Governor Gavin Newsom and Bill Essayli, a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in California, sparred on social media this week about whether the state is doing enough to prevent noncitizens from voting.

Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for California's Central District, surfaced a court document filed Tuesday in which a Los Angeles County election official said the registrar's office "is not equipped or authorized to verify voter citizenship because it does not independently house citizenship-related information beyond the voter attestation."

The official, Monica Flores, made the declaration as part of a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to force California to verify the citizenship of more than 20,000 people the federal government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent mail ballots ahead of this year's midterm elections.

Essayli called Flores' statement a "massive concession" that shows election officials take voters' word on whether they are a citizen.

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"American citizens’ votes are being diluted in California," Essayli wrote.

In response, Newsom's press office account on X said California adheres to a 1993 federal law that requires people registering to vote through the DMV to swear under penalty of perjury that they are eligible, including that they are U.S. citizens. Similar attestation requirements apply to federal mail-in voter registration forms.

"May want to brush up on your election law before tweeting," Newsom's office wrote in a jab at Essayli. "Perhaps Second Assistant is more apt from now on?"

Essayli fired back by citing two federal statutes that make it unlawful for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

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The public spat highlighted the central dispute in the lawsuit against California: whether the state should take additional steps to verify the citizenship of voters when the federal government flags potential issues with the rolls.

According to the Justice Department's complaint, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) cross-checked California voter registration records with federal immigration data.

That investigative process, described by DOJ lawyers as "preliminary," yielded a list of more than 20,000 registered voters federal investigators identified as likely noncitizens. California voters were mailed ballots beginning Oct. 1.

In its initial complaint filed Oct. 15, the Justice Department asked a federal court to require California to set aside mail ballots associated with people on the list until their citizenship could be verified.

Flores, an official with the LA County Registrar's Office, argued that doing so is now virtually impossible because once a ballot's signature is verified, it is removed from its identifying envelope and processed alongside hundreds of thousands of others.

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As of Tuesday, the county has processed 331,000 ballots, according to Flores' statement in court.

She also pointed out that the registrar's office is "not an investigative agency," adding that she was unaware of "any state or federal law granting it investigative authority."

Nonetheless, staff from the registrar's office reviewed a sample of 200 records from the Justice Department list that had LA County addresses.

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"The October list is unreliable: 112 of the 200 records correspond to registrations that are canceled or inactive," according to Flores' statement. "Of the voters where birthplace was meaningfully reported, 38.9% indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship; and 71.2% of the records have no voting history."

In a statement to Fox News, Essayli said these reported numbers "are meaningless because, by their own admission, they have no way to verify anyone's citizenship status or their birthplace."

There are indications that the Justice Department list does contain at least some individuals who could have broken the law.

On Monday, the Justice Department charged 28 individuals off that list, all lawful permanent residents, with making false statements on naturalization applications and fraudulently registering to vote. Most of them cast unlawful ballots in elections, officials said.

Editor's note: This op-ed is part of a series by Eli Steele exploring White guilt in America and the West. Steele is the director of the newly released documentary essay, "White Guilt." See the film at WhiteGuiltFilm.com.

I am a native Californian, and I will never get over the absurdity of seeing California and slavery in the same sentence. I believe I saw it for the first time during the height of the Black Lives Matter unrest. I remembered how I learned in my San Jose elementary school that California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. Yet here we are again, this time with AB 2599, the Truth in Disclosure Act.

On September 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the act into law. "This is a bill that requires large companies that operated before 1965 to search their records for ties to slavery going back to 1849, and then we make it public," Newsom said. "These are insurance policies on enslaved people. Human beings used as collateral, quite literally as collateral for loans."

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I first learned about these atrocities as a child, and they made me understand how total the dehumanization of slavery was. This history should be learned, but there is something profoundly different about turning history into a legal obligation, sworn under penalty of perjury. This comes at a time when most California students, including Black students, are underperforming in reading and math. So why does Sacramento want to excavate corporate records from 1849 rather than fix the classrooms today?

I believe the point of this investigation is not to discover more history, since we have historians for that, but to unearth confessions that can be commodified as grievances. To see why, you have to understand that White guilt is transactional.

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When I mention White guilt, many people tell me they feel none. Of course, they don't. You cannot feel guilt for what you have not done. But, that is not White guilt. "White guilt doesn't have anything to do with actual feelings of guilt," my father, Shelby Steele, author, columnist and Hoover Institution senior fellow, says in our new documentary, "White Guilt." White guilt is the collective guilt that says all Whites must carry the sins of the slave masters and segregationists forever.

Activists on the Left have leveraged this accusation for power since the 1960s, and it has produced a terror in many Whites, the terror of being tied to this racist past. Those Whites, especially liberal Whites, want innocence most of all, the ability to say, "I am not like those racist Whites."

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Black leaders understood early on, as my father did in the 1960s, that Whites would do anything out of their deep, existential desire for innocence. That is what gives White guilt its transactional nature. 

My father has said that White guilt is "quite literally the same thing as Black power." From Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton to Black Lives Matter, these leaders knew their power was in selling Black victimization. Whites bought innocence with everything from endless programs of dependency to lowered education standards. Both sides of this White guilt — Black power symbiosis get what they want, and that is the trap.

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In order to keep the lucrative White guilt grift alive, Black leaders have to keep Blacks locked into permanent victimhood, and Whites have to remain condemned as eternally guilty. As America continues to make racial progress, this symbiosis has moved further left, and further into the past, in search of more grievances.

It was California’s reparations task force that demanded AB 2599. This new law applies to any company doing business in California that takes in more than $100 million a year worldwide and existed in some form by the end of 1964. 

Once the legislature funds it, any such company will be legally bound to go through its records, and the records of its parent companies, subsidiaries and predecessors, back to 1849. It must report any findings that the company sold or leased slaves, used them as collateral for loans or insured them. The first filings are due as early as January 15, 2029, and the records will be kept online indefinitely. Every filing will be a confession made under oath, and every confession becomes one more grievance on the public record, available to the activists for as long as the database exists.

Newsom bought his own racial innocence by signing into law the demand that more Black victimization be found. Imagine if Newsom had refused to sign. He would have been blasted as the governor who protected the companies that exploited slaves. 

Right there is the very terror that White guilt deploys to kill any reasonable objections. And the corporations on the target list will confess to the sins of their predecessors and buy their innocence with statements of regret and funding for programs and initiatives. None of them will risk the stigmatization that comes with fighting a slavery disclosure law.

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On the same day, Newsom vetoed a bill to exempt reparations payments from state income tax. Where there was no innocence to be gained, he refused to cost his state actual revenue.

On the other side of the bargain are the sellers, and their product is Black victimization. The author of the bill, Democratic Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, told CalMatters which companies he expects to file. "I'm thinking agriculture. I'm thinking banking, insurance. I'm thinking anything in the financial sector." Then he said about what comes next. "Once the public has this disclosure and we have a full accounting of the impact, then it's up to us to decide what that means and what we're going to do about it."

If that last line comes off as a threat, it is because it is. Bryan is telling these companies that once the grievance is documented, lawmakers will set the price of penance. And what this statement also reveals is that this is nothing more than a fishing expedition to find the crime to fuel the White guilt-Black power symbiosis.

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That is why the left will never let the White guilt — Black power symbiosis die out. Kristin Nimmers, policy and campaign manager for the California Black Power Network, told Fox News Digital that "a single check is not going to holistically repair our communities." She wants "a harm-based approach, so whoever was harmed should be entitled to that repair."

The rest of us are chum in this transaction, Black children most of all. California released its new test scores on October 15. Only 33.7% of Black students met the state standard in English. In math, it was 21.5%. Our state is busy chasing the ghost of past crimes while ignoring the very crimes of miseducation taking place today.

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But the White guilt-Black power symbiosis never had any interest in doing the hard work of developing young minds into individual talents. Instead, this symbiosis will wait for the companies to report back on the sins of their predecessors, and then its elites will hold up the evidence as yet more proof that California and America are systemically racist. 

The past will be dragged into the present as if no progress had ever been made, the accusation refreshed and sharpened for another generation. And worst of all, the Black children who needed a state that believed in their future will instead be told that the sins in that database, from 1849, are what has been holding them back all along.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ELI STEELE

It is no surprise that a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit just enjoined the blatantly unconstitutional attempt by the "No-Longer-So-Golden State" to impose restrictions on the ability of ICE and other federal agents to enforce federal immigration law. That panel was doing exactly what federal courts are supposed to do — uphold the U.S. Constitution.

On October 14 in U.S. v. California, the court tossed the so-called "No Vigilantes Act" (NVA) onto the ash heap. This law was part of the state’s continuing effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement, which has included relentless public attacks by the governor and state officials on federal agents just trying to do their job of enforcing the law. That includes noxious claims like Newsom likening them to the thuggish "secret police" of an "authoritarian" state.

The NVA required any non-uniformed "federal law enforcement officer" operating in California to "visibly display identification" when carrying out federal law enforcement duties. A federal agent violating this requirement could be criminally prosecuted by the state.

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As the Ninth Circuit pointed out, the Supremacy Clause in Article VI makes the "Constitution, and the Laws of the United States … the Supreme Law of the Land." In other words, federal law not only overrides any state law to the contrary, but it requires what is called "intergovernmental immunity." Under "the intergovernmental immunity component of the Supremacy Clause … states may not directly regulate the Federal Government’s operations or property." The panel cites to a 1996 Ninth Circuit decision, Blackburn v. U.S., on this issue, but then points out that this basic legal principle — that states cannot interfere in federal functions — goes all the way back to one of the most seminal Supreme Court cases in our history, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). "It is the very essence of Supremacy," said the Court in McCulloch, "to remove all obstacles to its action within its own sphere, and so to modify every power vested in subordinate governments, as to exempt its own operations from their own influence." That is why "States have no power … to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the General Government."

California tried to argue that the NVA was constitutional because it did not "substantially burden" federal law enforcement. But the Ninth Circuit shot that down, too, saying any attempt by a state law to directly regulate "the conduct of the United States … is void irrespective of whether the regulated activities are essential to federal functions or operations, and irrespective of the degree to which the state law interferes with such functions or operations."

What made this law even worse was its threat to criminally prosecute federal agents. This is especially ironic because California attempted to do with the NVA what the Supreme Court specifically told the state it couldn’t do 136 years ago in another seminal case, In re Neagle (1890), also cited by the Ninth Circuit panel. That decision reads like a Hollywood movie but also demonstrates just how bizarre state officials have acted in California for a long time, not just in today’s heated political arena.

In re Neagle involved the state of California trying to prosecute a U.S. Marshal for murder. Marshal David Neagle was acting as a bodyguard for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, a job the U.S. Marshal’s Service still carries out today. He shot and killed the former chief justice of California’s state supreme court, David Terry, at a railway station in the San Joaquin Valley, after Terry tried to assassinate Field. Terry was known for his violent temper and apparently had a grudge against Field for a court decision involving the prior divorce of Terry’s current wife.

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The Ninth Circuit quoted the Supreme Court’s opinion in Neagle that even the "most unquestionable and most universally applicable of state laws, such as those concerning murder, will not be allowed to control the conduct a marshal of the United States acting under and in pursuance of the laws of the United States." California couldn’t prosecute a U.S. Marshal then for doing his job, and it cannot criminally prosecute federal agents now who are "acting under and in pursuance of the [immigration] laws of the United States." End of story, end of case, end of unconstitutional state law.

By the way, a second law enacted by California’s constitutionally ignorant legislators, the "No Secret Police Act," was already enjoined by a lower court for the same reason. That law made it a criminal offense for federal agents to wear "a facial covering that conceals or obscures their facial identity." You know, the same agents who have been villainized, doxxed, followed home, harassed, run down by cars, and shot at by thugs who masquerade as protesters.

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As the Ninth Circuit correctly recognized, the lawlessness occurring in California is not limited to thugs. Perhaps some remedial courses on the Constitution for Governor Newsom and the California legislature may be in order.

The Donald Trump administration dubbed it Operation Protect the Vote and on Monday focused its efforts on trying to substantiate the conspiracy theories promoted by the president and members of his administration: that large numbers of undocumented immigrants in California vote illegally for Democrats and that the state’s voter rolls still contain deceased individuals and people who have moved to other states. The charges announced, however, do not prove those claims.

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President Donald Trump promised jail for California officials who don’t heed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) warning that they will be criminally charged if they include the mail-in ballots of the some 200,000 people reportedly identified as potential noncitizens in their midterm election tallies.

The post Trump Warns California Election Officials of Jail Time if They Let Noncitizens Vote appeared first on Breitbart.

My recent trip to Malibu from Los Angeles was my first post-wildfire drive through the Pacific Palisades and, my goodness, there's nothing like seeing something with one's own eyes to grasp the enormity of the devastation. The obliterated hulks along Pacific Coast Highway 21 months after the tragedy raise multiple issues, including ones related to the excruciatingly slow rebuilding process.

This being California, the state has yet to grapple sufficiently with the reasons the wildfires started—and the failed response to them. But late is better than never, so I applaud a new report that Gov. Gavin Newsom commissioned from the nonprofit Fire Safety Research Institute. Released this month, it looked at the nitty-gritty of how the fires started and how multiple agencies reacted. The results aren't pretty.

The New York Times provided the best summary: "The comprehensive analysis found that while several state and local agencies fell fatally short in their preparation and response, the clearest lesson from the disaster was the extent to which climate-driven fires are outstripping modern firefighting." The report found LA officials failed to take the fires seriously enough at the outset. County officials handled the Altadena evacuations in a "chaotic" manner. They were unprepared for the intensity of the fire storms.

We've all read about some of the inexplicable stupidity. The Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty during the fires because of a repair to its protective cover, yet it's empty again (although it's in the process of being refilled). The California Coastal Commission allegedly delayed new permits for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to install fire-resistant utility poles because of concerns about an endangered weed. The commission disputes that report—and there's still heated debate involving multiple agencies.

If we can't get multiple agencies on the same page on one minor question about milkvetch, I'm skeptical California can deal with the basics. The report said the tragedy involved "multiple interlinked systems rather than any single factor or failure." In one example by Patch, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department remained at normal staffing levels. The Los Angeles Fire Department was reportedly so concerned about overtime costs that it reportedly responded slowly.

This epitomizes California's approach to everything: Bigger agencies, higher spending, and expanded workforces. The left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. Other priorities outside of public protection—budgeting, meeting union demands, turf battles—take precedence. This isn't malicious, but reflects the fundamental nature of government.

Even after the state suspended rebuilding regulations, the rebuilding process is still in a quagmire because of the number of involved agencies. How could California realistically streamline a wildfire-fighting process that involves an alphabet soup of local, county, regional, and state bureaucracies? Even the feds are involved because around 45 percent of the state's land area is owned by them. The wildfire issue is a statewide problem, so the conclusions should resonate beyond LA.

Furthermore, the report argues that California needs to change its overall approach toward wildfire resilience. Back to the Times analysis, which noted that climate-driven fires are becoming more intense and that's challenging the traditional ways that the state has battled wildfires. But how often have you seen governments respond efficiently to external economic or environmental changes? All governments are slow-moving freight trains.

Everything government does is mired in the past. As an unrelated example, the nation's education system isn't much different than the one created in the 1800s—despite all the technological changes that should have sparked a revolution. When COVID hit, private schools adapted and provided successful at-home learning, whereas the public schools watched students fall behind and truancy rates soar. It's not any different with any public service, including firefighting.

My fear: California policymakers will read that summary about "climate-driven" fire risks and do what they always do: blame the problem on climate change and double down on the state's counterproductive climate policies. They are designed to change the entire Earth's weather patterns (even though California is responsible for less than 1% of the world's greenhouse emissions), rather than adjust our regulatory system to make us more resilient in the face of warming trends.

California's union-controlled state and local governments aren't about to adjust firefighting budgets so they can further stretch their dollars. State firefighters generally earn more than $250,000 in annual total compensation, with some Los Angeles firefighting officials earning pay levels that boggle the mind. Instead of trimming costs, California has been ratcheting up pay levels.

California state officials haven't even been forthright about their approach toward brush clearance. For instance, four years ago Newsom touted an important wildfire-prevention program that at the time hadn't completed a single project. We hear promises, but little action.

That's government for you. It doesn't do anything well and is incapable of learning the right lessons even from the best reports. Driving along PCH was just my latest reminder of this sad truth.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post Why Are California's Governments So Lousy at Fighting Wildfires? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2222, creating tax incentives for news organizations. Under the law, eligible news organizations can receive a $20,000 tax credit for each of their first five journalists, $15,000 for each additional journalist and new hire, and $7,500 for eligible part-time journalists. Supporters say the program will help struggling newsrooms survive. Newsom said he approved the bill despite concerns that it could benefit wealthy owners, hedge funds, and media companies that do not need financial help. The program also has no spending cap and could create unlimited costs for taxpayers.

The post Brickbat: Paying the Piper appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Eliminate the death penalty for 563 inmates in California and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The proposal now being considered by Governor Gavin Newsom has been put to a statewide vote twice and came very close to passing.

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President Donald Trump said it without weighing the possible electoral consequences for Republican candidates in California, less than a month before the midterm elections. Far from generating laughter or support for his war with Iran, his comments have raised concern and could affect the vote in a state governed by Democrats since 2011. During a rally in Nebraska on Monday, the president said Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, two of the largest cities in the United States, calling it a “small price” to pay to eliminate what he says is the threat posed by the Iranian regime.

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The El Niño phenomenon has not yet reached its peak intensity, which the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects to occur at the end of this year, and seawater temperatures in the tropical Pacific area considered the epicenter of the event are already at record levels. The anomaly in that zone exceeded three degrees Celsius in mid‑September and has risen to a level similar to the peak of the El Niño event 11 years ago, in November 2015.

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