Tag Archive for: RecallGavin2020

Looters, Arsonists and Eco-Terrorists Oppose Newsom Recall

As of March 17, the Newsom Recall campaign has entered a new phase. With well over 2.0 million signatures turned in, a special election later this year is probable. So probable, in fact, that political campaigning to defend Newsom has begun. And it is the predictable garbage we’ve been conditioned to expect from Democrats.

“Far-right movements including QAnon, virus skeptics linked to Newsom…” blasts the meme, posted 3/15 on @GavinNewsom’s Twitter account.

The official opposition website, paid for by the California Democratic Party, employs the alluringly alliterative tag line “Stop the Republican Recall.” Of course. Tag it with everything you’ve trained voters to revile. Republican equals racist equals Trump equals conspiracy theorist equals domestic terrorist. See how that works?

Newsom’s allies are piling it on. Democratic Assemblyman Evan Low, with a district in the heart of Silicon Valley, posted a tweet on 3/16 that perfectly encapsulates the strategy Newsom is relying on. He writes:

If you support the recall of Gov. @GavinNewsom, you should probably know you’re joining sides with:

Trump
anti-vaxxers
Trump Jr.
Q-anon conspiracy theorists
Rudy Giuliani
white supremacists

You really want to be on that team?

Let’s explore the logic of this strategy, since it shall constitute a significant portion of the creative output we may expect to saturate all media, at staggering expense.

The first problem with relying on this alleged guilt by association is that one must wonder, is there a reciprocal version? That is, if you oppose the recall of Gov. Newsom, are you joining sides with the most violent and divisive sides of the Democratic party?

Imagine this:

If you oppose the recall of Gov. @GavinNewsom, you should probably know you’re joining sides with:

militant looters and arsonists
child traffickers and drug cartels
Hunter Biden
Blue Anon” conspiracy theorists
communists and Marxists
eco-terrorists

You really want to be on that team?

The only reason that sounds far fetched is because the entire corporate communications apparatus in America is bent on spreading the first message and not the second. There’s no compelling case to be made that Donald Trump Jr. belongs on some odious list, but Hunter Biden does not. Quite the opposite. Nor is there any compelling case that many of the conspiracies circulating on the Right are any more fanciful than those cherished by the Left.

But guilt by association, regardless of whether or not you can flip the target, is flawed reasoning. Let’s put this another way.

There are some things that Hunter Biden, along with militant looters and arsonists, child traffickers, members of murderous drug cartels, progressive conspiracy theorists, communists, Marxists, and eco-terrorists all share in common. They all believe the sky is blue. And they all believe the sun comes up in the morning.

Therefore, if you believe the sky is blue, and the sun comes up in the morning, you’re on that team. Do you really want to be on that team?

Unfortunately, and to state the obvious, a skillfully inculcated perception will overwhelm truth and logic when you have campaign money to burn. And unlike the Republicans, which is a genuine grassroots party, Democrats rely on a perennial torrent of funds from public sector unions, amply supplemented by deep pocket donations from a plethora of multi-billionaires. The biggest lie in America, and California is no exception, is that Republicans are the party of the moneyed elite. Not so. It’s the other way around.

So once Newsom’s defenders have bloodied the recall campaign with enough slime, using a tactic that works through expensive repetition, years of voter conditioning, and a compliant media, maybe they’ll move on to actually trying to defend his performance in office. It won’t be easy. Because support for Newsom, while formidable, is far from monolithic. A lot of Democrats don’t like him.

Newsom’s problem, you see, is he is privileged. This makes him an object of hatred in a party where politicians earn political capital based on how many disadvantages intersect to form their identity. Newsom is tall, thin, rich, white, male, and heterosexual. He has no disadvantages, which is a fatal disadvantage. If Newsom was short, fat, poor, of color, female or trans, and anything but hetero, he would have a future in the Democratic party. As it is, the fact that he has made it this far is an embarrassment to them.

For this reason, Newsom is obligated to do more than just pretend that the campaign to recall him is “linked” to the usual right-wing boogeymen. After all, of the roughly 2.1 million signatures collected by the recall, around 750,000 came from independents and Democrats.

Newsom, in his sly desperation, has actually accused the recall’s lead proponent, Orrin Heatlie, to be “someone who believes we should microchip immigrants.” Heatlie, reached for comment on this, found it laughable. Newsom’s attack machine uncovered a remark, expressed hypothetically to make a larger point, took it out of context, and is riding it for all it’s worth. Sound familiar?

Democrats have acquired power and maintained power using lies and slander. They have nurtured and exploited deep seated paranoia and resentments. They are everything they accuse their political opponents of being and worse, and they are backed up by billions and billions of dollars from some of the most calculating special interests in the world.

Newsom, and his party, have failed normal, ordinary Californians. They have failed in every important facet of public policy: education, housing, homeless, law and order, energy, water, transportation, economic policy, forest management, and more. There are bipartisan solutions to all these challenges that Newsom and his party are either too cowardly or too ideologically blinded to attempt.

That’s what this recall is really about. It’s bigger than Newsom. It’s about how to govern California for the sake of the people instead of the special interests that control the Democratic party. And all the slime and smears and mudslinging in the world will not prevent that process from playing itself out over the next several months. Saddle up.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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How to Beat Gavin Newsom in a Recall Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Winning Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Recall Newsom Campaign at a Crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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