California is imposing its radical policies on the rest of the nation

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** California is imposing its radical policies on the rest of the nation.
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Dear John,

I was talking last week with a wildly successful California businessman who decamped for Texas in July. “I’m pretty much giving up on California,” he said. “Let the state go to hell.” I told him I understood his frustration, and then offered this gentle warning: “You may have left California, but California won’t leave you alone.” I gave him several examples which (I believe) show that California laws are designed to create nationwide change — changes that will limit freedom, crush opportunity, and impoverish the nation.

California Policy Center exists to transform California
— to bring it back to principles of liberty, to create the space for creativity and innovation, and to provide hope for the future. Succeed in that mission and we may save America from a nightmarish future; fail in that effort, and America will fail. If America fails, the world will go dark.

I swept together a few examples of California’s national ambitions from my conversation with the man now living in Texas. The National Review published those examples on September 25. We pick up that story here, a few paragraphs in.

— Will Swaim

California is an incubator of radical policies built to metastasize throughout the nation.

... Consider our governor, Gavin Newsom, a true believer in the type of climate change that can be reversed by the action of a single, bold leader. Still governing under Covid-era emergency executive authority, Newsom recently cut his very own climate deal with China. “California is a global leader in combating the climate crisis while growing our economy, but we can’t tackle this existential challenge alone,” Newsom declared. Who needs the Biden White House when Newsom has a Chinese partner — which has failed to meet even its own stingy climate pledges, and whose own electric-vehicle batteries are handcrafted by Uyghurs concentrated in camps?

But never mind these bothersome details. It’s the image that matters, the picture of a progressive California governor with presidential aspirations cutting a planet-saving deal with China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment. For a man prepping his 2024 presidential primary run, this is campaign gold.

Also, more impressionistic than real, Newsom has pushed for the total electrification of California’s automobile sector — no more filthy fossil fuels, just electric cars running on so-called “clean energy.” Newsom forgets e-cars are made primarily of petroleum-based plastics and run on massive batteries made from such toxic metals as lithium and cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, and lead. Each of these components must be torn from defenseless Mother Earth. In California, we’re already hearing the protests of reedy-voiced, sunbaked environmentalists camped out near lithium deposits in such places as California’s Salton Sea ([link removed]) .

Newsom’s appointed California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced that it will ban, by 2035, the sale in California of new gas-powered vehicles. CARB’s 2035 deadline triggered a kind of national Schlieffen Plan. See, because of our weird topography and demography — millions of people crammed into the Los Angeles Basin, the Central Valley pinned up against the towering Sierra Nevada — the federal Clean Air Act allows us to set our own emissions standards so long as they’re stricter than the federal requirements. Other blue states, hoping to reduce vehicle emissions in the service of Saving the Planet, have been allowed to draft on California’s pioneering regulations. Some 15 states have said, “Sure, California, sign us up for whatever you think is best.”

We could go on like this, citing the innumerable ways in which California believes we’ve got ideas so effective and so (what’s the right word?) moral, superior, or übermenschlich, that the rest of you must be compelled to follow.

This week, Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, greenlighting the state legislature’s move to make California a sanctuary for transgender youth — or any minor fleeing their parents in states that anachronistically insist on parental authority. Newsom has granted California courts the ability to declare “‘temporary emergency jurisdiction’ over any child in, and any person who may bring the child to, California for the purpose of obtaining harmful interventions on children’s minds and bodies,” explains ([link removed]) Sharon Supp in National Review — and the power to overrule parents’ rights, custody agreements and court orders from the other 49 states because, you see, California knows best.

Consider another bill that Newsom just signed into law, Assembly Bill 257, the so-called FAST Recovery Act. Authored by the head of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, the Act creates a commission of political appointees to manage work and wages in many of California’s fast-food businesses.

But the union leaders behind Bill 257 won’t stop at the state’s borders. Newsom’s signature on the bill was still wet when the Service Employees International Union — part of the aforementioned California Federation of Labor — unleashed a national media campaign promoting AB 257 as the solution to labor problems everywhere.

“This is LANDMARK labor legislation that presents a way forward for fast food workers in this country,” SEIU said in countless posts. Under the hashtag #UnionsForAll and #AB257, union activists in Texas, Florida, Missouri, and beyond posted photos of workers celebrating the California unions’ win as their own.

California is America’s unlocked back door. It’s the easiest place to advance into the American mainstream bogus nostrums, untested business strategies, noxious Marxist pedagogie, and rank authoritarianism —all coming soon to a state near you.


Read the full article ([link removed]) by CPC president Will Swaim in National Review.


** Education officials reverse course.
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The California Department of Education (CDE) was universally raked over the coals last week for its attempt to delay the release of students' “Smarter Balanced" test scores until after the election. Now, education officials have reversed course ([link removed]) and will instead release the scores in October. No word yet if that means early October — before ballots are mailed out — or somewhere closer to Halloween and just days before the November 8 election.

We'll guess that State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond is going to drag his feet on this as long as he can get away with it. The more he waits, the less time voters have to react to the test scores, which promise to be the worst report card for the Dept. of Education in decades. As we noted here last week, the scores from Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) released Sept. 9 revealed that a jaw-dropping 72 percent of students failed to meet math standards. Students meeting English standards dropped to 41.7 percent.

This failure lays at the feet of Thurmond, Gov. Newsom and California's teachers' unions who kept schools shuttered during the pandemic for months longer than other states despite the desperate pleas of students and parents. Voters have the right to know how the students in their local school district fared before they cast their ballots.


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** Radio Free California #244: Who is this Guy?!
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Gavin Newsom sounds alternately like James Madison and the staff of Mother Jones magazine. CPC president Will Swaim and CPC board member David Bahnsen factcheck the factcheckers on this week's podcast. Listen now ([link removed]) .

More from CPC ()


** Prop 30 Splits California's Ruling Elite
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Lyft has already dumped $25 million into the Yes on 30 campaign and appears prepared to spend the opposition to the ground. But with the California Teachers Association and Gov. Newsom on the other side, this battle is just getting started. Read t ([link removed]) his week's article ([link removed]) from CPC senior fellow Edward Ring.


** The Education Revolution Rages On
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The culture chasm is wider than ever and ground zero for all wackiness is California's classrooms. Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, explains how parents running for school board and parent groups are holding the line. Read the article ([link removed]) .
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