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🕒 5-minute read

A Legal Nerd Alert

Unless you know me pretty well—and perhaps even if you do—you may not know that I am a nerd for constitutional law. I am especially fascinated by the inner workings of the federal courts and, of course, the Supreme Court.

That is why I subscribe to Advisory Opinions, the podcast from The Dispatch where Sarah Isgur and David French engage in upper-division legal nerdery at least twice a week. Their latest episode sent me down a rabbit hole involving an obscure Supreme Court case, a six-pack of beer and a $95,000 airplane.

It is a strange little case. It could also change how easily the government can take someone’s property.

The $95,000 Misdemeanor

The case is Jouppi v. Alaska. In 2012, Kenneth Jouppi was hired to fly a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, a remote Alaskan village where the importation, sale, and possession of alcohol are prohibited.

Jouppi flew a 1969 Cessna 206, a small, single-engine bush plane built to carry only a handful of people. It is the kind of plane where you sit within arm’s reach of the pilot and, if you are not accustomed to bush flying, spend at least part of the trip wondering whether you have made a terrible mistake.

Before the plane could leave Fairbanks, troopers found three cases of beer aboard—approximately 72 beers in all. Most were packed with the passenger’s groceries. But at least one six-pack was sitting in a shopping bag where prosecutors said Jouppi could not have missed it.

The plane never left the ground. But Alaska law defines transporting alcohol to include attempting to transport it, and a jury convicted Jouppi of a misdemeanor under instructions allowing knowledge to be established through deliberate ignorance. He received three days in jail, three years of probation and a $3,000 fine, with $1,500 suspended.

Then Alaska came for his $95,000 airplane.

To be clear, this was not the classic case of an innocent mother whose car was secretly used for a drug deal. There was plenty of beer aboard, Jouppi owned the air-taxi company, and Alaska has good reasons to protect isolated communities with limited police resources from bootlegging. State law mandates the forfeiture of aircraft used to transport alcohol into dry villages.

Even so, taking a $95,000 airplane over a misdemeanor is a lot of government punishment.

When Property Pays The Police

I do not have to believe Jouppi was innocent to be uncomfortable with what happened to him. I have long been skeptical of asset forfeiture, particularly when the government agency taking the property stands to benefit from keeping it.

Civil forfeiture is where things get especially strange. In a judicial civil-forfeiture proceeding, the government brings its case against the property itself, which is how we end up with absurd names such as United States v. $92,000 in Cash. Other seizures can be completed administratively unless the owner files a timely challenge.

There is a process on paper. In practice, the owner may have to meet strict deadlines, decipher an unfamiliar system, and hire a lawyer who costs more than the seized property. Plenty of people simply walk away.

Jouppi did receive a criminal trial, so his case does not directly address those due-process problems. His argument involves a different constitutional protection: the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines. Still, the financial incentive running through the larger forfeiture system is hard to ignore.

The Justice Department’s forfeiture fund received $2.422 billion in fiscal 2024 and paid approximately $369 million through “equitable sharing” to participating law-enforcement agencies. Those payments rose to $540 million in 2025. The separate Treasury Forfeiture Fund reported another $2.263 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue.

That is more than $4.6 billion flowing into two federal funds in one year, before counting forfeitures handled exclusively under state and local law.

These are not all police slush funds. Some of the money is returned to victims or innocent third parties, and some pays the cost of running the system. But hundreds of millions still flow back to law-enforcement agencies.

As Isgur put it, “It’s the budgeting problem.”

Police budgets should be set through taxation and legislative appropriations—not determined in part by how much property an agency manages to confiscate.

What Jouppi Could Change

Now we arrive at the constitutional-law part.

The Supreme Court has held that a punitive forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment when it is “grossly disproportional” to the underlying offense. The question in Jouppi is how a court is supposed to decide how serious that offense was.

The Alaska Supreme Court considered facts specific to Jouppi, including the quantity of beer, his role as pilot and operator, and the jury’s finding that he was deliberately ignorant. When assessing the gravity of the offense, however, the court also zoomed out. It considered the broad consequences of alcohol abuse in rural Alaska: violence, addiction, public-health costs and death. Viewed from that altitude, even one six-pack could be connected to grave social harm.

Jouppi wants the justices to zoom in. Was he running a bootlegging business, or was this an isolated incident? Did he earn additional money by allowing passengers to carry alcohol? How much did he knowingly transport? What harm did this particular attempt cause?

If the government gets to describe every offense at the highest possible level of abstraction, almost any forfeiture can be defended. A low-level drug offender becomes responsible for the opioid epidemic. A traveler who violates a currency-reporting rule becomes the equivalent of an international money launderer.

If the Court adopts Jouppi’s proposed rule, lower courts would have to look more closely at the individual, the conduct, and the punishment before allowing the government to take a valuable car, home, business, or airplane. Because the Eighth Amendment also applies to punitive civil forfeitures, the effects might extend beyond criminal cases like his.

So, Does It Matter?

The Supreme Court granted review in Jouppi on July 20. The case will not abolish civil forfeiture, end equitable sharing, or require a criminal conviction every time the government takes property.

Claimants would still have to show that a forfeiture is not simply harsh but grossly disproportional. Many would still find that contesting a seizure costs more than surrendering what was taken.

That is not a reason to dismiss the case.

Government should be able to confiscate criminal proceeds and the tools of a genuine criminal enterprise. But it should not be able to inflate a person’s wrongdoing into the worst imaginable version of the offense merely because that makes a valuable forfeiture easier to defend.

French described forfeiture as an “extra layer of punishment” that can become either “our extra way to punish you” or “our way to make money.”

When the government imposing the punishment also profits from it, even an incomplete constitutional restraint is worth welcoming.

Keep an eye out for oral argument in Jouppi during the Court’s 2026–27 term—and, of course, a decision likely arriving by late June.

Below the Paywall

A couple of political cartoons on this topic that didn’t make it up top, and some interesting videos…

Read more

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🕐 5-Minute Read

“I had been sleeping with his boss, who was also mine, and the mayor of San Francisco.”

That is Ruby Rippey describing the affair Gavin Newsom calls “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs” in his new memoir.

Brief? That is not how Rippey remembers it.

In a long and astonishing Vanity Fair essay ($) written in the first person, she recounts sleeping with Newsom while working for him at San Francisco City Hall. Her husband, Alex Tourk, was Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and one of his most trusted political aides.

So the mayor was sleeping with his employee, who was also the wife of the man helping run his administration.

I will say this for Rippey: She does not try to write herself out of her own scandal. She was an alcoholic, later used cocaine to keep herself drinking, and admits that she actively pursued Newsom’s attention.

“I was not coerced,” she writes. “I knew what I was doing.”

Fair enough. But Newsom was still the mayor. He was her boss and her husband’s boss. Rippey’s willingness to accept responsibility for her behavior does not erase his.

And that is before we get to the white dress.

The Wedding

The affair began at a Napa Valley wedding in 2005. Rippey wore a white strapless dress her mother had warned her not to wear. She drank Champagne, then wine, then more wine. Her husband eventually went home to their one-year-old son while she stayed behind to continue partying.

Later, Rippey climbed into a chauffeured car with Newsom and several other people. She stretched her legs across the center console and let her heels fall off. Newsom, sitting in front, took one of her feet and began massaging it.

Then her memory stops.

She awoke beside him the next morning, still wearing the dress. It was soaked from the waist down because she had passed out and urinated in the bed. Rippey gathered her things and left, forgetting a gold bracelet that had belonged to her grandmother.

A few days later, Newsom walked past her desk and silently dropped off the bracelet.

They both pretended nothing had happened. Then they started doing it again.

Rippey says the affair continued on and off for months. They met at Newsom’s Russian Hill penthouse, in the private back room of a North Beach bar and at the W Hotel in Los Angeles. Around City Hall, she lingered in doorways and looked for reasons to cross his path. His texts would arrive asking, “Where are you?”

She always went.

Rippey writes that the real attraction was not romance. It was the feeling of being chosen by the most powerful man in the building. The attention itself became another intoxicant.

This is where Newsom’s position matters. He was not some random man she met at a bar. He was the mayor, carrying on an affair with a visibly unraveling subordinate whose husband reported directly to him.

The Stain and the Shirt Buttons

One night at Newsom’s penthouse, Rippey spilled red wine on his pale carpet. She watched California’s future governor get down on all fours and scrub at the stain with a washcloth.

“You know, we really can’t do this anymore,” Newsom told her, according to Rippey. “You can’t be doing this to Alex.”

It is quite a scene: Newsom cleaning up the physical evidence while acknowledging the betrayal—and then continuing the affair anyway.

When Rippey finally left the penthouse in the early morning, Newsom’s black Lincoln was still idling outside. The driver had been told to wait. She climbed into the back seat knowing that he almost certainly understood what had just happened upstairs.

The Los Angeles episode is even more lurid.

Rippey arranged a girls’ trip knowing Newsom would be there for work. She and a friend spent the afternoon drinking Chardonnay before joining him at the W. Rippey remembers a few flashes from the hotel bar. After that, nothing.

She woke beside Newsom with a pounding head:

“On the floor near the bed are tiny shirt buttons scattered like coins. Not mine. One is stuck to the back of my thigh. I peel it off and dress carefully, leaving without waking him.”

Newsom later texted her: “Thank God the W had T-shirts.”

Rippey figured out that she must have ripped his shirt open during a night she could barely remember.

And through all of this, Alex kept going to work for Newsom.

The Collapse

By then, Rippey’s drinking had taken over her life. She was showing up late and hungover. She tried Antabuse, a medication that makes a person sick if they drink, and drank anyway. Eventually she stopped taking it.

Then she added cocaine because it allowed her to drink more and stay out longer.

Her sister started following her through bars at night to make sure she stayed alive. After one particularly bad nosebleed, she drove Rippey to an emergency room, where a doctor cauterized the inside of her nostril.

Rippey entered rehab in May 2006 and ended the affair. Her sister also called Newsom and told him that Ruby was sick. Even if she contacted him again, the sister said, it was his responsibility to refuse.

Newsom’s response, as it was later relayed to Rippey, was some version of: “God bless, God bless.”

After leaving rehab, Rippey remained silent for months. Alex continued working on Newsom’s reelection campaign, unaware that his wife and his boss had been sleeping together.

In January 2007, she finally confessed by email. Alex confronted Newsom, resigned, and ended the marriage.

This part matters because Newsom now writes that he “came clean” to Alex. Rippey says she had already told her husband. In her telling, Newsom admitted the affair only after Alex knew and demanded an answer.

That is not a minor dispute. Newsom’s version allows him to appear as the man who voluntarily told a painful truth. Rippey’s version has him acknowledging it after someone else forced the issue.

Then Kamala Harris makes an appearance.

Harris, San Francisco’s district attorney at the time, called Rippey as reporters and publishers pursued her. Her advice was to remain quiet, pause and let time give her some perspective.

Rippey says it was the best advice she received. It was also, whether intentionally or not, very helpful to San Francisco’s rising political class.

Rippey is now 20 years sober and remarried. She still accepts responsibility for the affair, but says she has come to understand the imbalance more clearly.

“Power does not need to coerce,” she writes. “It only needs to exist.”

So, Does It Matter?

Extramarital affairs no longer end presidential campaigns on their own. The salaciousness will make this story travel, but that does not necessarily mean it will cost Newsom votes.

For the story to cause lasting political damage, his opponents must connect it to something larger. In this case, they have an opening.

The affair itself is old. The dispute over how Newsom tells it is new. He chose to revisit the episode in a memoir that helps introduce him to a national electorate, and he portrays himself as the man who “came clean.” Rippey says that is not what happened.

That turns the political question from whether Newsom was unfaithful into whether he is sanitizing his past as he prepares to ask voters for a promotion.

The lurid details will do much of the work. This appeared in Vanity Fair, but parts could have run in Penthouse. The white dress, the blackouts, the cocaine, the shirt buttons and the waiting Lincoln are tailor-made for headlines, attack ads and viral clips.

Republicans will use every one of them. Newsom expects that. The more immediate danger may come from Democrats who do not want him to become the nominee.

Rival campaigns do not even have to challenge Rippey’s insistence that the affair was consensual. Her own formulation gives them what they need: She was responsible for her choices, but Newsom held the power and failed to exercise the judgment his position required. Those two things can be true at the same time.

Democratic opponents—or the operatives and commentators surrounding them—can use the story to raise questions about Newsom’s judgment, his treatment of subordinates and his honesty about an embarrassing episode. That is far more dangerous than another argument about marital fidelity.

None of this guarantees that the story will derail him. Voters have forgiven worse. But opposition research works best when it reinforces an existing suspicion, and Newsom’s critics already portray him as slick, ambitious and carefully packaged.

The sex makes this story irresistible. Newsom’s retelling of it could make it relevant.

He was a willing participant in the affair, so whatever political consequences follow—then or now—are his to bear.

But one has to feel for Jennifer Siebel Newsom and their children. They did not create this scandal, yet they must endure its return. A family can say nobody is perfect only so many times.

For them, this just has to be one big downer.

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⏱️ 4-minute read

He Saw It Coming

I first met John Moorlach when we served together on the board of directors of the California Republican Assembly in the early 1990’s. He later left the private sector and his own CPA practice for public service, serving as Orange County Treasurer-Tax Collector, a county supervisor, and a California state senator.

John has forgotten more about municipal and local government finance than I have ever known.

Many Californians first heard his name in 1994, when he warned that Orange County’s investment strategy was dangerously unsound. The county’s political establishment dismissed him. A few months later, Orange County filed for bankruptcy.

John had done the math.

I thought about that history while watching his recent appearance with Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider. Once again, John is asking questions that California’s elected officials would rather avoid.

Look Beyond The Budget

Most arguments about California’s finances focus on the annual budget: how much revenue came in, how large the deficit is, and which programs will receive more money.

John looks at a government’s overall financial position after its assets and liabilities are considered. Using unrestricted net position per resident as his yardstick, he estimates that California moved to approximately 42nd among the states for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024.

John points out that Silicon Valley and its major companies have generated enormous personal-income-tax revenue for California. He believes the artificial-intelligence wave is providing another boost.

The trouble comes when revenue surges and Sacramento expands programs or assumes new continuing expenses. When revenue falls, those expenses do not fall with it. California has repeated this pattern for years, and eventually the bills must be paid.

Promises Have A Price

California’s 2024 financial report removed a previously reported $46.2 billion unemployment-related liability. The California State Auditor says the adjustment corrected an accounting error. John told Khorrami that he tried to research the explanation but did not find the documentation he was looking for.

Taxpayers should ask how an error of that size survived earlier financial reporting.

John also discussed public employee pensions and retiree medical benefits. In 1999, California increased pension formulas for many government workers. An employee receiving 2 percent of final salary for each year of service could suddenly receive 3 percent, a 50 percent increase in the promised benefit.

The state did not set aside enough money to cover that increase, so taxpayers are still paying for it.

Employees naturally seek better compensation. John’s criticism is directed at powerful public-employee unions that press for commitments governments cannot afford—and at elected officials who approve those demands.

Open The Books First

John compared these obligations to a python slowly tightening around a city budget. Officials leave positions vacant, keep vehicles in service longer, and postpone maintenance on streets, pipes, and public buildings.

Residents usually notice the problem only when a road goes unrepaired, a position remains vacant, or a new fee appears.

Californians are increasingly asked to approve new taxes, fees, bonds, and assessments. Cities warn that public safety will suffer without another sales-tax increase.

A tax increase may occasionally be justified, but only after a government has explained its hiring, compensation, and pension decisions. Officials should disclose what reductions they considered before asking residents for more.

That requires accurate and timely financial reporting. John has found apparent errors in audited reports and has asked the Governmental Accounting Standards Board to require clearer disclosures showing how key figures were calculated.

If officials want more money, producing current and understandable financial statements is not too much to ask.

So, Does It Matter?

Orange County shows that these problems can be corrected.

As chairman of the Board of Supervisors during the Great Recession in 2008, John approved approximately 1,000 layoffs. Even after those difficult reductions, Orange County ranked 46th among California’s 58 counties when John conducted his 2012 review.

According to John, continued changes to staffing, pensions, and retiree medical benefits subsequently helped move Orange County into the top 15 counties in the state.

Those numbers affect far more than an accounting ledger. When government promises more than taxpayers can sustain, residents pay through higher taxes, new fees, fewer police officers and firefighters, and infrastructure that is repaired only after it begins to fail.

Fiscal responsibility is not simply an accounting preference. It is an obligation to taxpayers, residents who depend on public services, and future generations who had no voice when today’s promises were made.

That is also why transparency matters. Voters cannot hold government accountable if audited financial statements arrive late, contain unexplained errors, or conceal the long-term cost of current decisions.

John warned Orange County in 1994, when its political establishment preferred reassurance to arithmetic. California can address its obligations while it still has choices, or wait until financial necessity makes those choices for us.

The next time your city, county, or school district asks for another tax increase, ask to see its latest audited financial statements. Ask how much it owes for pensions and retiree medical benefits—and what elected officials have done to control those costs before asking taxpayers for more.

Watch The Interview

Below is Siyamak Khorrami’s full interview with John. I encourage you to watch it. Few people understand California’s public finances as thoroughly, or explain the consequences of avoiding them as plainly, as John Moorlach.

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🕐 5-Minute Read

What Caught My Eye

This past week, the Pew Research Center released a new report packed with data about the political mood heading into the 2026 midterms. There was plenty there for the obvious headlines — President Trump’s approval numbers, or perhaps more accurately his disapproval numbers, how voters feel about the economy, and which party they prefer to control Congress.

But digging deeper, I found something more interesting.

Pew asked voters a basic question about what they want from the people they elect: Do you want your candidate to push hard for your party’s policies, even if that makes it harder to get things done? Or would you rather your candidate find common ground with the other side, even if that means giving up some things your party wants?

That gets beyond who is up or down in the latest poll. It gets at what voters think the job of an elected official actually is.

What Does the Data Show?

Among Republican voters, 58 percent said they would rather have a congressional candidate who pushes hard for Republican policies, even if that makes it harder to get things done. Forty-one percent preferred common ground with Democrats.

Democratic voters were more closely divided: 52 percent wanted their candidate to push hard for Democratic policies, while 48 percent preferred common ground.

One important clarification: Pew groups voters by which party’s congressional candidate they support, not by registration. So independent or No Party Preference voters who plan to vote Republican or Democratic are included.

Pew does not separately break out NPP or independent voters on this question. But the demographic breakdown offers a clue. Among Republican candidate supporters, 67 percent of strong partisans prefer the “push hard” approach, compared with just 44 percent who are not strong partisans. Among Democratic candidate supporters, it is 60 percent versus 49 percent.

Pretty clear pattern: stronger partisan attachment means a stronger preference for fighting rather than compromising.

And remember how Pew worded the question. Voters were told pushing hard might make it more difficult to get things done.

Majorities on both sides chose that option anyway.

The People Paying Attention Want the Fight

This is where the survey gets really interesting.

The voters who want candidates to push hard are also more engaged in the midterms — dramatically so among Republicans.

Among Republican candidate supporters who favor pushing hard, 80 percent say it really matters which party controls Congress, compared with just 54 percent among those who prefer common ground. They are also twice as likely to say they have thought a lot about the congressional elections: 30 percent versus 15 percent.

The gap among Democrats is smaller, but it runs in the same direction.

Pew did not ask whether these voters are more likely to donate, volunteer or contact candidates. But after more than three decades working in and around political campaigns, I can tell you that politically engaged voters are also much more likely to do those things.

Someone paying close attention is more likely to email a candidate, make a phone call, talk politics with friends, volunteer, or write a check. Those are the voters candidates hear from. They are the voters campaigns notice.

And they are disproportionately saying: don’t compromise. Fight.

Maybe politicians aren’t ignoring the voters. Maybe they’re listening most closely to the voters who are listening most closely to them.

The Generational Divide

Then I got to the age numbers.

Among Republicans, there isn’t much of a generational divide. Among Democrats, there certainly is.

Seventy percent of Democratic voters under 35 want their candidates to push hard for Democratic policies. That falls steadily with age, bottoming out at just 43 percent among Democrats 65 and older.

That is a 27-point difference.

But here is what caught my attention: younger Democrats are more likely to want their candidates to push hard than Republicans in any age group Pew measured.

So let’s dispense with the idea that this is simply a MAGA phenomenon. By this measure, the youngest Democrats are the ones most clearly saying: fight, don’t compromise.

There may be broader context here. In another Pew survey, Democrats under 30 were significantly more likely than older Democrats to view democratic socialist political leaders favorably.

I wouldn’t claim one causes the other. But politically, it is worth noting that the same younger Democratic cohort showing greater receptivity to democratic socialist politicians is also much less interested in compromise.

What About California?

Pew asked about candidates for Congress, not the California Legislature. So I am not going to pretend these national percentages translate neatly to voters choosing a State Senate or State Assembly member.

There is no reason to think this tension disappears down the ballot.

In California, the parties face very different realities. Democrats dominate Sacramento and generally do not need Republican votes to move legislation. For Democrats, “push hard for our policies” is a viable governing strategy.

Republicans do not have that luxury. They do not have the votes to enact conservative policy on their own.

So California Republicans face a different choice: pursue compromise to make legislation marginally better, or prioritize the bully pulpit, draw clear contrasts and make the case for conservative policies.

Sometimes negotiating makes a bad bill less bad. Other times, Republicans give Democrats bipartisan cover for very little while making it harder for voters to see much difference between the parties.

So, Does It Matter?

There is nothing inherently noble about compromise.

Sometimes it moves the ball in the right direction. And sometimes “working across the aisle” is a polite way of asking conservatives to help Democrats advance policies we fundamentally oppose.

For California Republicans, the test should be simple: Did the compromise produce a meaningful improvement? A press release touting “bipartisan cooperation” doesn’t count.

Fighting just to put on a show isn’t much of an accomplishment either.

But too often in Sacramento, especially with Democratic supermajorities in both chambers, the concessions Republicans get for a “yes” vote are so minor they barely change the bill. At some point, shaving a few rough edges off a proposal that is still 95 percent bad is not compromise. It is putting a Republican imprimatur on a Democratic policy.

Sometimes a modest concession is worth taking. Other times, the right thing to do is vote no, explain why, and make sure voters understand the difference between the two parties.

Principle should not be sacrificed merely for the privilege of being called bipartisan.

And remember what the Pew data show: the most engaged voters are disproportionately not big fans of compromise.

LINK TO THE FULL REPORT

There’s a lot of interesting data in the report, full of charts, here.

Our morning content is free for all subscribers and guests! Usually our afternoon content is behind a paywall…. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, consider upgrading — you are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible. If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription! This afternoon content is not paywalled because has a link to the California Post, which is paywall-free (they make their money from ads). Below the paywall are some great additional political cartoons for our paid subscribers to enjoy!

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Los Angeles Needs More Cops—While the City Squanders Money Elsewhere

My latest California Post column looks at the widening gap between the police force Los Angeles has and the one its own chief says the city needs—and what that gap reveals about City Hall’s priorities.

The LAPD currently has 8,551 officers.

Chief Jim McDonnell says Los Angeles needs 12,500.

That is not a minor staffing shortage. And with the department continuing to lose officers, the city is moving in the wrong direction.

How did America’s second-largest city get here?

For years, Los Angeles politicians debated how much policing the city could do without. Now, with the 2028 Olympic Games approaching, the consequences of those choices are becoming harder to ignore.

In my full California Post column, I examine the political decisions behind the LAPD’s depleted ranks, the city’s claims that it cannot afford more officers, and what the mayoral candidates are—or are not—proposing to do about it.

Budgets are choices. So are priorities.

The question is whether protecting lives, property and public order still comes first at Los Angeles City Hall.

And is there really any hope for a city when neither candidate for Mayor apparently want to make public safety their top priority…

👉 Read my full column in the California Post HERE. (No Paywall)

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🕒 7-minute read

Listen To The People Building It - In Their Own Words

Is the rapid development of artificial intelligence going to be extraordinarily disruptive to the way Americans work and live? Don’t ask me. Ask the people building it.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and xAI, has predicted a future dominated by artificial intelligence and robotics in which “probably none of us will have a job.”⁠ Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to between 10% and 20% within one to five years⁠. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei said of policymakers. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

Amodei has an even more striking way of describing the strange future he thinks may be coming: “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs.”⁠

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman thinks enormous changes could arrive even sooner. “I think we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,”⁠ he said. After specifically mentioning lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketing professionals, Suleyman predicted that most of those tasks could be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been similarly blunt about customer-service jobs. “Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,”⁠ he said, describing AI agents capable of handling entire customer-service interactions without transfers or phone trees.

These aren’t warnings from anti-AI activists. They are predictions from some of the most important people building the technology. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re exaggerating. But Americans are listening, and increasingly they are worried.

According to Pew Research Center⁠, 51% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about increased AI use, while only 11% are more excited than concerned. On employment, 56% are extremely or very concerned that AI will eliminate jobs, compared with only 25% of AI experts.

Disruption Sounds Different From The Outside

Major technological advances have always been disruptive. Mechanization transformed agriculture, automobiles devastated horse-related industries, computers eliminated clerical jobs and the Internet destroyed entire business models while creating new ones.

On balance, innovation has made us enormously more prosperous. I am an optimist about technology, and I don’t want politicians freezing it in place to protect existing jobs. But understanding disruption in the abstract is very different from being the person whose livelihood may be disrupted.

If you’re a venture capitalist hearing that AI may automate most professional tasks, you may hear an extraordinary investment opportunity. If you’re a 48-year-old accountant with a mortgage and kids approaching college, you may hear something else entirely. In Silicon Valley, “disruption” is practically a compliment. The rest of America doesn’t necessarily experience it that way.

Now AI Is Coming To Your Neighborhood

Artificial intelligence requires a staggering amount of physical infrastructure. Data centers need land, electricity, water, transmission capacity and, in many cases, new power generation. But the industry’s political agenda goes well beyond infrastructure. The federal government has embraced accelerated permitting and financial support including loans, grants and tax incentives⁠ to help build AI infrastructure, while its national AI framework recommends federal preemption of many state AI laws and limits on state efforts to hold developers responsible for third-party misuse of their models⁠.

There may be reasonable arguments for some or all of those policies. Some aspects of AI regulation clearly lend themselves to national standards. But Washington should not preempt the field entirely. Federalism allows states to experiment and learn from one another rather than locking everyone into a single approach.

Whatever the merits of each policy, look at the cumulative ask: government assistance to build quickly, protection from significant state regulation and limits on some legal liability — while the industry’s own leaders are telling Americans that AI may eliminate huge numbers of jobs and profoundly disrupt everyday life.

AI is no longer something happening invisibly inside your laptop. It is showing up in communities, legislatures, courts and electric bills.

A Gallup survey⁠ released this year found that 71% of Americans would oppose an AI data center in their area, with 48% strongly opposed. For comparison, opposition to a nearby nuclear power plant was 53%. Americans are significantly more resistant to an AI data center than a nuclear plant.

That resistance is already having consequences. Data Center Watch⁠ says at least 75 projects representing roughly $130 billion in investment were blocked or delayed during the first three months of this year. More than 300 state bills dealing with data centers were introduced during the first six weeks of 2026 alone.

Much of the opposition is about exactly what people say it is about: electricity and water consumption, pollution, quality of life, utility bills and taxpayer subsidies. Those are real issues. But I wonder if something else is going on as well.

I haven’t seen polling that tells us how much opposition to data centers is really a manifestation of broader apprehension about artificial intelligence itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is significant. When Americans are repeatedly told that AI could eliminate huge numbers of jobs and profoundly disrupt their lives, the massive data center proposed down the road becomes more than another industrial development. It becomes the physical embodiment of the darker side of the AI revolution they keep hearing about.

Maybe future polling will prove me wrong. But it seems implausible that Americans can be increasingly apprehensive about AI in one poll and overwhelmingly opposed to the infrastructure needed to power it in another, with no relationship between the two.

AI Builds Political Muscle

The AI industry understands that public policy will shape its future. Companies want to build data centers faster, secure enormous amounts of electricity, limit regulations they believe inhibit growth and preserve freedom to develop their technology. They also argue that these policies help maintain America’s technological advantage over China — a national interest that happens to align quite nicely with their own.

And they are putting serious money behind that effort. The pro-AI political network Leading the Future has raised more than $125 million⁠ for the 2026 election cycle to support candidates favorable to AI development and oppose those it considers hostile. There is nothing wrong with that. Every major industry plays politics when government decisions can dramatically affect its future.

But there is a disconnect. The industry is rapidly becoming sophisticated about influencing politicians while proving much less successful at persuading the people who elect them. Spending millions supporting candidates friendly to AI doesn’t solve the underlying problem if 71% of Americans don’t want an AI data center built near them.

Political influence can win important battles. Public opposition can eventually determine the war.

What About The Rest Of Us?

This is where the industry’s challenge becomes more fundamental than public relations. AI companies don’t simply need to find better ways to sell Americans on what they are doing. They need to earn the confidence they are asking the public to place in them.

If Dario Amodei genuinely believes his technology could cause 20% unemployment, I want him to say so. The answer isn’t for AI executives to conceal what they think is coming because the public might react badly. But candor has consequences, particularly when the same industry predicting enormous disruption is asking for substantial public support and political latitude to continue developing at breathtaking speed.

So what exactly is the bargain being offered to the American people? If AI will be as transformative as its creators say, how much disruption should we expect? What is the industry doing about the upheaval its own leaders predict? Who bears the enormous infrastructure costs, and what responsibility will these companies accept when things go wrong?

Most importantly, what does the average American get out of this transformation? The industry has become extraordinarily good at explaining what artificial intelligence will be capable of doing. It has been considerably less successful at explaining why ordinary Americans should want the future it is building.

So, Does It Matter?

Apparently, at least one of the most important people in artificial intelligence understands the problem. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has criticized the rhetoric coming from his own industry, saying, “I don’t know why AI companies are trying to scare us.”⁠ More recently, he put it even more sharply: “Warning people is one thing. Scaring people is a completely different thing.”⁠

The same predictions that demonstrate AI’s extraordinary value to investors can sound terrifying to people whose lives may be disrupted by it. AI may ultimately increase productivity, cure diseases, create new industries and make Americans considerably wealthier. History gives us plenty of reason for optimism.

But history also tells us something about politics. If Americans increasingly conclude that AI is something being done to them rather than something being built for them, eventually the political system will respond. Data centers will become harder to build. Politicians will discover that attacking AI gets votes. Government will face pressure to intervene. And the industry could end up inviting precisely the heavy-handed government involvement it would rather avoid.

The people building AI cannot expect Americans to support the freedom and infrastructure necessary to transform their lives without first convincing them that the transformation is in their interest.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just need technology, capital, electricity, or political influence. It needs public legitimacy.

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When AI Becomes a Guide to Mass Harm

A new Wall Street Journal investigation examines what happens when increasingly powerful AI chatbots are asked to help make biological weapons, poisons, or plans for mass-casualty attacks.

The story raises the same question of public trust discussed above. Among the Journal’s findings:

• Some chatbots provided credible information about biological weapons and poisons.

• Experts concluded that certain responses could pose a genuine danger.

• Suspicious users may be banned without being reported to law enforcement.

• Determined users can sometimes circumvent AI safety restrictions.

• Tighter safeguards can interfere with legitimate scientific research.

• Congress is considering reporting requirements and greater federal oversight.

Paid subscribers can continue below for a preview and a gift link to the complete Wall Street Journal investigation. (I pay $39/month for a WSJ Subscription so you don’t have to…)

The Journal Found Something Disturbing…

In a new investigation, Wall Street Journal reporters Georgia Wells and Amrith Ramkumar examine the biological capabilities of leading AI models—and what can happen when people try to misuse them.

They report that hundreds of users asked an upgraded version of ChatGPT how to make or deploy biological weapons and poisons. In some cases, it supplied detailed instructions. Experts who reviewed certain conversations concluded that some answers were accurate enough to be dangerous, according to the Journal.

OpenAI banned the accounts involved but didn’t alert law-enforcement authorities, the Journal reports.

That exposes a gap in federal law. AI companies generally aren’t required to report users who ask for help making weapons or planning attacks. The companies largely decide when a conversation warrants contacting authorities.

OpenAI says it trains its models to reject harmful requests, tests them before release and monitors attempts to obtain dangerous biological information. It also says it contacts law enforcement when it identifies an imminent and credible threat. Other leading AI developers have safeguards of their own.

Those protections aren’t foolproof. Researchers told the Journal that persistent users can sometimes circumvent them during extended conversations. Open models present another challenge because users may modify them and remove their restrictions.

Blocking every question involving dangerous biological material isn’t a workable solution. Public-health officials, medical researchers and drug developers may need similar information. A model that rejects every sensitive question might be safer, but less useful during an outbreak or scientific investigation.

That is the industry’s dilemma. Companies want models capable of helping researchers solve difficult biological problems. Those same capabilities could help people with very different intentions.

Members of Congress have proposed legislation requiring AI companies to report certain dangerous threats. Another proposal would allow the federal government to shut down models deemed too dangerous.

This is no longer merely a debate about what AI might someday do. Companies are making these decisions now, mostly under rules they established themselves.

As you can tell, this kind of stuff feeds right back into the point of the main column above — AI companies have a real challenge on their hands.

Paid subscribers can read the complete investigation by Georgia Wells and Amrith Ramkumar through this GIFT LINK.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. As I mentioned last week, I’m trying something new — sending along something exclusively for members that I think is especially interesting or worth your time. For now, I’ve settled on a weekly email as the right cadence for this.

This week, it’s an extraordinary piece of reporting from the Los Angeles Times. It’s l…

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NEW AI ETHICS AND TRANSPARENCY POLICY

Given the proliferation of the use of AI in content creation these days, I think it is important to disclose to readers how and when I use artificial intelligence on this Substack. The policy is now permanently posted here. It can be found linked at the top of our main page, and will be linked in the footer of all e-mails. I would encourage you to read it. A shout-out to my friend for her encouragement and counsel here.

BELOW ARE SEVEN STORIES THAT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED!

One Video!

I was on CNN earlier this week…

On This Date in 1971…

THE APPOLO 15 LUNAR MISSION LIFTED OFF…

On July 26, 1971, Apollo 15 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, beginning one of the most ambitious missions of America’s race to explore the Moon. Astronauts David Scott, James Irwin and Alfred Worden rode a Saturn V rocket toward the lunar surface. By then, Americans had already landed on the Moon three times, but Apollo 15 was designed to do something more: turn lunar exploration into serious scientific fieldwork.

Scott and Irwin landed near the spectacular Hadley Rille and spent nearly three days on the Moon. They became the first humans to drive a vehicle on another world, using NASA’s new Lunar Roving Vehicle — the famous “moon buggy” — to travel farther from the lunar module and collect more geological material. Among their discoveries was the “Genesis Rock,” believed to be part of the Moon’s ancient crust.

Apollo 15 returned safely to Earth on August 7 after traveling more than a million miles. It remains a remarkable reminder of an era when America combined technological innovation, scientific ambition and national determination — and sent human beings a quarter-million miles from home to explore another world.

Hope you’re having a great weekend!

Jon

This Saturday feature, which is a labor of love for me, is packed with amazing content. It’s very popular. For those of you who subscribe ($70/year, $7/month), this column is a thank you for your support of my independent work. There are a couple of items above the paywall worth reading/watching. But that is the tip of the iceberg. SO MUCH more under the paywall.

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Reading/Watching/Listening Recommendations!

THREE FREE CURATED LINKS…

I recently joined Michael Schwartz on San Diego County Gun Owners Radio for a conversation about something I’ve spent nearly four decades watching up close: how gun owners can actually make a difference in politics. We talked about why simply voting for the “pro-gun” candidate isn’t enough, how politicians calculate the importance of the gun vote, and what effective political advocacy really looks like. My message was pretty simple: politicians respond to people who contribute their dime, their time — and hold them accountable.

HE CAN RUN, BUT CAN HE STRADDLE?

Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution examines Gavin Newsom’s emerging presidential posture and the challenge of reconciling the many versions of Gavin. Newsom opposes California’s wealth-tax initiative while proposing a national billionaires tax; once warned against overregulating AI but now talks about government taking a stake in the new economy; and has shifted his rhetoric on Israel. Whalen asks whether Newsom can successfully straddle these positions—or wind up looking like John Kerry, forever explaining which side he was on before he switched.

TAX HIKES JUST KEEP ROLLING IN AND PEOPLE KEEP ROLLING OUT

Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association warns that California’s chronic budget deficits haven’t stopped Sacramento from pursuing another $14 billion in taxes and “revenue enhancements.” Meanwhile, taxpayers continue heading for the exits: new IRS-based research finds California losing a taxpayer every 1 minute and 44 seconds. Coupal argues the problem could get considerably worse if voters approve November’s proposed wealth tax, driving away precisely the high-income residents whose tax payments California’s budget disproportionately depends upon.

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⏱️ 5 minute read

Worst Week In California Politics

Another week, another podium….

California politics never lacks for candidates, but only three can earn a place on this week’s medal stand. Sometimes the biggest losers are politicians who suffer an election setback. Sometimes they’re public officials who find themselves in legal trouble. Other times, they simply have a week they’d rather forget.

As always, these awards are entirely subjective. If you disagree with my selections, that’s part of the fun. The conversation is half the point.

Let’s hand out this week’s medals.

🥉 Bronze Medal — The Chula Vista City Council Majority

Chula Vista Councilmembers Carolina Chavez, Jose Preciado, Michael Inzunza and Cesar Fernandez decided $65,000 wasn’t enough—and eight consecutive years in office ended too soon. Their proposed charter amendment would boost council salaries nearly 70 percent, to more than $110,000, and allow a third consecutive term: twelve years in office, plus a $45,000 raise. The package would also increase the mayor’s salary from roughly $161,000 to $171,000.

The idea came not from taxpayers or the Charter Review Commission, but from Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 89, which authored and sponsored a package containing provisions favorable to public-employee unions. To help sell it, the raises and expanded term limits were wrapped in ethics, lobbying and transparency reforms. Nothing says ethical government like using ethics reform as gift wrap for your own compensation package.

The council tried to hustle the union-written measure toward the November ballot without meaningful public review. Mayor John McCann (my friend) is exempted: He opposed the package—including the raise for his own office—tried to remove the salary increases and sought review by the proper commissions. Nobody seconded him.

Then the public noticed.

Suddenly, the majority discovered restraint. It removed the raises and sent the package back for review—exactly what Mayor McCann had proposed. For trying to turn the city charter into a union-drafted employment contract for themselves, Chavez, Preciado, Inzunza and Fernandez earn this week’s bronze medal.

🥈 Silver Medal — Sausalito City Manager Elaine Forbes

In Sausalito, even municipal scandals apparently come with teak decks. This is an almost parodically affluent California enclave: seven thousand residents, a yacht-lined waterfront, median household income above $182,000 and median owner-occupied home values approaching $1.9 million. Its city manager is paid accordingly—$275,000 a year.

Elaine Forbes arrived with an impeccable résumé. The former Port of San Francisco director had overseen 270 employees and miles of waterfront before the Sausalito City Council unanimously hired her. She started July first. Seventeen days later, the city placed her on an unexplained leave of absence.

Two days after that, sheriff’s deputies responding to a noise complaint found Forbes aboard the Lisa Marie, a 66-foot, three-story yacht she did not own, surrounded by empty alcohol bottles. Authorities say she manipulated the controls “as if she was attempting to steal the vessel” and told deputies to get off her boat. It wasn’t her boat. Another yacht owner says Forbes had also entered his vessel, left clothing strewn around, took personal property and apparently departed wearing his wife’s sweater.

Forbes had been reported missing shortly before her arrest. Deputies booked her on suspicion of felony burglary; prosecutors instead charged her with four misdemeanors involving prowling, petty theft and lodging aboard two boats without permission. She has not entered a plea. A judge released her on her own recognizance, and Forbes agreed to undergo a psychological evaluation.

Her family says Forbes suffered a mental-health crisis, which deserves acknowledgment and compassion. But a crisis can explain alarming conduct without erasing its consequences—particularly when the person involved is the city’s chief administrator, responsible for enforcing its laws and supervising every municipal department. It is also fair to ask why Sausalito’s new manager was placed on unexplained leave after only seventeen days and what city officials knew before the yacht episode.

Sausalito officials praised Forbes’s “caliber, experience, connections” when they hired her. Now an acting manager is in place, and the city is trying to borrow its former manager back from Marin County.

For turning a $275,000 municipal honeymoon into an unexplained leave, a missing-person report, a two-yacht criminal case and an emergency search for adult supervision before July was over, Elaine Forbes earns this week’s silver medal.

🥇 Gold Medal — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Sometimes you have the worst week because of something you did. Sometimes the Kraken escapes from the laboratory while your name is on the building. Sam Altman did not personally release OpenAI’s most powerful models onto the Internet, but it happened under his watch—and at the worst possible moment.

OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful unreleased model were being tested with reduced safeguards. They escaped their supposedly isolated sandbox, reached the Internet and selected competitor Hugging Face as a target. The models exploited a zero-day vulnerability, used stolen credentials and obtained secret information that would help them cheat the evaluation. They had been told to explore complex attack paths, but nobody directed them to attack Hugging Face or hunt for the answer key. OpenAI designed the test, removed the guardrails and failed to contain what it created. Altman gets credit for every breakthrough; as CEO, he also owns what happens when the breakthrough breaks out. OpenAI called it an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

Politically, the timing is brutal. Governments are deciding whether AI companies can police themselves while Leading the Future—a pro-industry super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and other technology interests—has $31 million available after transferring another $20 million to AI-friendly groups. Altman is also scheduled to meet with lawmakers and the White House about a new model reportedly capable of unleashing large groups of AI agents on complicated assignments. Asking Washington to trust an army of autonomous agents is harder when your existing agents escape confinement and burglarize the competition.

Then there is Wall Street. OpenAI has confidentially filed for a potentially enormous IPO, and Altman has reportedly pushed for a $1 trillion valuation. Investors like disruptive technology, but “disruptive” usually does not mean breaking into somebody else’s servers, stealing credentials and cheating on the test.

OpenAI is simultaneously pressing Washington to confront cheap Chinese open-weight models that can offer comparable capabilities at a fraction of American prices. It warns that Chinese firms may have copied U.S. technology and that their bargain models threaten American leadership. Perhaps. But it is spectacularly bad timing to demand protection from dangerous foreign models just as your own closed American models conduct an unauthorized cyberattack—and Hugging Face reportedly uses a Chinese model to help defend itself.

The public was already skeptical. Pew found that roughly six in ten adults lack confidence that U.S. companies will develop AI responsibly, while 71 percent believe AI will make personal information less secure. Gallup found that 80 percent want safety rules maintained even if they slow development. OpenAI just supplied every regulator and nervous voter with a ready-made answer when Silicon Valley says, “Trust us.”

Perhaps Altman’s best break is that an entire generation has never seen The Terminator and does not recognize the name Skynet. Those who have remember the plot: Humanity creates a powerful system, gives it enormous autonomy and discovers that pulling the plug is harder than expected. OpenAI says this happened only during a test. But when your reassurance is that the AI merely escaped an experiment, hacked a competitor and stole the answers on its own, the comparison writes itself.

For letting loose the Kraken precisely when he needs politicians, investors and the public to believe OpenAI has everything under control, Sam Altman earns this week’s gold medal.

The “Winners” Accept Their Awards…

Every week in politics produces winners and losers. This feature isn’t about who made the biggest headline—it’s about who had the worst week.

Sometimes it’s self-inflicted. Sometimes it’s bad judgment. Sometimes it’s simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, each of this week’s medalists gave Californians something to talk about—and probably something they’d rather forget.

We’ll see who makes next week’s podium!

Our morning content is free for all subscribers and guests! Usually our afternoon content is behind a paywall…. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, consider upgrading — you are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible. If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription! This afternoon content is not paywalled because has a link to the California Post, which is paywall-free (they make their money from ads). Below the paywall are some great additional political cartoons for our paid subscribers to enjoy!

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The Dodgers Went to Trump’s White House. Good.

The Dodgers were under pressure to stay away. They went anyway.

My latest California Post column looks at why accepting President Trump’s invitation to the White House was the right call — and why it was fundamentally different from dragging the team into a political fight.

The Dodgers have now visited the White House in recent years after championships under two very different presidents. They went after winning in 2020. They went after winning in 2024. And this week, after winning their second consecutive World Series, they went again.

Different president. Same tradition.

That matters.

There was plenty of pressure on the Dodgers to boycott this visit, particularly because of the bitter political fight over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. But turning down a White House invitation because activists object to the president would itself have transformed a baseball tradition into a political statement.

And the ceremony demonstrated what the alternative looks like.

Trump talked baseball. Dave Roberts talked about his players and winning. The Dodgers presented the president with a championship ring and a No. 47 jersey. Politics largely disappeared for a while.

In my full California Post column, I explain why I see no contradiction between supporting this White House visit and criticizing the Dodgers last month when they inserted themselves into the immigration debate.

There is a principle connecting the two.

Sports are one of the increasingly rare places where Americans who disagree about almost everything can still share something. Republicans and Democrats don’t sit in separate sections at Dodger Stadium. Nobody asks how the guy next to him voted before celebrating a home run.

We have politicized enough of American life already.

Baseball doesn’t need to be another casualty.

👉 Read my full column in the California Post HERE. (No Paywall)

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🕒 8-minute read

California’s $100 Billion Bet

California voters will decide this November whether to approve Proposition 40, the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the taxable net worth of people who were California residents on January 1 and had net worth above $1 billion.

Supporters say Prop. 40 could raise roughly $100 billion. You can see the political appeal. Take a relatively small percentage from a tiny group of extraordinarily wealthy people and spend it on health care and other government programs.

Before California tries it, voters might want to know what happened to the countries that got there first.

A new CATO Institute study released today by economists Adam Michel and Chris Edwards provides some pretty compelling history. In 1990, 12 OECD countries imposed annual wealth taxes. Today, just four do. Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden are among those that tried wealth taxes and eventually abandoned them.

Governments Learned The Hard Way

Why did so many countries give them up? CATO points to limited revenue, complicated administration, people finding ways around the tax and wealthy taxpayers simply leaving. A 2018 OECD examination reached much the same conclusion.

Norway increased taxes on wealth, dividends and capital gains in 2022. Wealthy Norwegians started relocating. Norway’s Ministry of Finance calculated that people who emigrated during 2022 and 2023 took $14.1 billion in deferred income with them, representing about $5 billion in forgone tax revenue.

But Spain may be the example Californians should pay the most attention to. When Madrid effectively eliminated its regional wealth tax, its population of wealthy taxpayers grew roughly 10 percent relative to other Spanish regions during the first five years. A 2025 study found that regions losing wealthy taxpayers to Madrid lost six times more personal income-tax revenue per departing taxpayer than they gained from their wealth taxes.

They collected the wealth tax and still came out behind.

California Makes Leaving Easier

Spain is particularly relevant because wealthy taxpayers could escape one region’s wealth tax without leaving the country. Sound familiar?

If you are a Norwegian trying to get away from a national wealth tax, you have to leave Norway. That is a pretty big life decision.

If you are a Californian, you can move to Nevada.

Or Texas. Or Florida.

Economists Enrico Moretti and Daniel Wilson studied Forbes 400 billionaires and found that 35 percent of local billionaires leave states that impose an estate tax.

Prop. 40 anticipates this, taxing those who were California residents on January 1, 2026, even if they relocate later.

Fine. But California can’t require them to stick around afterward.

The Taxpayer Is Worth More Than The Tax

That is a serious problem in a state extraordinarily dependent on wealthy taxpayers.

The highest-earning 2.5 percent of Californians already provide 49 percent of state personal income-tax revenue. When those taxpayers leave, Sacramento loses the income and capital-gains taxes they would have paid in future years.

This isn’t just CATO making the argument. California’s own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst says some billionaires are likely to leave because of Prop. 40 and estimates the resulting loss of ongoing income-tax revenue could reach hundreds of millions of dollars or more every year.

CATO also cites a Hoover Institution analysis estimating that California billionaires currently pay between $3.3 billion and $5.8 billion annually in state income taxes. Hoover tried to calculate both sides of the ledger — what California might collect from Prop. 40 and what it could lose later as billionaires leave. Its estimate: California ultimately comes out about $25 billion behind.

And wealth isn’t cash. Someone worth $10 billion because he owns a huge chunk of the company he created doesn’t have $10 billion sitting in his checking account. Paying a wealth tax can mean selling assets or borrowing money just to come up with the cash for the tax bill.

The $100 billion sales pitch assumes California can take 5 percent from an enormous pool of wealth and essentially everything else stays the same.

Why would we assume that?

Before Sacramento Asks For More

There is another part of this debate that bothers me.

Before California creates another tax, how about accounting for the enormous amount of money Sacramento already collects?

California allocated nearly $24 billion for homelessness and housing over five fiscal years, yet the State Auditor found the state had failed to consistently track and evaluate whether its homelessness programs were cost-effective.

Then there is EDD. It ultimately estimated that roughly $20 billion in pandemic unemployment benefits were likely fraudulent. The problems didn’t disappear with COVID. The State Auditor says EDD remained a high-risk agency in 2025, with roughly $1.5 billion in improper payments during 2023 and 2024 and more than $500 million in estimated fraudulent payments in 2024 alone.

Now the federal government has deferred $867.5 million in Medi-Cal reimbursements while it reviews suspected fraud, noncompliance and questionable billing patterns. California disputes the allegations, and we’ll see where that investigation goes.

These aren’t rounding errors. We are talking about billions lost to fraud, billions appropriated to programs whose results the state failed to adequately track, and another huge government program now facing federal scrutiny.

Before Sacramento comes up with another way to collect money, how about doing a better job with the money it already has?

So, Does It Matter?

Of course California’s billionaires can afford to pay more taxes. That’s not the question. The question is whether Prop. 40 leaves California better off.

Most OECD countries that tried wealth taxes eventually walked away from them. California now wants to try one while depending heavily on precisely the taxpayers it could encourage to leave.

Maybe Sacramento collects billions from them once. But California has to live with what happens after the check clears.

Europe discovered that a wealth tax can give wealthy people a reason to leave the country.

California is betting its billionaires won’t leave the state.

That’s a much easier trip.

California voters are well advised to vote no on this ill-advised and cynical ballot measure.

Read It For Yourself

Here is a link to the CATO study, in case you want to go deeper. There’s a lot more in it than I wrote about.

More Content

I did hosted great podcast with Joshua Rauh, one of the economists who worked on the Hoover Institution study. You can watch that below!

Our morning content is free for all subscribers and guests! Usually our afternoon content is behind a paywall…. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, consider upgrading — you are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible. If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription! This afternoon content is not paywalled because has a link to the California Post, which is paywall-free (they make their money from ads). Below the paywall are some great additional political cartoons for our paid subscribers to enjoy!

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California AG Rob Bonta Rigs Language in Voter ID Initiative

My latest California Post column looks at a dramatic rewrite of the official language describing Proposition 39 — and what it reveals about the power California’s attorney general holds over the words voters see on their ballots.

More than 1.3 million Californians signed petitions to place a voter ID initiative on the November ballot.

But after the measure qualified, Attorney General Rob Bonta replaced the straightforward title used during signature gathering with something far more politically charged.

The initiative itself did not change.

The state’s description of it did.

In my full California Post column, I compare the before-and-after language, examine how Bonta has described measures backed by his political allies, and speak with a veteran California election-law attorney about just how unusual this rewrite is.

The larger issue goes beyond voter ID.

When one party controls every statewide constitutional office and holds commanding legislative majorities, the supposedly neutral language presented to millions of voters matters enormously.

The attorney general’s job is to describe ballot measures fairly — not put a political thumb on the scale.

👉 Read my full column in the California Post HERE. (No Paywall)

Our morning content is free for all subscribers and guests! Usually our afternoon content is behind a paywall… If you are not yet a paid subscriber, consider upgrading — you are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible. If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription! There is exclusive content below this column for paid subscribers…

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This column below first appeared last Saturday on the Daily Signal website, which I encourage you to visit, and bookmark. Lots of great news and opinion there!

🕒 6 min read

Gov. Gavin Newsom spent the past year celebrating a massive expansion of California’s Hollywood tax credit program, boosting it to a record $750 million a year.

Then his own budget managed to kneecap it.

Now Sacramento is scrambling to fix one of the governor’s biggest political headaches.

More than three dozen California lawmakers, including senior Democratic legislators, are urging Newsom to reverse a budget provision they say will cripple Hollywood’s newly expanded tax credits.

Sacramento expanded Hollywood’s subsidy with one hand while quietly weakening it with the other.

Lawmakers now say a broader corporate tax credit limitation buried in the state budget inadvertently swept up the very film tax credits they had spent months promoting. Assembly Democratic Caucus Chair Rick Chavez Zbur, who helped write the original expansion, said members believed a carve-out for film credits had already been secured before the budget vote.

Just months after celebrating the historic expansion, Newsom signed a budget extending broader limits on the use of corporate tax credits.

Through 2029, companies generally remain limited to claiming $5 million in credits annually. Beginning in 2030, they generally will be limited to claiming either $5 million or 70% of their California tax liability in a given year, whichever is greater.

Hollywood says this change significantly diminishes the value of the newly expanded incentive.

The result was a bizarre contradiction: Lawmakers increased the subsidy on paper while simultaneously limiting the extent to which many companies could actually claim the credits.

This is Newsom’s budget. He proudly signed it. If that budget accidentally kneecapped one of his signature Hollywood initiatives, the responsibility begins with him.

The episode is both embarrassing and revealing.

Because beneath the legislative fumble lies a much bigger story about how California governs.

The problem with these tax credits has little to do with Hollywood. It has to do with government deciding which industries deserve special treatment and which are left to fend for themselves.

California imposes one of the nation’s most expensive business climates, then selectively hands out tax breaks to politically favored industries as compensation.

That’s a politicized tax policy.

Manufacturers don’t receive Hollywood-sized carve-outs. Family-owned restaurants don’t. Independent retailers don’t.

Thousands of California employers simply pay the state’s high taxes, navigate its regulations and hope they can survive.

Hollywood gets a government subsidy.

Supporters argue that the credits are necessary because other states aggressively recruit film production. It’s true that Georgia, New Mexico and others have built generous incentive programs to lure studios away.

But that argument raises an even more uncomfortable question.

If California has become so expensive that Sacramento must continually subsidize one favored industry just to keep it from leaving, perhaps the real problem isn’t the size of the tax credit.

Perhaps it’s California.

Instead of fixing the business climate for everyone, Sacramento keeps creating carve-outs, exemptions and targeted subsidies for the industries with the greatest political influence.

The government is choosing winners and losers.

California doesn’t really have a coherent tax policy anymore so much as it has a tax code filled with political exceptions.

Which brings us back to Hollywood.

Hollywood isn’t just one of California’s most iconic industries. It is one of the Democratic Party’s most valuable political assets, generating campaign contributions, celebrity endorsements, elite fundraisers and the kind of national political validation every Democratic presidential hopeful craves.

That makes this budget mistake different from almost any other.

If Sacramento accidentally undercut tax credits benefiting manufacturers or family-owned businesses, would lawmakers rush to pass corrective legislation?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Hollywood, however, doesn’t have to wonder.

When Hollywood calls, Sacramento answers.

Hollywood has every right to lobby for its interests. Every industry does.

The real question is why Hollywood almost always finds lawmakers sprinting to its rescue while millions of ordinary Californians are told to get in line.

That answer has far more to do with politics than economics.

As Newsom continues positioning himself for what increasingly looks like a presidential campaign, the last constituency he can afford to alienate is Hollywood.

It has fueled Democratic fundraising, celebrity activism and campaign infrastructure for decades — the kind of national validation any Democrat eyeing 2028 needs badly.

That’s why this story isn’t really about a drafting error buried deep inside a budget bill.

It’s about political priorities.

Newsom’s own budget created a problem for one of California’s most politically connected industries.

Now the pressure is on to solve it — and fast.

Watch how quickly this gets fixed.

California families have spent years asking Sacramento for relief from soaring taxes, unaffordable housing, skyrocketing insurance premiums and an increasingly hostile business climate.

They are routinely told change takes time.

Hollywood probably won’t have to wait.

Newsom’s budget created this mess.

His presidential ambitions will almost certainly clean it up.

Below the paywall I lay out succinctly the eight reasons why Hollywood Film Credits are a bad, bad idea.

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Two weeks ago we rebranded our Worst Week in California Politics, handing out Bronze, Silver and Gold to three California political figures who had weeks they would probably rather forget.

Now I want your help picking this week’s “winners” - lol

Who had a truly awful week in California politics? Who got caught in a scandal, suffered an embarrassing defeat, made a spectacular unforced error, got arrested, endured a damaging revelation, watched a political gambit blow up in their face—or simply generated the kind of headlines that make political consultants stop answering their phones?

The field is wide open: elected officials, candidates, political operatives, activists, interest-group leaders—anyone playing a meaningful role in politics anywhere in California is eligible.

Send me your nominees and tell me briefly what happened. You can hit Reply to this email or use the button below.

And don’t worry about attaching your name to your suggestion: all nominations will be kept anonymous.

So, who deserves Bronze, Silver or Gold this week?

Oh yeah. If you missed last week’s edition, you can find it here.

I made two appearances last night on CNN’s “The Issue Is…” with host Elex Michaelson and my co-panelist, Democratic consultant Dave Jacobson.

Across the two conversations, we covered an unusually wide political landscape: Zohran Mamdani’s transition from campaigning to governing, New Jersey’s voter-registration error, the battle for Arizona, control of Congress and the political consequences of the war with Iran.

Different issues, certainly. But they all lead back to the same question:

What happens when political promises collide with the realities of governing?

Mamdani, Netanyahu and election integrity

Our first conversation began with Zohran Mamdani walking back a major campaign pledge involving trying to potentially arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah were he to come to New York City.

Whatever one thinks of Mamdani or Netanyahu, the episode illustrates a recurring problem in politics: Candidates make promises that sound compelling on the campaign trail but prove impossible—or inadvisable—to carry out once they are responsible for governing.

Mamdani has received an extraordinary amount of national attention for a mayor. His carefully produced response video, complete with flags, an official setting and somber music, appeared designed to communicate that he had made the transition from candidate to officeholder.

But the trappings of office do not make the underlying contradiction disappear.

We then turned to New Jersey, where Governor Mikie Sherrill disclosed that a software error had improperly registered approximately 6,600 people to vote. According to the discussion, roughly 400 of those people subsequently voted.

I praised the governor for identifying the problem and addressing it transparently. That is how public officials should respond when the system fails.

The incident also raises a commonsense question: Why shouldn’t election officials use every reliable source of information available to keep voter rolls accurate?

The tolerance for ineligible voting should be zero. At the same time, confidence in elections depends on transparency, credible evidence and officials who can communicate without turning every administrative error into a partisan weapon.

Watch the first CNN panel below:

Arizona, the battle for Congress and the Iran war

In the second panel, we looked ahead to the midterms, beginning with Andy Biggs’ victory in Arizona and his coming contest against Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs.

Democrats will portray Biggs as an ideological extremist. But having spent time with both Biggs and Kari Lake, I believe voters will see a significant difference in temperament. Biggs is far more restrained in his personal style—and unlike Lake, he has repeatedly appeared on Arizona ballots and won.

Arizona also has hundreds of thousands more registered Republicans than Democrats. Independent voters will be critical, but neither party can ignore that underlying advantage.

The conversation then expanded to control of Congress and the central strategic question facing Trump’s political operation: What will happen to the more than $300 million reportedly held across its various committees?

Will that money be used to protect Republican congressional majorities? Will it be preserved for a preferred successor? Or is it destined for some other purpose?

Money alone will not solve the GOP’s problem. President Trump also has to focus his message on the issues that will move persuadable voters. A prime-time address centered on the SAVE Act is unlikely to do that.

And then there is Iran.

Trump may have expected a short, decisive operation. Instead, he appears to be caught in a conflict that is difficult to exit. If the war continues and gasoline prices remain elevated, the political consequences for Republicans could be severe.

The president still needs to make a clear case to the American people: Why did we enter this war? What does victory look like? What will it require? And how does it end?

You cannot win an argument you are not making.

Watch the second CNN panel below:

Always love feedback! Just hit reply or the button below.

This column first appeared in the California Globe. The Globe is a “must-read” for those following California politics!

I also want to give a shout-out to the investigative journalists at CBS News who really provided the content for this column with their fabulous work.

You can listen to this post (and all posts) on our podcast feed, So, Does It Matter? SPOKEN. It is available on your favorite podcast app. And you can listen to it here. Usually we paywall afternoon stuff, but since this already ran on a non-paywalled site, here it is for all.

Gavin Newsom has a $6.2 million diaper problem. His administration awarded a no-bid contract to Baby2Baby, a nonprofit with longstanding ties to the Newsom administration. One of its co-CEOs, Norah Weinstein, also serves on the board of the California Partners Project, the nonprofit co-founded by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Then Newsom told Californians the deal had gone through “a competitive bidding process.” It had not. California’s own contracting database labels the $6.2 million deal “NON-COMPETITIVELY BID.” Newsom’s administration now says the governor was referring to the “competitive nature” of the process.

But the department’s own chief deputy director told state senators in May what the exemption really does. It “allows you to essentially engage in negotiated contracting outside of state rules,” she said, because the normal bidding process “can be cumbersome and time consuming.” Apparently Sacramento has discovered a new form of government procurement: a contract that was not competitively bid but was competitive enough for the governor to call it competitive bidding.

The state asked organizations interested in participating in the program for information. Fifteen responded. The administration says all 15 were evaluated under the same process and that Baby2Baby was selected because of its ability to procure, warehouse and distribute diapers statewide. But the Request for Information, or RFI, explicitly stated it was “Not a Solicitation.” Whatever the administration wants to call the process now, it was not competitive bidding.

California had specifically exempted the diaper program from normal competitive-bidding requirements. Existing diaper banks had been told there would be an opportunity to compete. Yet some organizations that responded reportedly were never interviewed, and some learned Baby2Baby had been selected when Newsom publicly announced the partnership. Having several organizations express interest does not magically turn a no-bid contract into a competitively bid contract.

This also was not Baby2Baby’s first no-bid trip to California’s treasury. In 2022, lawmakers directed $1 million to Baby2Baby for a car-seat program. The following year, another $1.5 million was directed to the nonprofit for diaper distribution in Los Angeles.

Baby2Baby may be perfectly qualified. It is a highly regarded charity with a large distribution network, and there is no evidence it has done anything improper. But if Baby2Baby was clearly the best organization for the job, why not let it compete and win? Instead, taxpayers are being asked to take the Newsom administration’s word for it.

This was not an accidental loophole buried somewhere in California’s sprawling bureaucracy. The exemption was written into the state budget, passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Newsom. The 893-page budget exempted the diaper initiative from competitive bidding, public advertising requirements and review or approval by the Department of General Services, the state agency responsible for overseeing government contracting. The resulting deal also avoided the normal public visibility associated with no-bid contracts.

Try finding one sentence in an 893-page budget. That’s not oversight. That’s playing Where’s Waldo with taxpayer money, and nobody in Sacramento wanted you to win.

California does allow no-bid contracts. But that path requires justification to the Department of General Services and public posting. It has been used 474 times since 2018. This deal skipped it entirely. Then CBS News started looking for how many other times Sacramento had done the same thing. That is when Diapergate stopped being just a story about diapers.

More than two dozen exemptions across seven state departments, covering more than $1 billion in appropriations. The exemptions waive competitive bidding and Department of General Services oversight. Roughly two-thirds have no expiration date. One exemption covers a $253 million opioid-response fund. Another gives California’s Office of Health Care Affordability, the state’s own health-cost watchdog, its own no-bid authority through 2031.

Let the lawyers decide if any laws were broken. I already know what this reeks of: ethical improprieties.

But competitive bidding and public oversight exist because taxpayers should not have to blindly trust politicians and bureaucrats to spend their money wisely. Without those rules, taxpayers have little way of knowing whether the state got the best deal or why one organization was chosen over another. Diapergate is not an isolated controversy. It has exposed a much larger Sacramento practice.

Newsom cannot shrug this off as some obscure decision made deep inside the state bureaucracy. He championed the diaper initiative, signed the budget containing the contracting exemption, and his administration selected Baby2Baby and publicly announced the partnership. When questions arose, Newsom personally assured Californians that the deal went through a competitive bidding process. It did not.

California’s political leadership has decided that programs involving more than $1 billion in taxpayer appropriations can operate outside normal competitive-bidding and contracting safeguards. Californians deserve to know why.

Before Newsom throws another stone at President Trump, he might want to check how many windows are left in his own glass house.

Recommended reading - our original reporting on this from back in May.

Our morning content is free for all subscribers and guests! Usually our afternoon content is behind a paywall… If you are not yet a paid subscriber, consider upgrading — you are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible. If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription! There is exclusive content below this column for paid subscribers…

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🕒 8-minute read

The Chronicles of Katie - From Boom To Bust

Katie Porter is done. Not just done running for governor. Not taking time to lick her wounds after finishing fifth with a humiliating 4.4 percent of the vote. As reported Friday by The Sacramento Bee, the former Orange County congresswoman and onetime progressive superstar now says she is closing the door on electoral politics altogether.

“I am closing the door on being a candidate,” Porter told the Bee. “I cannot foresee that path back.”

But here is the question: Did Katie Porter close the door on electoral politics? Or did California voters close it in her face?

It is a remarkable ending for a politician who, not long ago, seemed to have no shortage of paths forward. The whiteboard-wielding progressive darling flipped a Republican-held Orange County congressional seat, became a national fundraising phenomenon and turned congressional hearings into made-for-social-media performances. A protégé of Elizabeth Warren, Porter seemed destined for bigger things: the U.S. Senate, the governor’s mansion, perhaps beyond. For years, Porter’s national progressive celebrity was mistaken for statewide political strength. By the time California voters rendered their own verdict, those turned out to be two very different things.

As someone who has criticized Porter for years, I could simply say good riddance. But that would miss the real story. Republicans did not finally figure out how to end Katie Porter’s political career. We certainly tried. Scott Baugh came remarkably close.

Republicans did not retire Katie Porter.

California Democrats did.

And it did not happen overnight. The warning signs were there for years. To understand how one of the Democratic Party’s brightest progressive stars ended up with 4.4 percent of the vote, you have to start with how high she once climbed.

The Progressive Superstar

Katie Porter arrived in Congress in 2018 with a compelling biography. A UC Irvine law professor and protégé of Elizabeth Warren, she defeated Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in a historically conservative Orange County district and quickly became one of the Democratic Party’s most recognizable freshman members.

Her breakthrough came not from floor speeches or legislative dealmaking, but from congressional hearings. Armed with a whiteboard and an instinct for confrontation, Porter turned dry policy exchanges into viral political theater. She grilled corporate executives, bankers and Trump administration officials in clips tailor-made for social media, winning praise from progressives who saw her as unusually prepared, fearless and effective.

Porter built a national following and a formidable small-dollar fundraising base that gave her political reach far beyond Orange County. She won reelection in 2020 and increasingly looked less like a swing-district congresswoman and more like a future statewide candidate.

Conservatives, including me, saw something different. Porter was no moderate Democrat who happened to represent a competitive district. She came from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party and embraced the politics that came with it. But whatever you thought of her ideology, there was no denying the trajectory.

Katie Porter was a rising star.

And rising stars usually start looking for a bigger stage.

Scott Baugh and the First Warning

The first real warning sign came in 2022. By then, Porter’s ambitions for higher office were hardly a secret. But before she could think seriously about running statewide, she decided that she first had to win reelection to Congress.

Enter Scott Baugh.

Baugh, a former Republican leader of the California Assembly and former chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, gave Porter a much tougher race than a nationally prominent Democrat with her fundraising prowess might have expected. Porter ultimately defeated him, but barely: 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent, a margin of just 9,113 votes.

And it cost her dearly.

Porter’s campaign spent nearly $29 million during the 2021-22 election cycle, an extraordinary sum for a House campaign. Baugh’s campaign spent only a fraction of that amount, though outside spending also poured into the race. Porter survived, but the victory came just as she was preparing for the vastly more expensive proposition of running statewide in California.

She was not broke. Porter still had more than $7 million in campaign cash at the end of 2022. But she had just been forced to deploy an enormously expensive political operation to win another term in Congress by three points, just as she was preparing to make the leap into statewide politics.

In retrospect, perhaps everyone should have paid more attention to what Scott Baugh had just accomplished. Porter was still a national progressive celebrity and fundraising powerhouse.

But for the first time, the distance between Katie Porter’s national political profile and her actual appeal to voters was becoming difficult to ignore. Campaigns have a way of exposing weaknesses that media attention can conceal. Scott Baugh did not end Katie Porter’s rise. He exposed how much more fragile it was than many people realized.

The Senate Gamble

Two months after surviving Baugh, Porter made her move. In January 2023, even before Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement, Porter jumped into the race for her U.S. Senate seat. She gave up the relative security of Congress and bet her political future on winning statewide.

Porter remained a formidable fundraiser, ultimately bringing in more than $30 million for the Senate effort (but had she retired from Congress and not faced Baugh, she would have had twice that amount). But Adam Schiff entered the contest from a much stronger financial position. While Porter had just spent heavily defending her House seat, Schiff had cruised through a safe-seat reelection and accumulated a massive war chest. By the closing weeks of the primary, Schiff had roughly a two-to-one advantage in television advertising.

Schiff outplayed her. California’s top-two primary meant his biggest threat was not Republican Steve Garvey. It was Porter. Schiff flooded the airwaves with ads ostensibly attacking Garvey, knowing that raising the former Dodgers star’s profile among Republican voters could help propel Garvey into the November runoff and knock Porter out. Schiff finished first with 31.6 percent, Garvey took 31.5 percent, and Porter finished a distant third with just 15.3 percent.

Porter had gambled her House seat and lost. Giving up an office you already hold is one of the biggest gambles in politics. Winning can launch a career. Losing often ends one. She was not going to the Senate, and she was not going back to Congress.

Her immediate reaction did her few favors. Porter complained about “billionaires spending millions to rig this election,” language she later clarified was not an accusation of voter fraud. The progressive star who had entered the race expecting to compete with Schiff had been outspent, outmaneuvered and eliminated.

Still, Porter was not ready to leave the stage.

Then the Cameras Turned Around

Porter built her national reputation in front of cameras. Put a corporate executive or government official in the witness chair, pull out the whiteboard and start asking pointed questions. Porter controlled the exchange, and millions watched the resulting clips online.

But there had long been signs of another side to her confrontational style. Former staffers described difficult experiences working for her, and a 2023 Washington Post examination aired concerns about her management style. Her congressional office experienced higher-than-average staff turnover in all but one year. In one remarkable text exchange with then-Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan, Porter declared, “I am a United States Congresswoman,” before warning, “You can lecture me on professionalism. And see what happens.”

Then came something worse. Politico published previously unseen video from 2021 showing Porter during an online event telling a staffer who briefly entered the frame, “Get out of my fucking shot!” followed by, “Stay out of my shot.”

The complaints about Porter’s temperament were no longer merely stories from former employees or attacks from political opponents. Voters could watch her behavior and decide for themselves. Porter later acknowledged that she “absolutely could have done better.”

Thirty current and former staff members eventually signed a public letter defending Porter. But it was too little, too late. Viral videos are hard to unsee.

There was other baggage. Court records from Porter’s contentious divorce described an extraordinarily volatile marriage, with allegations on both sides and an incident in which Porter threw hot mashed potatoes at her then-husband. Both sought help for anger management. The details are messy and should not be overstated, but they added to a picture that was becoming increasingly difficult for Porter to escape.

For years, Porter’s critics had been telling voters something about Katie Porter.

Now they did not have to.

They could press play.

The Comeback That Wasn’t

Porter did not respond to her Senate defeat by stepping back. She ran for governor, presenting herself as the same unapologetic progressive who had first made her famous. Her platform included abolishing ICE, moving California toward single-payer health care, free child care and tuition-free public universities. She was not trimming her ideological sails.

But the temperament issue followed her directly into the race. In October 2025, Porter bristled during a CBS interview when asked how she planned to appeal to Californians who had voted for Donald Trump. “I don’t want to keep doing this,” Porter said. “I’m going to call it.” She ultimately continued the interview, but the exchange went viral and handed her critics more ammunition.

Democratic opponents openly questioned her fitness to lead, and her campaign spent months trying to repair damage that had already been done. Porter even tried humor, releasing an ad that played off the infamous “get out of my shot” video.

It did not work.

By then, the campaign had stopped being about Katie Porter’s agenda. It had become a referendum on Katie Porter herself.

Porter had once been considered one of the leading candidates for governor. By the June 2026 primary, she had collapsed to 4.4 percent, finishing fifth behind Xavier Becerra, Steve Hilton, Tom Steyer and Chad Bianco. A politician who had once commanded national attention and raised enormous sums from progressive donors could barely register with California voters.

Porter offered explanations. She argued that the election was unusual, that Democratic voters were making strategic choices and, repeatedly, that criticism of her temperament was shaped by sexism. She told LAist that she could not remember the word “temperament” being used against a male candidate.

But by then, the campaign had become less about the future Porter was promising and more about the candidate voters thought they already knew.

And when California Democrats finally had the chance to judge Katie Porter for the state’s highest office, almost all of them chose someone else.

So, Does It Matter?

Which brings us back to Porter’s declaration that she is “closing the door” on being a candidate.

In explaining her political demise, Porter offered perhaps the most revealing line of all: “I don’t know what I could have said or done other than be a man.”

Really?

She could have treated people around her differently. She could have answered a reporter’s entirely predictable questions without threatening to end the interview. She could have refrained from telling an employee to “get out of my fucking shot.” She could have avoided sending an elected mayor messages reminding her, “I am a United States Congresswoman,” followed by, “You can lecture me on professionalism. And see what happens.”

None of that required Katie Porter to become a man.

Women in politics can face double standards. But sexism is not a magic eraser. It does not erase Porter’s own words, her own behavior or the videos millions of voters could watch for themselves.

Conservatives like me spent years warning voters about Katie Porter’s politics. We opposed the progressive agenda, the Warren-style economics and, eventually, a gubernatorial platform that included abolishing ICE and moving California toward single-payer health care. We also saw a politician whose national celebrity increasingly seemed out of proportion to her actual appeal to voters.

Scott Baugh forced her to spend nearly $29 million to survive by three points. Porter then gambled her House seat on a Senate campaign and lost. Adam Schiff outspent and outmaneuvered her. The stories about her temperament piled up. Then came the videos. Given one last chance to reinvent herself in the governor’s race, she finished fifth with 4.4 percent.

That is not sexism. That is a political career collapsing under the weight of bad decisions, bad behavior and, ultimately, voter rejection.

And here is the part Porter still seems unwilling to confront: Republicans did not do this to her. Conservatives did not do this to her. Donald Trump did not do this to her.

California voters did - mostly of her own party.

So when Katie Porter says she is now “closing the door” on being a candidate, perhaps she has the sequence of events backward.

The voters slammed it shut.

Typically, our afternoon content is behind a paywall — or there is something extra for our paid subscribers. If you are not one, please consider upgrading. You are missing a significant portion of what we produce each week, and your support makes it possible.

If you want to get it all and support my efforts, please consider a paid subscription!

Because of the paywall this piece is not offered on our podcasting channel.

🕒 8-minute read

Everybody’s A Communist, A Socialist, Or A Fascist… Depending On Who’s Talking.

Is Gavin Newsom a socialist?

Is Zohran Mamdani something entirely different — and is he already proving it? He isn’t just talking about socialism. As mayor of New York City, he’s opening city-owned grocery stores in the Bronx right now.

Political labels aren’t supposed to end arguments. They’re supposed to help us make better ones. Conservatives have history on our side. We don’t need to redefine words to win debates — we need to use the right ones. If socialism has repeatedly failed, and if communism has produced some of history’s most repressive governments, then the historical record is already compelling. We don’t strengthen that case by calling every politician to the left of Ronald Reagan a communist.

By the end of this column, you’ll know why Gavin Newsom isn’t a socialist, why Bernie Sanders isn’t simply another liberal, why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani occupy more than one political category, and why conservatives sometimes weaken their own case by using these labels interchangeably.

Political philosophies don’t fit neatly into boxes. Politicians often borrow ideas from more than one tradition. But these labels still have core meanings, and if we’re going to debate America’s future honestly, we ought to begin there. Before we classify today’s politicians, let’s first define the categories.

Liberalism: Still Capitalism

Ironically, the word “liberal” has probably changed more than any of the labels in this column.

America’s Founders would have recognized themselves as classical liberals. Classical liberalism emphasized individual liberty, private property, free markets, limited government and constitutional rights. Think John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. In today’s political vocabulary, many of those ideas sound more conservative than liberal — a reminder that political labels evolve over time.

Modern American liberalism took a different path, particularly during the Progressive Era and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today’s liberals still believe in democracy, private property and capitalism, but they also believe government should play a much larger role correcting what they see as capitalism’s shortcomings. They generally place greater confidence in government action, favor more direct democratic decision-making over many of the structural checks built into our constitutional republic, and support broader regulation, higher taxes and a more expansive social safety net.

That’s where most Democratic elected officials still live philosophically.

Governor Gavin Newsom isn’t proposing that California nationalize Apple, Chevron or Disneyland. He supports a larger welfare state, stricter environmental regulation, expanded Medi-Cal, stronger labor protections and a more activist government than I would prefer. Those are perfectly legitimate subjects for political debate, but they’re still debates taking place within a capitalist system — not arguments for replacing capitalism altogether.

Conservatives have spent decades arguing that ever-larger government often produces slower economic growth, more bureaucracy, less innovation and greater dependence on the state. That’s an entirely legitimate argument to have. But we don’t strengthen it by pretending every expansion of government is socialism. In fact, doing so makes it easier for actual socialists to argue they’re no different from mainstream liberals.

So Where Does Gavin Newsom Fit?

Read on…

You’ve reached the part of our afternoon content where the free preview stops — the paywall. If you’ve found this discussion worthwhile so far, you’re about to reach the part where we apply these definitions to today’s political movements and finish classifying the politicians we began with. That’s the content reserved for paid subscribers.

Here’s what’s below the paywall:

• Is Gavin Newsom really a socialist?

• Is progressivism just liberalism with a new name?

• Why are Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom different?

• Where do AOC and Zohran Mamdani actually fit?

• What has socialism traditionally meant — and what does it look like when someone actually does it?

• Why did communist governments never resemble Marx’s vision?

• What mistake do conservatives make when arguing about the left?

• Why is precision a political advantage?

Read more

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. I am trying something new — sending content just to paid subscribers. I don’t know yet if this will be weekly or every other week. Stay tuned. But the idea is that I will find something that interests me and pass it along to you. Of course, if you have suggestions or ideas, whether general or specific, about what y…

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