Tag Archive for: Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom’s “Freedom State”

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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell, 1984

With his eyes firmly set on the Democratic nomination for president, Gavin Newsom on January 6 was sworn into the California governor’s office for another four-year term. In his second inaugural speech, Newsom highlighted the theme he evidently believes will carry him into the White House, “freedom.” But his perverse definition of freedom is as extreme as the right-wing caricatures he claims he’s protecting us from—and far more likely to be realized.

One of the centerpieces of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda is the right to an abortion. But Newsom isn’t merely defending the principles of Roe v. Wade, which tied the legality of abortion to the viability of the fetus. Nor is Newsom advocating the abortion policies enforced in almost every European nation, where abortion is illegal after 12 weeks.

When it comes to abortion rights, Newsom is pandering to extremists—some would call them murderers—who won’t rest until abortion is legal right up until the moment of birth. As it is, California’s “pregnant people” have the freedom to abort up to 24 weeks. “Viable” or not, here’s a photo of a 24-week-old fetus. Killing this beautiful, obviously sentient human being is “freedom,” according to Gavin Newsom.

Also central to Newsom’s freedom agenda is making California a sanctuary for “transgender youth seeking medical care.” Newsom, again pandering to extremists, is willing to allow confused teens and preteens the “freedom” to permanently alter their bodies. Never mind that we’re talking about minors. Never mind if much of this horrific fad, these surging rates of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” can be shown to be the result of social contagion and nurturing pressures from biased psychotherapists. Bring out the surgeon’s scalpel. Sign up children for a lifetime of unhealthy and expensive “maintenance” pharmaceuticals. And if someone who has surgically “confirmed” their gender has crushing regrets once they’re grown up, too bad, and shut up.

Newsom’s “freedoms” also extend to state-sanctioned, public use of addictive drugs. Never mind that pretty much every person with experience working with addicts and the homeless acknowledges treatment must be imposed on addicts if they are ever to recover, that approach would not permit what writer Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the “addiction maintenance industry” to continue to prosper. And make no mistake, that’s what’s going on here. The only winners in this deadly charade are drug cartels and aid workers employed by nonprofits or by the government. This is how, as our cities turn into shitholes, and depraved addicts die by the thousands, Gavin Newsom claims to be standing up for “freedom.”

The story of Newsom’s “freedom” agenda, which he’s aggressively selling in every blue state in America, doesn’t end with late-term abortions, “gender affirming” surgery for minors, or the right to mainline heroin on a city sidewalk. These are just some of the ways in which Newsom pacifies extremists and rewards opportunists, despite being hideously offensive to anyone possessing a shred of common sense and decency.

Newsom’s Freedom Agenda Is a Distraction

More to the point, these “freedoms” Newsom peddles are distractions. In some respects, Newsom and others like him on the Left are merely trolling Red America with these endorsements of depravity. This is what they do to allow their economic agenda to advance quietly. As Newsom crows about protecting the “freedom of speech” for educators—translation: the right to teach five-year-old children that they can choose their “gender” and 10-year-old children how to have anal sex—critics of this filth can be forgiven for missing how Newsom and his ilk are presiding over the slow creep of economic enslavement.

This is where the inverted logic of Newsom’s rhetorical agenda of freedom is fully exposed. Californians are being herded into regimented lives, controlled by very large corporations, public-employee unions, and environmentalists, whose alliance and shared agenda is only inexplicable at first glance. A deeper examination shows how their interests align and blows away traditional stereotypes of Right and Left.

A troubling article published in December at National Review titled “California Destroys Its Independent Truckers,” describes what Newsom is enabling, and by extension, what Democrats have in store for the entire country.

The article begins by describing how Assembly Bill 5, a state law signed by Newsom in 2019, “compels independent drivers to surrender the companies they’ve built and seek employment in large firms that can hire them.” Having recently lost court appeals, 2023 will see the loss of California’s more than 70,000 owner-operators. They are either retiring or moving to other states. Very few will be willing to join major trucking companies, and even fewer will be able to comply with the conditions set forth by AB 5 that might allow them to continue to operate independently.

But if AB 5 doesn’t wipe out every independent trucker, California’s all-powerful regional air-quality boards have declared the state’s ports off-limits to trucks with engines over three years old. As Swaim notes, “It will likely further concentrate market share in large corporations that can afford newer trucks—a remarkable but predictable outcome in a state that protests corporate control of the economy.”

At the state level, California’s Air Resources Board has declared a ban on the sale of all trucks running on gasoline or diesel fuel after 2040. Imagine how this will impact not just any independent truckers that may be left standing but any company operating a small fleet of trucks. These regulations, designed by unions and environmentalists, will force the consolidation of California shipping into a handful of very large corporations.

Anyone who thinks what happens in California stays in California is making a dangerous assumption. The wealth and influence of California’s high-tech and entertainment industry, combined with its oversized weight in the U.S. Congress, means that if Democrats win nationally, the political and economic model being imposed on Californians is going to be imposed across America.

Newsom’s “Freedom” Is Economic Slavery

The economic destruction of California’s middle class is a product of legislation and court rulings that have made it practically impossible for private developers to build affordable homes while still making a profit. They have been driven out of a hostile state, thanks to a protracted approval process, inevitable and endless environmentalist litigation, exorbitant municipal permit fees, ridiculously overwritten building codes, zoning restrictions that drive up the price of whatever raw land remains available for building, the lack of available water, overpriced and scarce building materials, a labor shortage, and the unwillingness of cities and counties—unlike throughout previous decades—to share the burden of enabling streets and utility infrastructure.

As a result, the average home in California, even in this downturn, stands north of $760,000. To make up for the shortage of private developers who can turn a profit and are therefore willing to develop housing without subsidies, an entire new class of developers and renters have emerged. The developer constructs low-income housing, taking advantage of tax incentives and government matching funds, which is then occupied by residents who have some or all of the rent paid for by the government.

This concept—creating scarcity by driving small private firms out of business through overregulation, and thereby enabling unionized and heavily subsidized large corporations to take control of a market where prices have been deliberately driven higher—is not restricted to housing. Does anyone think large energy companies don’t welcome regulations and restrictions that drive smaller competitors out of business at the same time it increases the prices they can charge and the profits they can earn? Is it far fetched to recognize that hedge funds buying up farmland for the water rights will prefer a state of perpetually worsening water scarcity, or that big agribusiness concerns with the financial resilience to withstand shortages don’t take every opportunity to buy up smaller farm operations that are driven out of business when every input, from water to fertilizer to tractor fuel, has been priced out of reach?

This is the economic slavery for which Newsom, and the state of California, is merely an instructive example. It’s happening all over the world.

These are the Lords of Scarcity, systematically imposing escalating economic hardship on every ordinary working household in America and beyond. They are imposing water shortages and calling for rationing; suppressing conventional energy and rationing during “peak” demand. At the same time they are decommissioning cheap sources of electricity and transportation fuel—from natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power—and similarly decommissioning the infrastructure to distribute them. This comes along with the imposition of all-electric cars (even though advanced hybrids are far more practical and sustainable) along with mileage taxes and “congestion” pricing that limits access by independently owned vehicles into urban cores. Add to these the suppression of new housing and the destruction of agriculture.

The collusion of big business, big government, and big labor to orchestrate this conquest throws every conventional ideological stereotype into the trash. The closest political economy that would define what is happening in California today—and by extension throughout the world – is fascism. It is economic fascism by virtue of governments and corporations working together while co-opting the labor movement. It is political and psychological fascism by virtue of the way it identifies convenient scapegoats, reminiscent of the scenes in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where citizens would perform a daily “two minutes of hatred for enemies of the party.” But the 2023 version of such a ritual is to scapegoat the racists, the sexists, the transphobes and homophobes, the climate deniers, the election deniers; all those bigots who would take away our “freedom” to murder the unborn, mutilate children, mainline heroin, or, to just preserve the freedom to earn a modest middle-class lifestyle in exchange for honest hard work.

This is how the social radicalism of the Left has been co-opted to become a useful distraction for our oppressors.  It gives everyone something to hate, with the full endorsement of every corporation and government agency in the nation.

Such is the freedom Gavin Newsom is selling. Don’t be surprised, two years from now, if it carries him all the way to the Oval Office. On the other hand, every American who values genuine freedom should be encouraged by how precarious Newsom’s strategy is when exposed to the light of day.

Newsom, and the entire corporatist establishment for which he is merely a rising figurehead, are presuming that hundreds of millions of Americans being driven into poverty will never realize that divisive rhetoric on social issues is nothing but a diversion. Don’t bet on that. Be hopeful. Times will change.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Newsom’s Homeless Policies Require Radical Revision

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California’s Homeless Industrial Complex was delivered a minor jolt last month, when Governor Newsom “issued a blanket rejection of local California governments’ plans to curb homelessness, putting on hold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.”

The panic was short-lived, however, when in a November 18 conference in Sacramento the governor relented and released yet another billion dollars to California’s cities and counties after their representatives all pledged that “in the next round, they commit to more aggressive plans to reduce street homelessness.”

Oh please. “We’re going to plan to make more ‘aggressive’ plans. Ok? Now give us the money.”

This is theatre, but it doesn’t have to be. Newsom is one of the few individuals in California with the power to completely upend the corrupt, phony compassion-spewing army of opportunistic bureaucrats, nonprofits, and politically connected developers who have squandered billions in order to make California’s homeless crisis worse than ever.

Newsom was right to reject funding requests that, on balance, claimed they would only reduce homelessness in California by two percent. But he is wrong to expect that “more aggressive policies” will ever be effective unless the fundamental model to combat homelessness is completely scrapped and replaced.

Homeless policy in California rests on premises that guarantee ongoing failure. The so-called “Housing First” doctrine, which requires the homeless to be given free housing without any behavioral conditions before they can be treated for mental illness or substance addiction, much less trained to develop marketable skills, is a failure.

The decriminalization of sociopathic behavior including public use of hard drugs and repetitive petty theft, along with court rulings that prevent police from removing people from public places unless they can offer them free shelter, is a failure.

And the conflation of the obligation to provide “supportive housing” with the prevailing scam whereby a few thousand units of housing are built at a cost of a few billion dollars, is an abject, scandalous failure.

Finally, California’s neglected water, energy, and transportation infrastructure, its decimated timber industry, its offshoring of the sources for every necessary building material, its punitive policies of urban containment, its protracted, capricious, and extortionate process to obtain building permits, and its ridiculously overwrought building codes – all of this defined by fanatics and orchestrated by oligopolists – is the real reason housing is unaffordable.

If Governor Newsom wants to help the homeless, he will reject all of these premises. He will denounce the Housing First policy as unbalanced and ineffective, he will demand legislative and legal actions to reform laws that prevent police from arresting criminals and institutionalizing psychotics, and he will set a cap on how much a shelter bed will cost and challenge cities and counties to come up with solutions within that constraint.

All Newsom has to do to ensure cities and counties adhere to these new and radical revisions to homeless policy in California is withhold the money. All of it. It’s a lot of money. According to the LAO, last year the State of California “provided $10.7 billion to 50 housing and homelessness-related programs across 15 state entities.”

That probably isn’t all the money being spent. Deciphering state budget allocations, taking into account the many ways “housing” and “homeless” are categorized, perusing the general fund, capital accounts, bond financings, federal pass-throughs, special funds, and who knows what else, is a fool’s errand. There are infinite routes through the labyrinth, all of them yielding different results. Expect $10.7 billion to be the low number. That’s a pretty big Minotaur, but that’s only the state’s share.

Then there is the money California’s cities and counties are also pouring into the maw of the Homeless Industrial Complex. Earlier this year, the City of Los Angeles agreed to commit another $3 billion to house “some” of its homeless. In this current fiscal year, Los Angeles County has budgeted $532 million to “fight homelessness.” These totals don’t include additional spending on low income housing and rent subsidies. They don’t include spending on homeless and housing programs by the other 87 incorporated cities in Los Angeles County. They don’t include the rest of California’s cities and counties.

It isn’t necessary to wade through over 500 local budgets to know tens of billions of dollars have been squandered, because of political choices that created the homeless crisis, the housing shortage, and then made the problem worse instead of better.

Consider the KTLA report from February 2022, exposing a homeless housing project where each unit under development was going to cost $837,000 per unit. Consider what outraged residents in LA’s Venice neighborhood have dubbed the Monster on the Median, projected to cost over $100 million to construct, on land that’s worth at least another $50 million, in order to offer 140 units of subsidized housing.

This is blatant, deplorable corruption. It’s everywhere. And it’s all perfectly legal. Newsom, it’s time to go beyond words. Take this to the next level. End this. Now.

Estimates of California’s homeless population range in excess of 150,000 individuals. How much would it cost in an honest, functional society to get them off the streets? First, one must understand – and this is based on evidence gathered from people with extensive and direct experience working with the homeless – if California’s laws were revised to make laws against vagrancy, intoxication and theft enforceable again, half of the homeless (or more) would vanish overnight. They would return to domiciles they had previously spurned in favor of the freedom and unaccountability of the street.

The homeless that remained after changing the legal environment could be managed by reserving existing shelter space and supportive housing for those unsheltered homeless who can remain sober and accept counseling and job training. There is already enough capacity built to handle those homeless who are willing and able to work towards regaining their independence.

The rest – and this would be most of them – could be sorted according to their afflictions into cohorts of criminals, addicts, and psychotics. The addicts and the criminals could be removed to regional camps set up in inexpensive parts of the California’s urban counties. These camps could be set up for millions of dollars, not billions, using expertise on loan from U.N. personnel who have done similar work, overnight and on a budget, in conflict zones all over the world. To help earn their keep, they could participate in conservation projects and other character building work, and recover their sobriety, their dignity, and eventually their freedom. The truly mentally ill would have to be placed, involuntarily, in psychiatric hospitals.

Taking this approach to the homeless crisis would not be cheap. Expanding the capacity of psychiatric hospitals, in particular, will cost hundreds of millions. But overall, this approach would work, and it would cost far less than what is being spent today to execute policies that have merely turned California into a magnet for the indigent of the nation. Incremental shifts in homeless policy in California will never solve the problem. And Gavin Newsom knows it.

Do more, governor.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Newsom’s Charisma Overcomes Dahle’s Truths in a Rigged Debate

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For the best description of Gavin Newsom’s behavior during his debate with gubernatorial challenger Brian Dahle last Sunday, one must go all the way back to Hunter Thompson’s unforgettable book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972, where he compares a career politician on the scent of the presidency to a bull elk in a mating rut. Here is a snippet of Thompson’s arresting prose:

“The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares. A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way.”

Against such potent political hormones, cascading through Newsom’s whole lanky body these days with the force of the Los Angeles River after a monsoon has dumped ten inches of rain onto the San Gabriel Mountains in under an hour, Dahle never had a chance.

Even if Dahle could have mustered sufficient combative eloquence to butt heads with Newsom in rut, the setup was rigged. In a fair staging, the candidates are placed on opposite sides of the set, with the moderators in the center, usually facing them. Thanks to organizer bias likely masquerading as budget constraints, this debate had two tables, both facing the camera, with the candidates at one table and the moderators at the other. The tables were angled to make it easier for the moderators and candidates to see each other. At the candidate table, Newsom had the outside spot. Throughout the debate, this put Dahle at a major disadvantage.

Instead of both candidates being in identical and therefore neutral positions, Dahle was sandwiched between the moderators and Newsom. He was forced to either turn his head towards the moderators or towards Newsom, and could never speak to them both at the same time. Newsom, on the other hand, turned in his chair to practically face Dahle, looming over him whenever he tried to speak. It was reminiscent of how Trump hovered behind candidate Hilary Clinton in the second presidential debate of 2016. But don’t expect the same approbation to fall on Newsom.

Hectoring Dahle like a schoolboy, Newsom used his height advantage as well as his positioning to lean into Dahle’s personal space with impunity, often making points with hand gestures that moved well beyond the halfway point of the table to almost, but not quite, make Dahle involuntarily flinch. It was a masterful display of dominant body language, facilitated by the sponsors of the debate either through disgraceful negligence or willful hostility towards Dahle.

One must wonder why a public broadcasting service, funded by taxes along with tax deductible donations, can’t even muster impartiality when the chances that Dahle, whose campaign account through the most recent reporting period ending 9/24 had a balance of $408,000 compared to Newsom’s $23.2 million, has about as much chance of an upset as walk-on athletes from Newsom’s favorite Waldorf school have of fielding a football team and beating the Los Angeles Rams. And it wasn’t just the stage that was rigged. Throughout the debate, as Newsom, leaning in, repeatedly interrupted Dahle, the moderators made no attempt to give the candidates equal time to speak.

With all that said, even if Newsom was so old he’d need transplants to maintain his pompadour, and was not entering the springtime of his presidential political rut, Dahle was outgunned. Several times he got trapped in places where with more experience he would have been able to score points. One tough example of this was when Newsom goaded Dahle into focusing on and defending a gas tax holiday, when it appeared Dahle was about to make a much more powerful point about California’s supply gutting regulatory war on refineries and drilling.

Another area where Dahle got backed into a corner, with Newsom getting help from one of the moderators, was on the question of whether Proposition 1 would permit late term abortions. Dahle all but let them assert that Prop. 1 does not do that, when in fact the language is ambiguous. If legal experts who are pro-life have concluded that Prop. 1 will permit late term abortions, that should be good enough for Dahle to run with. He should have forcefully declared his belief that Prop. 1 will permit abortions up until birth, and he could have immediately – without taking a breath or permitting himself to be interrupted – to ask Newsom why even abortion at “only” six months is not grotesque. He could have described a six month old fetus and challenged Newsom to defend killing it.

Instead, the moderators used the abortion discussion to segue into asking Dahle if he is for the death penalty, and again Dahle appeared indecisive. If Dahle has gone on record as supporting the death penalty, which the moderators implied, then he needed to own it. He could have explained the grisly, psychopathic, hideous, murderous crimes that earned these criminals a death sentence and challenged Newsom to explain how these criminals should be spared while innocent babies are killed. It’s not a contradiction to support the death penalty while also being pro-life. Unless there is no difference between a murderer and a baby, what’s contradictory is amnesty for killers and death for fetuses.

Over and over Dahle was outmaneuvered by Newsom with the complicity of the moderators. A telling moment was during the segment on public education, where Newsom said he “took offense” at Dahle’s criticism of California’s K-12 system of public education, where, as Dahle pointed out, “seventy percent of kids can’t read at their grade level.” Watching Newsom in this moment was revealing. As the hormones of his presidential rut surged through him, you could see a vicious curl to his mouth and hear a vicious edge to his voice. That it would surface in this moment should be no surprise. Newsom is owned by the teachers union, one of the most powerful special interests in the state, an organization in complete denial of the harm they’ve done to a generation of students.

Republicans Have Solutions – But They Have to Own Them

If politicians like Brian Dahle, and the California Republican Party he represents, want to have any chance to regain political power they will have to lean in to the issues where they’re being challenged. They have to openly and loudly reject the premises of the Democratic establishment.

“Climate change” is not the reason California’s forests are burning. It’s because California’s Democrat controlled legislature has destroyed the timber industry at the same time as it has made it all but impossible to graze livestock, do controlled burns, or mechanically thin the forests. They’re overgrown tinderboxes. Why didn’t Dahle make this point, raising his voice while doing so?

Similarly, Newsom’s blather about creating jobs could have been countered by Dahle interrupting and reminding Newsom that California has the highest rate of poverty in the nation. Dahle was right to point out that companies are leaving and residents as well are fleeing to other states, but why, when Newsom rattled off some vague story about “public-private and public-public partnerships” to revitalize Kern County, Dahle should have interrupted him to state the obvious: If you want to create good jobs in Kern County, start drilling again for oil and gas. Quit sending our money and our best jobs to Nicolás Maduro.

It is impossible to tepidly call for more oil and gas drilling, more refinery capacity, more logging, more nuclear power plants, and more reservoir storage. These things must be done. It is not possible to sort of and partially hold the teachers union responsible for ruining the public schools. They are unequivocally responsible. Instead of letting Newsom, again with help during the debate from the moderators, claim that Proposition 47 (which decriminalized crime) didn’t cause more crime, dispute that highly debatable assertion, and remark that even without Prop. 47, district attorneys like the idiotic George Gascon in Los Angeles are actively working to make our cities unsafe.

It is a moderate politician that is outspoken and explicit in their support for clean fossil fuel, safe nuclear power, off-stream reservoirs, responsible logging, and school choice. It is a moderate politician that calls for putting criminals in jail, and moving homeless people into centralized, cost-effective and safe shelters. It is a moderate politician that calls for deregulation in order to enable more competition between businesses which will drive down costs for everything, including housing. And any politician with an ounce of decency knows that a late term abortion is one of the most ghastly forms of murder imaginable. So no. No late term abortions. Make Democrats defend abortions up to six months, which is appalling enough.

These are the solutions that Newsom accused Dahle, and his party, of lacking. California’s Republicans have to be promote these solutions without apology or compromise. They are not extreme, even though they shatter every premise and piety of the Democratic machine. The politically and environmentally correct “solutions” that have been imposed on Californians by Democrats are nothing but a facade to empower special interests. Solutions exist. They’re scary. Own them.

Newsom won last night. He won because he is slick, as Dahle pointed out. He won because the debate itself, right down to the seating assignments, was rigged in his favor. He won because he spoke his party’s line with the conviction of an accomplished thespian, whereas Dahle’s truths were sincere but lacked theatrical passion.

But let’s be real. Even if Dahle destroyed Newsom, leaving his political carcass, reeking of rut, wasting on the roadside, Dahle would still be financially outgunned by more than 50 to 1. An advantage like that can turn a comatose candidate into a winning competitor. Just consider the zombie who two years ago became U.S. President. That’s what overwhelming support from established special interests can do in politics. Newsom’s no zombie. Newsom is a bull moose, in the full flush of his political life, lusting for the prize.

California’s Republicans must change the terms of the discussion. They must build their platform on a foundation that doesn’t merely reject, but ridicules and replaces the fundamental assumptions of the Democratic party, their media allies, and the special interests that are mopping up the state. Only then will they attract the support they need to win.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How to Beat Gavin Newsom in a Recall Election

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With nearly 900,000 signed recall petitions already collected, four active recall committees now operating, and belated but significant press coverage shining a spotlight on the effort, the chances that Gavin Newsom will be in a fight for his political life in the Spring of 2021 has gone from a longshot to a distinct possibility.

In an article published by NBC News entitled “Recall effort against California governor an attempt to destabilize the political system,” Newsom spokesperson Dan Newman called the recall effort “a distraction and a circus.” Newman also characterized the recall proponents as “a ragtag crew of pro-Trump, anti-vaccine extremists, along with some ambitious Republican politicians who would like to be governor,” and warned that a recall election could cost taxpayers “upward of $100 million.”

Any candidate willing to stand against Newsom in a special recall election could start right there. They could explain that the money Newsom and his party’s policies have wasted, the wealth they have vaporized, and the hard won prosperity they have expropriated, makes $100 million a trivial price to pay for a course correction. A victorious challenger begins by quantifying the economic cost of policies imposed on Californians by Newsom. They then offer bright and bold alternatives that remove these oppressive burdens and restore opportunities to normal Californians.

The first step would be to point out the tragic cost of the extreme reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of quarantining the elderly and medically vulnerable, Newsom quarantined the entire population. This prevented Californians from acquiring herd immunity, and allowed the virus time to mutate into alarming new variants that may be used to justify lockdowns lasting years. Meanwhile, the damage to California’s economy includes over 2.6 million jobs lost. So far, less than half of those jobs have been regained.

A conservative, back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of this policy would be to take the average annual salary in California, which is $63,000, times one-million jobs lost for one year. That would be $63 billion. Compare that to the $100 million cost of a “distraction and a circus” necessary to get rid of the governor that caused this catastrophe.

And then there are the fires, caused not by “climate change,” but explicitly by the policies of California’s one-party state legislature that all but destroyed the timber industry. If the annual harvest of timber in California were tripled, back to the level it was before the Sierra Club and their allies declared war on logging, the amount of timber being removed from California’s forests each year would be equal to the amount of annual growth. This would restore California’s forests to health, and would cost nothing.

Instead of seeing millions of acres of overgrown, neglected forests burn in super fires every year, costing billions and displacing thousands of people, we would see thousands of new jobs, and the timber companies would maintain fire roads and fire breaks, as well as trim the growth along transmission line corridors. But when the latest round of infernos terrorized California last summer, what did Newsom do? Called for more electric cars. That is the act of a clown. That is what you might expect of a “distraction and a circus.”

There’s no end to the nonsense that Newsom and his party have concocted. After already wasting well over $5 billion, they want to redirect the rest of the nearly $100 billion earmarked for the bullet train into “light rail.” That’s $100 billion vs. $100 million for a special election. Note to innumerate journalists: One billion is one-thousand million. Finding a politician that will put money into freeways and smart roads instead of mass transit in the age of COVID for a mere $100 million is a cheap date.

What about housing and the homeless? Consider the staggering economic cost of overpriced housing. If the median price of homes in California were $250,000, like they are in Texas, instead of an obscenely overpriced $600,000 which is California’s median, people could afford to buy homes, housing stock would increase, and more people could find shelter. Roughly 500,000 homes are sold every year in California. That means that instead of paying around $935 per month (30 year fixed at 3%), each year another half million new Californian homeowners are paying around $2,250 per month. The difference adds up to another $10 billion per year, compounded every year, coming out of Californians’ pockets for the privilege of living here. And the beneficiaries? Exiles, who took the money and ran to other states, where they’ll spend their winnings starting a new life somewhere they feel welcome instead of oppressed.

As for California’s homeless, 150,000 strong? Their numbers keep rising, despite tens of billions already spent on “supportive housing” that costs over $500,000 per unit. Newsom presides over this racketeering scandal, which only benefits politically connected “nonprofit” developers, their for-profit vendors, and public sector bureaucracies, and does nothing to reduce the numbers of homeless.

The cost of energy is another way that Newsom and his gang have oppressed Californians. California’s notoriously corrupt Public Utilities Commission has been systematically decommissioning clean natural gas and nuclear power plants in favor of far more expensive solar and wind power. Now they are pushing to deny gas hookups in new homes. As this monstrous scam quietly gathers momentum, special interests line up for a piece of the action: along with the entire “renewables” industry, add all those high tech firms and appliance manufacturers that intend to create “connectable” washers, dryers, dishwashers, heaters, air conditioners, water heaters and refrigerators to “help” consumers manage their consumption. The cost to retrofit every one of California’s 13 million households? If all seven of these major appliances could be purchased for under $10,000 – and that’s a laugh – it would “only” cost California’s consumers $130 billion.

When calibrating the economic and social costs of the Gavin Newsom administration, the state of California’s public schools has to rank at or near the top. Governor Newsom is wholly owned by the teachers’ unions. This is the reason he has supported legislation designed to undermine charter schools, it’s why he blocks any other attempts at education reform, and it’s why he hasn’t pushed harder for California’s public schools to reopen. Thanks to politicians like Gavin Newsom, there is a generation of youth that are not getting the education they deserve. The cost of this policy failure is incalculable.

The Winning Strategy

Beating a governor like Gavin Newsom ought to be easy, but it will require a candidate with the courage to promote bold solutions. For example:

Open California back up for business. Focus on protecting the vulnerable instead of locking down an entire population. Demand legislation to restore responsible logging in California’s forests. Support infrastructure projects that offer practical value to all Californians – more water storage, more roads and freeways, and clean, cost effective, conventional energy from natural gas and nuclear power. Explain that housing will not become affordable until cities are allowed to build again on California’s abundant open land, perhaps in the places currently earmarked for solar farms. Expose the homeless industrial complex boondoggle and call for supervised, no-frills homeless encampments to be built in areas where land is inexpensive. Change the laws to restore penalties for hard drug use, public intoxication, petty crime, and vagrancy, and watch most of the homeless problem evaporate overnight. Push for school vouchers, so parents have absolute choice over where to send their children to get an education, and the teachers union monopoly on public education is broken forever.

Along with bold policies, however, a successful candidate must run a bold campaign.

That would begin with the unshakable belief that what they are proposing is something that every ordinary Californian wants, especially low and middle income Californians. The successful candidate should prioritize campaigning in low income neighborhoods. They should enlist the support of conservative activists in the black and Latino communities, but not as an afterthought, or as one item on a vast strategy checklist, but as the core strategy. They should be physically present in these communities in every venue they can find. They should be visible on social media with a focus on these communities. And they should repeat, over and over, not pandering sops to the various identity groups they address, but their bold policy agenda for that is designed to benefit everyone.

The political elite in California is a hereditary aristocracy. Brown, Pelosi, Getty, Newsom. A tribe, connected by blood and money. Newsom, the poor soul, might be aptly compared to Czar Nicholas, a weak man who was forced by fate to govern a fading empire. Then again, California isn’t exactly fading, at least not yet. Instead, the recent explosion of Silicon Valley wealth has buttressed what was already a formidable coalition of aristocratic old money, powerful environmentalist pressure groups, and a public sector bureaucracy coopted by union negotiated pay and benefit packages that largely immunize them to the punitive cost-of-living their policies have inflicted on everyone else.

This is the story that has to be told to Californians of all colors, genders, origins and incomes. Because it is a story of oppression by a corrupt and self-interested ruling class, and all their rhetoric about “equity” and “inclusion” is a brilliant distraction from the real issues. With any luck, Gavin Newsom is about to stand trial for crimes against the common man. If that happens, the right candidate can beat Newsom, if they are unafraid to tell the whole truth, offer the hard choices, and explain how much better life can be in the Golden State.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Harmeet Dhillon: THIS Recall Gavin Campaign Has Over 800,000 Petitions

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Harmeet Dhillon doesn’t need national publicity. She’s frequently invited onto the national stage by conservative television hosts. By the time you’ve been on television as many times as Harmeet Dhillon has, you’re not appearing for the thrill of the experience, you’re appearing because you have a duty to spread the truth and motivate millions of people to fight the good fight.

So why would Harmeet Dhillon, one of the finest and most eloquent conservatives California’s got, make an epic misstatement of fact, one that throws cold water into the faces of thousands of activists who have worked tirelessly since June to recall Governor Newsom?

In an appearance on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle last week, Harmeet Dhillon was asked about the signature gathering campaign which could very well force Gavin Newsom into a special recall election, and a fight for his political life by the spring of 2021. Ingraham mentioned that according to one of the leaders of the effort, Tom Del Beccaro, the effort to recall Newsom has gathered over 700,000 signatures so far.

Ingraham asked Dhillon, “how would this work, if the signature number, 1.5 million was actually reached?”

To which Dhillon answered, “first of all this is the third such recall effort, there are two prior efforts, so I think the signatures you are mentioning are with some other recall efforts.”

Where is Dhillon getting her information? If she had talked with anyone connected with the recall campaign, she would know that 700,000 is actually an outdated number, and that the latest estimate has total signed recall petitions at well over 800,000. Not including the “two prior efforts.”

Last week, a few days prior to Dhillon’s appearance on Fox, I spoke with Paul Olson, principal at GoCo Consulting. Olson’s firm, which has years of experience in this business, are verifying that the signed petitions are valid. They are checking signatures, names, and addresses against a file of California’s registered voters. They are making sure signatures match, names are correct, that there aren’t duplicates, and the forms are filled out correctly.

In a telephone conversation with Paul Olson on 11/18, he confirmed that his firm has already processed 494,000 signed petitions which have either just been turned in or are now being delivered to the county clerks around the state. Olson also confirmed that his firm is currently processing another 230,000 signatures. That’s 724,000, Ms. Dhillon. All gathered for this effort, and not including previous efforts.

When combined with the 55,000 – for this effort – that were turned in earlier in the year, and the ones signed but still on their way to GoCo, conservatively estimated at 60,000, this campaign has already collected an estimated 839,000 signed recall petitions.

Lead proponent for the recall, Orrin Heatlie, reached for comment on 11/23, was enthusiastic. “There are many good developments over the last few days. We are talking with people who have just now decided to support and endorse the campaign. On all fronts, signature gathering, web traffic, and donations, our momentum continues to build.”

To force a recall election, the campaign will need to turn in not quite 2.0 million signatures, in order to be certain to yield a net quantity of approved petitions numbering at least 1,495,709. They have 114 days left to gather another 1.0 million signed petitions. When one considers the fact that two weeks ago, 5.9 million Californians voted to reelect President Trump (a number set to increase since they’re still counting votes), and every one of those voters would probably sign a petition to recall Newsom, finding people to sign is not the problem.

What will challenge the recall campaign is earning additional publicity and managing logistics. The volunteers who have gathered over 800,000 signatures can continue gathering signatures at an accelerating rate, but they need help. Some of that help will come from a new committee formed to assist on the recall, headed up by former California State GOP chairman Tom Del Beccaro. But where are the rest of the troops?

Where is the California State GOP, which endorsed the recall effort early in the summer? Now that the November elections are over, why aren’t they putting their resources in every county into the recall? Almost every email the CAGOP blasts to their list disparages Newsom. Do they really mean it? Because the state party, fully committed to the recall, could make a big difference.

As for Harmeet Dhillon, she is invited to call Laura Ingraham’s senior producer (his name is Roman Cofini), and request a new interview where she can tell America – most certainly including Californians – the true measure of the recall campaign’s accomplishments so far.

That one gesture would go a very long way towards motivating volunteers who have already made history. It would also attract national attention to a movement that strikes at the heart of the progressive fraud in America, King Newsom, California’s endangered governor.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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What Gavin Newsom’s Inevitable Political Doom Means for Democrats

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Just in time for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered 38 California counties moved to the “purple tier” of coronavirus prevention mandates. This means Californians are now subject to a curfew, wherein “non-essential work, movement, and gatherings must stop between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.”

Including all the major population centers in the state, this curfew comes on top of a reestablishment of a ban on eating indoors in restaurants, as well as a requirement that people wear masks whenever they leave their homes, and “limit mixing, practice physical distancing and wash their hands.” It also comes on the heels of Newsom’s recently updated “Mandatory Requirements for All Gatherings,” which specifies in preposterous detail exactly how families and friends may gather during the holidays.

The irony in all of these mandates coming from Newsom is that despite enraging millions of Californians who are not convinced they are at all necessary, the pandemic and Newsom’s aggressive response to it are providing political cover for Newsom among those other millions of Californians, more numerous, who believe lockdowns and curfews are necessary. Once this political cover goes away, that equation, favoring Newsom, is going to change. And the speed and ferocity of that change, when it happens, is going to surprise a lot of people.

Nowhere to Hide

When the pandemic is over, Newsom will have nowhere to hide. Newsom, along with the Democratic Party he represents, will preside over an economy battered beyond anything Californians have ever seen. Apart from the tech billionaires who have shamelessly profited as an entire population was driven into the virtual world, California’s economy will be a smoking ruin. The COVID-19 shutdown will expose the fragile foundations of California’s alleged prosperity, and blast it to smithereens.

Before COVID-19 came along, California had the highest rate of poverty and nearly the highest income inequality in America. It had the highest cost-of-living and some of the highest taxes. It had crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, devastating wildfires caused by negligence, avoidable shortages of water and electricity, a housing industrydestroyed by overregulation, and an explosion of the homeless—people who could be helped if it weren’t for the toxic progressive combination of misguided compassion and rampant corruption.

All of these problems will be worse when people are allowed back on the streets. The homeless encampments, unregulated and not subject to the pandemic mandates affecting everyone else, will have become permanent. Small business owners everywhere will survey the financial wreckage, and move elsewhere. Tech companies, their bubble valuations topped out, will not be sufficient sources of tax revenue to make up for the imploding tallies from everyone else. The only thing standing between state and local government agencies and financial catastrophe will be a federal bailout.

Newsom is more than just an incompetent, hypocritical, corrupt governor. He exemplifies the entire fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party in California.

California’s voters are at a tipping point. Newsom’s polling numbers, still high back in September and October, were mostly just a reflection of an anti-Trump electorate being supportive of anything that seemed to defy Trump. When mismanaged and neglected forests burned down half the state, and Trump said Californians needed to revive the timber industry, Newsom instead signed an executive order requiring electric cars, and California’s anti-Trump voters cheered. When COVID-19 struck, and Trump said we must be careful not to let the cure become worse than the disease, Newsom instead imposed a statewide lockdown, and California’s anti-Trump voters cheered again.

The problem with all this anti-Trump enthusiasm in California is that it only buys time for Newsom. In the recent election, with votes still being counted, Californians edged out Texas to cast the most ballots of any state in America—5.9 million so far—for President Trump. And in this high-turnout election, Trump even improved his percentage performance, rising from 31.6 percent in 2016 to 34.2 percent in 2020.

It’s a safe bet that every one of those Californians are ready to throw out Newsom and every other Democratic lawmaker. In fact, the ongoing populist movement to recall Newsom, fresh on the heels of a 120-day extension up to March 17 to gather signatures on a recall petition, has a very good chance of making him fight for his political life in a special recall election in the spring of 2021. And while Trump voters provide ample prospects to sign these recall petitions, the ranks of Californians who’ve had enough of Newsom are growing.

The Hypocrisy of the Party of the Rich

The apparent perpetual nature and increasing severity of what amounts to martial law are driving voters away from Newsom, a process exacerbated by Newsom himself, when he failed to comply with his own mandates. In a faux pasthat will go down in history, on November 10 Newsom and his wife joined at least 10 other people, sans masks, for a dinner paid for by lobbyists at the French Laundry in Napa County, one of the most expensive restaurants in the United States.

Newsom is going to have a hard time talking his way out of this. The hypocrisy of a man who built his image on his aggressive mandates to cope with the pandemic; the brazen display of privilege, lobbyist patronage, and stupefying wealth at this elite restaurant while small business owners, including restaurateurs, have no privilege, have no customer patronage, and must helplessly watch a lifetime of hard-earned wealth slip away rightly enrages many Californians.

Newsom’s initial response? “I should have modeled better behavior.”

Californians, whether they’re Left, Right or centrists, like most people everywhere, dislike hypocrisy. The Democratic litany, which claims Republicans are the party of the wealthy, is about to be broken, and Newsom’s hypocrisy is helping that along. While the vast majority of Californian parents are watching their children try to learn while being locked out of their public schools for nearly a year, Newsom’s children go to a private school, where attending classes was never seriously disrupted.

This reality, that the wealthy are exempt from the consequences of curfews and lockdowns, and these same wealthy are providing the backing and the agenda for the Democratic Party, is a ticking time bomb. Republicans already understand this. Republicans understand that their party is now the party of the worker. And every time a Democratic politician slips up—like Newsom with his dinner, or Pelosi with her two freezers filled with $12-a-pint ice cream—more voters realize that identity politics and environmentalist panic is a smoke screen, a con job, a way to get them to keep voting for the party of the rich.

Ultimately, when Californians emerge from their “dark winter” and try to resume their lives, they are going to have less tolerance than ever for the rhetoric of the Left. For example, compassion for the homeless is going to wear thin when your business is ruined and your bank is foreclosing on your mortgage, and meanwhile, thousands of homeless people took over the streets where you live and trashed them. They’re stoned out of their minds and shitting on the sidewalks.

And what is the answer? Round them up, put them in tent shelters in inexpensive parts of town? Get them off drugs? Dry them out? Help them? No. Of course not. Democrats will propose to spend additional billions to give them free housing on the beach at a cost of between $500,000 and $1 million per unit, and not even require them to stop using methamphetamine.

Of course they’re homeless and high all the time. Democrats reward them for it.

Similarly, next summer, when another 4 million acres of forest burn in California, and burned out homeowners can’t get fire insurance unless they move into a city where, thanks to overregulation, it costs $1 million to buy a bungalow with a backyard so small you can’t even set up a swing for your kids, Democrats will claim that the timber industry is the problem instead of recognizing it as the solution, and that absurdity will finally be heard for what it is: elitist, quasi-communist, clueless, baseless, misanthropic, opportunistic bullshit.

In every area of public policy, the progressive fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party, led by Gavin Newsom, will be exposed as threadbare posturing, designed to make the rich even richer, while everyone else gets broken financially and herded into subsidized hovels to save the earth and foster “equity.”

But perhaps the most egregious crime of the Democrats, inviting the biggest backlash, will be the performance of California’s public schools.

Returning to the classroom after being almost completely abandoned by teachers who never missed a month of pay despite not having to do much teaching, parents will demand a return to education fundamentals. They will demand a return to classroom discipline and teacher accountability. Who knows, maybe they will even demand school vouchers, to break the Democratic union monopoly that’s turned public education in California into a cruel joke.

One may go on and on. How many of California’s Latinos, who voted for Trump in record numbers, are going to stay loyal to Democrats, led by the likes of Newsom—white as snow and filthy rich—who have decided, without asking, that their ethnic group is no longer known as “Latinos,” but is now “Latinx,” pronounced “Latin-Ex.” Exactly who among the Democrats thought this act of cultural imperialism would be welcomed by Latinos? They’re in for a rude shock, and it’s about time.

There is a seismic wave building in California. It’s still far away, but it’s coming in with the tide. And when it reaches the shore, it is going to sweep away everything in its path. Most definitely including Gavin Newsom, and his rotten, corrupt, wealthy, dirty, grasping, lying, worthless party.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Recall Campaign Gets Powerful New Ally

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The Recall Gavin 2020 campaign, which took on new life when a judge granted them a 120 day extension, till March 17, 2021, has just acquired the support of a new committee, Rescue California. Headed up by former California GOP Chairman Tom Del Beccaro, this new PAC brings a powerful group of experienced politicians, political professionals, and donors to the front lines of the Recall Gavin movement, bringing help to what is already one of the most impressive grassroots efforts in California history.

Reached for comment on this new development was Rescue California Co-Chair Tony Krvaric, long-time chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party and one of the most formidable political strategists in the state. He said “This new PAC is built with the right people to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, holding him accountable for his erratic leadership and stunning hypocrisy in this crisis. Californians deserve better and we invite everyone to join in this effort.”

The coalition that has now formed is a unique opportunity, long overdue, for establishment Republicans in California to merge their talents and resources with what has become a massive, bipartisan collection of volunteers. Having this new player involved does not change anything with the petition. There is still only one official recall petition, which can be downloaded by anyone with an internet connection and a printer. To ensure there is no wasted effort, both organizations are working with the same firm to collect signed petitions and verify their validity.

In a telephone conversation with Paul Olson on November 18, whose company, GoCo Consulting, is doing the petition verification for the recall, he confirmed that his firm has already processed 494,000 signed petitions which have either just been turned in or are now being delivered to the county clerks around the state. Olson also confirmed that his firm is currently processing another 230,000 signatures.

When combined with the 55,000 that were turned in earlier in the year, and the ones already signed but still being delivered, conservatively estimated at 60,000, this campaign has already collected over 800,000 signed recall petitions.

“From the beginning I have been impressed with the efforts of the original petitioners,” said veteran fundraiser Ann Dunsmore, who assisted the all-volunteer recall campaign through the summer. Dunsmore is now working with the new committee, explaining that “I was pleased to be asked to continue supporting the cause by Republican elected officials and Republican party leaders throughout the state. I hope we will be able to support the recall in a fashion that respects the passion and the efforts of the volunteers which has gotten us this far.”

When reached for comment on this new development, the lead proponent of the recall, Orrin Heatlie, was enthusiastic. “This is happening at exactly the right time,” he said, “we have just gotten the 120 day extension. This new committee, supported by dozens of prominent elected officials and seasoned professionals, is a perfect complement to our volunteers. We are the army, and they are the cavalry. I could not be more pleased.”

It remains to be seen how much energy the California State Republican Party will put into the recall effort. The post-election counting, at least in California, is winding down. The California GOP is riding on the heels of some important victories including picking up two seats in the US Congress. They’re also dealing with a few heartbreaking defeats such as Senator Moorlach, who lost his bid for reelection after being targeted by the prison guards’ union. Right now, with the election over, is a perfect time for California’s GOP, which continues to regularly blast emails sharply critical of “King Newsom,” to get directly involved in this increasingly credible attempt to kick the King off his throne.

Getting the requisite 1,495,709 signatures to force a recall, with over half of them already collected, ought to be easy if a determined and adequately funded coalition steps up. Prospects to sign the recall petition are not in short supply. In 2016, candidate Trump got 4,483,810 votes in California, 31.6 percent. In 2018, with more ballots left to count, Trump has already received 5,884,058 votes in California, 34.2 percent. He not only earned the support of nearly 1.5 million more voters than he’d attracted in 2016, he improved his percentages in what was an election with record turnout. Finding a Trump voter in this state who would be unwilling to sign a recall petition would be a tough job. But that’s only part of this opportunity, because getting rid of this governor is a wholly bipartisan cause, backed not only by Republicans, but by Democrats, Libertarians, and independents.

The strategic value of making Governor Newsom fight to stay in office cannot be overstated. Newsom is more than just an incompetent, hypocritical, corrupt governor. He exemplifies the entire fraud that constitutes the Democratic Party in California. Governor Newsom, and his party, have ran California for decades, and the legacy of their rule is the highest income inequality and the highest cost-of-living in the United States, crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, devastating wildfires caused by negligence, avoidable shortages of water and energy, a housing industry destroyed by overregulation, and an invasion of homeless that could be helped if it weren’t for the toxic progressive combination of misguided compassion and rampant corruption.

A special election that forces Newsom to defend his office would be an opportunity for California’s GOP to redefine itself not just by being anti-Democrat, but by offering real solutions: education vouchers to guarantee universal school choice, reform of crippling environmentalist overreach such as the California Environmental Quality Act, great new infrastructure projects to build new roads, repair the aqueducts, and invest in more water storage, keeping Diablo Canyon open, and reviving the timber industry which could thin California’s overgrown forests.

Several organizations working cooperatively to ensure this recall effort qualifies for the ballot is not easy. But it is not unusual for initiatives and recalls to be promoted by more than one campaign. The Davis recall in 2003 had several independent committees working to gather petitions, and that result is history. Will history repeat itself?

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Mismanaged Forests Burn, Newsom Blames “Climate Deniers”

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What we quaintly refer to as “super fires” have incinerated nearly 5,000 square miles of California’s forests so far this year. In response, Governor Newsom has declared he has “no more patience for climate deniers.” But it isn’t climate change that caused these superfires. It was negligent forestry.

When it comes to facts that matter on the issue of our burning forests, perhaps Newsom is the one who is in denial. Because when Newsom denounces “climate deniers,” he denies the following far more pertinent facts about wildfires and climate:

  • The timber industry in California has been cut to a small fraction of what it was in 1990 in terms of employment and board feet of timber harvested. In 1990, 6.0 billion board feet were harvested from California’s forests, today the harvest rarely exceeds 1.5 billion board feet.
  • Dense, overgrown forests result in unhealthy trees, because the increased number of trees are competing for the same amount of sunlight, water and soil nutrients. This is the reason so many of them cannot resist disease and infestations, not climate change.
  • Year after year, millions of acre feet of snow and rain fall on these dense tree canopies and either evaporate immediately, or are sucked up by the overgrown, water stressed biomass as soon as they hit the ground. Far less water makes it into the aquifers and rivers as a result.
  • The overgrown forests are not only packing up to ten times more fuel than what is historically normal, but because these trees aren’t adapted to being packed so close together, half of them are dead or dying, which means they are tinder dry.

Any honest mainstream journalist, if there are any left, needs to ask Governor Newsom one simple question:

“Under which conditions would be a lightning strike be more likely to cause a catastrophic fire: on a grove of stressed and dying trees, dried out and packed 200 per acre, on a 75 degree day, or on a grove of healthy trees, moist and dispersed 20 per acre on an 85 degree day?”

A child can answer this question, but perhaps Gavin Newsom isn’t interested in the truth.

How California’s Forests Turned Into Tinderboxes

For over 20 million years, forests existed in California at a much lower density than they are today. These forests were healthy and abundant with wildlife, and they stayed healthy through climate cycles that included droughts and so-called mega-droughts that lasted a century or more.

That all changed starting around 1850 when American settlers began logging operations that left vast clear cut areas. The second growth forests that filled these clear cut areas had a higher tree density, and this unnatural response to the original clear cuts is where the problems began.

Natural fires, usually caused by lightning strikes, probably would have burned through 2nd and 3rd growth forests, with the hardier trees surviving to restore the original ecosystems, but over the past several decades fire suppression tactics had become highly effective and were aggressively practiced. Fire ceased to be a significant source of natural thinning. Forestry officials and private landowners tried to do controlled burns, but ran into too much bureaucracy to ever do it at anywhere near the necessary scale.

The problems of overstocked forests magnified in the 1990s when logging operations throughout the Western United States came under attack from environmentalists. While logging practices needed to evolve, cutting logging activity to a fraction of what it had been for over a century caused additional density. For decades now, annual growth has far exceeded harvests.

Unhealthy, unnaturally dense forests. Far fewer smaller, natural forest fires. Almost no logging activity. It doesn’t take a genius to know what comes next.

Forestry experts including some environmentalists have been warning politicians about the fire hazards in the forests, urgently, for well over 20 years. But effective forest thinning has been prevented by environmentalist backed over-regulation.

If Gov. Newsom is in “denial” about any of this, he might explain: Why is it, if we knew this was an urgent problem, that California’s forests are still twice as dense, or more, than they were for the last 20 million years?

“Climate Change” Policies Are Misanthropic and Futile

Whenever there’s a wildfire, Newsom and all the others in denial over their epic policy failures, come shouting “climate change.” They have the audacity to tell us to turn our thermostats up to 78 degrees and refrain from using electric appliances, and they claim these fires are evidence of why this is necessary. They embark on a “renewables mandate” that jacks utility prices up to the highest in the nation in exchange for unreliable power.

More than anything else, what Newsom and all the rest of these politicians who want California to set a “climate example” to the world are in denial of is their own misanthropy. They know perfectly well that California only emits one percent of the world’s CO2. They know as well that China and India are not about to stop using fossil fuel to grow their economies. They know that fossil fuel accounts for 85 percent of global energy production, with hydroelectric and nuclear power accounting for another 11 percent. All renewables account for only four percent of global energy production. Four percent.

Although one often wonders, Newsom is smart enough to figure out, based on readily available and indisputable data, that if everyone in the world, per capita, used half as much energy as Americans do, global energy production would have to double. And it will. And for the next 20-30 years, fossil fuel is going to account for a large portion of that.

Someday, probably within the lifetime of most people alive today, there will be a series of breakthroughs in energy technology. Fusion power. Satellite solar power stations. Direct synthesis of atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel. Who knows? But until that time, the only reason to impoverish the lives of ordinary Californians in the name of the “climate crisis” is so rich and powerful people like Gavin Newsom can get even richer and even more powerful.

Once this horrific fire season comes to an end, there is just one thing Gavin Newsom should be doing as follow up. He needs to figure out how California’s forests are going to be rapidly thinned from, using the Sierra Nevada as an example, 200 or more trees per acre, down to the historical norm of 40 trees or less per acre. No forest management solutions are perfect. But in search of perfection, we engineered a cataclysm. Have we learned? Or will we just watch the rest of our forests burn up, and blame it on climate change?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Recall Newsom Campaign at a Crossroads

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With three months left to collect signatures, one of the largest and most organized grassroots efforts in the history of California politics is at a crossroads.

The Recall Newsom campaign has mobilized a bipartisan coalition involving over 100,000 volunteers, with momentum that is still building despite being almost completely ignored by the media, major donors, politicians, and political organizations. Those political organizations would include the CAGOP despite the fact that CAGOP tailors a significant percentage, perhaps even a majority, of its mass email messages to disparaging California’s hapless sitting governor.

This dismissal of California’s disenfranchised grassroots by their supposed professional champions not only signifies excessive caution and unfortunate hypocrisy, it is a practical blunder. A concerted and unified recall effort, backed by establishment political forces, would yield tangible political benefits. It would finally offer conservatives a cause that makes a compelling case to independents and disaffected Democrats. It would lend momentum to the campaigns of CAGOP candidates who endorse the recall, harnessing for their benefit the power of the recall volunteers.

Most significantly, a recall effort that was backed by the conservative establishment would be a courageous shot heard around the world. It would serve notice to anyone, anywhere, who has written California off as an ungovernable cesspool of corruption and chaos. People are fighting back, and they mean business.

What the political experts that consider a gubernatorial recall effort futile must understand is that Gavin Newsom’s failures are bigger than Gavin Newsom. If you successfully destroy the credibility of Gavin Newsom, you destroy the credibility of California’s Democratic party.

Newsom is the figurehead that represents a ruling class that has destroyed the aspirations of ordinary Californians. This ruling class incorporates leftist billionaires who are indifferent to California’s high cost-of-living. It includes public sector unions who have “negotiated” outrageous pay and pension packages which serve to exempt their members from the worst effects of California’s unaffordability.

California’s ruling class also includes radical environmentalists who, more than any other special interest, have tied California’s economy up in knots, making it nearly impossible to build new and affordable suburbs on open land, making energy and water both scarce and prohibitively expensive, and crippling with excessive regulations California’s manufacturers, oil and gas producers, timber companies, and countless other concerns that do actual productive work.

It’s time for California’s conservative establishment to stop playing only defense, or when they do go onto offense, only wage incremental battles. “We can take back an assembly district!” “We have to put all our resources into stopping the ‘split roll’ initiative!” Well, yes. And no. Of course these battles have to be fought. Meanwhile, however, there is no overall strategy or message. No unifying theme. No simple but profound rallying cry. No ecumenical passion that reaches out to every voter in California, regardless of their ideology or background. In short, it’s all tactical, which in these times of epic transformations and tensions, nobody cares about.

Getting rid of Gavin Newsom offers that strategic battle. Not just because he’s Gavin Newsom, a pompadoured white scion of incredible wealth and privilege, who nonetheless mouths “anti-racist,” “anti-sexist,” “anti-transphobic,” etc., etc., etc., identity politics bullshit that has been a useful distraction for Democrats for decades. No. Getting rid of Gavin Newsom sends a message that conservatives are serious about political realignment. Not in twenty years. Not in twenty months.

Now.

If the Gavin Newsom recall effort were backed by serious money and if this grassroots volunteer army of unprecedented size were assisted by experienced professionals, well, to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, “even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown.”

Imagine the consternation that might spread among Democrats from Sacramento to Minneapolis if real money, serious professionals, mega donors and national conservative media were to recognize and support this Recall Gavin campaign. Imagine how the nation would react to a determined recall effort that takes to task the entire legacy of California’s democrats, holding their leader accountable. Let’s take a visual excursion into what this campaign might include:

Picture television commercials and internet videos, depicting California’s ruined cities, graphically examining these lawless cesspools of crime and drugs and feces, while blaming Gavin Newsom and his democratic party.

Imagine prime time spots, depicting California’s homeless, numbering 150,000 or more, occupying neighborhoods and city centers, the vast majority of them either substance abusers, criminals, or psychopaths, if not all three.

Imagine an aggressive media campaign to expose the corruption of the homeless advocates, who have become mere shills for subsidized developers that make their money by building “homeless housing” at a cost of between a half-million and a million dollars per unit on some of the most expensive real estate in the world, ruining these neighborhoods forever. Imagine exposing these corrupt boondoggles that cost billions, but only help a small fraction of the people in need.

Picture the videos of raging forest infernos, caused by environmentalist “experts” who conned the public and manipulated the politicians, using lobbyists and litigators to prevent forest managers from doing underbrush removal and controlled burns. Imagine getting out the truth, that these extremists and their opportunistic allies destroyed most of California’s timber industry, and tied up rational efforts to clear out the accumulating tinder in litigation and endless cycles of permit applications that wasted precious time and deterred countless efforts.

The list goes on. Low income Californians sweltering in brownouts, because safe nuclear and hydroelectric power is being decommissioned, and development of California’s abundant clean natural gas reserves is completely off the table. Failed public schools that are cramming transgender ideology down the throats of 3rd graders, instead of teaching them multiplication tables. Millions of Californians denied their livelihoods because of ill conceived, misanthropic laws that force businesses small and large to convert their independent contractors into employees, even in situations where that makes no practical or moral sense.

It doesn’t take a genius to think up all the ways California’s democrats have betrayed and oppressed ordinary Californians. It just takes the courage to say it. Spouting Black Lives Matter slogans or parroting the latest Sierra Club press releases on “climate change” may be the currency of today’s democrats, but it takes no courage and even less thought. For that matter, fighting only incremental battles for reform requires only incremental courage, and even less vision.

What California needs is for conservatives with resources and influence to seize this moment, during this critical election cycle, to capitalize on the opportunity that brave volunteers have given them. They need to hop onto this bandwagon, and make Gavin Newsom the face of everything wrong with the Democratic party. They need to take this chance to expose Newsom and his party for what they are: an elitist clique of rhetoric spewing incompetents, backed up by a coopted lying media, and funded by some of the most conniving oligarchs in the history of the world.

The Recall Gavin campaign is at a crossroads right now, but there is still time. All the pieces are in place. The hardest work has already been done.

Who will stand behind this recall? Who will give this army of volunteers the legitimacy it deserves in their battle against a failed governor and a failed party? Who will do this knowing that in return, this army shall remain intact for the next battle, and the one after that?

The Recall Gavin campaign offers millions of disenfranchised voters a voice at last. It offers conservative leaders a chance to decapitate the enemy leadership, instead of fighting a war of attrition that they’ll never win. It is a springboard from which, with stupefying rapidity, not only can the Democratic syndicate finally be rejected and broken, but policies of prosperity and freedom can be offered and accepted by voters across this great and trendsetting state.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Life on the American River

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…the colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces, of people going by,
I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they’re really saying, I love you…
– What a Wonderful World, sang by Louis Armstrong in 1967

The American River runs through the heart of Sacramento, from the bedroom communities in the eastern foothills all the way into downtown. There is a wide expanse of parkland along both banks. Down on the river these days the sun doesn’t set till after 8 p.m., and on weekdays after work, and after the heat of the day starts to recede, people gather.

Some sit on the bank in beach chairs, enjoying the breeze that’s cooled as it passes over the water. Others fish for striped bass and shad that run this time of year. On the footbridge that connects the neighborhoods of Rancho Cordova on the south bank to those of Fair Oaks on the north bank, hundreds of people cross, passing fishermen casting their lines. There are cyclists, people walking their dogs, families, couples. The people are of every color imaginable: white, black, brown, Asian. And nobody notices. Nobody thinks anything of it.

On these weeks near to the solstice, the daylight lingers. The sun drifts north as it slowly sets, prolonging the day. From the south bank the sun hangs directly over a bend in the river, reflecting off the water. It turns the swimmers downstream into silhouettes, their identities extinguished in the glare. Only their common humanity is visible as they stand in the water, their legs chilled by snowmelt from the High Sierra, their torsos baking in the sauna of a Sacramento summer.

A short distance downstream, on the north bank, on a compound guarded around the clock by sheriffs and state police, is the mansion where Gavin Newsom lives with his family. But nobody enjoying these fine evenings on the river thinks about politics. They’re enjoying life. To be part of this, it wouldn’t take but five minutes for Gavin and his family to summon the bodyguards, pile into their armored SUV, and come down to the river. Don’t hold your breath.

This is unfortunate. This is a missed opportunity. It’s a teachable moment Gavin Newsom will never experience. Because if California’s posh leader bothered to mingle with real people for a change, instead of the professional hate-mongers who pass themselves off as spokespersons for “the people,” he wouldn’t see colors. He wouldn’t see group identities. He wouldn’t see warring factions of privileged and oppressed. He would see hundreds of Californians, Americans, united by simple pleasures amidst profound beauty.

Gavin Newsom isn’t the only member of America’s elite to ignore the resilient unity that still lives in the hearts of most Americans. A typical example of what is the current fixation of the media is ABC’s Nightly “News,” where for the past several months, whenever they weren’t hyping COVID-19 as the plague of the century, they were hyping something far more preposterous – that America is an endemically racist nation. Day after day, stories that shouldn’t even make local news are reported as if they’re events of national importance. The theme is always the same: a white person does something offensive or harmful to a black person. There is never any context. There are never any stories of blacks offending or harming whites, or other blacks. It’s a constant drumbeat: whites are racists, unworthy of anything they possess, living on land they stole, in a nation built on the backs of black slave labor.

There’s plenty of evidence to refute this nonsense, and it’s obvious as well why the networks are gripped by this obsession; they’re terrified that blacks will vote for Trump. So they’re willing to lie, misrepresent, selectively emphasize, and grossly distort events in order to foment racial resentment and hatred. In a bitter irony, ABC Nightly News always ends its 30 minute newscast with a “feel good” story. Somebody helping a stranger. Somebody triumphing over adversity. An act of courage, a gesture of kindness. Ironic, because this brief feature invariably follows 25 minutes of absolute trash, scientifically formulated to anger and terrify viewers. And by design, the Pavlovian repetition dulls the bullshit receptors of all who watch.

Back on the banks of the American River, thankfully, people aren’t watching television. An inordinate percentage of the people on the water aren’t even staring at their phones. Take a walk on the footbridge. Listen. A white man asks a black man “what did you catch?” Smiling, he answers “got some bass.” An Asian woman compliments a Hispanic couple on their beautiful German Shepherd. The dog pulls on its leash, attempting a friendly leap onto its admirer. Two men of indeterminate ethnic origins toss a Frisbee back and forth in the distance. A watchful mother’s child pedals their first bike, nearly wobbling into strangers who carefully step aside. The sounds of laughter rise above the murmur of conversations and the rush of the water under the pylons.

This is the America that Gavin Newsom doesn’t see, and ABC’s David Muir ignores. This is the America that endures, and will endure, long after the separatists and provocateurs are gone.

For the sake of one presidential election, America’s elite institutions, all of them, are fomenting racial strife and pandering to radicals. They are unwilling to put police violence into any realistic, fact based perspective. Instead of encouraging activism to build on previous reforms, they are fueling violent rioting and succumbing to ridiculous demands. It is a shocking dereliction of civic responsibility and a devastating rejection of our shared national identity.

Where are the leaders who will remind us that Christopher Columbus was a brave visionary, who defied the scientific wisdom of his time to prove, in a voyage that required unimaginable bravery, that the world was round? Who will step up and remind us that Father Junipero Serra was a man who lived a life of humility and compassion? Why can’t Gavin Newsom find the courage to say these things?

Instead he sits in his mansion, insulated from and in denial of the positive aspects of our history and the harmonious essence of our society today. And within sight of the same sycamores and cottonwoods, along the same riparian corridor that nurtures hawks, deer, jack rabbits and mountain lions, this harmonious human society is on abundant display.

Gavin Newsom needs to get out a little more. There are fine evenings to be had on the American River.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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