California

"Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity" may very well be the epitaph of Gavin Newsom's political career when he leaves office in January 2027. Driven by his presidential ambitions, California's governor is torching a quarter-billion taxpayer dollars on a redistricting scheme that would make Elbridge Gerry himself blush. What Newsom calls "fighting Trump," voters increasingly recognize as #GavinMandering, a transparent attempt to override the independent redistricting commission they approved to end exactly this kind of political manipulation. The political implications are staggering, not just for California but for the future of Democratic Party credibility nationwide.

Gavin Newsom once touted California as the fossil fuel industry’s “foe.” In 2024 he declared energy workers “the polluted heart of the climate crisis.” Together with Attorney General Rob Bonta he famously filed an outlandish climate lawsuit in 2023 demanding oil majors pay the costs of climate change. And under Newsom anti-energy lawfare has been coupled with burdensome environmental regulations, delays in permitting and punitive legislation such as a pledge to end oil drilling across the state by 2045. But now, a decade since the madness started, the strategy has turned out to be a dud. The “bold” climate plan has produced no reliable or affordable alternatives to oil and gas – and has even forced major refineries to up and leave.

Judging from how much Gavin Newsom talks about Donald Trump these days, the governor’s real project isn’t governing California – it’s raising his national profile ahead of an inevitable presidential run. He’s found an issue that lets him pit himself against Trump and gain coveted national media attention: reconfiguring California’s congressional districts to put more Democrats in Congress. He’s pitching it as a way to “fight fire with fire” after Texas Republicans passed their own partisan maps. In reality, it’s a political power grab dressed up as righteous urgency. The problem is that in 2010, Californians voted to take redistricting away from politicians and hand it to an independent citizen commission – a reform meant to end gerrymandering.

With great fanfare, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed “historic” legislative package designed to “advance an abundance agenda.” It’s a nod to the recent (and fashionable) book Abundance by the liberal bloggers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and it’s supposed to reform a state best known for a punitive cost of living and chronic shortages of everything essential – including housing, water, and energy.  Key to Newsom’s new legislation are Assembly Bill 130 and Senate Bill 131, both of which make fundamental changes to how the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is enforced.

In a 2023 interview, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked how he ended up in a leadership position. After struggling with his response, he eventually paraphrased a line from George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant: “I put a mask on and my face grew into it.” It was a remarkable admission that inadvertently validated his most common critique – that he is fundamentally inauthentic. Newsom has always seemed as though he were grown in a lab to be a politician. In a way, he was. The son of a well-connected judge and insider of the Getty family dynasty, he has glided through public life with the polished ease of someone born to power. He looks like a central casting governor, speaks in political platitudes and has successfully learned to suppress any sign of human spontaneity.

California is catching the deregulation bug. The state legislature has apparently realized that people need houses too, and sometimes the endangered insects have got to go. On Monday, Gavin Newsom signed a bill streamlining permitting for building projects mired in environmental review.  About time, says Cockburn. Consider for a moment the California High-Speed Rail, a project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, which has yet to emerge from environmental clearance despite starting in 1996. The budget has multiplied, in the meantime, from $30 billion to $100 billion. The segment just from San Francisco to San Jose, where the train would use pre-existing Caltrain rail, almost limped across the permitting finish line in 2021.

In 1976, the Ramirez Pharmacy opened in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Appropriately located on the corner of East Cesar Chavez Ave, the pharmacy is the crowning achievement of my grandfather, Eddie Ramirez, and is in many ways physical evidence of the American dream.  But in today’s Los Angeles, we’ve seen citizens and non-citizens waving Mexican flags while torching cars, attacking police and burning US flags in protest of the Trump administration's immigration raids in the state. Protesters have looted businesses downtown and lit fires, leading to full blocks of the LA commercial district nailing plywood to their storefronts.  “Lately, since all this ruckus started with a protest, we have seen a drop in the business.

Gavin Newsom had a golden opportunity this week to prove that he’s learned something in the time since the summer of George Floyd. He had an opportunity to set himself up as a Democrat willing to take on the factions of his own coalition when their methods go from peaceful protest to setting fires in the streets, destroying property and all-out anti-cop violence. He could have taken a stand for law and order, taking flak from his own side for standing up for the law-abiding citizens of California. Instead, he blew it. He called the decision by President Trump to deploy the National Guard “an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act,” and announced a lawsuit against the government over the issue.

Addressing a ballroom filled with Democratic supporters and donors in San Francisco last night, Kamala Harris asked a favor from her audience. “Please allow me, friends, to digress for a moment,” she asked with a slightly mischievous grin.  Hallelujah. Here we go: OK, it’s kinda dark in here, but I’m gonna ask for a show of hands. Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago, the one of the elephants at the San Diego zoo during the earthquake? Google it if you haven’t seen it. So that scene [has] been on my mind. Everyone’s asking "what’ve you been thinking about these days"... here those elephants were, and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle, and stood next to each other, to protect the most vulnerable. Think about it.

Somewhere atop the sun-drenched hills of coastal California, failures go to rebrand themselves, and rebrand their rebrands as "pivots." There, Kamala Harris and Meghan Markle are busy writing the next chapter in the book of blaming the system for the personal failures of wealthy and powerful people. Harris, fresh from discovering that Democratic strategists had invented the America that was enthusiastic about her, now contemplates her political afterlife. She does so from the same region of the same state where Markle, having learned that royal traditions don't yield to Instagram aesthetics, crafts multi-million-dollar deals to explain why it's everyone else's fault. Welcome to the Golden State, where yesterday's rejections become tomorrow's empowerment memoirs.