Tag: california

$190,000 payout for Antifa-supporting teacher to resign has critics fuming over union clout

Reports that a California school teacher who was aligned with Antifa was paid $190,000 to resign this year are sparking outrage, leading critics to say it reveals the strength of California’s teacher unions on public education in the state.

Information obtained by the Sacramento Bee revealed that former Inderkum High School teacher Gabriel Gipe was paid $190,000 to resign from his post. According to the Bee, the payout was taxed, and the final check totaled $100,000.

Gipe, an AP Government teacher, was secretly recorded saying he had 180 days to turn his students into “revolutionaries,” as revealed in a Project Veritas video released in September 2021. The conservative organization’s video release sparked intense backlash, and the district announced that it planned to fire Gipe within a few days of the video’s release and started compiling a dossier outlining evidence against him, according to multiple news reports at that time.

The school’s investigation revealed that Gipe rejected the regular AP Government curriculum and “instead led freewheeling lectures about communism,” the Bee reported.

School district Superintendent Chris Evans told the Bee that the decision to pay Gipe came down to “basic math.”

“California is not an easy place to fire a teacher,” Evans told the Bee. “I think everyone knows that.”

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Despite Strict Gun Control, California Had The Most Active Shooter Incidents In 2021: FBI

In a report issued by the FBI, California ranked first for the most active shooter incidents in 2021. The state has been in the top spot in three of the past five years.

According to the study, a total of 61 active shooter incidents occurred across 30 states last year with 103 people killed and 140 wounded. This is up from 40 incidents and 38 killed in 2020.

California had 6 incidents that claimed the lives of 19 people with 9 wounded. Texas and Georgia each had 5.

California, which has some of the strictest gun laws, saw 0.015 shootings per 100,000 people. Texas, which has very unrestrictive state gun laws, had nearly the same at 0.0167 per 100,000 people. Georgia had 0.045 per 100,000 people.

Criminal attorney Arash Hashemi told NTD, a sister outlet of The Epoch Times, that in his opinion there’s no easy answer to how gun laws should be handled.

“We need both sides to sit down and listen to what’s going on. I know one side says we need to ban guns, one side said there would be no regulation. But there needs to be a meeting of the minds in the middle,” Hashemi said.

California is moving ahead to implement more gun restrictions. The new state Senate Bill 918, which is currently on its way through the legislature, would ban the carrying of guns in most public areas, regardless of whether someone has a carry license or not.

However Hashemi suggested a slightly different approach. He said the Second Amendment can’t be violated, but he thinks certain people should be restricted from owning a firearm.

“I think California needs to implement these background checks but at the same time make sure they don’t infringe on people’s rights to bear arms,” Hashemi said.

He said vetting gun buyers for red flags like mental illness or psychiatric medication is important.

He added that the importance of the Second Amendment is to give the civilians of the United States a check on the government.

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San Diego Unified School District Will Teach Children That Heterosexuality is Oppressive – And Promote “Genderqueer,” “Non-Binary” Identities

Groomers at San Diego Unified School District are teaching children that heterosexuality is a “system of oppression.”

Christopher Rufo obtained documents from the school district that reveal the new radical Marxist curriculum being taught to young children in grades K-12.

“San Diego Unified School District claims that heterosexuality is “a system of oppression,” promotes the idea that girls can have penises, and encourages children to adopt synthetic sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “genderqueer,” and “two-spirit.”” Christopher Rufo said.

The district will teach children that white Europeans created a “gender binary” – “man” and “woman” that “oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people.”

The school district will teach young children that gender binary has “resulted in a system of heteronormativity and cisgender privilege.”

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Chuck Schumer Learned Nothing From the Failure of Pot Legalization in California

During the next year, California officials said last week, the state expects to seize “more than $1 billion worth of illegal cannabis products.” That announcement came a few weeks after the U.S. Justice Department bragged about guilty pleas by 11 unlicensed California marijuana merchants who had been nabbed with help from state and local law enforcement agencies.

The continuing war on weed in California, which supposedly legalized marijuana in 2016, reflects the striking failure to replace black-market dealers with state-licensed vendors, a plan that has been doomed by high taxes, local bans, and overregulation. Judging from the marijuana legalization bill he introduced last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D‒N.Y.) has learned nothing from that experience.

Six years after California voters approved recreational marijuana, unauthorized suppliers still account for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of sales. A recent report from Reason Foundation, which publishes this website, highlights one major reason why licensed businesses have had so much trouble competing with illegal suppliers: Taxes are too high.

Geoff Lawrence, Reason Foundation’s managing director of drug policy, found that California’s effective tax rate ranged from $42 to $92 per ounce, depending on the jurisdiction, compared to an estimated wholesale production cost of $35 per ounce. The corresponding rates in Colorado and Oregon, both of which have been more successful at displacing the black market, are about $33 and $21, respectively.

Despite modest tax relief approved this year, legal marijuana remains overpriced in California. It is also inconvenient to buy in much of the state, Lawrence notes, thanks to local sales bans that have created “massive cannabis deserts” where “consumers have no access to a legal retailer within a reasonable distance of their home.”

Legal sellers also must contend with burdensome licensing requirements and regulations. Dale Gieringer, California director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says those rules help explain why legal marijuana prices are much higher than he anticipated.

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Bill Moves Forward That Will Legalize Psychedelic Drugs Like DMT & Ibogaine in the Entire State of California

Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that kidnapping and caging people for possessing illegal substances does nothing to prevent use and only leads to more crime and suffering, government is still hell bent on enforcing the war on drugs. Like a crack addict who needs to find his next fix, the state is unable to resist the temptation to kick in doors, shake down brown people, and ruin lives to enforce the drug war.

Instead of realizing the horrific nature of the enforcement of prohibition, many cities across the country double down on the drug war instead of admitting failure. As we can see from watching it unfold, this only leads to more suffering and more crime. Luckily, there are cities, and now entire states in other parts of the country that are taking steps to stop this violent war and the implications for such measures are only beneficial to all human kind.

Eight years ago, Colorado citizens—tired of the war on drugs and wise to the near-limitless benefits of cannabis—made US history by voting to legalize recreational marijuana. Then, in 2019, this state once again placed themselves on the right side of history as they voted to decriminalize magic mushrooms. But this was just the beginning and their momentum is spreading—faster and stronger, toward decriminalizing all plant-based psychedelics. Then, this year, the state of Oregon decriminalized all drugs.

Now, another state is following suit, but not just with psilocybin— a bill in California is moving forward with a legalization measure for other psychedelics like mescaline cacti, ayahuasca and ibogaine.

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State spends half a BILLION dollars pushing ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’

The Democratic-controlled state of California spent millions on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the past several years, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report by The Center for Organizational Research and Education (CORE), a consumer protection nonprofit, examined about 400 public records requests to local and state governments as well as K-12 school districts and higher education institutions. California spent roughly $497 million on DEI activities between mostly 2020 and 2022 and years prior, according to CORE.

“DEI spending is out of control,” Will Coggin, a researcher for CORE, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The people of California are footing the bill for diversity consultants, equity authors, and inclusion officials to rake in millions. With hundreds of millions already spent and potentially billions more to come, it’s a feeding frenzy funded by taxpayers.”

For instance, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife spent close to $50,000 for “racial equity” workshops and trainings for employees between 2019 and 2021, according to the report. The state’s Department of Conservation spent around $180,000 on DEI initiatives for the fiscal years 2020 and 2021, the report says.

President Joe Biden issued an executive order in June 2021 requiring federal agencies implement DEI training and race-conscious hiring practices. DEI is often linked to Critical Race Theory, which holds that America is systemically racist and that people must view social interactions in terms of race.

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Woke California AG Tells Gun-Permitting Officials to Deny Applicants Based on Politics

After the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in June, California’s attorney general encouraged law enforcement officials in the state to deny firearm carry permits to individuals with a history of “hatred and racism”—whether expressed in social media posts or elsewhere.

The problem is that in these politically polarized times, defining hatred and racism is problematic, leading to definitions that disfavor the beliefs of conservatives and others who don’t toe the “woke” or politically correct line, critics say. Allowing these concepts to be used in the gun-permitting process is a recipe for abuse and could lead to violations of gun-permit applicants’ Second and First Amendment rights, they say.

On June 23, the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, that New York state’s tough concealed carry gun permitting system was unconstitutional because it only granted public-carry licenses “when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense.”

The day after the Bruen ruling, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sent a “legal alert” (pdf) to law enforcement officials, advising them that the state was dropping the requirement for gun license applicants to provide a “good cause” because the requirement is now “unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

But “the requirement that a public-carry license applicant provide proof of ‘good moral character’ remains constitutional” and should continue to be enforced.

A “good moral character” investigation “requires an independent determination,” Bonta wrote.

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California law may backfire terribly as 70,000 independent truckers could be forced out of work, unleashing ‘devastating’ supply chain misery

A California law threatens to unleash more supply chain misery and inflation on residents of the Golden State by forcing independent truckers out of the workforce.

California Assembly Bill 5 was introduced by former state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat, and signed into law in September 2019 by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

AB5 called for “a person providing labor or services for remuneration shall be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor unless the hiring entity demonstrates that the person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.”

Certain professions were exempt from AB5, including insurance agents, health care professionals, investment advisers, realtors, barbers, and fishermen. However, truckers were not exempt from AB5.

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University Of California Waives Tuition For Native Americans, Starting Fall 2022

Announced in April, the UC Native American Opportunity Plan allows California residents who are “members of federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes” to get free education on UC campuses. The program applies to undergraduate and graduate students.

“The University of California is committed to recognizing and acknowledging historical wrongs endured by Native Americans,” UC President Michael Drake said in a letter (pdf).

“I am proud of the efforts the University of California has made to support the Native American community, including the creation of the [program].”

The UC system has ten campuses—Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. About 295,000 students were enrolled in the system in fall 2021.

The program is expected to cost $2.4 million and will be funded mainly by both the state’s and UC’s financial aid programs, according to Drake’s office.

The program was developed to expand “student diversity and make the University of California more affordable and accessible,” Drake said in the letter. The approximate annual tuition for a state resident is $13,104, according to the UC Admissions office.

California has 109 federally recognized tribes and has more Native Americans and those of Alaska Native heritage than any other state in the country, according to the Judicial Council of California.

Native Americans make up 1.7 percent of the state’s population while accounting for 0.5 percent of the UC system’s student body in Fall 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the university’s enrollment statistics.

Some universities and lawmakers across the country are following UC’s steps.

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California presses ahead with restricting doctors’ speech from going against “contemporary scientific consensus”

The California Senate Business, Professions, and Economic Development Committee approved bill AB 2098, which would punish doctors for disagreeing with the state’s chosen authority and spreading COVID “misinformation.”

According to the author of the bill, Democrat Assemblyman Evan Low, the controversial bill “helps ensure we tackle misinformation and disinformation” spread by doctors about COVID.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill was drafted after doctors sharing their opinions about Covid on social media was seen to be undermining public messaging.

The bill argues that misinformation by medical practitioners is negligent:

“‘Misinformation’ means false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to an extent where its dissemination constitutes gross negligence by the licensee.”

An analysis of the bill by the committee concluded that it:

“Makes disseminating misinformation, as defined, or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, by a physician and surgeon unprofessional conduct.”

During the hearing of the bill by the committee earlier this week, it was heavily opposed, particularly on First Amendment grounds and the idea that doctors should be allowed to go against “scientific consensus,” as that’s how major discoveries of the past have come to be.

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