California has beaches. California has mountains. California has, according to the Babylon Bee's latest tourism brochure, the only itinerary in America that pairs the two with a single, unbroken crisis from sand to summit.
The Bee's October 27 headline has Governor Gavin Newsom touting California as the only state where you can see a homeless man defecating on a beach and on a mountain in the same day. Read that sentence twice, because the second reading is where the joke lives: the state's pitch is no longer its scenery. It is the range of its failure.
To be precise, because precision is the whole brand: Newsom did not say this. The line is satire, invented by the Bee, and any post that pasted it into his mouth would be lying about a real person to land a joke. What is real is the pattern the joke names — a homelessness crisis so visible that it has become California's most recognizable feature, in every postcard setting the state owns.
Other states have a crisis. California has a crisis with geography. Beach in the morning, mountain by afternoon, same story at both elevations, and a governor whose administration has spent billions managing a problem that keeps getting more photogenic.
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Visit California. Bring hiking boots. Bring beach shoes. Apparently you will need both before lunch.
Sources: The Babylon Bee (Oct. 27, 2026) — satire.
