Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Sure, he hasn’t announced it and has claimed he’s “all in” for Biden, but he’s increasingly taking time off from personally disrupting the nation’s Dapper Dan supply chain in order to weigh in on national issues, measure the drapes, and attempt to troll Republican governors. His latest salvo, directed toward Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sworn in as Arkansas’ governor about 15 minutes ago, claims that “While [Sanders] touts public safety, here is what she skips over: Arkansas has the one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” This is, of course, true. In 2020, the last year for which CDC stats are available, Arkansans have a much greater chance of being murdered than Californians.

No doubt California’s extreme weather makes for dramatic television, and for climate eschatologists it stirs up another round of end-times unease. California cliffs tumbling onto highways and sinkholes appearing out of nowhere have been all over the news. Lowland and flood plains are underwater up and down the state. Dry creeks have been raging torrents. One Guardian headline goes, “California’s rainstorm hell ‘among the most deadly disasters in our history.’” California governor Gavin Newsom tweets, “California is proof that the climate crisis is real and we have to take it seriously.” Both the media and Governor Newsom should get a grip. There is no evidence that climate change is to blame for these heavy rains. California has long suffered from extreme weather.

Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come to the border, the border is coming to them. On Thursday, two buses of illegal immigrants unloaded in front of Harris’s vice presidential residence. Others have arrived in downtown New York, Chicago, and D.C., to the fury of local mayors and governors. A small planeload caused an uproar on Martha’s Vineyard when it landed on that self-proclaimed sanctuary island. More busloads are sure to come, probably in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and perhaps a beach community in Delaware. The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving.

California has gone full pagan — it lives and dies by the weather. Over the last few days, the state’s power grid has groaned under the strain of a massive heatwave. Combine that with a hydropower-sapping drought and you’ve got a recipe for blackouts. While major weather events pose challenges for any electricity system, California’s has become uniquely vulnerable to blackouts thanks to an over-investment in weather-dependent wind and solar. Every night during the heatwave, solar experiences its scheduled defeat at the hands of sunset and Californians are left praying for the wind to blow and and the imports to flow.

Americans are voting with their feet and the results are in: red states are winning. An incredible 46 million people moved to a new ZIP code over the year to February 2022, the highest annual total since Equifax, a credit agency, began tracking moves in 2010. Republican-leaning red states gained the most residents — led by Florida, Texas, and North Carolina — while the blue states of California, New York, and Illinois were the biggest migratory losers. The most popular pandemic-era moves were from New York to Florida and California to Texas — so much so that U-Haul ran out of moving trucks leaving California last year. Given the chance to flee high-cost cities, Millennials did so in droves.

“Freedom is under attack in your state,” exclaimed California Governor Gavin Newsom in a bizarre 30-second television ad that aired on Fox News in Florida markets over Fourth of July weekend. Unnamed “Republican leaders,” gasped a man who held his constituents under near-house arrest for two years, are “banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors. I urge all of you to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.” Newsom’s anti-Florida canards cost his 2022 reelection campaign a reported $105,000. They addressed an audience that will vote neither for nor against him.

Many are worried about losing their abortion rights now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. In some states, abortion will now be heavily or fully restricted, while other states are busy trying to keep the procedure available throughout all nine months of pregnancy — even though 65 percent of Americans support banning most abortions after the first trimester. With Roe gone, each state will have free rein to create abortion laws, and some are intent on expanding and maintaining radical, unregulated options. It’s not just about access to abortion, but proper medical care for women undergoing them and protection for babies who may ultimately survive them. To this end, abortion radicals have little to offer.

Michael Shellenberger is an unusual political candidate. He’s also arguably the only person with a chance of stopping Gavin Newsom from spending four more years as governor of California. A fifty-year-old environmentalist, Shellenberger is a former Democrat running for governor as an independent. And he has form when it comes to aiming leftwards. A self-styled ecomodernist, he has been a vociferous critic of the environmentalist movement, its insularity, economic illiteracy and fetish for scarcity. More recently, he has set his sights on the progressive approach to homelessness and addiction.

Last week, signing a batch of pet bills to end the legislative session, Gov. Gavin Newsom made California the first state in the nation to require gender-neutral retailing. The law, which will take effect in three years, is limited to toys and 'childcare products' sold by big companies. It will never be enforced, since in essence it's already happening. Target dropped boys and girls toy sections in 2015, and for years retailers have been moving away from gender-specific labels. But the law’s emptiness is immaterial. The point is not to weed out a bias or fix a pressing wrong. The act is a victory for LGBT advocates who claim that sellers pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes and stigmatize non-conformers.

If we have learned anything over the last few months it is that emergencies, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. The ruling elites have been as shifty and duplicitous about what justifies enacting emergency powers as the FBI has been about what warrants investigating angry parents at school board meetings (and before them, Trump campaign operatives for their Russian 'collusion’.) One feature of all these police-state excursions into unbridled power never changes — vagueness. It is so much easier to move the goal posts when there are no lines drawn on the field. The COVID-19 pandemic served as the all-encompassing key to unlocking 'emergency powers’ for politicians and unelected government bureaucrats.

In August, polls showed that Gavin Newsom’s chances of surviving a recall were slipping away. Many Democrats were so apathetic and Republicans so fired up that in a low-turnout election, the nation’s largest Blue State might indeed oust its liberal governor. Democrats went to work. Leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris to Sen. Bernie Sanders all painted the recall as a 'life or death’ battle to preserve liberal values and fight 'Trumpism’ and extremism. Larry Elder, the leading Republican in the simultaneous election to pick a successor to Newsom should the recall succeed, was turned into a boogeyman with a Los Angeles Times columnist actually calling him 'the black face of white supremacy’. The strategy worked.