Comedian Adam Carolla says he will be leaving California just has soon as his twin teenagers graduate from high school.
Further, the former “Man Show” star said a large part of the problem with his native state is its current governor, “narcissistic” Democrat Gavin Newsom.
“I have twins, and they’re in their senior year of high school and I couldn’t — I didn’t want to pick up and, you know, tear up their roots, you know? So people always go, ‘When are you leaving?’ And I go, ‘I will be attending their high school graduation in a U-Haul,’” Carolla told conservative podcast host Sage Steele during an interview published last week.
He added that he doesn’t even know where he’ll move to, suggesting maybe Texas, Florida, one of the Carolinas, or Tennessee. “There are like 15 places,” Carolla said.
“And that’s sad because I don’t even have a place that I need to go,” he explained. “There’s a difference between going, ‘I want to live out my retirement years in Maui’ or ‘I got to move to Arizona because I have bronchitis’ or something. This ain’t that. This is just, ‘I have to leave. I don’t even know where I’m going.’ This isn’t me cheating on you for another woman. This is ‘I hate you so much. I’m moving into a motel room and not dating for six years.’”
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“[G]rowing up out here, nobody left. You’d be a fool to leave, you know,” Carolla noted. “And the notion of moving out of L.A. and going to like one of the Carolinas or Nashville … You watch the beginning of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ that’s how it worked. They lived over here and then they came to where we are, and I was already there,” he said.
“Moving to a place like Wyoming or something would have been unfathomable, unheard of.”
Steele agreed no other state has the beauty and diversity of landscapes from the climate, to the Redwood forests, the beaches, the mountains, and the desert.
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“There’s no better state in my opinion and they’ve ruined it. And I’m so sad, because I have always loved to visit, and even that has changed,” the former ESPN reporter said.
Carolla described California’s problems as “self-imposed” and “super avoidable.”
“I say to a lot of people like, ‘when’s it end? When do we change course?’ And the No. 1 answer is, ‘We haven’t bottomed out yet. We’re getting near it. We haven’t totally bottomed out.’ And then I say, ‘Why is it necessary to bottom out?’” he said.
“It’s like saying, ‘You know, I was looking for some stuff in my son’s room and I found some syringes and a baggie of heroin. But he hasn’t flatlined yet. I have not walked in and seen foam coming out of his mouth or him convulsing.’ And you go, ‘Yeah, I know, but why don’t you get him in some treatment now?’ And you go, ‘Because his heart hasn’t stopped yet,’” Carolla stated.
“And it’s like, ‘Yeah, I know, but why do we have to bottom out?’ We know where we’re going. Let’s reverse course. California and Los Angeles can’t do it.”
Carolla cited the failed effort to recall Newsom in 2021 saying, “We voted him right back in.”
He also pointed to the election of Los Angeles Mayor and former Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass in 2022, rather than real estate developer Rick Caruso, who pledged to address L.A.’s crime and homeless crises.
Carolla said Bass won based on identity politics as a “woman of color” over Caruso because despite being a “super competent,” he’s “old,” “white,” and “rich.”
“We get what we deserve,” Carolla said. “And we deserve it.”
He recalled an interview he conducted with Newsom in 2013, finding the then-lieutenant governor to be “narcissistic douchebag” and a “slippery eel of nothingness.”
“He says nothing. He says nothing,” Carolla asserted. “He’s a sociopathic, narcissistic, empty bag. And we vote for this guy. He says nothing.”
“He’s a buffoon. He’s an idiot,” the comedian said. “I said to him, ‘what’s going on with traffic? We have such horrible traffic in L.A., especially, the worst in the world. Like, why aren’t we doing something about it. Why isn’t there a plan? Where’s our traffic czar? What’s going on?’
“He goes, ‘I saw this billboard. I kind of liked it. It said, ’You’re not in traffic. You are traffic.’ It doesn’t mean anything. The point is, that’s how he talks.”
Los Angeles Fox affiliate KTTV reported in December, based on U.S. Census figures, that California’s population declined by roughly half a million from April 2020 to July 2023.
