by Edward Ring
As President Biden’s age threatens to derail his reelection campaign, waiting in the wings and trying not to appear too eager is Gavin Newsom. It’s not easy. Wanting to be president with an intensity that might make Gollum’s lust for the One Ring appear prosaic, California’s governor knows that if Biden drops out, he’s the oddsmakers’ favorite.
But there is absolutely nothing Gavin Newsom has ever done that qualifies him to be president of the United States. If Newsom becomes the next U.S. president, he will accelerate a process that is already well underway and must be stopped at all costs: turning all of America into California.
There are glaring examples of California’s over-the-top embrace of progressive extremism. Identity politics. Race and gender “equity.” Decriminalizing crime and hard drugs. A complete failure to manage the state’s homeless, much less help them. An obsession with climate change that has inspired laws that reach into virtually every facet of life. Shortages of energy, water, and housing. And prices for goods and services so punitive that millions have fled.
Under Gavin Newsom’s watch, the state is devolving into feudalism: a massive underclass that can’t survive without government assistance, supervised by an elite minority that will retain political power by continuing to dole out that assistance. The formula is simple: make life progressively more difficult for ordinary Californians, tell them their travails are the result of bigotry and climate change, then secure their votes by offering them more government benefits.
And herein lies Newsom’s biggest crime, one shared by the progressive elites that run California and intend to take over the world. It is the biggest lie of modern progressivism—the corrupt foundation of their power. Newsom and his ilk are telling California’s middle class that what they have attained is socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable. They tell us that the ideals of equity and environmentalism compel us to live in high-density, low-impact housing, utilize shared transportation, and limit our consumption of anything that elevates our “carbon footprint.” And they are telling us that our taxes must be utilized to offer these same limited amenities to anyone who is “underserved,” “historically disadvantaged,” “unhoused,” or in any way a victim of “systemic discrimination.”
All of these assertions are monstrous lies. California is unaffordable because of decades of political choices, escalating every year, that have created high prices for everything. And more to the point, the elites that Newsom is part of and represents are themselves profiting from all of these policies that have condemned most Californians to lives of constant work and constant economic struggle. Which is to say that Newsom’s lies about the “climate crisis” and the alleged pervasive ongoing scourge of bigotry are not even noble lies in the service of achieving a better future for all. They are lies in the service of corruption, a con job designed to further enrich and empower a small elite.
Newsom is unqualified to be president of the United States for the same reason he is unfit to be governor of California. His entire public policy agenda is a rhetorical farce, existing only to fool voters, while across every major industry, politically connected players consolidate their power and their profits. Examples of this are comprehensive.
Across every business sector, owners and executives face cruel choices: fight a losing battle to preserve competition and manage costs, or stop doing business in California entirely, or join the cabal. Some still fight. Countless businesses have left. And a growing number choose to accommodate. They accept stifling regulations, knowing they have reduced the number of competitors. They accept higher costs and pass them on to increasingly captive customers with fewer and fewer options. They become bloated with attorneys and bureaucrats to deal with myriad government agencies, and for whatever the customer cannot bear, they collect in government subsidies. It’s a vicious circle, and as California spirals into feudalism, it’s taking America with it.
There is the homeless industrial complex, a consortium of government bureaucracies, “nonprofit” developers and operators, and for-profit vendors that have consumed tens of billions over just the past few years to house a laughably small fraction of California’s homeless, while simple shelters where sobriety was enforced would get them safe and on a path to recovery for a fraction of the cost.
There is Environmentalism Inc., unifying ambitious and zealous government agencies with powerful environmentalist nonprofit advocacy groups, trial lawyers, “renewables” importers, manufacturers and systems integrators, joined with utilities that love high energy prices because their profit is held to a fixed percentage of revenue. Higher costs per kilowatt-hour or therm of natural gas equal more absolute profit.
There are public sector unions—perhaps the most powerful special interest in the state—committed to the growth of government because it grows their membership dues. And the worse things get in California, the more unionized government employees are necessary to deal with crime, the homeless, and poverty. Societal failure is public sector success.
Not least, of course, are the tech billionaires, who to date have used their personal wealth and the unprecedented influence of their companies to manipulate state and national politics according to their agenda. As described, that agenda checks all the rhetorical boxes but obscures raw ambition. History provides no comparable example of wealth and power this concentrated, and they want more.
In every sphere, creating scarcity and shortages enriches the elites in California. Setting land aside to be preserved as “open space,” cordoning off urban areas and preventing expansion, is a perfect way to ensure that real estate investment portfolios—often held by huge hedge funds and public employee pension funds—continue to appreciate. And as ordinary Californians are priced out of owning homes, investment banks gobble up the inventory and rent the properties back to the plebes.
This is what Gavin Newsom offers America. This is the scam—the historic, tragic, malevolent agenda that Newsom and the people he represents have resolved to inflict on the world.
The alternative is not a mystery. Spend government money on practical infrastructure that yields long-term benefits instead of squandering hundreds of billions on absurd make-work projects like high-speed rail and floating offshore wind, which will be permanent drains on the economy. While recognizing reasonable environmental concerns, deregulate energy, mining, timber, water, transportation and housing so millions of Californians can be employed in high-paying jobs instead of collecting government benefits. And most of all, by restoring competition in all sectors of California’s economy, we can lower the cost of living.
Gavin Newsom is smart enough to know this solution would work. But the people who donate to his campaigns, and who donate to the campaigns of the supermajority of progressives who are party to the same fraud, have no intention of ever permitting this solution to again become reality. That is why Newsom—and any politician like Newsom—can never be allowed to become U.S. president.
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Edward Ring is an author for American Greatness.
Photo “Gavin Newsom” by Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0.
