Tag: california

Katie Porter Has Bizarre Meltdown During California Governor Candidate Interview

Democrat former Rep. Katie Porter, running for California governor, had a bizarre meltdown during a pre-recorded interview with CBS Sacramento affiliate KOVR-TV reporter Julie Watts that was released Monday and went viral Tuesday.

Porter served three terms in Congress, from 2019 to 2025, leaving her House seat to run what turned out to be a losing Senate bid in the 2024 jungle primary. Porter, who became notable for her use of a whiteboard in House hearings, is currently the leading candidate for governor–polling around 20 percent support in a crowded field of Democrats, Republicans, third party and independents.

Watts interviewed eleven candidates running in next year’s jungle primary for governor to be held on June 2. The two top vote getters regardless of party advance to the general election on November 3, 2026.

The candidates were asked the same questions, with Porter melting down over being asked if she needs the votes of the forty percent of Californians who voted for President Donald Trump last year.

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California Governor Vetoes Bill Mandating New Health Curriculum for Elementary and Middle Schools

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have directed the State Board of Education to approve new teaching for health classes in elementary and middle schools.

The bill, sponsored by Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, a Democrat who represents Encinitas, California, sought to compel the State Board of Education to finalize health education resources by mid-2028. These materials were to follow the guidelines set in a 2019 statewide plan for health instruction.

In explaining his choice, Newsom said the bill should be considered only after finishing an ongoing evaluation of health teaching programs across California. This study aims to assess current practices and identify potential improvements before mandating new tools.

According to opponents of the measure, implementing the bill could lead to introducing lessons as early as third grade that teach children that reproductive organs do not always align with an individual’s sense of gender.

“Teaching controversial gender theories to students as young as eight or nine years old is not a practice that most Californians support, nor want to see happening in our schools,” state Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, a Republican from Santee, wrote in a Sept. 26 letter to the governor, urging him to veto the bill.

Jones, in his letter, wrote that the 2019 health framework “introduces the theory that reproductive anatomy does not necessarily determine a person’s gender.”

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California’s Vague ‘Hate Speech’ Bill Would Force Big Tech To Censor Mainstream Conservative Views

alifornia lawmakers are once again leading the charge — not toward progress, but toward repression. Their latest move, Senate Bill 771 (SB-771), is being packaged as a bold stand against “hate” on social media. In reality, it’s a direct assault on the free expression and constitutionally protected speech of ministries, minority groups, and faith-based organizations.

The bill would force Big Tech to remove content that could be interpreted as “harassment” or “intimidation” based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and more — or face financially devastating lawsuits.

If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs this bill into law as expected, it will become one of the most dangerous speech-restricting laws in the country. Cloaked in the language of civil rights, SB-771 is built to punish dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

The target is anyone who dares to speak publicly about values or perspectives that conflict with the state’s ever-expanding list of protected identities. In practice, this means community groups sharing discussions on traditional family structures, cultural views on gender roles, or advocacy for certain social issues may find themselves silenced — not by law enforcement, but by tech giants eager to avoid legal risk.

The bills says:

California law prohibits all persons and entities, including corporations, from engaging in, aiding, abetting, or conspiring to commit acts of violence, intimidation, or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.

 3273.73. (a) A social media platform that violates Section 51.7, 51.9, 52, or 52.1 through its algorithms that relay content to users or aids, abets, acts in concert, or conspires in a violation of any of those sections, or is a joint tortfeasor in a violation of any of those sections, shall, in addition to any other remedy, be liable to a prevailing plaintiff for a civil penalty for each violation sufficient to deter future violations but not to exceed the following:

(1) For an intentional, knowing, or willful violation, a civil penalty of up to one million dollars

(2) For a reckless violation, a civil penalty of up to five hundred thousand dollars.


This language may appear just, but its sweeping terms — “intimidation,” “coercion,” even “aiding” — are dangerously vague. In the hands of ideologically motivated actors, they can be weaponized to silence constitutionally protected discourse under the guise of enforcing civil rights.

That’s the chilling brilliance of SB-771: it outsources censorship to the private sector under threat of state-enforced financial ruin. The law doesn’t need to directly ban speech — it just makes the cost of hosting it too high for Big Tech to tolerate. This will especially impact small ministries, minority-led organizations, and faith-based nonprofits with limited legal or technical resources. For them, one flagged post — perhaps a cultural reference taken out of context — could mean being shadow-banned or deplatformed altogether.

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Gavin Newsom Just Gave California’s 800,000 Uber and Lyft Drivers a One-Way Ticket to the Unemployment Line

California Governor Gavin Newsom just gave his state’s Uber and Lyft drivers a one way ticket to the unemployment line.

Newsom signed a landmark agreement on Friday that would allow Uber and Lyft drivers to form a union.

The Democrat said at a press conference that the unionization deal will offer ride-hailing drivers a “voice, to give them choice, give them dignity and a say about their future.”

“I say that because it needs to be said: I’m not naive about how people are feeling about their future,” he explained.

California has become the second state in the nation, after Massachusetts, to allow Uber and Lyft drivers to unite at an industry level to negotiate for higher pay and benefits, such as health coverage.

The arrangement was finalized in August through talks between Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento, SEIU union officials, and representatives from Uber and Lyft.

The measure, known as AB 1340, was introduced by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Marc Berman and sponsored by SEIU California.

It establishes rules that allow app-based drivers to bargain collectively for improved wages and access to employee-style benefits, including health insurance.

Yet sadly, it does not take a genius to work out that all Newsom is condemning the state’s 800,000 Uber and Lyft drivers to losing their jobs altogether.

Companies such as Uber and Lyft are already aggressively driving down the wages earned by their drivers as part of their efforts to become profitable.

The decline in wages is also linked to the exploding popularity of ride-sharing as a profession, in many cases embraced by immigrants and people who are searching for more permanent work.

Nowadays, most long-time drivers reminisce about the “glory days” when they could earn a respectable living from their work.

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California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Certain Health Care Facilities

A county health officer in California issued an order requiring masking in acute care facilities starting on Nov. 1, an order authorities attribute to rising seasonal respiratory illnesses.

The mandate, which lasts until March 31 of next year, requires the use of face masks by people in acute care facilities, skilled nursing facilities, surgical and maternity centers, and infusion centers such as dialysis and chemotherapy centers, during respiratory virus season, not including patients.

“These respiratory viruses can cause serious illness, particularly in vulnerable groups such as infants, older adults, pregnant individuals, and those with weakened immune systems,” Lisa Hernandez, the Santa Cruz County public health officer, said in a statement. “This order aims to reduce the spread of these viruses and protect those most at risk from severe outcomes, including hospitalization and death.”

Santa Cruz County is located to the south of San Jose and other cities that make up Silicon Valley in California.

Last fall, officials in counties around California’s San Francisco Bay Area implemented similar mask mandates in health care facilities that lasted from Nov. 1, 2024, to April 2025.

An official in California’s Yolo County said last month that residents were advised to wear masks indoors because of COVID-19.

“Based on current wastewater levels of the virus that causes COVID-19, I recommend that everybody in West Sacramento wear a mask when they are around others in indoor public spaces,” Aimee Sisson, the Yolo County health officer, said in the statement.

The most recent data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the rates of positive tests and emergency department visits across the United States are continuing to fall.

Positive tests fell to 6.7 percent for the week ending Sept. 27, down from 9.6 percent during the previous week, according to the data. The percentage of emergency visits for COVID-19 fell from 1 percent to 0.7 percent.

Nineteen states are experiencing “high” or “very high” levels of COVID-19, according to wastewater data reviewed by the CDC. Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, and Utah are seeing the highest levels.

“COVID-19 activity has peaked and is declining in many areas of the country, but emergency department visits and hospitalizations are elevated nationally,” the CDC said in a separate statement.

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California plan redistributes prime farmland in the name of “equity”

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s “agricultural equity” advisers have a plan to de facto nationalize farmland and redistribute it along largely racial lines.

This is according to a draft document released this summer by the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force. According to the report, 82% of private farmland in California is owned by white producers; a fact authors blame on “inequities in resource distribution.” Their draft plan lists reparation-style recommendations to disrupt this status quo, restoring “stolen wealth” to the committee’s preferred groups.

California lost 1.6 million acres of farming and grazing land between 1984 and 2018—more than 47,000 acres per year or one square mile every five days. To address this crisis, the task force suggests removing prime farmland from the market altogether.

“In order to protect California’s Prime Farmland and Farmland of Statewide Importance, the Legislature should move to safeguard them in the public domain,” the report states.

By stripping owners of their right to freely sell or transfer farmland, the California government would be able to “halt the problem at the root,” the report claims. A state-funded entity could then buy up available farmland and redistribute it to “priority producers or land stewards”—defined as socially disadvantaged or historically excluded farmers.

The report predicts much of this available farmland will come courtesy of a 2014 California law that regulates water use. The controversial Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) shifted control from landowners to local agencies, giving government the power to dictate water use on private property and to impose fees for groundwater pumping. SGMA forces farmers to stop farming near “overdrafted basins,” in some cases calling for pumping reductions of 20-50% or more.

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California Ends Kamala Harris’s Truancy Law Punishing Parents

California parents will no longer face arrest if their children miss school following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 1 decision to approve legislation repealing Kamala Harris’s truancy law.

The 2011 law that the former vice president sponsored when she served as the state’s attorney general made it a misdemeanor for parents if their children were chronically truant by missing 10 percent or more of school days, starting in kindergarten.

The law punished parents with a fine of up to $2,000 or one year in county jail. At the time, she said the bill was an “effective strategy” to reduce chronic elementary school truancy and a smart approach to crime prevention.

This week, Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 461 to end the criminalization of truancy for parents and remove the 2011 law from the state’s penal code. Newsom did not explain why he signed AB 461 in his press release about legislation decisions on Oct. 1. The bill, one of 105 bills signed into law that day, takes effect on Jan. 1.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Patrick Ahrens, a Silicon Valley Democrat, called the truancy law a “failed policy.”

“Thank you to Gov. Newsom for signing my bill to repeal this failed policy of criminalizing struggling California families for their children missing school,” Ahrens said in a statement. “Fining or imprisoning parents did nothing to get kids the education and support they need.”

While California’s truancy law remained on the books for more than a decade, school districts were becoming less likely to enforce the punitive measures against parents, according to EdSource, a nonprofit educational resource focused on the state’s school systems.

The first arrests under the law were of five parents in Orange County in 2011. The parents were handcuffed and taken to Orange County Jail before being released on their own recognizance for ignoring repeated requests to get their children to school.

While parents have been arrested in California under the truancy law, it was unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges. Most school districts instead went beyond the law to reach out to parents with emails, letters, and phone calls to resolve truancy problems, according to the California District Attorney’s Association.

The new law was sponsored by End Child Poverty California, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty. Several justice and parent organizations, including the California State Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), also supported it.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom Threatens to Withhold Billions from State Colleges Signing Trump ‘Compact’

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to withhold billions in state funds from any college that signs an agreement to support President Donald Trump’s education agenda.

Deemed the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the Trump administration seeks to require universities to adhere to “rules written by the administration in a variety of areas, including admissions, hiring, free speech on campus, teaching and the use of endowments,” per KCRA.

“Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” the compact states.

Gavin Newsom denounced the compact as a “radical agreement” and pledged to withhold billions in state funds should any college cooperate with it.

“IF ANY CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY SIGNS THIS RADICAL AGREEMENT, THEY’LL LOSE BILLIONS IN STATE FUNDING — INCLUDING CAL GRANTS — INSTANTLY. CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM,” Newsom said in an intentionally uppercased statement as a troll of President Trump.

At least nine universities in the country have received the compact, with only one — University of Southern California (USC) — residing in the Golden State.

“USC is a private school that receives Cal Grants from the state. Cal Grants are part of the state’s financial aid program that provides funding to students that does not need to be paid back,” per KRCA.

“According to the California Department of Finance, USC received a total of $28.4 million in Cal Grant funding in the past year. The independent AICCU intuitions together received $227.6 million in total in that same year,” it added.

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Newsom opposes the protection of free speech.

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California Governor Signs Bill To Integrate Hemp And Marijuana Markets After Banning Intoxicating Cannabinoids Outside Of Dispensaries

The governor of California has signed a bill to integrate intoxicating hemp products into the state’s existing marijuana market—an attempt to consolidate the cannabis industry and prevent youth access to unregulated hemp.

After the legislation from Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D) passed the Senate last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed it into law on Thursday.

“We are continuing to place the safety of every Californian first,” Newsom said. “For too long, nefarious hemp manufacturers have been exploiting loopholes to make their intoxicating products easily available to our most vulnerable communities—that stops today.”

This follows the governor’s emergency order last year that outright prohibited hemp products with any trace amounts of THC from being sold, which industry stakeholders warned would devastate the marketplace.

Under the newly signed bill, intoxicating hemp products that meet certain regulatory requirements would be able to be sold at licensed cannabis retailers with age restrictions and testing rules. But it’s unclear how that might ameliorate the hemp industry’s concerns, when adults and patients go to a store with the option to buy a broader array of marijuana products.

“Bad actors have abused state and federal law to sell intoxicating hemp products in our State. As the author of legislation that allowed the legal sale of non-intoxicating hemp CBD products, this is absolutely unacceptable,” Aguiar-Curry said. “AB 8 is a result of years of collaboration with this Administration, and I appreciate the Governor’s signature.”

“Our first job is to protect our kids and our communities,” she said. “With this bill, we’ll have responsible regulation, increase enforcement, and support struggling legal cannabis businesses against criminal competition.”

Nicole Elliott, director of the Department of Cannabis Control (DCC), said the legislation represents “a critical step forward for California’s cannabis industry and for consumer safety.”

“By closing loopholes around intoxicating hemp products and bringing them under the same strict rules as cannabis, this legislation protects consumers, ensures fair competition for licensed businesses, and strengthens the integrity of our regulated marketplace,” she said. “AB 8 makes it clear that all intoxicating products must be held to the same important standards Californians expect.”

The key provisions of the law take effect in January 2028, mandating that consumable hemp products with cannabinoids other that CBD must comply with the state’s current medical and recreational marijuana laws.

A Senate analysis of the bill released last month said the measure would ban the sale of “synthetic cannabis products and inhalable cannabis products containing cannabinoids derived from hemp,” place restrictions on incorporating raw hemp extracts into foods and beverages and expand “the authority for state and local enforcement agencies to inspect, seize, and destroy unlawful cannabis products.”

This all follows Newsom announcing emergency regulations last year to outlaw hemp products with any “detectable amount of total THC.” Under that move, hemp products that don’t have THC are also limited to five servings per package, and sales are restricted to adults 21 and older.

The proposal came less than a month after the state legislature effectively killed a governor-backed bill that would have imposed somewhat similar restrictions on intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoids.

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TEN MONTHS AFTER THE FIRES: Only TWO Reconstruction Permits Have Been Issued in Malibu, California

The wildfires that swept through southern California happened in January. That was ten months ago. Since then, in Malibu, which lost more than 700 structures in the fires, only two reconstruction permits have been issued. TWO.

What are the people who run California doing all day? How is this even possible?

We are reminded of the predictions by Adam Carolla after the fires. Pretty much everything he predicted is coming true.

Hot Air reports:

Malibu Lost 720 Structures in the Fire; 2 Building Permits Have Been Issued So Far

Remember the halcyon days of January 2025, when every politician representing the Los Angeles area, from city councilmen to the governor, promised to expedite permitting to help residents rebuild after the disastrous fires the Democrats created?

It was all bulls**t, and everybody knew it then, but of course, everybody in California’s Pravda pretended to take them seriously. After all, this is California, where the sun shines ever day and Gavin Newsom has a perpetual 10-year plan to end homelessness. Democrats are GOOD and Republicans are EVIL.

Well, as predicted by every sane person, the politicians have failed to follow through with their promised expediting of the permitting process. Of the 720 structures destroyed, only two have gotten permits to rebuild. One suspects that Newsom’s promise to rebuild the area better than ever actually means that he and the Democrats want to reshape it into their version of utopia.

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