🧵 “Why care about California? It’s more Mexican than American at...
Robert Sterling@RobertMSterling
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Jun 17, 2025
~5 min read
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🧵 “Why care about California? It’s more Mexican than American at this point.”
Respectfully, no. This is wrong. California isn’t just American; California is America itself, every bit as much as the colonies of New England or the plains states of the Heartland. We must cherish and protect every inch of it, no less than we would the forestland of Georgia or the prairie brush of Texas.
Respectfully, no. This is wrong. California isn’t just American; California is America itself, every bit as much as the colonies of New England or the plains states of the Heartland. We must cherish and protect every inch of it, no less than we would the forestland of Georgia or the prairie brush of Texas.
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When tens of thousands of gold prospectors braved the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin Desert in search of the quintessential American promises—self-reliance, wealth, a new beginning—it was to California’s mines they trekked. California is where they built San Francisco from a remote backwater of just 200 souls into the 19th century's most important city in America and the most significant trading hub in the world.
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In World War II, it was California’s 140 military installations that housed 1.6M American GIs, and it was largely through the ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco that many of them embarked to the Pacific theater. For tens of thousands of them, California’s coastline would be the last American soil they would ever see in life.
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To this day, California—home to Camp Pendleton, 29 Palms, Fort Irwin, and too many Navy and Air Force bases to list here—is where more active-duty US troops are stationed than any other state (yes, including Texas). You can practically hear Marine recruits getting hazed from San Diego’s airport terminals.
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During the war, tens of thousands of defense workers in California produced over 300,000 aircraft (just think about that number for a second). Following the war, California would continue to serve as the epicenter of the aerospace and defense industries—home to Lockheed, Hughes, Douglas, General Dynamics, and countless suppliers, large and small alike, supporting their supply chains—whose white-collar engineers and managers, and whose blue-collar factory workers and mechanics, would form the backbone of California’s burgeoning middle class.
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Hollywood—despite its undeniable moral deficiencies and cultural shortfalls in our current day—is where John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Clint Eastwood filmed the movies that would teach the world about American masculinity, and where Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe would show the world American beauty. It is in no small measure due to the soundstages of Los Angeles that American values became ascendant in countries that may otherwise have tilted toward the Soviet orbit during the Cold War.
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When Walt and Roy Disney were looking to start the animation studio that would produce Steamboat Mickey, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the other iconic movies that would define American childhood, it was Los Angeles they chose. When Disney looked to build its first theme park, it was the orange groves of Anaheim they selected for their site.
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California is where Richard and Maurice McDonald would open a drive-in restaurant (another quintessential California invention, by the way) that would become the most iconic food chain in the world. It’s where In N Out perfected the double double and Panda Express perfected their orange chicken. All-American brands Levi’s and Gap were started in San Francisco; if you’ve ever worn Vans, you’re paying homage to the skater culture of Southern California.
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Palo Alto—home to Stanford University and to the garage where two of its graduates, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, would found their company—birthed the modern technology industry as we know it. Every foundational technology making it possible for me to type this and for you to read it—not just smartphones, apps, and social media, but, more fundamentally, microprocessors, silicon-based semiconductors, integrated circuits, transistors—was brought to market from California.
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Despite the best efforts of its political class and its administrative state, California has been vital for American economic growth (for the world economy at large, actually). California is where Apple invented the iPhone—and the IIe, and the PowerPC, and the MacBook, and the iPod, and AirPods—and where Steve Jobs taught corporate America to think different.
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It’s where Larry Page and Sergey Brin made the internet searchable, and where OpenAI created the large language models that are transforming the world (and writing this thread… just kidding!). Mark Zuckerberg may have started Facebook in a Boston dorm room, but it was to California that he decamped to build it into a trillion-dollar business.
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And it’s not just software, either. California is where Tesla designed the first electric vehicles that ever gained widespread consumer adoption. It’s where Elon Musk and the SpaceX team revolutionized space flight. Under the shadows of an oil refinery in El Segundo, California is where a group of young guys like @ADoricko are revolutionizing American manufacturing.
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But California’s tech industry and its economy, as important and as impressive as they are, aren’t why California matters most to America. Most important is that California represents American aspiration. It’s the far end of the continent and the natural destination of the American experiment, whose care-free cities and whose sun-drenched beaches—from Mission Beach in San Diego to Carmel and Santa Cruz on the Monterey Peninsula, and everywhere on Highway 1 in between—beckon to all Americans, regardless of where we were born and no matter where we now call home.
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Most importantly to me, California is where I became a Marine. It’s where I met, and where I married, my wife. Our two boys were born there; I’ll never forget how beautiful our toddler’s strawberry blonde hair was from getting bleached under the constant San Diego sun.
I wasn’t born in California, but California is where I became the man I am today.
I wasn’t born in California, but California is where I became the man I am today.
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California is America. It is the birthright, the manifest destiny, of every American. I will never give up on it, and I pray that, when God blesses America, he blesses California every bit as much as he blesses the rest of this beautiful land.
