Kevin Kiley says California sucks. How about we rent him a U-Haul so he can move to Texas?

Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, the flyweight, dyspeptic GOP nominee for the Placer County-based 3rd Congressional district, recently delivered a California-bashing oration to the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC. To be charitable, it was perhaps the most intellectually dishonest speech I’ve ever heard except for every public utterance of his new hero, former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Kiley immediately before the 2022 primary.

CPAC once was (kind of) an intellectual if conservative affair, featuring now-sane-seeming speakers like Ronald Reagan, a former governor of Kiley’s California hellscape.

Now CPAC is a mentally ill theme park of alt-right grievance. This year’s conference in Dallas hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an authoritarian loon who decried “peoples of mixed race” and runs his country like an episode of “The Sopranos” meets the KKK.

Clearly, Kiley sees that public insanity is the route to Congress, so his moral compass is, um, spinning.

In his speech, Kiley dropped several little gems about how much California sucks. I’ll annotate them for the purpose of intellectual honesty, which Kiley is flatly incapable of conveying.

“In the progressive utopia of California,” Kiley said, “you walk down streets that double as restrooms and injection sites.”

Well, one of the reasons for this is that Gov. Reagan reduced mental hospital funding and ended mandatory commitment, for starters (note to readers: Reagan was a Republican), though Gov. Gavin Newsom is moving to change that. We have a lot of work to do to be sure, but California cities like San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles continue to be international destinations. And of course the streets of Granite Bay, where Kiley grew up are, oh, rather nice.

“I wrote a book called ‘The Case Against America’s Most Corrupt Governor,’” Kiley said sweetly, referring to his nemesis, Newsom.

First off, a li’l self-published screed isn’t exactly “War and Peace.” To paraphrase Truman Capote, that’s not writing; that’s typing.

Kiley also described the Biden administration as a “train wreck.” What does he call the Trump administration, a train wreck colliding with the Hindenburg launched from the Titanic?

“We have a very different model for the nation,” the assemblyman said. “Our model for the nation is the one that created this nation, one with freedom at its foundation.”

Yeah, you guys do have a very different model.

It’s a Constitution-blind mobocracy dictated to and led by a coup-plotting grifter who looted his own father to create a real estate empire built on not paying his bills.

It’s like Kiley slept through Con Law at Yale.

Kiley: “(California) is the model that is sending Californians to Texas in record numbers.”

Oh, hell yeah, Bubba. We’re all moseyin’ on down to Texas, where their governor, Greg Abbott, can’t quite tell the truth about the police handling of the Uvalde shooting to the parents of dead elementary school students. Family values, anyone? And check out Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who fist-bumped a fellow senator to celebrate making sure that disabled veteran burn pit victims had to wait even longer before President Joe Biden could sign a bill to help them this week.

Kiley even bemoaned the shortage of U-Hauls in California. I suppose that’s technically correct, and there is indeed an affordable-housing shortage here. But I would ask this: Since Kiley has served five years in the Assembly, did he do anything there to address it?

Or should we rent one more truck for Kiley to move to Texas, where he might be a better congressional candidate since he claims to be a real, live big-boy rancher (despite living in an apartment in Rocklin)?

There’s more to Kiley’s speech, but not much more. It was just another example of his kaleidoscopically dystopian worldview, with a particular emphasis on disparaging his own state.

Imagine all the speeches Kiley could give in Congress, where he could not only give up on California but on the whole idea of America and democracy as well.

This story was originally published August 12, 2022 at 5:00 AM.