

Your humble servant, Ben Stein, has been a citizen of the Golden State since 1972. It was then that I moved to Santa Cruz and taught for a brief while at the spectacular campus of UC, Santa Cruz. There are not enough words to say how magnificent that campus was in those days. I was introduced to it by my dear friend from Yale Law School, Chris Wilson.

He and his wife and my wife and I drove to an overlook at Cowell College and stared at the Bay of Monterey. I swore I would return. Sure enough, thanks to my film school professor, Stanley Kauffmann, I got a job teaching about the political and economic content of entertainment movies at College V just months later. The scenery was so perfect that my heart stopped the first hundred times I walked across the foot bridges going across the campus.

Sadly, I left the College V world after a student put up a huge Nazi swastika made of tables and chairs in the college dining hall. I complained about it to the College V top dog, James B. Hall. He responded with a nasty, antisemitic letter to the student in question. I asked him to apologize to me and to the students of College V, many of whom were Jewish. He doubled down with an even more bitterly antisemitic letter about me.

I left and went back to my native Washington, D.C. There, I soon went to work for Mr. Nixon as a speechwriter. That’s another story.

Anyway, I have now lived and worked in sunny Cal since June 30, 1976, as a script writer, novelist, economist, lawyer, law teacher, and expert witness. I love California. I love the weather and the climate and pretty much everything else.

But I do not like at all the exploding antisemitism in the air. It has been here for a LONG time. But now, with Israel and the USA trying to stop the Iranian hate/murder regime, and the antisemites all over the left side of the state, I am moved to anger and fear.

The most awful part of it is Gavin Newsom, our governor. He is now speaking out in hate phrases against Israel. Israel is the most urgent, most powerful enemy that the Islamic genocide architects face. Mr. Newsom is urging Americans to stop Israel from defending itself. He calls Israel hate names and phrases and urges Americans not to allow Israel the weapons it needs to defend itself. This is done to help Newsom get to the top of the heap of the Democrat party, which has become ever more racist day by day.

God help us when this magnificent state, God’s gift to mankind, has become a bastion of hate.

Of course, Mr. Newsom has long been an idiot.

But this day’s idiocy, tied to a tidal wave of anti-Jew feeling, has weapons and promises a Holocaust in our time, on our glorious beaches and forests, frightens me. Please, fellow California Dreamers, wake up and smell the flowers, and let’s turn our backs on a man who lives by stupidity and hate. California is too beautiful to hate.

READ MORE from Ben Stein:

Why Do Israel and Trump Stand More or Less Alone?

Learning From Jesse Jackson

The Family I Married Into

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