Politics

The Problem with Energy Blinders

Randal OToole — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:42:56 -0500

Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.

A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the point of the new paper was that “significant decreases in future energy consumption can only be achieved by reducing the average energy used per hour of human travel.”

In other words, people don’t substitute energy for time: if they use a slower but more energy efficient form of travel, they won’t travel more hours (thereby using more energy) to make up for the slower speed. The paper presents this as some kind of revelation: saving energy means forcing people to use more energy-efficient forms of travel. As a practical matter, this means emphasizing walking and cycling.

The problem is that such a policy ignores numerous other important social goals. Want to maximize productivity to keep the nation competitive with other parts of the world? Increasing the average speed of travel is a key component of national productivity.

Want to reduce income inequality? Increasing the average speed of travel among low-income people will give them access to more and better jobs. That necessarily means increasing auto ownership. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has found that the average resident of one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost three times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as a 60-minute bike or transit ride, and more than three times as many jobs in a 10-minute auto drive as a 60-minute walk.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Bicycles may be the most energy-efficient mode of travel, but that doesn’t mean they are always the best mode. Photo by Carlton Reid, under CC 2.0 License.

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe.

The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump. What it found was a group “marked by desensitization”. They viewed politics as a form of entertainment, more like a video game. To them, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, despite their promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, are not excluded from conservatism; even where their views are disavowed, they are treated as legitimate fixtures of the movement.

The roots of these disturbing shifts likely lie in the impact of social media and a startling lack of historical knowledge. The Survey Center on American Life confirms that young adults have become increasingly distant from their families and from one another. Instead, they tend to experience the world through the prism of social-media self-expression. As one recent report notes, they are far more focused on themselves than previous generations.

According to academic Jean Twenge, the online world brings “instant communication and unrivaled convenience” but also leaves young people “more isolated from each other” and more polarised, creating “a mental health crisis among teens and young adults”. The new ideal is to optimise the self; interactions with other people, particularly those with different views, are increasingly rare.

For the politically engaged, on both Right and Left, politics increasingly functions as another mode of self-expression. Among women this tendency skews Leftward, while among men it skews Right. For conservatives, this means grappling with an emerging, largely youthful constituency which is prone to conspiracy thinking and increasingly willing to adopt views that include Holocaust denial and open antisemitism.

Some may argue that these troubling trends are merely transitory. After all, many who embraced the far Left during the Vietnam War later became patriotic citizens, and some even turned into Reaganites. Yet much of this shift was tied to young people eventually assuming adult responsibilities: spouses, homes, children. Many in the new generation either reject these paths or see them as unattainable. Unable to establish stable adult lives, they may cultivate a politics that is unanchored, alienated, and potentially violent.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: screenshot from America First/YouTube channel.

Carney Faces Up to the Reality of Trudeau's Climate Fantasies

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.

This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”

What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.

Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.

The shift gained more credibility when the magazine Nature recently retracted a 2024 study predicting economic collapse due to climate change. Reality has started to bite, even in my home state of California, a bastion of climate hysteria. Governor Gavin Newsom, an avid supporter of net zero, earlier this year basically  fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations. He also kept the state’s last nuclear plant going.

As they shy away from climate catastrophism, resurgent progressives in the U.S. focus rightly on issues like cost of living, medical care, and jobs. They realize very few working class voters — now up for grabs in the next election — actually prioritize climate policy; in a recent Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (non-college) voters identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their families. Recent U.S. polling reveals that belief in predominately manmade climate change is now at 45 per cent, according to Pew, and enthusiasm for spending money on climate initiatives has plummeted.

Perhaps even more surprising, politicians in deep-green Europe are beginning to recognize that green obsessions undermine their own industries.  Net-zero policies, notes a recent OECD study, have doubled the rate of job losses in high-carbon jobs, which traditionally paid higher salaries to mostly male, non-college educated workers than the retail, tourism and other low-end service jobs that replaced them. Virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are those with the strictest renewable policies  —  Germany, California, and the U.K. Overall, British, Italian and Germany industrial users pay roughly twice more for electricity than the U.S. or Canada.

So, here’s the reality: oil and gas remain the dominant source of energy, with even coal, a dirtier fuel than natural gas, making a comeback. Despite billions spent by governments — taxpayers — to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use, notes energy expert Robert Bryce, is not only thirty times larger than wind and solar combined, but is also growing faster. In the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar but 13,000 from fossil fuels.

Adding to the power grid is increasingly important with the rise of artificial intelligence. This appears to be leading to greater fondness among oligarchs and investors faced with a desperate need for reliable, affordable energy, which solar and wind are not. Now, some embrace nuclear power, long verboten among the green activists they so generously funded.

This shift away from tough climate policies will shape global politics for the next decade or more. Countries with ample fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Qatar will become richer and more influential. Other, more troubled oil producers, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela are able to survive, in the face of awful governance, only because they still have their share of “black gold.” The developing world, notably Africa and India, will either develop their own resources, or import huge quantities.

In this still fossil-fuel dominated world, Canada will have great cards to play and now may even be willing to play them. These are also Canada’s biggest exports; it is the world’s fourth largest crude exporter. Like the United States, the world’s leading energy producer, Canada’s influence will be tied to its natural resources.

Canada’s embrace of energy production also constitutes a way to work against fossil-fuel-funded malefactors like Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, and Russia. It is also a way to counter China, which emits more GHGs responsible for more than 30 per cent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share.

China, which lacks huge oil or gas resources, has seized on Western climate policies as a way to penetrate markets for solar panels and electric vehicles. This leads to praise from some greens, but the Middle Kingdom is not exactly abandoning fossil fuels; indeed, its EV and panel industries rest on power generated by its over 3,000 coal-power plants, which accounted for  64.4 per cent of global emissions in 2023.

In an ideal world, energy growth would be a common agenda in North America, faced with challenges from Russia, the Middle East and China. But Donald Trump’s misplaced idea of national interest makes such cooperation difficult for now. So, Canada will need to find other markets for crude and other commodities, precisely what proposed West Coast LNG and pipelines would address. Asia is a boom market for fossil fuels, and Canada could enrich itself hugely through this trade.

This is the moment for Canada to assert its economic power and tell us Yankees that you can play the “great game” of power politics, too. Carney’s shift also provides an opportunity — after a decade of disappointment — to get the country back on track and reassert itself as one of the world’s great liberal democracies.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: Premier Smith and Prime Minister Carney sign a memorandum of understanding that opens the way to construct a new oil pipeline, via X.

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:28:14 -0500

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.

No other state outside Washington DC has been cutting so many jobs, and California now suffers from America’s highest unemployment rate at 5.5%. But this is nothing new. The state has been haemorrhaging jobs in fields such as manufacturing, construction and business services since Joe Biden’s presidency.

Michael Bernick, who previously served as the director of California’s labour department, has pointed to the state’s “Upstairs, Downstairs economy”, in which a wealthy college-educated class relies on service economy workers. California manages to be at once the state with the most billionaires and the nation’s poverty capital. Its teenage unemployment rate tops 21%, just short of twice the national average; for those under the age of 30, it ranks second nationally behind Mississippi.

This shortage of jobs, particularly high-quality ones, has steadily built into a crisis in recent years as politicians look away. Affordability, particularly for housing, is a big issue but California is also by far the worst state at creating jobs which pay above average, losing 1.6 million such roles in the last decade. In the past year, the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Tech is supposedly California’s strong point, yet even here things are murky. While venture-financed AI startups descend on the Bay Area, the overall picture is one of tech job losses. This year, according to the LA Times, thousands of workers at the likes of Amazon, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros have been laid off. Worse still, many tech jobs are headed elsewhere. Texas is leading the charge, followed by Florida, as Southern states including Tennessee and Georgia make significant gains.

One factor here is that California’s nationally high energy prices are undermining its AI industry. Firms such as Nvidia and Samsung are now looking to establish data centres in locations with lower prices, so that they’ll be better placed to develop advanced chips and processors. For instance, the University of Texas at Austin is planning a substantial new quantum computing centre, while energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania are now seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate traditional industrial sectors.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Felton Davis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Slouching Towards Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents.

Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer. In 1991, a young Newsom was photographed with the Getty children as part of a newspaper story titled “The Children of the Rich.” It’s unlikely that the San Francisco elite, who have financed his ruse, are fooled; nor is anyone else for that matter. Yet the act goes on, without a hint of shame.

In November, his former chief of staff was indicted for wire fraud and falsifying tax returns, using fake contracts to deduct the cost of luxury handbags and private jet travel. Dana Williamson’s defense team say federal investigators had sought her cooperation with an as-yet undisclosed investigation into Newsom himself. His team denies any knowledge of such an investigation – an increasingly common occurrence in the one-party state.

Whatever the truth of the Williamson case, Newsom’s record as Governor alone ought to be fatal. California has led the globe in culture and technology for more than a century. If the state were a country, it would be the fourth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom endlessly brags. But look under the hood and California has become a disaster for most workers.

This economic regime is, as former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick puts it, an “upstairs, downstairs” autocracy. Newsom’s state has a phenomenally wealthy class above a large, low-wage underbelly. Of course he rarely discusses the other California; the state has the highest proportion of those living in poverty, tepid job growth and the country’s highest rates of unemployment.

Among teenagers the unemployment rate tops 21 percent, just short of twice the national average. For Gen Z, unemployment ranks second, just ahead of Mississippi. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; it hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. In the past year, the only new jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Yet the Governor likes to bask in California’s glow. He inherited an economy that is home to five of the top ten companies in the world. No other region on the planet comes close. The presence of these firms, and their capital gains, along with a highly inflated property market, do much to propel the state’s GDP. That’s partly why he now dominates the race to be the presidential candidate for 2028, as his long-time rival Kamala Harris fades towards well-deserved obscurity.

The notion of an enlightened California coming to rescue the nation from Trump also plays well with large sections of Silicon Valley. Despite the tech world’s flirtation with MAGA, loyalties remain decisively on the side of the Democrats. The Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in almost two decades. Partly that’s down to demographics. Young workers are fleeing. Left behind is a rapidly aging population, many rich from real-estate investments, a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, public-sector workers, whose unions funded Newsom’s successful redistricting drive. Leading Democratic pollster Paul Mitchell told me that, thanks to these demographic changes, the GOP’s chances of recapturing the Governor’s Mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event.”

Newsom’s agenda is shaped largely by public-employee unions and tech-financed green lobbies. But these same policies have devastated the state’s blue-collar economy. Once a major oil producer, the state now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign imports from South America and Saudi Arabia. California’s regulations have added to the erosion of industrial jobs. Since 1990, one-third of manufacturing jobs – 1.3 million positions – have disappeared. Newsom likes to present himself as a member of the hustling classes and yet, in truth, he has destroyed them, encouraged by the established wealth of unions and tech oligarchs. It’s a story that makes much more sense when you learn of his early years.

Over the past two decades, four million net domestic migrants have left California – that’s the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined. In the past decade, the four leading destinations for young people were all in the South – Nashville, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. Austin’s growth in educated-millennial migration was almost three times that of New York and twice that of San Francisco. This has only accelerated under Newsom.

Some suggest that California’s tech sector will make up for this decline in jobs. But companies, too, are leaving. Along with energy firms such as Chevron and Occidental, the recent exodus includes Tesla, SpaceX, McKesson, Jacobs Engineering and Oracle. The big winner is California’s arch-rival, Texas. Hollywood is also suffering a major loss of jobs to other states and countries. Tech employment is heading downward, with more than half of all national tech job losses occurring in the Golden State. Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

Optimists point to artificial intelligence as a new source of growth, but California’s high energy prices make that unlikely. The soaring need for affordable electricity is leading firms such as Nvidia and Samsung to locate centers which fabricate advanced chips and processors in areas with lower prices for electricity. This includes Texas, where a new quantum-computing center is being planned, and energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania, which is seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate its industrial sector.

To be sure, many AI firms began life in San Francisco. But they are unlikely to create more tech jobs. City economist Ted Egan suggests that layoffs from other companies, largely due to AI replacing workers, have wiped out gains from the new tech. AI will, if anything, accelerate the rewards to the investor class, a handful of entrepreneurs and well-compensated “genius” programmers. What seems to be happening is that a few highly paid executives and developers stay on their campuses, while computing power shifts to places where energy is cheaper. California is becoming the oligarch’s state, led by the oligarch-in-chief.

Nothing drives the mass departure from America’s most blessed state more than affordability. This of one of issues that excites both the “abundance” advocates and the increasingly socialist-oriented YIMBY movement. Newsom, who bought a new $9 million house last year, claims to be taking bold steps to improve the state’s housing market. But he has overseen laughably poor results. Many Californians will never own a home or find an affordable rental. Despite hundreds of “pro-housing” initiatives, the state’s housing crisis is getting worse. California consistently lags in the construction not just of single-family homes but multifamily homes as well, while the state dominates the list of the nation’s most expensive ZIP codes.

Home prices in coastal California are nearly 400 percent above the national average, and statewide the median cost of a home is 2.5 times higher than in the rest of the country. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest home-ownership rate in the nation, 56 percent (New York’s is lowest, at 54 percent). Nor have Newsom’s policies helped renters. The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is just shy of $3,000 a month, according to apartments.com, about $1,000 more than the national average.

Housing is just one of the many Newsom policies that may not play so well in the vast center of America, where single-family homes are the norm and prices are far lower. Certainly, his long-standing assault on fossil fuels will win over few workers in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, the Dakotas and Pennsylvania, the epicenters of the US’s enormous energy production. Laid-off factory hands in Michigan may not welcome an agenda that includes the wiping out of profitable gasoline-fueled cars. Progressive mantras that play well in California may prove Newsom’s undoing in a 2028 presidential run.

But it would be foolish to underestimate Newsom. Burdened by dyslexia, he has compensated with extreme discipline and hard work. Never an object of adulation, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, or of respect like the more cerebral former California governor Jerry Brown, his career trajectory has evolved carefully, along very pragmatic lines, even while Newsom embraces progressive bromides. “He is trying to be the anti-Trump,” notes long-time Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, “but if he needs to cut ties with the left, he’ll do it.” There is little sign of that yet in his cultural stances, such as his preference for transgender over parental rights or his embrace of climate-change religion, which still resonate with his state’s progressive-dominated media.

An ability to shift from ideology to practicality has been a hallmark of Newsom’s career. Expect a move right on these questions in the coming months. As mayor of San Francisco, he often sided with business interests against the local radical left. As lieutenant governor under Brown, he resorted to visiting Texas in search of a more viable economic model. Just this year he displayed his skill at shifting with the winds by trying to reach out to conservatives such as the late Charlie Kirk when it seemed MAGA was on the rise.

When necessary, Newsom is willing to jettison progressive demands. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” – so-called safe drug-injection sites. He worked to keep the state’s last nuclear and natural-gas plants in operation to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts. To do otherwise would have been madness: these plants account for half of California’s electricity. Newsom is many things, but mad is not one of them. Facing a dismal fiscal reality, he has been forced to fend off proposals from Sacramento progressives that included a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax – already the nation’s highest – and adding new payroll taxes for universal healthcare.

To balance practicality with ideology, Newsom uses his media skills – ultra-friendly Politico claims he has “won the internet” – to assert himself. The donor class, which has always liked him, now sees him as the best option at a time when a majority of under-40s embrace socialism. Particularly threatening to Palo Alto is a survey that found that a majority of under-40s now favor restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits of less than $1 million annually.

GOP opponents say that Newsom is the “tier one” to fear in 2028. “He’s really smart,” according to California’s Republican national committeeman Shawn Steel, “besides having great hair.” Even the American Conservative proclaimed him “the big winner” of the 2025 elections, thanks to his gerrymandering initiative.

Of course, Newsom’s record of failure for working people could provide fodder for a challenger from the left, and in November 2028 from the GOP. But right now, anti-Trumpism overwhelms serious progressive critiques of Newsom’s record. He is no great statesman. But, with his media savvy and good looks, he could well play one on TV, and that may be more than enough against either his party’s socialists or the remnants of a disintegrating MAGA.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Press Office of CA Governor Newsom

An Anti-woke Counter-revolution is Sweeping Through the Media

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: IMDB/House of David

Thankful for "Don't Tread on Me" Conservatives

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US, one of our best holidays.

This year I want to express thanks for a group of people who often drive me nuts, the folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn, don’t-tread-on-me conservatives.

These are the people who form the core of the populist base. They are suspicious of government and institutions. No matter how little money the government spends, it’s always too much. No matter how low the taxes, they are always too high. No matter what the change or initiative, they seem to oppose it.

They are ornery and defiant and generally make it difficult for government and society to get things done. They very often oppose things I’d like to see, which frustrates me to no end.

But they might be the only thing standing between us and the kinds of Orwellian regimes that exist in places like the UK.

As you know, I’m a big fan of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, and his study of the American upper class and elite. He viewed the old WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Establishment as necessary to avoid excesses in which society might devolve into a bureaucratic despotism, corporate feudalism, or charismatic Caesarism.

His student and collaborator Howard Schneiderman said of this, “A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper‑class families, is the final protector of freedom in modern democratic societies.”

That establishment is long gone. Today, the final bulwark of freedom in American society is that ornery folk libertarian conservative who simply refuses to go along with encroachment on his personal liberty.

Multiple times in the last decade, there was a full-spectrum institutional push to impose top down controls on society that, if successful, would have created a mechanism for essentially ruling the public from beyond democracy.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

Tom Steyer Would Drag California Further Left on Climate

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

After over a decade of mismanagement and misdirection under governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, Californians now can double down by electing the latest aspiring Gubernatorial candidate: billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer, who made much of his money investing in such things as fossil fuels, including coal, is now preaching to the masses as a converted environmental zealot. He has remained a hardline defender of the state’s climate regulatory regime, a stance more central to his candidacy than even Gavin Newsom or his prospective rivals.

Given the impact of such policies on California, a potential Steyer Governorship and the continuation of dogmatic climate policy is exactly what the state does not need. For well over a decade, the state’s politicians have indulged in a misguided drive to lead the world’s response to climate change, with catastrophic effects.

But there’s no bucking this trend, and Steyer may soon lead the charge. The unfortunate Kamala Harris has bowed out, and former Representative Katie Porter — an Elizabeth Warren acolyte — has undermined her candidacy with televised outbursts and nasty testimony from former employees and her ex-husband.

California’s lower-income and minority households are already suffering from the consequences of the ruling elite’s green obsessions. The California Air Resources Board, for example, has produced evidence that the 2022 Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality policy was likely to hurt the income of those earning less than $100,000 annually while raising the income of those above this level.

It’s no surprise then that California is now moving below the national average of both income and job growth and even further behind rivals like Texas, Utah and Washington. When you add this to the fact that regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to 2.5 higher than the rest of the country, the detrimental impact that climate policies have had becomes clear. This has been particularly tough on Latinos, California’s largest ethnic group — with some even labelling these policies “the green Jim Crow”. For Latinos, California ranks near the bottom in terms of homeownership, business ownership and real adjusted incomes — roughly $10,000 less than in Texas.

For his part Governor Newsom, in his bid for national power, has realised the weakness of these policies. He has shown some signs of adjusting his reality, pushing back against Steyer and the powerful green lobby by allowing the once massive oil industry to remain and keeping the last nuclear and natural gas plants, which together account for more than half the state’s electricity.

Given his quasi-religious commitment to Net Zero, Steyer is unlikely to follow Newsom in taking these moderate steps, or let his Democratic opponents suggest any changes. And it’s not like the GOP hopefuls — former David Cameron Advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — will prove to be effective opposition. Republicans have not won a state-wide race in almost two decades.

Intensifying the push to Net Zero is the last thing working-class Californians need. But with his money, entrenched lobbyists and a compliant media, Steyer looks hard to stop. Even if he doesn’t win, he could still shape the race, forcing candidates to cleave ever more to the Left on the environment. The Golden State deserves better.

This piece first appeared at: UnHerd.

Photo: Phil Roeder via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

California's Billionaire Tax Could Bring Down Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Gavin Newsom’s run for the White House is going from bad to worse. Last week, his former chief of staff was arrested for allegedly siphoning off campaign funds for personal use, raising questions about the California Governor’s control of his inner circle. Now a bigger challenge looms: a rising socialist tide.

After Zohran Mamdani’s sweep to the New York mayoralty and a similarly high-profile win for Katie Wilson in Seattle, California progressives are eyeing a new billionaire tax initiative — a policy Newsom is staunchly against. The union-backed legislation would see the state’s richest residents hit with a one-time, 5% tax on the net worth of individuals — including everything from investments to property value, and even other assets like jewellery and paintings — worth over $1 billion. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for healthcare spending and 10% for the state’s ailing K-12 education system.

Newsom likes to claim that California is “the envy of the world” when it comes to social justice. In reality, the state suffers from the highest poverty rate in the country and maintains the highest unemployment, which is particularly acute among young people under 30. To top it off, the level of inequality is greater than Mexico and closer to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras: hardly the envy of the Americas, let alone the world.

In the past, Newsom sought to stifle debate about the dire condition of the state by building what The Nation called an ideal “blue welfare state” — a model of government based on European democracies that prioritises welfare. But economic and budget conditions suggest the state is running out of money and cannot continue handing out ever bigger subsidies to poorer residents. California spends more of its budget on welfare than almost any other state, twice as much as arch-rival Texas.

Even larger infrastructure projects are facing problems. Many state transit agencies and hospitals have huge deficits and are seeking for more state aid, while the troubled “bullet train” is also short of financing. To make matters worse, it could take upwards of $100 billion more to address the state’s consistently awful homelessness situation. In the long run, some have noted that California and Newsom face a tsunami of payments with trillions of dollars in pension debt set to rear its head. It’s therefore no surprise that, despite the tech boom, California places 42nd in fiscal health among the American states.

But will a levy on billionaires fix the situation? Although the wealth tax could help to address the budget deficit, it could also ramp up the departure of the wealthy residents — the top 1% of taxpayers pay more than 40% of California’s personal income. California, like New York and New Jersey, has suffered a drain of wealthy taxpayers already, losing over $300 billion in tax revenues over the past decade. This is mainly to the benefit of other — usually red — states.

Newsom, then, finds himself in a bind. The California Governor must look to keep his historical support base while simultaneously making himself the self-appointed leader of the Resistance. His stance against the wealth tax will not be popular with progressives, but massive income redistribution resonates with many voters in the home base of some of America’s wealthiest citizens.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.