In the opening days of 2022, a California state legislator took to the page then known as Twitter to market his bill that do allow children from the age of 12 and up to get protein needles without familial knowledge or consent. Sen. Scott Wiener reassured families that the act didn’t consider an intellectual withdrawal, being entirely consistent with the country’s well-established democratic values.
” California law already allows 12-17 year olds to access various types of medical without parental consent, example: HPV &, pylori B vaccinations, abortion care, beginning control, mental heath, domestic violence-related care”, Wiener , wrote. ” SB 866 builds on this existing law to expand vaccine access”.
Who cares if your 12 year-old injects pharmaceutical products without telling mommy and daddy – she can already sneak contraception or get a secret abortion, so what’s the big deal? Aren’t you , progressive?
Advancing the point, then-Sen. Richard Pan , spoke , on the Senate floor about his day job as a pediatrician, where , of course , he has secret discussions with 12 year-olds about STDs and sexual assault. ” I don’t need to go ask the parent, because we know that it’s important that those youth get the care, and they also have the privacy necessary to do that”.
The state’s endless flood of aggressively anti-parent legislation is the reason Republican Sen. Scott Wilk, who has since termed out of the legislature, famously , said , during a committee hearing that he would “move to America” as soon as his job ended. ” If you love your children”, he said, with Wiener sitting nearby, “you need to flee California”.
Wiener, Pan, and Wilk join a long parade of people whose names don’t appear in a new book that purports to tell the story of California’s decline.  , Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All, by Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter, sets out to” show which forces, and which individuals, are responsible for turning the Golden State into a shadow of its former self”. That’s not what it does.
This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t important – it is. But it’s narrower in scope and achievement than the subtitle suggests. The success of the book is that it’s a highly successful binder of opposition research on the 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom, with some decent material thrown in on Kamala Harris and Adam Schiff.
McFetter works for Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute, and this is the lane where the book scores points. Like Schweizer, Crabtree and McFetter follow the money, doggedly and damningly. A chapter on Newsom’s financial relationships with China, and his addiction as a politician to Chinese enterprise, is devastating. It calls Newsom’s judgment into question, with receipts, and shows his recklessness in opening the door to the state he governs for CCP-tied businesses – over and over again. The list of Newsom-adjacent business and political figures who have gone to prison for fraud and bribery is worth the price of admission alone.
So if you somehow believe, against all normal human instincts, that Gavin Newsom is a good choice for president, here’s your tremendously effective wake-up call. The book is also good at showing that woke posturing is a mask for an endless game of self-dealing and featherbedding, and the political figures who center their personalities on posturing about equity and social justice are having, let’s put it this way, somewhat , different , discussions behind closed doors.  , Fool’s Gold , succeeds as a book about money and politics, and that’s worth doing.
Beyond that, though, the book leaves more material on the table than it takes in, and it misses a great deal about the morally deranged culture that has devastated the state. It seems, at times, to be written by people who are squinting at California from a distance – as when the first chapter refers to all the crime and homelessness now in evidence on “once tony and vibrant Wilshire Avenue”. It’s called Wilshire Boulevard, and the” tony and vibrant” part has always been pretty small. The filthy intersection of Wilshire and Alvarado, for example, at the edge of MacArthur Park, was quite tony … in the 1920s. ( The story of , this nearby hotel , parallels the story of Los Angeles, an elegant place that faded. )
Consistently, in offering a story about Newsom’s endless parade of failures, the book allows other people to sneak away into the bushes. A chapter about the pandemic has the governor aggressively locking everyone down and keeping schools closed. On the ground, California was a distributed authoritarian nightmare, and everybody got in on the act. Notorious figures like Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s bizarre public health director, go unmentioned. Sheila Kuehl, the Los Angeles County supervisor who voted to shut down restaurants because of the danger of using them and then , left that very meeting to go to dinner at a restaurant, doesn’t get her fifteen minutes of fame. And Santa Clara County’s astonishingly horrible public health surveillance of a San Jose church, Cavalry Chapel, belongs in a book about the death of the California dream. If you don’t know that story,  , read it here.
On one point, Crabtree and McFetter miss something truly remarkable. Describing the state’s soaring electric utility rates and the long history of mutual backscratching between Newsom and Pacific Gas &, Electric, an investor-owned utility, they find – but misunderstand – a contract for renewable energy:” One inked contract will send power to Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Central Coast Community Energy, two nonprofit green energy suppliers”.
That’s not exactly what they are, and what they really are is precisely a story about dark scheming and the decline of California. They’re governments – joint powers agencies formed by cities and counties, operating on the borrowed authority of the local governments that created them. Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Central Coast Community Energy are community choice aggregators (CCAs ), local government public utilities that are siphoning electric power revenue away from investor-owned utilities.
Silicon Valley Clean Energy omits a portion of its name in its marketing materials: It’s the Silicon Valley Clean Energy , Authority. You can read its joint powers agreement , here. The JPA for Central Coast Community Energy is , here.
Community choice aggregation in California is legally centered on the “opt-out” model, not the opt-in model: Your city or county switches your utility account to the governmental CCA, without asking, unless you call and say no. They sign you up to be billed for electricity by a government agency. Then community choice aggregators charge customers for electric power generation, but state law requires investor-owned utilities to deliver their electricity – and to bill their customers. So CCAs – local governments, all over the state – have captured a bunch of the money that California ratepayers shell out for electricity, but the bill still says “PG&, E” on it, and customers still have to pay the investor-owned utility for the electricity they buy from their local government joint powers authorities. Many Californians are now paying for electricity twice: a sneaky payment to government, for generation, and a payment to a utility, for delivery. And the local government CCAs are piling up billions of dollars in surpluses, which they store as cash reserves.
Crabtree and McFetter say this about California:” California’s petty green politics and self-inflicted energy wounds – unrealistic carbon-reduction mandates, rolling blackouts, sky-high utility rates, gas-tax hikes, and incomplete transportation boondoggles– are merely a glimpse of what we will see if progressives are allowed to continue in their crusade to impose their green agenda on all Americans”.
Every word of that is completely true. They’ve gotten the big picture exactly right. But they’ve missed some important details, in work that cries out to be continued. California is darker than you think.
Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U. S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of” Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond”, published last year by W. W. Norton.
