Free Republic

Governor Gavin Newsom is a disaster. Newsom is hypocritical, incompetent, and a non-thinker. How bad does California have to get before people will consider someone who has an “R” after their name? Just look at his actions over the past year. American Thinker interviewed many who think that the governor needs to be recalled. Orrin Heatlie is the lead proponent of the nonpartisan recall effort. He feels that the governor is acting as a tyrant, taking action over and over against the will of the people. He thinks, with plnety of evidence, that the governor is out of touch with...

I am writing this column upon returning home to California after five days in Florida. For the first time since my first trip to Los Angeles in 1974 and moving there two years later, I dreaded going to California. That first trip, as a 25-year-old New Yorker, I experienced the palpable excitement looking at the American Airlines flight board at JFK airport and seeing "Los Angeles." For most Americans, the very name "California" elicited excitement, wonder, even envy of Californians, and most of all ... freedom. While America always represented freedom, within America, California exemplified freedom most of all. Yet,...

Thanks to the collective efforts of city and state Democratic “leaders” like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the coronavirus-inspired mandates in L.A. County are the most restrictive in the state and among the strictest nationwide. Business owners in the area have cried foul, with some being so outraged and fed up that they’ve taken matters into their own hands. One such person is Alex Jordan, who runs the “Eat at Joe’s” diner in East Redondo Bay. Jordan told news station KTLA that he is defying Newsom and the county because of loyalty to his employees...

Californians have suffered greatly in our crazy war against the China virus. Our economy is a wreck. Restaurants are dying off by the hundreds. Schools are half closed. Disneyland is a ghost town. And now things here have gotten worse. Because cases of new positive infections and hospitalizations have jumped lately, Gov. Gavin Newsom has pulled the "emergency brake" on reopening the state's economy, imposed a new limited "Stay-At-Home Order" through Dec. 21 and issued a bunch of idiotic rules to ruin Thanksgiving and Christmas for 40 million people. Newsom and his public health experts call their edicts "small gatherings...

A few sheriffs in California are coming out publicly to say they will not be enforcing some of the new lockdown orders Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has imposed with the holiday season in full swing.Newsom, who was recently caught attending a private party with multiple people at a high-end restaurant, issued a "limited" stay-at-home order for most of the state, which also includes a curfew from 10:00 p.m.-6:00 a.m. Newsom said the lockdowns are necessary because of the rising numbers of COVID-19 cases. "At this time, due to the need to have deputies available for emergency calls for service, deputies...

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has been at the forefront of telling California residents to wear masks, not gather in groups, and to be socially distant as the United States deals with COVID-19, but he violated his own orders at a recent gathering in a high-class restaurant.Newsom has already apologized for the incident, but photos obtained by Fox 11 show just how much the party he was attending threw the COVID-19 guidelines out the window.EXCLUSIVE: We've obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he's in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the...

The virus that came out of California this year is deadlier to election integrity than COVID could ever be to Americans. The once Golden State, renowned for creating and exporting much of what constitutes American popular culture, now exports a vote-fraud rich, elections-stealing contagion across the nation. We’d have preferred a repackaging of the Beach Boys and the surfing craze. As of November 3, the California elections bug has infected -- the word is actually, corrupted -- battleground states. The Trump presidency is the immediate target of this scourge. We await litigation treatments to see if the patient -- the...

Only a few decades ago California twice elected Ronald Reagan governor and twice voted for the Gipper as President. It later chose a series of Republican governors, ending with its former Senator Pete Wilson (1991-1998). Twenty years later the state has no functioning Republican Party and all statewide offices are securely held by Democrats in the mold of San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. What California looks like today is what Democrats want for the whole country. That Gilded State dystopia is described in detail in the first chapter of Michael Anton’s book The Stakes: America at the Point...

The wisdom of then Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s decision to change centuries-old Senate rules to allow a simple majority vote for appeals and district court justices was clearly warned against. Many Republicans plainly stated to Democrats: do not do this. Reid’s 2013 move reset the threshold for circuit and appeals judicial confirmation from 60 senate votes to 51 (It also set in motion a change in Supreme Court confirmations to the same 51 vote threshold stewarded by current Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell). One of the most intriguing fallouts from Reid’s fateful decision is the battle within the confirmation...

On Saturday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill SB-145 into law. This law “exempts from mandatory registration under the act a person convicted of certain offenses involving minors if the person is not more than 10 years older than the minor and if that offense is the only one requiring the person to register.” The bill was introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener (D), who applauded Newsom’s legislative endorsement, saying “Newsom’s signing of the bill ended “blatant discrimination” against LGBTQ youth in California by treating them “the exact same way that straight young people have been treated since 1944.””The...

I know you've been busy binging the exciting coverage of the Democrat National Convention. But have you heard the latest bit of horrible news from the once golden state of California? I don't mean the 367 wildfires that are out of control and charring the hills of Northern California. Or the heat wave and the rolling blackouts caused by the high electricity demand for air conditioning. I'm talking about the possible disappearance from California of the popular ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft. Both companies were planning to completely shut down their California operations at midnight Thursday rather than comply with...

CA wildfires in my part of the state are bad and getting worse. While the fires haven't caused evacuation of my city yet, there's no telling what this coming week holds.

As commentator Dennis Prager often notes, truth is not a left-wing value. The Left pays homage to the higher value of accomplishing its agenda, by whatever means necessary, and any lie that advances the agenda is justifiable for the greater good. This reality is starkly apparent in the realm of transgender ideology – and it’s playing out in the California legislature. A committee in the state Senate recently passed a bill designated AB 2218, which would establish a Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund to finance medical interventions for trans-identifying individuals. Such interventions could include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females,...

I don't know what daily life is like during our Great National Shutdown in states like Pennsylvania, where I hear golfing is verboten, all liquor stores are closed and masks must be worn into retail stores. But out here in sprawling Los Angeles, where half of the state's 1,512 COVID-19 deaths have occurred, things are getting goofier and scarier all the time. It's not the coronavirus I'm sacred of. It's power-mad politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, both of whom have been making it sound like we're going to be in strict lockdown mode until Thanksgiving....

That’s how an article from the San Francisco Chronicle labels the new law. It’s been a rough start to 2020 for many workers in California. The new year brought the implementation of California’s new gig law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5). Designed to target the gig economy, specifically companies such as Uber and Lyft that rely on an army of independent contractors to provide the company’s services to customers, AB5 will have broad-reaching effects upon gig work in California.   If companies are forced to reclassify more workers as employees, a huge swath of independent contractors will be laid off to...

I grew up in New Jersey. Morris County to be exact. Don’t get me wrong. I loved living there, but the taxes were immense. And by my senior year of college, my father had enough. They exited to the collar counties around Philadelphia, where the property tax burden was considerably less. Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a red state, especially where my parents live—it’s roughly 50-50 Democratic to Republican—but it’s sure better than the Garden State’s politics. In Pennsylvania, there’s a Republican legislature and if the state party could actually find a sentient being to run for governor, that person could win....

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds. Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids. Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in...

Democrats are turning California into a third-world hellhole without electricity, water, and freedom. Due to Democrats' love for trees, at least 800,000 Californians will be without power for several days. Instead of properly managing California forests to reduce the chances of big fires, Democrats are saying Californians have to go without lights, refrigerators, and air-conditioning. Democrats could also avoid this by not making the power company financially liable for all forest fire damages, but since PG&E is a company, not an illegal alien, the Democrats couldn't care less about doing what's best for California. While they try to blame climate...

The California legislature has been batting around Assembly Bill 392 for most of the year without getting across the finish line. The legislation was crafted in response to “deadly shootings of unarmed black men” in the state and it had originally been billed as one of the toughest use of force laws regulating police activity in the country. But negotiations with law enforcement officials resulted in some changes being made to the language (without which it wouldn’t have passed) and activists are saying it’s too watered down to be effective. (Including some complaints from a very curious choice of people...

Public schools are reopening for business across America, meaning it's time to get back to reading, writing, arithmetic ... and revolution. As usual in matters such as these, California is leading the way. On the first day of classes at Denair Middle School near Modesto, science teacher Luis Davila Alvarado handed out a worksheet from a transgender advocacy group titled "The Gender Unicorn" asking students about their "gender identity," "gender expression" and their sexual and emotional attractions. These are children. And yet the teacher did not ask permission to hand the worksheet out. Most parents were outraged. The school estimated...