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Gavin Newsom Handed $53 Million in State Contracts to His Biggest Donors

California has become a case study in how political connections translate directly into profit.

For Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wealthiest supporters, campaign contributions appear to double as investments—ones that yield lucrative state contracts, taxpayer-funded benefits, and prestigious appointments.

Since Newsom entered office in 2019, records show that California has steered more than $53 million in state contracts to companies owned or managed by his top donors.

These contracts have covered everything from wildfire prevention and emergency response to public health services.

The overlap between political contributions and state spending highlights an entrenched culture where those with financial ties to the governor reap disproportionate rewards.

Donors have also secured massive tax breaks and credits.

California’s climate initiatives, energy projects, and green subsidy programs have disproportionately benefited firms connected to Newsom’s political backers.

These arrangements not only raise ethical questions but also distort the competitive landscape, favoring politically connected companies over those competing on merit.

The pattern extends beyond financial contracts.

Newsom’s allies have gained placement in elite academic circles, including appointments to university boards and advisory positions.

Such appointments provide not only prestige but also influence over education policy and access to state resources.

For major donors, the returns extend far beyond dollars and cents—they reach into the very institutions that shape California’s future.

The controversy has grown more prominent as Newsom positions himself on the national stage.

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Why the Coming Death of Cable TV Is One of the Greatest Stories of Our Time

For more than a quarter-century, we’ve been hearing predictions about the demise of cable—and with it, cable news.

A Pew Research article from 2000 showed the trends began more than 30 years ago, when consumption of broadcast and local news began to decline, and users began to get more news (and entertainment) online.

These trends have only increased since, to the extent that the long decline in cable news may finally be reaching its end.

“This week might well mark the last time we ever care so much about cable TV news,” veteran media analyst Alan Wolk noted in April, following the surprising departures of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN.

Wolk wasn’t saying cable news was necessarily a terrible product; it was an obsolete one on an obsolete platform. While he didn’t predict that the death of cable was imminent, he made it clear it might be time to start looking for hospice care.

“…eventually, probably sometime in the next five to ten years, cable TV is going to stop being worth it for all parties involved and will, for all intents and purposes, disappear,” Wolk wrote.

End of Days?

The decline of cable is obviously bad news for the six largest cable news networks (Fox, CNN, Fox Business, MSNBC, CNBC, and HLN).

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post points out that fewer people watching cable news doesn’t just mean less ad revenue, which accounted for $2.6 billion in revenue collectively for the cable giants last year. It also means less revenue from cable providers, who provide cable news networks the majority of their revenue ($4 billion) through licensing fees.

“…the day could soon come when an exodus of cable subscribers leaves cable operators unable to afford the hefty license fees that those news programmers now command,” Farhi writes.

This is obviously bad news for cable news companies. Ditto for talking heads like Jake Tapper and Sean Hannity, both of whom pull in eight-figure salaries.

For consumers, content creators, and society generally, however, the collapse of cable news is nothing to be feared.

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Is Trump Preparing for the Next Civil War, or Already Fighting It?

The US – that powerful nation standing for peace, self-determination and liberty – as Charles Hugh Smith discusses, is a spectacle, an artifice, a lie. Smith refers to Guy Debord’s 1967 book, and Debord’s subsequent Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.

Debord seems to have completely anticipated my life as a child of the Cold War and adult participant in the rise of the executive warfare state. What’s more, he explained it:

The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

The constructs in which we operate provide for endless intellectual challenges, often taking us down deep rabbit holes. But rabbit hole or not, all of us are living and producing within a simulated liberty, accompanied by – to paraphrase Debord and Smith – hyper-complex technological systems, unitary and ahistorical governments, and all-encompassing state and techno-narratives created to replace the humane and silence humanity.

We are fascinated by what we see on our screens – in Gaza, in Ukraine and now Venezuela, even in the Pacific. Yet, we must have been getting a snack when the plot twisted and the peace and America First campaign morphed into Tomahawks to Kiev, brutal US-assisted genocide in Gaza, the US Navy blowing up fishermen and other civilians in international waters at will, without consequence.

The media summary of the latest Gaza flotilla was pure Hunger Games-style pablum: “It was the first time since Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza’s waters in 2009 that an unauthorised humanitarian mission has reached closer than 70 nautical miles from the territory.” What is an ‘unauthorized’ humanitarian mission?” Apparently they’re quite common, as we saw with Bush 43 and Katrina, feeding the homeless, and even Peanut the Squirrel.

The current idiotic fiascos – NATO’s Ukraine and Israel’s expansionist murder spree – have been curiously unwinnable, and even more curiously, unstoppable. Trump complained he didn’t understand how difficult it would be to end these wars. The vast majority of countries represented in the United Nations probably agree with Trump on this point – why can’t the stupidity and inhumanity just be stopped (ideally by the US government simply ceasing to fund them)?

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First-cousin marriage linked to terrorist financing, money laundering and people trafficking, experts warn

The storm over first-cousin marriage deepened last night after experts linked it to terrorist financing, money laundering and people trafficking.

Tories called for the marriages to be banned after The Mail on Sunday revealed last month that NHS guidance promotes their ‘benefits’ despite an associated increase in birth defects.

The marriages are also connected to unregulated, untraceable ‘hawala’ financing – a way of transferring money worldwide that depends on family ties and doesn’t leave a paper trace.

To make a transfer using hawala, someone deposits cash in one country with a password.

The same amount can be withdrawn abroad using the password via a trusted middleman in both countries. It does not require physical movement of cash.

The National Crime Agency says risks of money laundering and terror financing under this system are high.

It says Hezbollah has received billions through the system and Isis depends on it.

British funds have reached terrorist cells in Somalia and Syria, adds the crime agency.

Government investigators believe hawala is being used to launder at least £2billion every year in the UK.

Academic Dr Patrick Nash says because cousin marriages are typically made with foreign relatives, they are more likely to import hawala to the UK, as well as needing to transfer money abroad to family.

He says: ‘Labour must act swiftly to ban cousin marriage and hawala or be complicit in terrorist atrocities.’

Since being cut off from financial markets by the US, Iran has become adept at using hawala to transfer British funds to prop up terrorist regimes in the Middle East.

The National Crime Agency has also found that hundreds of millions of pounds a year is being channelled through hawala to smuggle migrants and potential terrorists into Britain.

Documents have been unearthed showing Government ministers, tax authorities and law enforcement officials promoting the hawala network.

In one case they show how families can use hawala to pay people-smugglers to help to cross the Channel.

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PROTECT WOMEN: Out-of-Control Trans Activists Vandalize Europe’s Largest Feminist Conference Happening in the UK

Trans individuals want to ‘teach’ women what they are.

In following a new trend, Trans activists vandalized the venue of Europe’s largest feminist conference, taking place in Brighton, in the UK.

Purple paint was sprayed on the façade and windows were smashed in the runup to this weekend’s FiLiA conference.

There’s no need for us to wonder who did this, since Bash Back, a trans activist group, has proudly claimed credit for the vandalism and even posted a video showing masked figures vandalizing the venue.

Around 2,400 people will participate in the gender-critical charity’s conference.

Author JK Rowling, a champion for women’s rights against trans activism, retweeted a post by journalist Julie Bindel.

The Telegraph reported:

“Ms. Bindel, who is speaking at this year’s event, wrote on X: ‘Trans activists have smashed one of the large front windows of the Brighton Centre – the venue where 2500 feminists are meeting this weekend to talk about male violence, misogyny and the like. Why can’t EVERYONE see this movement for what it is?’”

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Starmer national security adviser accused of blocking spy case is senior member of shadowy lobby club China ‘uses to groom UK elite’

The senior Government adviser at the heart of the Chinese spying row was a member of a secretive network used by Beijing to cultivate Britain’s elites.

Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, was a fellow of the 48 Group, a lobby club founded by British communists which allegedly ‘grooms’ British politicians and business leaders to fall under the sway of China’s Communist Party.

Sources have pointed the finger at Mr Powell for the Government’s failure to state that China represented a threat to national security – an omission which the Director of Public Prosecutions has said led to last month’s collapse of the trial of Chris Cash and Christopher Berry on charges of passing secrets to China between 2021 and 2023. Both men were formally declared not guilty and deny any wrongdoing.

The Tories have accused ministers of causing the collapse of a major spying trial because they feared that calling China a national security threat might jeopardise trade relations.

The Government has denied interfering with the case.

The 48 Group, which is one of the most prominent pro-China lobbying organisations in Britain, says its aim is to improve trade relations between the two nations – but has been accused of furthering the Beijing regime’s wider causes in Britain, as this newspaper first reported in 2020.

Its patrons have included Labour grandee Peter Mandelson, who was recently sacked as Britain’s Ambassador to the US over his links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Both Tony Blair and former Tory Chancellor George Osborne have attended events hosted by the 48 Group in London.

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Breaking Free From State Rule

Wars are mass-murder, massive theft, and unrelenting propaganda. In this country they’re lucrative overseas entanglements, as government diverts loot from taxpayers to the war industry. They’re also perpetual, as war embellishes the sanctity of the state as well as providing grounds for increased plunder of its population. Wars are government as Houdini—drawing attention to the bloody far-away while relieving attention on the corrupt close-at-hand. For the victor, the propaganda is inked as truth in the history books. War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne concluded, but not for the people under it:

In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

Government-controlled monetary policy is cover for counterfeiting, an insidious form of taxation that creates gross economic distortions and inequalities. Presidential elections are extravagant contests between straw men owned by those behind the throne. Formal education is indoctrination into dominant narratives. The US Constitution is a feel-good distraction from the larceny and depravity of the political class.

Blogger J.D. Breen has published a brief history of the 21st century in two parts (here and here). “As last century was launched when the Maine sank in Havana harbor, this one turned when the Twin Towers were toppled. . . . The remnants of the U.S. Constitution went in the shredder.” Shocking, but not surprising, he said, given the destruction wrought by US intervention in Muslim countries over the decades.

But government, as we’ve learned, is never accountable for wrong-doing. If it was, it would imply the state is fallible, a blasphemous idea.

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Gavin Newsom’s Wife Pocketed $300K a Year from Political Insiders

California’s “First Partner,” Jennifer Siebel Newsom, has built a business empire that thrives on political connections.

Public records reveal that the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom runs companies filled with her husband’s former Democrat aides and confidants.

At the same time, she collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the state and lobbyists.

Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and activist, operates The Representation Project, a nonprofit that pushes progressive messaging in schools and public institutions.

That nonprofit has accepted donations from corporations actively lobbying Gavin Newsom’s administration, raising serious concerns about influence peddling.

Her companies and foundations have also benefited from the support of the governor’s political allies, creating a direct overlap between California’s government apparatus and the Newsom family’s personal ventures.

The financial entanglements are wide-ranging.

In recent years, her nonprofit has received state contracts and corporate donations that coincide with policy interests before her husband’s office.

Lobbyists and politically active firms saw their contributions rewarded with access to California’s decision-making machine.

At the same time, Siebel Newsom’s family charity, the Siebel Family Charitable Foundation, directed tens of thousands of dollars back into her nonprofit, further blurring the line between charitable activity and personal enrichment.

This network of organizations and donors has allowed the Newsoms to advance a politicized agenda in California schools while financially benefiting from it.

The Representation Project has been at the center of programs that promote progressive identity politics and diversity initiatives, often funded with taxpayer dollars.

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Spies were ‘gagged’ from objecting to new Chinese mega embassy plans

British spies were ‘gagged’ from raising objections to a new Chinese embassy in east London, documents suggest.

The revelations about the proposed embassy – dubbed a ‘spy campus’ – are likely to increase concerns about the development on the site of the Royal Mint buildings near the Tower of London.

A final decision on whether to approve the plan, revived by No 10 despite being blocked by the previous government after warnings from MI5 and Scotland Yard in 2022, has been deferred while the row about the collapsed Chinese spy trial continues.

Now unearthed documents show inspectors were denied access to key secret documents by Labour when approving the ‘mega embassy’ which will be ‘crawling with spies’.

The documents include a critical assessment from security services – the contents of which have been redacted.

Ministers refused to allow a private inquiry, which would have allowed secret evidence to be considered.

Critics have accused ministers of trying to ram the application through and shut down any dissent or security concerns which might jeopardise it.

Officials in the Communities Department, which is handling the planning case, are preparing to announce the October 21 deadline will be pushed back.

The department declined to comment.

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