The end of fascism and other California stories
Dear John,
When President Trump federalized National Guard troops to protect federal buildings during June’s Los Angeles riots — and deployed U.S. Marines from Twentynine Palms to back them up — Gov. Gavin Newsom breathlessly predicted the End Times.
“This is what fascism looks like,” he said. He called the president’s action “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism,” “a fascist impulse in real time,” and predicted, “Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.” Aiming at his ethnographic bull’s-eye, Newsom told Spanish-language reporters that Trump’s actions were “la fantasía trastornada de un presidente dictatorial” — the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial president.
This week, the president demobilized the troops. Peace had been restored, Trump said. But the real authoritarian threat remains: Having flouted federal immigration law for decades — by encouraging illegal immigrants to enter and stay in California — the governor and his allies fueled rioting as a strategy. Those politicians are still in power.
Panicked that similar high-profile policy failures will smother his White House aspirations, Newsom has worked speedily to reverse some of them. On others, President Trump is doing for Californians what we apparently cannot do for ourselves.
REDISTRICTING, PART I
Last week, hoping to increase the Republican margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, Trump asked the Texas legislature to redraw the state’s congressional voting map in time for the 2026 midterms. Trump wasn’t asking for something illegal: While many states (including California) limit electoral cartography to the decennial U.S. Census, Texas law allows redistricting to occur at any time. Also unlike Texas: the California constitution requires that the electoral map be created by a nonpartisan commission — not, for example, by state lawmakers or the governor himself.
But never mind the law. Fired up by Trump’s Texas request, Newsom promised some redistricting of his own. “We can act holier than thou,” Newsom told reporters in Los Angeles. “We can sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be, or we can recognize the existential nature that is this moment.”
The governor claims to have identified two loopholes in state law. First, he might persuade his allies in the state legislature to simply pass a law allowing them to redraw the maps immediately. Reminded that that would violate the state constitution, the governor offered a second possibility: the state legislature could craft an initiative repealing California’s nonpartisan redistricting process and place it before the voters in time for the June 2, 2026, primary.
It’s one thing for California Policy Center to ask the governor to follow the state constitution. But Newsom has more interesting critics. “Trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish,” said Alex Lee (D-Milpitas), among the Assembly’s most radical members. “It is a betrayal of the party platform... I understand we want to recapture the House, but it frustrates me that we would rather cheat on the elections.”
REDISTRICTING, PART II
California’s next legal redistricting will follow the 2030 census. But that nose-counting is likely to further erode California’s — and the Democrats’ — representation in Congress.
“Even if the governor wanted to redraw congressional maps to favor Democrats, which state law already makes difficult, the math might only work out until the next Census,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Juliue Zhu.”Data shows that not only is California’s population stagnant, it’s shrinking fastest in Democratic parts of the state. On average, between 2020 and 2023, Republican-leaning congressional districts in California grew, while Democratic ones shrank.” Zhu says a report from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) “echoes earlier forecasts of the state’s declining political clout, including from the non-partisan American Redistricting Project and from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. All three reports found the state could lose at least three seats; the Brennan Center projected four.”
“California isn’t alone,” Zhu notes. “Other Democratic-leaning states like New York, Illinois and Minnesota are also expected to lose one or two seats due to population declines. Meanwhile, Republican-leaning Florida and Texas could each gain as many as four new seats.”
DERAILED
Trump’s federal review of the state’s scandal-plagued high-speed rail system arrived a few weeks ago, and its conclusion (the project has “no viable path forward”) seemed obvious to anybody with eyeballs. Just as predictable was Trump’s announcement this week that, following his federal review, he’s pulling back $4 billion in federal funding. CPC board member (and cohost of our fabulous Radio Free California podcast) David Bahnsen offered this advice to Newsom: “Take the win.” Newsom (Bahnsen suggested) should have sent Trump a muffin basket for this act of political mercy. The governor could have told his most radical and train-loving supporters that the project is simply unsustainable without federal support. He could have blamed the president for this crushing blow (as he does so many other Newsomian failures) and put behind himself one of his administration’s most glaring failures. Instead, he (and sidecar-riding Attorney General Rob Bonta) sued Trump in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
California Policy Center fellow Marc Joffe offered three observations: (1) “The Administration was correct to claw back federal high-speed rail funds. Due to a lack of other funds and cost overruns, the project has little chance of being completed by the promised 2033 deadline in the grant agreements.” (2) “Newsom and Bonta are wasting California taxpayer money by suing the federal government over this matter since they have virtually no chance of prevailing in the Supreme Court.” And finally, (3) “A better option for the state would be to scale back the project: lay the initial 119 miles of track without electrification and then connect to existing track that Amtrak already uses to serve the Central Valley. That would allow some increase in speed and frequency of Amtrak service between Merced and Bakersfield.”
SECOND AMENDMENT MISFIRE
Last week, at the beginning of a marathon four-hour interview with Newsom, conservative podcaster Shawn Ryan presented the governor with a gift: a Sig Sauer P365 XMACRO pistol. “This is fabulous,” Newsom told Ryan, holding the pistol with something like reverence or maybe terror. “The last thing people would expect is that I respect this gift.” “Really?” Ryan asked. “Yeah, man, I’m not anti-gun at all,” Newsom said — and then (symbolism alert!) he returned the gun to its box. “I’m just for gun safety, common sense. The vast majority of folks on the right and the left agree. And I think we’ve lost a little touch with some commonsense background checks, I think there’s an age appropriateness.”
Flash forward a few days, to Thursday, July 24, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had this to say about one of Newsom’s “commonsense background checks”: “Given the fees and delays associated with California’s ammunition background check regime, and the wide range of transactions to which it applies, we conclude that, in all applications, the regime meaningfully constrains California residents’ right to keep and bear arms.”
Newsom responded with that most sublime of legal claims: “Most major polls show overwhelming bipartisan support for universal background checks and other gun safety measures.” A poll! That’ll show the U.S. Constitution!
ENERGY REFORM
Freaking out about the political impact of high gasoline prices, Politico reports, “the California Energy Commission is floating increasing in-state oil drilling and fuel imports, lawmakers have proposed boosting ethanol and freezing the low-carbon fuel standard, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office this week began circulating draft bill language for a proposal to streamline new well permits in existing oil fields.”
For years, California Policy Center’s Edward Ring has been calling for precisely these reforms, including (recently) right here. Sniffing out the stink of official fear, Ed predicted just a few days ago that state officials would begin loosening the reins. That won’t be enough, he concludes: “Even if state agencies make this change, they still have to reevaluate all their policies impacting California’s oil industry. From drilling to distribution to refining, the regulatory environment is driving major operators to shut down and relocate. Exporting our environmental footprint — along with good jobs — is expensive and hypocritical. We can do better.”
CEQA ‘REFORM’ IS A WIN FOR UNIONS
Claiming that he hopes to spark a housing boom, Newsom has demanded — and signed — a package of bills he says will reform the most significant obstacle: California’s notorious Environmental Quality Act.
Governor Ronald Reagan signed CEQA in 1970. Back then, its 4500 words were designed primarily to allow the public to weigh in on major government programs — the construction of highways, dams and universities, for instance. Now, literally 100 times longer, CEQA has become a kind of regulatory swamp for private citizens and builders: many enter but few return alive. It’s most often used by environmental radicals who simply hate humans. But it’s also become a favorite weapon of trade union leaders who, though they represent just 15 percent of all construction workers, want 100 percent of all construction jobs. Labor leaders have used CEQA to extort union contracts from builders who might otherwise produce housing quickly at a far lower cost. Bogged down in litigation, many builders have simply left the state — or joined the parade of crony businesses that rely on government-subsidized construction projects.
Newsom’s “reform” bills give those labor leaders everything they wanted from their CEQA lawsuits. The reforms “only apply if developers follow certain union-inspired rules, like paying union-level wages and following work rules that make projects more expensive and take longer to finish,” writes CPC’s Andrew Davenport. But it gets worse, he says. One of the bills Newsom signed, AB 130, “actively rewrites how those wages are calculated to ensure unions maintain dominance. As noted by political commentator Jon Fleischman, “Section 26 further rigs the system by manipulating prevailing wage calculations to exclude non-union data, guaranteeing that union-negotiated rates become the mandatory standard.”
“There is an urgent need for more housing, especially for working Californians being priced out of their own communities,” Andrew concludes. “Environmental oversight matters, but so does the ability to build homes in a timely and cost-effective manner.”
MANUFACTURING POVERTY
Reporter Kenneth Schrupp reveals, “The state-funded Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found California had ‘no job creation’ in the fourth quarter of 2024, citing federal data that shows the state lost approximately 80,300 jobs between January and December of 2024.” Writing for the Center Square, Schrupp also found this in the LAO report: “Since mid-2022 … five out of six quarterly early benchmark revisions have shown weaker employment trends than first reported by the monthly survey. For context, the monthly survey has overestimated net job growth by 25,000 jobs per month on average over this period.”
That’s the sort of economic miracle that produces more bad news for Newsom. A new Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that California and Nevada are tied for second place among the highest unemployment rates in the nation. “Second highest”? Newsom may wish to thank God for Washington, DC.
Perhaps hoping to support Newsom, CalMatters helpfully blamed Trump for a state economy that has been hobbling for years. Beneath the headline “Thousands of Californians lost work after LA immigration raids — including citizens,” reporter Levi Sumagaysay writes, “California saw a 3.1% drop in private-sector employment the week immediately after the Trump administration stepped up its immigration raids in the state, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census data.” But that “new analysis,” published by the University of California Merced’s Community and Labor Center, suffers from a few methodological problems: it relies on notoriously volatile Census data from just a single week; that Census data, in turn, relies on worker interviews (a very subjective “self-report”) to explain their unemployment; and it extrapolates from events that occurred primarily in Los Angeles to account for statewide phenomena.
But most fundamentally, the CalMatters story confuses correlation with causation: a simple edit of that headline might just as reasonably – and perhaps more accurately — read, “Thousands of Californians, including citizens, lost work after LA immigration riots.”
HOW CALIFORNIA GOT ITS NAME
Finally, July marks the publication 515 years ago of the smash-hit Spanish novel that gave California its name. Las Sergas de Esplandián follows the adventures (“la sergas”) of a Spanish nobleman (named Esplandián) who defeats in battle — and then marries — a warrior queen named Calafia. She’s a black woman who rules a Muslim kingdom called California, an island of gold located “on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by Black women, without any men among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.” Her beauty and courage — and her stories about gold — are so intoxicating that Esplandián overlooks momentarily Queen Calafia’s description of her female soldiers: they fight like well-armed mixed martial artists and ride flying dragons on raids to capture men for purposes of procreation. And when they’re finished with their captive men, these distaff Californians feed them to the dragons along with a side order of tender male infants who have issued from their intimacies.
It’s ghastly. But all of it — the conquest/marriage of a Muslim queen by a Spanish Christian nobleman, a magical island on which gold is as common as dirt, serried ranks of Amazon warriors bedecked in precious metals, and their remarkable low-carbon dragon-based transportation system — captured the enthusiasm of the Spanish moment.
All of that was clearly on the mind of the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes 25 years later. In 1535, having toppled the Aztec empire, Cortes sailed from somewhere near present-day Acapulco northwest and into the mirror-like waters we call the Sea of Cortez. His three ships anchored just off the coast of what appeared to be an island. He led his armored soldiers — clanking like 400 Tin Men — onto the desolate shore near the modern-day city of La Paz, planted a flag (likely the very complicated Cross of Burgundy) in the sand, and called the place “California.”
But after a year of exploration, they found nothing beyond the white sand beaches and the dun-colored hills — no Amazon warriors, no flying dragons, and no gold. There was almost no fresh water, the soil was anemic, and resupply ships were rare. Hungry, sick and terrifyingly isolated from the rest of the expanding Spanish empire, they returned to Mexico City. But we got “California.”
— by CPC president Will Swaim
|
|
Radio Free California #399: Newsom Agonistes
On this week's podcast with CPC president Will Swaim and CPC board member David Bahnsen: In a single week, Gov. Gavin Newsom lost federal support for the California High Speed Rail project, declared an unwinnable war to redraw California’s voting map, and confronted the worst unemployment numbers in the nation. Bonus! Republican candidate for governor Steve Hilton describes his strategy for breaking through California’s blue wall of noise. Listen now.
|
|
|
|
|
|
