Unions Behind California Wealth Tax Proposal

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again. This adage applies well to ideas for new ways to tax Californians. Every election cycle we see new ways to be taxed, and higher tax rates, but rarely will we see a tax get repealed.

So it is that Assemblyman Alex Lee (D, San Jose) has introduced Assembly Bill 259, the Wealth Tax Act, which will impose an annual “worldwide net worth” tax of 1 percent on net worth above $50 million, rising to 1.5 percent on net worth over $1.0 billion.

Everything about this bill is goofy. It’s unconstitutional, it applies to intangible assets like goodwill or trademarks, it applies as well to assets that have subjective, wildly fluctuating values, such as fine art, and it even applies to equity owned in private companies that the holder may never convert into real money.

Already weighing in at nearly 16,000 words, AB 259 is riven with loopholes. And this typifies governance in California today — a state awash in laws and regulations so capricious and so complicated that they only reward those willing to laboriously scheme their way through the bureaucratic maze and opportunistically search for cracks in the walls, while penalizing those who aren’t sufficiently devious and instead prefer to do productive work. California is losing those good people.

A wealth tax will accelerate an exodus already in progress, as the wealthy will flee to more hospitable states, joining California’s small businesspeople, its vanishing middle class, aspiring youth, skilled workers, honest tradesmen and contractors, fixed-income retirees, and everyone else who can no longer afford to live here.

There’s a reason nobody can afford to live in California, and laying even more taxes onto the rich won’t fix it. But that isn’t the point, if you’re Alex Lee. Because taxes fund the state government, and the state government pays state employees, and labor unions collect dues from state employees. In the November 2022 election, apart from contributions from the State Democratic Party, every one of Lee’s top twenty contributors were unions, starting with the California Teachers Association.

Alex Lee and his union-controlled allies in the state legislature aren’t operating alone. As Lee proudly proclaimed in a press release issued January 23, AB 259 was issued “in coordinated effort with seven additional states,” Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington. These bills vary, but all of them tax wealth.

There’s something else these bills share. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last month, “In the absence of a federal wealth tax, the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive nonprofit, and the State Revenue Alliance, which works with labor groups to call for taxing rich people, gathered a handful of states to create policy as part of the ‘Fund Our Future’ campaign.”

With what labor groups, you might ask? The State Innovation Exchange Board of Directors includes Mary Kusler, National Education Association, Michelle Ringuette, American Federation Of Teachers (AFT), and Brian Weeks, American Federation Of State, County, And Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Advisory Committee for the State Revenue Alliance includes Amie Baca-Oehlert, Colorado Education Association, Marc Stier, who has worked as a campaign manager for the SEIU, and Charles Khan, the “Organizing Director at the Strong Economy For All Coalition, a Coalition of Labor Unions and Community groups.”

The other people overseeing and staffing the State Innovation Exchange and the State Revenue Alliance have backgrounds that typify big government and social justice activism — their resumes include copious references to familiar labor slogans — Defund The Police, Fight for $15, “campaigns for social, racial, and economic justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. As for the umbrella group “Fund Our Future,” it was founded by the American Federation of Teachers in 2019.

Behind this drive to impose a wealth tax is not merely a presumptuous resentment, i.e., the mission of the State Revenue Alliance is that “corporations and the ultra rich pay what they owe.” There is also a profound ignorance informing this movement. The “ultra rich” typically buy assets using after-tax income. Then if they collect dividends or rents off those assets, they pay taxes again.  If they ever sell their assets, they pay taxes on whatever gains they realize. There is already property tax on real estate, and we can thank the Biden administration and the 117th U.S. Congress for a new luxury tax on expensive planes, boats, and automobiles.

Based on current law, it might appear that America’s wealthy, especially those living in California, already “owe” plenty.

What unions in general, and public sector unions in particular, fail to understand is that in their drive for higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for their members, they are raising the cost-of-living for the rest of us.

The unions’ relentless push for more regulations and higher taxes make doing business more expensive, which translates into higher prices for goods and services. As such, union-backed taxes are regressive, and achieve the exact opposite of what unions purport to care about: they hurt working families.

Unions and their political front groups will never stop pushing these bad policies, however, because it runs contrary to their own financial interests.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Somalia’s Problem Isn’t Climate Change, it’s the Climate Agenda

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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently appeared on NPR’s “News Hour” to discuss the looming catastrophe in Somalia and call for more aid to the troubled east African nation. In her interview, she repeatedly cited climate change as the reason for Somalia’s current predicament.

Framing problems, whether they occur in Syria, Somalia, or California, as primarily the result of “climate change” is inaccurate and unhelpful. The drought in the Horn of Africa is indeed severe, so bad, in fact, that NPR reports it as “the worst drought in 40 years.”

So what about 40 years ago? If the multiyear drought gripping the Horn of Africa in the 1980s was worse than the one we’re seeing today, what changed? It wasn’t the climate.

What’s really happened in Somalia over the past 40 years is, in almost every imaginable aspect, evidence of how the international community’s foreign aid agenda has failed. Food insecurity in Somalia and elsewhere is exacerbated by aid policies that ignore the root causes and propose unsustainable solutions. Today, the trajectory of policies proposed by globalists in the name of combating “climate change” are going to make the problems facing nations like Somalia much worse.

To begin with, the primary cause of Somalia’s current difficulties is a population that has grown beyond the capacity of a primitive agricultural economy to sustain. In 1950, Somalia’s population was only 2.2 million. By 1983, 40 years ago, it had nearly tripled to 6.1 million. Without investment in infrastructure and adoption of modern agriculture, Somalia was already overpopulated. The nation already lacked the ability to withstand a drought. But the drought and famine in the early 1980s was just the beginning of Somalia’s imbalance between its internal capacity and demand for food.

Today Somalia has a population of 18.1 million, triple the number of people living there in 1983. There is no end in sight. In 1983, the total births per woman in Somalia was 7.3, unchanged from 1960. By 2020 that rate had only dropped slightly. Women of child-bearing age in Somalia on average are still having 6.4 children. Their population is increasing at a rate of more than 3 percent per year. This means their population will double to 36 million people by 2045, just 22 years from now.

If Somalia were possessed of a vibrant and growing economy, modern infrastructure, and a robust agricultural sector, one might applaud their fecundity. After all, prosperity, as we have seen throughout the world, tends to correlate almost perfectly with population decline. But nothing of the sort has happened in Somalia. It is a failed state, utterly dependent on foreign aid.

Ever since African nations gained independence in the 1960s, the policies of mostly Western nations have centered around shoveling billions of dollars in food aid and medical aid, with the utterly unsustainable result being exploding populations in societies that don’t evolve and advance internally because they don’t have to.

To put this failure into stark economic terms, Somalia’s GDP in 2020 was $6.9 billion. On that base, their exports totaled a paltry $276 million, while they imported $4.2 billion. Somalia’s trade deficit is nearly 60 percent of their GDP. They are a welfare nation, living on a welfare continent.

When Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield elaborated on the crisis in Somalia, one of her first observations was how the war in Ukraine, a world breadbasket, was reducing the flow of food aid. But while welfare in the form of food aid may be necessary and justified in the present crisis to avert mass starvation, in the long run it is the addiction that kills the patient.

Even now, Somalia could produce all the food it needs internally and withstand droughts. The nation has two rivers running out of the highlands of Ethiopia that could irrigate vast areas of fertile land in Somalia’s southwest. The Juba River, at its point of entry into Somalia, has an average annual flow of 4.5 million acre-feet per year while the Shabelle River averages another 1.9 million acre-feet per year. According to the World Bank, Somalia has an estimated 3.5 million acres of arable land. To feed 18 million people, this is plenty of water and plenty of land.

An expert on the potential of Somali agriculture is Dr. Hussein Haji, founder of the Somali Agricultural Technical Group (SATG). In a lecture posted on the SATG website, Haji identifies Somalia’s perennial water sources for irrigation, its ample farmable land, and its year-round growing season. Haji also points out that crop yields per unit of area in Somalia are one-tenth that of modern farms. Haji goes on to note the potential of Somalia’s coastal fisheries and abundant grazing land.

Solving Somalia’s Challenges Requires Rejecting Climate Change Ideology

Bringing Somalia, and the rest of Africa, into the 21st century is complicated. But what is not complicated is the fact that nothing on offer from the globalist climate change agenda is going to help. Somalia needs hydroelectric power and reservoirs to guarantee a drought-proof water supply. That will require dams, or at least off-stream reservoirs if the topography permits it.

But dams and hydroelectric power are environmentally incorrect. Hence Somalis are denied water and food security.

Somalia also has abundant oil and gas reserves. They could drill and refine oil and gas to fuel their  growing industrial and transportation sector, generate electricity, produce fertilizer, and have plenty left over to export.

Successfully transitioning Somalia into a nation that is food independent even in drought years requires a combination of conventional infrastructure investment paired with evolved thinking on sustainable agriculture. Innovative grazing techniques could help restore arid landscapes in Somalia and elsewhere in Africa. Purchasing high-yield, but open-pollinated seeds, could ensure Somalia’s farmers can improve their productivity without becoming hooked on expensive so-called terminator seeds, which cannot be saved and used for next year’s crop.

A common thread that can inform what might otherwise seem an inconsistent approach is to recognize that behind strategies to supposedly combat the “climate crisis” is a cabal of Western corporate and financial elites who want to control the world. To do this, it is necessary to leave nations dependent on foreign aid and unable to survive without incurring huge trade deficits. This is the hidden agenda behind the supposed necessity to halt all investment in practical infrastructure and conventional energy in developing nations.

If you want to control a people—whether it’s an emerging nation overseas or an aspiring inner-city community in America—control the food and control the money. In the bargain, your bureaucracies and your corporate allies will be the conduits through which power and profits will be harvested.

Americans and citizens of other Western nations are also victims of the globalist climate agenda. One must differentiate between the misanthropic actions of the plutocracy that has currently hijacked American politics, and the innate, magnanimous character of the American people: traditional values, know-how, optimism and bold dreams.

If a political balance were restored between genuine environmentalist values and the need for practical infrastructure, Americans could preserve upward mobility and the middle class in their own nation at the same time as they made investments in nations like Somalia to enable them to achieve prosperity. Moreover, if American companies went to Somalia to build dams, aqueducts, power plants, an electricity grid, and drill for gas and oil, they could do it with the utmost possible respect for the environment.

If Somalia were to become a truly independent and prosperous nation, its population would stabilize, as has happened without exception throughout the developed world. This is perhaps the finest irony and most sinister consequence of the climate change agenda. If Africa’s population stays on course, and doubles to over 2 billion people by 2050, every time there is a drought or a disruption in food aid, hundreds of millions of Africans will strip the forests bare for fuel and slaughter the wild game for protein. They will live in societies so destabilized by poverty that the very last thing on their minds will be breathing clean air, drinking clean water, or protecting wilderness and wildlife.

Environmentalism, in trying to solve the alleged climate crisis, is destroying the environment.

At its cynical roots, globalist diktats to combat the “climate crisis” are schemes to create dependency and debt in order to control the Global South. This is the real reason why Somalis are starving today. This is why, along with all their counterparts throughout Africa, they are migrating by the millions to prosperous Western nations. Western elites call them “climate refugees.” The precise opposite is true. They are refugees from nations held down and impoverished by the globalist climate agenda.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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.

How Individuals Can Realign America

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King Theoden: What can men do against such reckless hate?
Lord Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.
– Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, 2002

We live in tumultuous and often troubling times, but that does not make them unique. The ordeals and challenges we face are as old as our species: war, famine, disease, poverty, hate, mass psychosis, greed, brutality, tyranny. Nature is often cruel, and the human capacity to inflict harm on other humans is bottomless.

What is perhaps unique about today, however, is the pace of change and the global scale of its impact. In less than a generation, a communications and information revolution has transformed the lives of 8 billion people. We now stand on the threshold of conquering disease, eliminating poverty, exploiting the resources of outer space, extending our lifespans, and all the while, everyone on earth is witnessing this progress and wanting their share.

This is the truly novel and mostly hopeful context of the age in which we live. But as incredible new wealth and new ways to wield power are created and growing in exponential increments, like moths to a flame, ambitious souls are trying to grab as much of that wealth and power they can. Some hope this competition will naturally evolve for the greater good of everyone. Others, true to the darker side of human nature, just want to use it for themselves.

How do we face the challenges of our time? How do we do good? How do we cope with evil? What do we do with the time that is given us? What can individual Americans do?

First we must recognize that if American society is losing its traditions and splintering into polarized factions, it isn’t all happening by accident. If chaos alone governed our destiny, why is it that  every institution we used to trust, in lockstep, is promoting so many obvious lies? No objective and informed person can fail to at least question, if not completely reject, premises these institutions relentlessly promote:

Human civilization is unsustainable. We are running out of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel will destroy the planet. Renewable energy is clean. Renewable energy is the only acceptable option. White people are inherently racist and enjoy unwarranted privileges. Mathematics are racist. The nuclear family is oppressive. People can choose their genders. Men can have babies, and women can have penises.

Each of these premises is not only false, but, if accepted, will wreak destruction on America and the world.

Yet these foundational lies inform every manner of mainstream public communications, from news, entertainment, education, and public policy debate, to social media discourse and search engine results. The truths that must replace these lies, in similar fashion, constitute the foundation of a resistance:

Humanity can flourish. Fossil fuel does not create an existential threat to the planet, and there’s plenty of it. Renewable energy is not cleaner or more sustainable than fossil fuel or nuclear power. White people are not inherently racist. Providing equal opportunity to earn success in a colorblind society is the only equitable way to allocate privileges. Math is not racist. The nuclear family with a father and a mother is the optimal way to raise children to become healthy, happy and productive adults. Sex is immutable. Women have babies, and men have penises.

Is that clear enough?

Asserting these truths has a virtue that the other side, for all its power, cannot match: They’re true. They’re backed up by data, experience, science, and common sense. That’s why despite odds that often seem hopeless, it is still possible to rally the American people and politically realign the nation. There’s a gravity to truth. It flows downhill like a river. Lies, on the other hand, require continuous effort to uphold. Truth, as it applies to these fundamental premises, also has the virtue of being uplifting and optimistic.

It’s a relief and a breath of fresh air to hear someone explain that we’re not all about to die in a climate cataclysm, that there are plenty of energy resources, that prosperity is an eminently possible choice, that America has created the most inclusive society in the history of the world, and that it’s OK to be white, black, brown, or whatever, it’s OK to be colorblind, and it’s OK to have a traditional family and teach traditional values and norms to your children.

The venues for asserting truth to power are many and the opportunities are poorly exploited. Here are some of the many ways to change your community and change the nation.

How You Can Change the World

Pack public meetings: Leftist activists who show up, without exception, to loudly push their agendas at city council meetings are sending a message: Vote for what we want or we will continue to disrupt everything you do, including every public meeting where you appear and including any attempt you make to get reelected. Packing public meetings also helps a biased media spread the perception that there is grassroots support for a policy, even if there isn’t. Elected officials and appointees to governing boards are reluctant to vote for anything that violates the sentiment of the boisterous crowd packing a meeting. If you don’t show up, you lose.

Litigate: Using lawfare to derail common sense public policies has been used by the establishment Left for decades. Litigation is one of the primary reasons we can’t get the homeless epidemic under control, or build new water projects or oil pipelines, or any other badly needed infrastructure. Litigation has been the synergistic partner to regulatory bureaucracies, where the activists sue the agency, the agency immediately settles, paying the activist law firm a massive penalty fee and layering new regulations onto the American people.

Litigation has been used to compromise American elections, where to eliminate “voter suppression,” countless loopholes have been blown through election integrity up to and including not even having to produce a valid ID in order to vote. Litigation has been used by the Left to expand every well intentioned bit of legislation or regulatory decree from a nuisance into a monster. It’s a racket. Fight fire with fire. Sue.

Participate in grassroots election campaigns: An obscure and very close election, belatedly called on December 1 in deep blue California exemplifies how good candidates can beat the odds. In the seventh assembly district, where registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by six points, political newcomer Josh Hoover overcame a five-term incumbent Democrat despite being outspent four-to-one. His secret? What limited resources his campaign had were spent primarily on mobilizing volunteers to knock on doors, send texts, and make phone calls.

Hoover already had name recognition, because voting households had been saturated with television ads and mailed flyers demonizing him. This meant when voters met the candidate in person, or met his volunteers, they already knew him, and could immediately tell he was a good candidate with good ideas, that he was the underdog, and that his opponent had nothing to offer apart from a dirty campaign.

Get involved in local campaigns: It’s hard for one person to change the outcome of a national election. But the concerted efforts of just a few individuals can make the difference in a race for city council or school board. If you’ve had it with how your city is managing the homeless crisis or how your school board is failing to manage the left-wing agenda of the local teachers’ union, then get involved. If you don’t want to run for local office, help a local candidate. In many of these races, just a few more people walking precincts can change the outcome. It happens all the time. As local victories build up, these winning politicians gain experience to take the good fight to races for higher office. When it comes to local elections, one person can make a difference.

Support ballot initiatives and recalls: On September 14, 2021 Americans witnessed an unusual political event. In solidly Democratic California, of all places, Governor Gavin Newsom had to take time off from pursuing his dream of becoming the 47th U.S. president to fight for his political life. Fueled by a relative pittance in donations but an abundance of passion, a grassroots army, easily a hundred thousand strong, circulated petitions to recall the governor, submitted over 2.1 million signatures, and forced a special election. Newsom and allied committees opposing the recall were forced to spend $92 million to defend his seat.

If a strong enough contender had surfaced, Newsom would have lost. Initiatives and recalls are expressions of direct democracy with decisive power. In an age when petitions can be downloaded from a website, printed at home, signed and returned, the power of local and state ballot initiatives can be exploited far more often and at far less cost than is currently done. Find a cause, and start a committee. You will give them a scare. You will drain their resources. You might win.

Listen to what nonpolitical people want: Most Americans have a vague sense they’re being fed a pack of lies by a government run by special interests, but unless they’re among the minority of Americans who have made politics one of their top priorities in life, they don’t realize the extent of the danger or the depth of the lies. For these Americans, the last thing the Right needs to do is come across as even angrier and more extreme than the leftist machine they oppose. There are issues that animate the hard Left and the hard Right, and it’s an existential battle. But the derivatives of that battle are playing out in the issues that everyone cares about.

It isn’t necessary to explain—truthfully or not—that evil forces are behind the push to replace math instruction with queer theory. It’s more productive to calmly ask “don’t you think it’s better if we prioritize reading, writing and arithmetic in K-12 schools, and keep sex education age appropriate and subject to parental consent?” Similarly, it isn’t necessary to explain—truthfully or not—that the entire “climate change” narrative of doom is a plot by a fascist oligarchy to conquer the world. It’s more productive to simply explain that renewables aren’t ready for prime time, and conventional energy is the only way civilization can thrive.

Find new allies: Probably the most important missing partner in reforming the American establishment and realigning American politics are labor unions. This deserves closer examination. As it is, the prevailing special interests in America are hedge funds, technology corporations, and pharmaceutical companies, in that order, with most of corporate American falling in right behind them. These special interests now completely control the Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party.

Historically, however, labor unions controlled the Democratic Party. What has happened to labor unions in the past 50 years, and especially in this century, is their original charter—to protect the American worker—has been supplanted by a veneer of internationalism, i.e., protect all workers of the world, eliminate racism, and stop climate change, while behind that veneer is a desperate compromise.

Unwilling to submit to the optics of supporting populist Republicans, or to support the anti-establishment substance of America First policies, union leaders in America have joined forces with the neoliberal, globalist uniparty. Open borders and energy poverty are policies they now accept, and an impoverished and disenfranchised American workforce is the consequence. If labor unions were true to their membership, they would return to their roots and demand regulated borders and deregulated energy and infrastructure development. Don’t give up on labor unions.

Boycott woke corporations: There are several lists of so-called woke companies that pander to the activist Left. While high profile examples include Disney and the NBA, it is important to also look for the companies that express their wokeness in ways that directly harm the economy. For example, the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria being used by the Left to judge companies is designed to eviscerate America’s energy economy.

Choose your targets carefully, and attend to the big picture: The most influential woke institutions in the world are arguably Blackrock and Vanguard. Pick companies to boycott where there a movement has formed in order to leverage your impact. Consider investments in the growing non-ESG movement such as being pioneered by Vivek Ramaswamy’s new firm Strive. Never forget that as more Americans rebel, these boycotts will gather irresistible strength.

Become a prepper: This advice is offered in the broadest possible sense. Being a prepper doesn’t necessarily mean you have to hunker down in remote hills on a fortified compound. It can just mean you have prepared for possible hard times by stocking food, fuel and a means to defend your home at the very least against nongovernmental disorder, i.e., against mobs of rioters and looters. Knowing you and your family are prepared for difficult times makes it easier to participate in public activism, because you know you’ve already done everything you can in your private life.

Engage in peaceful protests: When the people who control the pumps that deliver water through aqueducts to farms and cities in Southern California are driving to work, on yet another day when those pumps are turned off so an endangered bait fish can survive, a fish that is being wiped out by non-native, introduced predator species more than by the pumps anyway, why aren’t ten thousand angry people lining the road outside the gates? Environmentalist extremists, along with social justice warriors, have engineered demonstrations to stop everything from pipelines in the Dakotas to desalination plants off the California Coast, so why aren’t the people whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by these policies also showing up and applying pressure? Organizing has never been easier. Do it.

Be a social media warrior: This is the easiest form of getting involved. It’s been justifiably satirized: the “activist,” sprawled on his couch with a bong and a laptop, poking keys and pretending he’s making a difference. But it’s naïve to think fighting online battles doesn’t matter, and misleading to think it’s easy to do this effectively. If tens of millions of people share news, promote values, and expose misdeeds online, the truth cannot be suppressed.

If tens of millions of people engage in activity reciprocal to how organized online mobs of left-wing activists behave, reporting every misleading message, vilifying every villain, exposing every decision maker that currently hides in bureaucratic anonymity, it will make a difference. If you can’t do anything else, learn everything you can about social media, set smart priorities to maximize your time, and get to work.

The tactics described here are only some of the ways to help keep America great. There are plenty of reasons to be hopeful about where America and the world is headed. And this optimism is yet another source of power. Optimism energizes activists and it attracts new recruits. Matching an optimistic attitude with proven tactics becomes a force very difficult to stop. Political realignment is possible in America. Every one of us can help make it happen.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Equity Paradox

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If a society strives to achieve “equity” for every citizen merely by providing equal opportunity, then it will have to accept unequal outcomes. If a society does not accept unequal outcomes, then it will have to provide unequal opportunities. That is a circle that cannot be squared. Societies must choose one or the other.

This paradox is denied by every major institution in America. Implicit in that denial is the fantasy that designing a society to favor certain groups in order to achieve equality of outcome will not fatally undermine the cohesion and vitality of the overall society. Theoretically, it might have worked several decades ago, when “disadvantaged” groups constituted a minute percentage of the American population. Offering special benefits and privileges to a small fraction of the population may have been a manageable burden. But today, the vast majority of Americans belong to a so-called “protected status group.”

The magnitude of this shift in just 6 decades bears enumeration. In 1960, at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, the population of the United States was 89 percent white. The social justice programs that were launched at that time, affirmative action and the war on poverty, had an impact – for good or ill – that was limited. If affirmative action released unqualified students into elite universities, or unqualified engineers and executives into upper management, it only represented a 10 percent displacement. If welfare and other programs initiated by the war on poverty destroyed the work ethic and broke up the families of the so-called beneficiaries, at least only 10 percent of the U.S. population was so victimized.

Today, almost everyone belongs to a protected status group. Social justice advocates now demand proportional representation be extended to include not only blacks, but all nonwhites, as well as all women. They demand this “equity” be applied to all university admissions, all hiring and promotions, all government contracts, and even in the quantity of criminal prosecutions and prison populations. For America’s black population, social justice advocates are now demanding, via direct “reparations” payments, a leveling of individual net worth. The only people left in the American population who are not protected and offered special privileges are nonHispanic white males. These men now constitute less than 30 percent of all Americans. Among minors, the percentage of nonHispanic white males in America is less than 25 percent.

How America moved from extending civil rights to a disenfranchised tenth of the population to extending special privileges to 75 percent of the population is a tale for the ages. It represents a shift from something that was noble and mildly disruptive into a movement today that is nefarious and catastrophically destructive.

Restoring Equality of Opportunity Requires Accepting Inequality of Outcome

The standard rhetoric of social justice warriors starts by pointing out disparities in group achievement and then immediately attributes those disparities to oppression. In almost every case, however, other causes can be identified for these disparities. Although you will never hear this from Democrat and RINO politicians pandering for votes, the supposed “gender gap” in pay between men and women has been thoroughly debunked. When taking into account hours worked per year, consecutive years in the workforce, the market value of the college majors earned, willingness to travel or relocate, the market value of the job choices made, and several other factors, women in America today actually make slightly more than men.

The incessant drumbeat to advance women over men extends to executive suites and boardrooms, where men still outnumber women. But is it sexism that has denied women proportional representation at the top, or the fact that significant percentages of women do not choose a path in life that requires these particular sacrifices? And why is that a bad thing?

While much of the alleged disproportionality in career outcomes between men and women is actually nonexistent, the disparities between whites and blacks are very real. Blacks have lower rates of high school or college graduation, lower household income, they have lower household net worth, and they have far higher rates of incarceration. But why?

The chief obstacle to black achievement is not racism. Rather, the primary barrier to black achievement in America is a thug culture that undermines if not terrorizes black communities, expressed in broken homes, substance abuse, gang violence, contempt for education, and rejection of law enforcement. What caused this, ironically, were earlier iterations of what is now called “equity,” that is, welfare programs that turned fathers and husbands into a liability.

Thanks to welfare and other entitlements that have made black men economically unnecessary for child rearing, over 70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Multiple generations of black men have subsequently been raised in homes without a strong male role model and have turned to gangs, drugs, and crime. Today, although blacks are barely 13 percent of the U.S. population, they committed an estimated 60 percent of the homicides in 2021, mostly against each other. Black perpetrators are overrepresented in every category of crime in America. Welfare and related entitlements, combined with failing public schools and low expectations, are the reason why.

This is the equity paradox in real life. Denying the paradox by abandoning the principle of offering equal opportunity, and instead leaping to merely making payments and extending privileges in order to provide equality of outcome, has not helped anyone. It has only caused grievous harm to the black community. Instead of recognizing this, social justice warriors, in pursuit of “equity,” are demanding more of the same.

The Tough and Virtuous Upside of a Colorblind and Genderblind Society

The terms “colorblind,” “assimilation,” and “meritocracy” are not code words for racism. They are noble concepts to live by. They are the inclusive premises of American civilization and America’s vitality, and they must be defended at all costs. It is inevitable that in a meritocracy, some groups will perform better than others. But in America today, this has little to do with race.

If white racism is so pervasive in America, how does one explain why Asian-Americans have demonstrated economic and academic achievements that outperform the white population?

The reason is simple. Asians in America were willing to support their own communities, embrace the values of hard work, education, and thrift, preserve intact nuclear families, and build generational wealth despite potentially being held back by discrimination. Over time, and in no small measure of irony, when it comes to admission to elite universities, Asians now find themselves, in many cases even more so than whites, victims of discrimination because they produce high academic achievers far in excess of their share of the population.

An extraordinarily accomplished Asian American, multi-millionaire entrepreneur and outspoken critic of woke culture, Vivek Ramaswamy, had this to say in a recent interview. “I don’t care what skin color you are, what language your parents spoke, what nation your parents came from, the reason immigrants come to this country is because they want to pursue excellence unapologetically, they want their kids to pursue excellence unapologetically, and right now in America we have this new anti-excellence culture that elevates victimhood, elevates mediocrity, and penalizes excellence itself. The idea that that math is racist is a racist thing to say, it assumes that people of certain races can’t do math well, when in fact it is the failure of our public schools to teach math in an equal way that is the actual problem that we should be talking about.”

Conservative pundit Larry Elder has put it more succinctly. “If you’re willing to spend two hours a day working on your jump shot,” he asks, “why aren’t you spending that much time working on algebra problems?”

Another purveyor of the tough love of meritocracy is Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, who argues in her book “The Diversity Delusion” that affirmative action not only embitters the many qualified whites and Asians who are pushed aside, but harms the supposed beneficiaries. In an interview presented by the Hoover Institution, she said:

“If our goal is to graduate more black scientists, racial preferences work against that goal. If those students admitted to Duke with over a standard deviation of gap in their incoming freshmen credentials had instead gone to North Carolina University, a perfectly respectable school, where they met the qualifications of their peers, they would stand much greater chance of graduating in good standing with a science degree.”

Instead, MacDonald argues, underqualified black college students either drop out or change from a STEM major to a watered down nontechnical major. MacDonald also alleges that a symbiotic relationship has formed between the racial preference beneficiaries and the diversity bureaucracy. As unqualified students are admitted, they can’t compete academically, and they start blaming phantom racism for their intellectual and psychological difficulties.

We are seeing this played out across academia and, more recently, it has become pervasive across corporate America as well. These institutions have been taken over by a gang of woke commissars, committed to imposing “equity” on American society. They are either in denial of the paradox it embodies, or they welcome the prospect of living in a nation where merit no longer matters, and equality of opportunity is erased in favor of “anti-racist” racism and “anti-sexist” sexism to achieve equality of outcome.

It’s tough to sell tough love – i.e., earn your success by competing against immutable standards that are the same for everyone – to a population that’s being spoon fed victim ideology and oppressor guilt from the day they’re born, but that’s what has to be done. One of the most compelling public intellectuals to get to the root of the problem is Jordan Peterson, who claims that what woke brigades characterize as a history of oppression and victimhood is in fact an inevitable and natural process common to all cultures. He identifies Western Civilization not as uniquely malevolent, but the opposite, because it recognizes the rights of individuals.

In recognition that you can have equal opportunity, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both, Peterson falls squarely on the side of equal opportunity. But equal opportunity is meaningless unless you reward merit, and when you reward merit, you must live with hierarchies of achievement; inequality. Quoting from a recent interview, Peterson says “hierarchies are based on competence, not arbitrary power. If they are not based on competence they are tyrannical and cannot be sustained.”

This is life in America today. A burgeoning tyranny, engineered by opportunists and fanatics that deny the equity paradox. This denial is a monstrous lie that will drive America to ruin. In pursuit of equality, America’s institutions no longer offer equal opportunity.

The rhetoric of victim and oppressor and the agenda of forced equity must be rejected on every front. Equal opportunity rewards excellence. Equal outcomes requires tyranny and is indifferent to excellence. From school board meetings to corporate conference rooms to cocktail parties, and everywhere else, the equity agenda must be openly and forcefully refuted.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Power of Political Optimism

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There is a difference between optimism and naïveté. In politics today, optimism offers conservatives an inexhaustible source of infectious power that can overcome and shatter the foundations of the establishment’s fear-based version of “populism.” Indeed it is naïve to think any other approach has a chance.

Optimism has insurrectionary power because it contradicts everything the American establishment now trains voters to accept. From uniparty conformists and their corporate, academic, and media allies who package and spread the messages, to deep state agencies and plutocrats who decide on the messages, there is a common theme: pessimism. And when pessimism impels us to believe in worst-case scenarios, panic follows close behind.

What else might explain every rote proclamation that the world is coming to an end because of the climate crisis? What else explains why millions of American children are coping with mental illness, suicidal thoughts, and hopelessness for the future? They’ve been convinced the earth is on the brink of burning up. What else accounts for educated adults utterly convinced that the planet may soon be uninhabitable? What else lends apocalyptic context to every report—a staple now part of all reporting on hurricanes, floods, or winter storms?

It isn’t merely the end of our planetary biosphere that has turned half the nation into compliant defeatists. Along with the climate emergency we have a health emergency that even now finds millions of Americans afraid to congregate, afraid to take off their masks, afraid to get a job or go to school.

The currency of establishment politics in America relies on pessimism. What other word better characterizes the incessant claim that white Americans are by definition racist, that America is an inherently racist nation, and that BIPOC individuals (for the blissfully uninitiated, that’s black, indigenous, and people of color) cannot possibly hope to succeed without government edicts and entitlements to compensate for the pervasive discrimination inflicted on them by privileged white people?

The power of political optimism is that it rejects all of this. Burning fossil fuel is not going to immolate the biosphere. Forests are not disappearing. We can protect wildlife and wilderness, while also remaining realistic about what sort of a human footprint is necessary to power civilization. Diseases and pandemics will strike, and with courage we can balance the risks, protect the weak, preserve our freedom, and exercise reasonable precautions as we build herd immunity and move from pandemic to endemic. We can methodically develop vaccines and treatments, but don’t need to compel people to take them. As for racism, only vestiges remain, as Americans have built the most inviting and inclusive culture in human history.

That is optimism. It is powerful because it challenges the establishment narrative at its roots. In 21st century America, optimism is subversive. Flaunt it. Deny the doomsayers their moment. Reject the pessimistic essence of everything they’re saying. Starting there, we have a chance.

Staying Optimistic Despite Current Events

Anyone taking a hard look at what has happened to this country over the past 50 years can make the case that optimism is naïve and futile. American culture has been under unrelenting attack. The values that made America great have been undermined if not lost. The traditional family, with children raised by a father and a mother, is now denigrated as a vestige of the oppressive patriarchy. A work ethic, once considered the first prerequisite for success, is being systematically destroyed by the rhetoric of “equity.” A united nation, which for centuries had embraced the process of ethnic assimilation, in recent decades has been fractured not merely by massive new waves of immigration, but by a new message of division. For the first time in history, immigrants are not encouraged to work and assimilate, but rather to resent as racist the people who built the nation they’ve entered, and to fight to destroy it. Even the concept of what it is to be a man or a woman is questioned by the institutions we once trusted.

In recent years, unforgettable moments exemplify how far we’ve fallen as a nation. The heartbreaking images of howling mobs toppling statues of American heroes. The historic St. John’s Church came within an eyelash of turning into a pile of ashes, as rioters assaulted the White House, nearly breaking through the fence. Rampaging mobs spent the summer of 2020 spreading a defiant message as they smashed and looted downtowns across the nation: Stop resisting, elect our candidate, or we will burn this whole country to the ground. Major cities, now more than ever, are taken over by tens of thousands of predators, psychopaths, and addicts who are stealing, screaming, shitting, and shooting up in ruined public spaces that once were magnificent examples of a brilliant civilization.

These depredations to our nation and culture just scratch the surface. But the madness that inspires them is fertilized by pessimism. An optimist would never condemn the traditional family, the value of a work ethic, the promise of assimilation, or the immutability of biological sex. An optimist doesn’t believe our cities must be ceded to disorder, or that compelling addicts to sober up is an inhumane and futile act. An optimist does not think that life is fundamentally unfair, or that life on planet earth is about to end because we’ve reached a catastrophic climate “tipping point.”

This is the transgressive, revolutionary power of optimism. Not only does it unequivocally reject the fear-based premises of America’s establishment uniparty, but it can inform a comprehensive worldview that sees a bright future for America and for humanity.

In every aspect of global challenges there are optimistic scenarios. Perhaps the biggest premise of the currently prevailing political establishment in America is that globally, we are running out of resources and civilization as we know it is unsustainable. Here and abroad, this deeply pessimistic assertion is used as the moral justification for unprecedented assaults on every aspect of our lives—from freedom of movement, to the retention of middle-class wealth and survival of small businesses, all the way to basic property rights and national sovereignty. Yet this premise is a deeply flawed and hopelessly pessimistic, agenda-driven distortion of reality.

And it is easily debunked.

Choosing a Better Future

Adequate water is often cited as the looming and inevitable Malthusian check on humanity achieving universal prosperity, but technology already exists to recycle urban wastewater, desalinate seawater, engineer interbasin transfers from water-rich regions to water-poor regions, and more efficiently harvest storm runoff. Apart from mustering the political will to undertake these projects, the energy required to pump and treat water is considered by some to be the most prohibitive obstacle. But pessimism over securing adequate energy resources also rests on dubious premises.

To begin with, conventional energy is not in short supply. Proven reserves of so-called fossil fuels, at double the current rate of consumption, are sufficient to last about another 160 years. “Unproven” reserves of natural gas, oil, and coal, are estimated to be many times that. Energy abundance can also be achieved with advanced nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion, factory-produced biofuels, or through improving photovoltaic technologies, satellite solar power stations, or even direct synthesis of CO2 exhaust into liquid fuel. Energy scarcity is a political choice, not an unyielding reality.

While hard limits do exist on some of the most essential mineral resources, there are also tantalizing new workarounds and innovations to compensate for scarcity. Most metals can be recycled, and even complex systems like batteries will be cost-effectively recycled once robotic technologies dramatically lower reprocessing costs. One of the most promising alternative building materials is cross-laminated timber, a mature technology that is now available to replace concrete panels and steel trusses, and is already used as the primary structural building material in high-rise buildings around the world.

Perpetual human innovation, whether it’s cross-laminated timber, or next-generation concrete using abundant desert sand, or, for low-rise buildings, structural blocks with cores of hemp or straw, or virtually inexhaustible new minerals mined from the moon and asteroids will ensure that when the political and economic environment favors innovation, the collective lot of humanity will get better and better.

Optimism is the prerequisite for everything good—the motivation and freedom to innovate, the courage to coexist in peace, the character to work hard and accept meritocracy, the vitality to stay healthy and sober, the judgment to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of humanity, the faith to believe in a bright future, the charisma to attract others to a joyful movement, and the enduring conviction that we will overcome this rapidly descending tyranny.

Pessimism, on the other hand, catalyzes fear, panic, despair, and desperate fanaticism. Pessimism provides the fertile soil into which manipulative agendas are planted, sowing guilt, resentment, hatred, and the dark comfort of extremist solutions to manufactured problems. Pessimism and the products of pessimism are the body on which evil festers and grows.

Practicing optimism, and professing optimistic perspectives on political challenges is the furthest thing from being naïve. Optimism is a weapon, a talisman, capable of recruiting and realigning the American people to obliterate every diabolical schema and evil scheme that currently threatens their nation. Make it the foundation of your politics, and wield it with recognition of its power. And enjoy every minute.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Will “The California Promise” Become a Movement?

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According to Joe Garofoli, senior political writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “The California Promise,” announced by Assembly Republicans on October 5, is “short on Trumpisms, but also on innovative policy ideas.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that remark. Very few Republican politicians in California will openly say what most Republican voters in California believe, which is that despite his imperfections as a politician and peccadillos as a man, Donald Trump’s policies are mostly sound.

Until Republican politicians are willing to walk that tightrope, Garofoli’s words present a fatal paradox. How can you promote meaningful solutions that match the scale of California’s problems, if every solution you offer is either “Trumpian,” because Trump would avidly support it, or tepid, because only tepid solutions escape Trump’s endorsement?

After all, it was Trump who was willing to remind America that climate change hysteria, and the attendant fascist transitions being imposed to combat the alleged crisis, is based on what remains a theory filled with holes. It was Trump who suggested we thin the forests the way they do in Scandinavia, and was mocked for his supposed stupidity. Pick any big idea full of common sense that will stop the Democratic machine that feeds on failure, and Trump probably said it.

But even if Trump hasn’t gone on the record to say we need to bring back the timber industry if we’re serious about stopping forest fires, or that denying the sale of advanced hybrid cars by 2035 is short-sighted and draconian, or that we must retain SAT scores as the primary criteria for college admissions, or that we should resume drilling for oil and gas in California, or that parents should be able to choose what school they’re going to send their children to, these are things that Trump would say if you asked him, and therefore they are toxic, racist, climate denying, dangerous sentiments, dead on arrival in this enlightened state.

Staying therefore well within the pale, California’s Republican Members of the Assembly and Assembly candidates cooked up an impressive list of policy recommendations, the details of which can be found here. They address six categories: cost of living, safety, education, homelessness, water supply, and fire safety. In each category, actual legislation has been submitted by one or more Assemblymen. But the sad reality is with rare exceptions, if any, these bills will die in committee.

If these proposals are doomed, a few questions are pertinent going forward. First, would they make things better for Californians if all of them were passed by the legislature and signed by the governor? The answer to that is unequivocally yes, even though there is much more that can be done. Which brings up a logical follow up question, which is if these relatively moderate solutions are nonetheless symbolic, what assortment of solutions would be more likely to excite enough voters to flip the legislature and politically realign the state?

To be fair, and from taking a close look at the proposals that constitute The California Promise, that’s a tough question. It’s easy enough to say the biggest problem with gasoline prices isn’t the gas tax, it’s the regulations that have constricted the supply of gasoline, which dramatically raised prices, so therefore prioritize deregulation and worry about the gas tax later. Why save $0.50 per gallon with a gas tax holiday, when you can save $2.00 a gallon with deregulation? What’s not easy, however, is to endure the blowback from the entire environmentalist/refinery industrial complex. The environmentalists want no gas. The refiners want super expensive gas. Thread that needle.

Assemblyman Gallagher’s solution to homelessness, regional shelters, is the only thing that’s going to get them off the streets. But notwithstanding the mortal threat such a solution presents to the homeless industrial complex, and the allegations it invites that Gallagher wants to build concentration camps, any solution of this sort would have to impose a per-bed cost ceiling. Otherwise the leeches that have already squandered billions will just adapt to find a new and equally profitable way to perpetuate the scam and prevent resolution.

At the risk of being churlish, if not heretical, proposing tax cuts isn’t a realistic solution as the state is about to descend into another round of deficit budgets. The solution is to propose spending cuts. Easier said than done, but that’s the territory that needs to be thoroughly explored. Per capita general fund spending in California, adjusting for both inflation and population growth, has doubled in just the last ten years. Where is all that money going? Find out what happened, and scream bloody murder.

The California Promise has good ideas on public safety. Restoring pre-Prop. 47 felonies might even be something the GOP can sell to the majority Democrats. Similar potential may exist with some of their education proposals, especially Assemblyman Hoover’s proposal to expand vocational education programs. With vocational jobs now often paying more than jobs requiring college degrees, and a serious shortage of skilled workers, this proposal is a winner.

One would think proposals to increase California’s water supply would earn bipartisan support, but they don’t. If they did, the state would spend funds already allocated to, for example, start construction on the badly needed Sites Reservoir. Nonetheless, some of Assemblyman Devin Mathis and Vince Fong’s proposals might have a chance. Streamlining the permit and review process, codifying the goal – set by Newsom himself – of achieving another 3.7 million acre feet of storage capacity by 2030, and expediting judicial review of anti-water project lawsuits are all reforms that most Democrats know are necessary. That may or may not translate into support when it comes to a floor vote.

As for fire safety, a proposal to subsidize a restoration of California’s biomass power capacity will not hurt. Biomass power is baseload power, unlike most othe renewables, and it doesn’t cost any more than the fully loaded cost for solar or wind energy. So why not? As for the proposal to increase wildfire emissions reporting, that’s a nice in-your-face reminder to the climate change zealots as to where most of the CO2 is coming from, but it won’t help the forests, and it won’t stop the zealots. A better proposal, probably futile, would be to bring back California’s timber industry, which harvests less than one quarter what it harvested in the 1990s. If you want to prevent wildfires, you have to thin the tinderbox. It’s that simple.

But the real question is what happens next? Did The California Promise come and go? What is the future of this project? Was it a press conference, a splash page, and a gummed together amalgamation of legislative proposals that GOP Assemblymen were going to submit anyway, or is it something more?

As a movement, The California Promise has potential. It can morph and evolve, cohering into a comprehensive alternative for voters, earning the support of all GOP politicians and offering a platform for all GOP candidates. Whether it veers into Trumpian territory or not, it will earn the enmity of Democrats and their captive press. But with unity and a commitment to solutions, it can make the difference if it becomes a perennial effort and not a one-time stunt. To get to that next level requires investment and leadership. Is the California GOP prepared to do that?

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

How One Candidate Beat the Odds in the One Party State of California

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Anyone who thinks it is impossible for Republicans in California to regain relevance has not studied the campaign, and improbable victory, of Josh Hoover. The odds were against Hoover, who ran against a seasoned incumbent Democrat, five term Assemblyman Ken Cooley. The redrawn 7th District, with 38 percent registered Democrats versus 32 percent Republicans, favored Cooley. To make matters much more challenging, Cooley’s campaign spent $4.8 million compared to Hoover’s $1.7 million.

Hoover won by 1,383 votes, less than one percent, and how he did it is a case study in how California’s Republican candidates can win despite having far less money and a registration disadvantage. Reached by phone earlier this week, Hoover said that while there were a lot of factors in the race that came into play, the most obvious explanation for his victory was that he simply outworked his opponent in making direct contact with individual voters. The Hoover campaign mustered far more people to send texts, make phone calls, and walk door to door.

Cooley, by contrast, during the final month was spending over $250,000 per week on television and radio ads. Throughout the campaign Cooley was mass mailing expensive campaign flyers. Cooley’s campaign relied on mudslinging, like so many do, but it may have backfired on him. When a household has received over dozen flyers attacking Josh Hoover as a Trumpian misogynistic book burning extremist, they’re taken aback when they meet the candidate and realize he’s not a monster at all, but a genuine, humble, reasonable, thoughtful person who cares about the people living in his district.

As Hoover put it, “Cooley never attacked me on anything I ever did, he created generic talking points on why Republicans are bad and tried to paint them over who I am. It didn’t resonate because it wasn’t believable.” No. It wasn’t. Not when the target of the unfounded attacks has walked precincts, knocked on thousands of doors, and met voters face to face.

Hoover, who along with hundreds of volunteers, knocked on over 40,000 doors during his campaign, didn’t have the funds to match Cooley punch for punch on the air. Instead he put campaign resources into calling every grassroots activist organization in the region that would support him, and recruited volunteers. His campaign staffers called every potential source of volunteers not once, but every week throughout the summer and fall. If any organizations, such as the county GOP, provided Hoover their volunteer list, then every person on that list was called regularly. It worked. During the final weekends of the campaign, Cooley had at most 50 people in the field. By contrast, throughout the late summer and through the first weekend in November, Hoover was consistently sending over 100 people out to walk precincts.

Not only did Hoover’s team recruit volunteers from the county GOP office, from GOP legislative staffers, from local tax fighting groups, and other activist groups, but he also set up internship programs at the local colleges and high schools, where scores of additional teenagers and young adults were recruited to engage in direct voter contact.

Along with prioritizing putting limited resources into building up a bigger ground game than his opponent, Hoover focused on a positive message. When forced to respond to negative ads that were attacking him as a bad person, Hoover’s flyers instead attacked Cooley on his record and his actions. But Hoover’s primary message, consistently expressed in direct voter contacts, was that he cared about the same issues as his voters – quality education, public safety, homelessness, the cost of living.

When Cooley made a late pivot to claim he would clean up the homeless encampments along the American River, it was easy for Hoover to respond. After all, Cooley has been in the state legislature for ten years, and the situation has not improved.

There were some factors helping Hoover that may or may not be replicable in other districts. The new 7th district incorporates a lot of walkable suburbs, making it easier for a volunteer to knock on hundreds of doors in a single day. The redistricting cut away some of Cooley’s reliable blue communities and replaced them with Fair Oaks (purple), and Orangevale (red). Even in Folsom, also added to the 7th District and mostly blue, Cooley was starting from scratch and had no advantages of incumbency.

There may have been complacency in Cooley’s campaign, but until Republicans start winning more races, Democratic complacency may benefit any Republican trying to beat the odds. When asked repeatedly how he won, Hoover was consistent, “we knew from the beginning we would not leave anything on the field,” he said, “no stone unturned in regards to volunteer effort and ground game. We invested in talking to voters directly, and made sure we had a message that speaks to voters with kitchen table issues rather than a partisan message. Our message was that we care about the people in our community and we want to put forward solutions.”

In California, Every Voter is Fair Game

Another key strategy Hoover adopted from the start was to consider every voter fair game. In a strategy that informed both their message and how they prioritized which households and neighborhoods to send door knockers, they set a goal to attract 10 percent of registered Democrats, plus all no-party-preference voters.

There is a subtle but important difference between the registration landscape based on which party has more registered voters, versus one based on how many voters are not in the opposition party. This comparison is useful in California since registered Democrats greatly outnumber registered Republicans. The first chart, below, is sorted from registration data on all 80 Assembly Districts. It shows the twenty districts in the California Assembly that have the highest values when subtracting the percent Democrat registration from the percent Republican registration. The percentage difference shows in column one (RvD gap). This is a traditional way of evaluating a candidate’s chances.As can be seen on the above chart, the 18 Republicans that won this November all did so in the districts where Republicans have the strongest registration. That would include, however, six victorious Republicans (names italicized) that won in districts where there were more registered Democrats than Republicans. Juan Alanis, in the 22nd District, was able to prevail despite a 7.72 percent registration disadvantage. But maybe, in this era of widespread and growing bipartisan dissatisfaction with failing Democratic policies, the registration advantage or deficit isn’t the only way to view a Republican candidate’s prospects.

The next chart, below, presents the same data, but this time sorted by column two, which calculates the percentage of registrants in each district that are not registered as either Democrats, Greens, or the Peace and Freedom parties (“Non DGP”). Sorted this way, the roster doesn’t shake out much differently, but the approach this represents is the future. Every voter is in play, and for targeting and messaging, the prevailing question is how many voters have proclaimed themselves to be either liberal or progressive, and how many have not.

This second chart reflects Hoover’s strategy. The results are interesting on both charts. They show that in all 12 districts where there was a GOP advantage, the GOP candidate won, and that in six cases, Republican candidates won in districts where there was a Democrat advantage. Republicans should study the tactics of all six candidates who beat the metrics, i.e., had negative GOP percentages and high absolute numbers of Democrat voters – they are Devon Mathis (33), Laurie Davies (74), Tri Ta (70), Josh Hoover (7), Greg Wallis (47) and Juan Alanis (22).

If six Republican Assembly candidates could beat the odds this time, what if next time every Republican Assembly candidate emulated Hoover’s strategy, aspiring to attract every independent or Republican voter, along with 10 percent of the Democratic (or Green or P&F) voters? Were all of them to fully succeed in this objective, then two years from now, Republicans would control 71 seats in the Assembly. Strategists may pick their number, and ratchet that goal down to whatever reality they’re comfortable with. But this is not fantasy.

Democrats are destroying California. Most voters have figured that out, and are waiting for politicians to step up with solutions. Registered Republican voters constitute a super-minority in California, but Republican candidates can still win if they stick to the issues that concern everyone, and make their case on the ground. Josh Hoover proved it.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How Local Taxpayers Involuntarily Fund Left Wing Groups

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Earlier this month a San Diego based group “The Transparency Foundation” released a fifty page report documenting widespread use of taxpayer funds to support “lobbying, issue advocacy, and political activities.”

Entitled “Follow the Money: San Diego County,” the report alleges “extensive coordination between government agencies and these Left-wing groups for both funding and policy development, with no apparent control on their lobbying and political activities.” The report claims the funds are being made available through government contracts and grants, as well as through “in-kind use of government staffing resources under the guise of membership on ‘advisory’ working groups.”

In a series of detailed exhibits, the report focuses on ten “so-called non-profit, non-partisan groups,” Alliance San Diego, Center on Policy Initiatives, Environmental Health Coalition, Mid-City Community Advocacy Network, PANA, Youth Will, San Diego Pride, Sand Diego LGBT Community Center, San Diego Organizing Project, and Climate Action Campaign. The report alleges these organizations each have engaged in some or all of the following activities: Targeted get-out-the-vote efforts, and lobbying for partisan political agendas, including expansion of government welfare, union mandates, tax increases, defunding the police, government subsidized mass transit, government subsidized housing projects, expanding rights for illegal immigrants, rent control, “Green New Deal” environmental regulations such as a mandate to force homeowners to retrofit their homes to eliminate natural gas appliances, and more.

The nine month investigation documented over $6.6 million in taxpayer funds diverted to these ten organizations in San Diego County during just one fiscal year 2020-21. But this is probably a small fraction of the total. The authors explain that the $6.6 million only represents “the amounts of contracts and grants directly verified by our investigation.” Significant diversions of funds to the ten organizations the investigation focused on may not have been discovered, as well diversions of public funds to other organizations that are not among the ten that were investigated. Also not included in these figures is “whatever share of over $100 million in statewide Covid-19 funding for ‘community-based organizations’ that was routed through several foundations and private health contractors.”

The chairman of The Transparency Foundation,” Carl DeMaio, in an email, said “outright non-compliance by local government agencies on our public records requests lengthened the time it took to produce the report.” This noncompliance was noted in the report, where they state “Given the opacity of local government financial reports and the difficulty our investigation encountered in getting several local San Diego County government agencies to comply with our requests under the California Public Records Act (CPRA), we believe the total amount of taxpayer funding going to Left-Wing groups in San Diego County is substantially higher than what this report captures.”

Using public funds to support partisan political activities is illegal, but illegality is difficult to prove when the parties involved refuse to respond to CPRA requests, and because there is significant grey area when interpreting what constitutes partisan political activity. While some actions appear to have been blatantly partisan, others may be explained away by public officials as fulfilling a nonpartisan obligation to provide public information, public education, or public services. But other findings in the investigation are equally troubling.

Quoting from the report, “Our investigation failed to find any contracts or grants awarded during 2021-2022 by Republican-controlled city councils or school boards in San Diego County to groups that could be considered conservative, let alone groups engaging in lobbying, issue advocacy, or political activity. In fact, conservative organizations that filed 990s and operate primarily in San Diego County did not have government funding streams — either because they refuse to accept government funding or no government agency considers them for funding. In stark contrast, our investigation found significant funding being provided by Democrat-controlled city councils and school boards to Left-wing groups.”

Another key finding was that left-wing organizations in San Diego County operate in a highly integrated manner. For example, they worked together to target specific communities with “civic engagement” and “get-out-the-vote” where the result of their targeted efforts would benefit Democratic candidates in local elections. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with nonprofits working together to address various challenges in a specific community. Depending on the nature of their nonprofit charter, there also may not be anything wrong with them pursuing partisan objectives. What’s wrong is if their activities are funded by taxpayers, or, as the investigation claims, some of these groups failed to register as lobbyists, or failed to report campaign contributions.

The investigation goes on to enumerate additional findings, many of which appear to explicitly violate laws governing nonprofits and campaign finance, and many as well which if not explicitly illegal, are unethical insofar as they violate the reasonable expectation that government agencies, which are funded by all taxpayers, should not support partisan political activity that is only supported by one partisan fraction of all taxpayers. To clarify these points of law and to further the investigation they started, The Transparency Foundation concluded their report with five recommendations:

(1) Ban government agencies from supporting political groups, (2) compel government agencies to provide complete information on their diversion of funds to political groups, (3) convene a San Diego County Grand Jury to investigate the use of taxpayer funds by groups that engage in lobbying, issue advocacy and political activity, (4) convene a Congressional committee to conduct an oversight hearing on the misappropriation of Covid-19 funds using San Diego County as a case study with follow up by the Inspectors General of federal agencies that were involved, and (5) have the California State Auditor investigate which organizations received over $100 million in statewide Covid-19 funds and what were the deliverables and results associated with the funding.

What The Transparency Foundation has done in San Diego County exposes what is likely a systemic and perennial process in California at large. It is another example of how the cards are unfairly stacked in favor of Democrats in this one-party state. If any of the many policies implemented by Democrats were not worsening failures, it might be possible for some people to condone this corruption. As it is, every Californian, no matter what their party affiliation, should realize that what is marketed as enlightened politics has become a political machine, serving only itself.

This investigation, and its recommendations, should set a precedent for reform minded activists to follow in every city and county in California.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

The “Reparations” Scam

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California is considering paying “reparations” to black Californians who are directly descended from enslaved people, which may surprise most Californians. After all, slavery was never legal in the Golden State.

Governor Gavin Newsom, heedless of the fiasco he’s inviting, formed a “Reparations Task Force,” no doubt with his future presidential aspirations in mind. The task force issued an interim report in June, detailing California’s “historyof slavery and racism and recommending ways the Legislature might begin a process of redress for Black Californians, including proposals to offer housing grants, free tuition, and to raise the minimum wage.”

To understand how slavery is applicable to California, one must sift through the report’s 500 pages of convoluted logic common to the victim industry in America. According to the report:

“In 1883, the Supreme Court interpreted the 13th Amendment as empowering Congress ‘to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States.’ However, throughout the rest of American history, instead of abolishing the ‘badges and incidents of slavery,’ the United States federal, state and local governments, including California, perpetuated and created new iterations of these ‘badges and incidents.’ The resulting harms have been innumerable and have snowballed over generations. Today, 160 years after the abolition of slavery, its badges and incidents remain embedded in the political, legal, health, financial, educational, cultural, environmental, social, and economic systems of the United States of America. Racist, false, and harmful stereotypes created to support slavery continue to physically and mentally harm African Americans today.”

In other words, the task force is not recommending reparations for slavery, but rather for discrimination.

And how do task force members recommend California pay for its mistakes?

The task force’s preliminary findings identify a “housing wealth gap” and recommend granting $223,239 to every black Californian who is descended from slaves, at a cost to California taxpayers of $501 billion.

But this doesn’t take into account possible additional reparations for “unpaid prison labor and years of lost income [while in prison],“ or “disproportionate health outcomes,” including shorter life expectancies which the group’s economic consultants estimated to be worth $127,226 per year. And this is not a complete list of the “injustices” and “harms” the task force is considering.

Practical suggestions from the task force as to how reparations might be implemented will have to wait until at least June 2023. More “racial and financial data” needs to be gathered from the state’s Department of Justice to “make more accurate calculations.” But, along with “a formal apology,” the task force has preliminarily recommended cash payments, free college tuition, and zero-interest housing loans.

The phony sanctimony attendant to the professional grifters peddling this nonsense is breathtaking.

In predictably fawning coverage by the Los Angeles Times, the vice chairman of the state “task force” charged with coming up with reparation ideas said “the process came down to three ‘A’s’—admitting the problems of the past; atoning for them by identifying appropriate reparations; and acting on that information in a unified way to make sure state legislators, who would finalize a program, follow through and get the work done.”

Certainly, one of those three “A’s”—admitting the problems of the past—is healthy enough. There has been racism and discrimination in America’s past, just as there has been racism and discrimination in the past of every nation. Any decent person with a sense of history should acknowledge the past and abhor racist or discriminatory behavior. It’s the “atone” and “act” parts of the three “A’s,” however, where problems surface. Big problems.

For starters, if California is offering reparations for racial discrimination, why not offer them to every group that ever suffered discrimination based on their race or ethnicity throughout California’s history? Why not Hispanics or Native Americans? What about the Chinese workers who built much of California’s early infrastructure, or the descendants of Japanese Americans living in California who had their assets confiscated and were relocated to internment camps during World War II?

One might argue black citizens were victims of more discrimination than Native Americans, Hispanics, or Asians, but as any serious student of California history knows, that would not be an easy argument to make.

The biggest problem with “reparations” for black Californians is that we’ve already tried it, through the state’s welfare system that has caused significant damage to black families. How does welfare help the black community or the black family, if, as conservative Larry Elder puts it, “you have replaced the father with a welfare check”?

Thanks to welfare and other entitlements that made a black male breadwinner unnecessary, over 70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Multiple generations of alienated black men have grown up in homes without a strong male role model and have turned to gangs, drugs, and crime. Today, black men are overrepresented in every category of crime in America, and welfare, i.e., reparations, are the reason why.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that proponents of reparations are in denial of this basic truth: When you take away the incentive for people to work and support their families, you foment chaos in families and communities.

Activists who demand reparations ignore these truths because they are part of what we may as well dub the “antiracism industrial complex.” Like every parasitic coalition of special interests that benefit by exploiting the cause of those groups they’re supposedly trying to help, this is a profitable con.

So far, whenever reparations have been tried to atone for racism and discrimination—not just welfare, but affirmative action—they have proven counterproductive. The welfare state fostered by the Great Society programs of the 1960s contributed massively to government dependency and black student underachievement. Affirmative action has undermined the immutable standards necessary for a society to thrive as a competitive meritocracy.

The consequences of affirmative action are as damaging to black communities as welfare is. The evolution of affirmative action into “equity” where proportional representation by race and ethnicity is demanded in everything—hiring, promotions, admissions, contracts, and even household wealth—is a mortal threat to the social and economic health of America. And both affirmative action and “equity” provide cover for the one place left in California where systemic racism still exists: the failing public schools in disadvantaged black neighborhoods.

If the task force really wanted to do something to help the black community, it would start with improving California’s K-12 public schools and addressing the failure of politicians beholden to the teachers’ unions to enact any real education reform. The task force recommendations include adopting a “K-12 Black Studies curriculum that introduces students to concepts of race and racial identity.” But nowhere to be found is any call to action for California’s schools to be held accountable for the fact that 84 percent of black students did not meet grade-level math standards on the state’s student assessment tests this year.

Anyone believing a handout of a half-trillion or more to 2.2 million black Californians is going to improve race relations is delusional. But it will ultimately be harmful to blacks themselves. Nobody ever felt better about their lives, or improved their lives, by getting something for nothing.

The reality for blacks in America today is that if they are willing to work hard, study to acquire marketable job skills, and reject the woke narrative that only puts a chip on the shoulders of all who ascribe to it, they have opportunities that equal if not exceed those of anyone else.

Unfortunately, you will never hear that hard and helpful truth expressed by anyone participating on the Reparations Task Force, or anyone else whose career may depend on denying it.

There is no chance that California’s reparations task force’s scheme can be carried out equitably, nor any possibility it will do anything but cause harm to race relations and the black community. This is what Gavin Newsom is flirting with. But as it lurches forward, with Newsom’s fingerprints all over it, it may help him win an early 2024 primary in a Southern state. Perhaps that’s all that matters.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.