Everyone Gets $5 Million? California's Reparation Plan Explained | Will Swaim

The idea is that California has a special and unique obligation to pay our fellow citizens $223,000 for the damage done by slavery. And there's another proposal in San Francisco to do $5 million. San Francisco's annual budget is about $14 billion. This proposal would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 billion or so dollars. I don't understand the math. They likely don't either. But this would bankrupt the city. You're going to have a revolt. Why do you think we are going down this path? California was never a slave state. When I read the commission's 500-page report, it's comic in its misunderstanding of California history. My guest today is Will Swain, president of California Policy Center. Today he will explain the history of slavery in California, reasoning behind the California reparations proposals and its potential impacts. The kinds of social welfare programs that were supposed to really lift people out of poverty and those very programs have in fact damaged people. The challenge with that is, you know, if California fails, America fails with it. If America fails, the lights go out all over the world. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Thank you. Good to be back. We want to talk to you about reparations. This has been a big topic in California. And you wrote an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal. Can you tell us what the California state is doing on reparations now? What's the status? Sure. Well, let's start perhaps by just talking about what reparations are. It's the concept that when there's an historic injury against a group of people, that those people are owed some kind of recompense, a repayment of sorts, to repair, to repair the damage, reparations. So in California, the idea was, under a piece of legislation passed about 2020, that California owed the descendants of slaves some sort of reparation. And a commission was formed, studied the problem, released a 500-page report last summer, and recommended a repayment to all Black Californians who can trace their ancestry back to an African American in the 19th century, whether enslaved or freed, as long as it was a Black person before the 19th century. So that's how the issue started. And it's now being undertaken as a possible actual piece of legislation that this payment would go forward by the California state legislature. So we'll know more about that likely this year. And what is the payment? What is it like? Well, it's $223,000 per person, and they're talking about cash, along with a few other kinds of possible... They've made a variety of proposals, including support for home purchases, student loan debt forgiveness, credit card payoffs, that kind of thing. So people who find themselves in debt and qualify under this program might have access to additional funds. And what about the people that are mixed races? That's a very good question. And it's not clear entirely how this state commission figures on people who are, as you say, mixed race of some sort. 23andMe is going to have a field day if this goes through with people trying to figure out whether they've got African ancestry, as most of us do at some level. But it sincerely looks like all a person has to be able to do, whether they're 100% African American or, as is more likely, mixed race. So if they had a great-grandfather or somebody. Right. Great-great-grandfather. Yeah. Utterly conceivable that somebody who looks roughly like you or me might actually qualify under this program. And is California doing this because they want to help the people out of poverty? Is that what the idea is that, okay, we need to give reparation to them? Yeah, the argument on their side is that African Americans are disproportionately represented among poor people and that the only explanation for this must be sort of the remnants or the ramifications of slavery. And they don't really take into account the number of programs undertaken by the federal and state government since the end of the Civil War to actually repair the damage of slavery. But the idea is that California has a special and unique obligation to pay our fellow citizens $223,000 for the damage done by slavery. Because the poverty rate on blacks in California is a couple of percentage points higher than the average. That's correct. From what it looks like. Yes. Yeah. So the assumption is that that can only be explained by racism. And it is utterly conceivable that they're right about that. That it is really racism that accounts for some of that difference, that disparity. But I would have a counter-argument about how the racism actually takes place today and has since probably the 1960s. And I would argue that it's in fact probably well-intentioned government programs that have set African-Americans back in California. It's not the problems of the 19th century and slavery. Why isn't it the problems of the 19th century? Well, for a number of reasons. Number one, California was never a slave state. California entered the union in 1850 as a free state. That was the condition of its admission into the union. It was going to be a free state. So there was no slavery essentially here, right? Not unless it was illegal. And we can talk about that in a moment. But slavery was illegal in California from statehood. And it had been outlawed by the Mexican government, which controlled California as early as 1837. So long before the Civil War, California, which was then under the Mexican flag, had no slavery, or at least not legal slavery. So California has never been a slave state. And the few occasions where people are actually able to find people who were enslaved are really remarkable, in part because they were prosecuted by California's civil authorities as kidnapping. And the slaves who were being held against their will were emancipated. We have slavery today in California. There are people who come here from other parts of the world, and they're brought here illegally. And cartels are doing that to illegal growers. Sure, yes, yes. So there's no question that slavery existed in the 19th century in rare circumstances. It was very hard to keep slaves in the 19th century, because California was a vastly different place. It was far less populated, of course. The territory is vast. And you had the draw of the gold mines, for example, where African-Americans frequently fled from other parts of the country just to come and see if they could join in the gold rush. So there were options to get away. It was very, very difficult. In one instance, I'll give you an example. After statehood, so statehood, remember, is 1850. In 1851, a Utah farmer brings slaves... So before we get into that statehood, when was Mexico sold California, right? Is that there was a... Yeah, that's after the Mexican, the war with Mexico. And that ends with the U.S. making a modest purchase offer to take California and most of the Southwest after the war with Mexico in the 1840s. We get Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah, Colorado. I mean, everything that the Mexicans had controlled in the American Southwest is ceded or surrendered to the United States government in return for some compensation. Mexico didn't allow any slavery, right? After 1837, that's correct. So after that, and so then you were telling me this specific case. Can you tell us more about it? Sure. It's a fascinating case. Utah farmer enters Southern California in the very early 1850s, right after statehood. And he is advised before he comes into California by his friends, don't bring slaves there. He does it anyway. And he shows up with a kind of a wagon train and some mules and a few slaves, perhaps as many as 13. It's difficult to know at this point. But he arrives in what's now San Bernardino County. At that point, it was still Los Angeles County. And word gets back about the existence of these slaves to the sheriff of L.A. County, who is a white man who gathers a posse together. That is, for those who don't know the word posse, almost everybody does. But it's a kind of informal gathering of people who have been deputized to help the police officer, in this case, the L.A. County sheriff. And they're a mixed race. There are Mexicans, Native Americans, white people. And they go riding as fast as they can, 60 miles east into San Bernardino County. Well, I'm sorry, what's now San Bernardino County. And they find these people being held. And the farmer says, no, no, no, you misunderstand. They're here. They're part of my family, right? And they poke around a little bit, the sheriff's posse do. And they find out, no, these are not his family. These people have been brought here illegal, and they are enslaved. They bring the slaves back to L.A., to downtown Los Angeles for a court hearing, where the judge invites the farmer to come and present testimony. These people are really just his friends. They're not slaves. They're just workers. And the farmer beats it. He leaves. He gets out of California as quickly as he can and heads back to Utah, Texas, I think he may have gone back to. And the judge immediately emancipates the former slaves. Now, one of those is a woman named Biddy Mason. And Ms. Mason was already in her 30s at this point, and a midwife of some renown in slave circles, a woman who delivered babies the way an obstetrician might today, and very effective, very smart woman. She immediately starts practicing her trade of midwifery and then becomes a property owner. She gets into what we would call today real estate development, builds buildings, buys property, and in her 50s is already a millionaire, one of the wealthiest people in Los Angeles County. So let's summarize. African-American woman born in slavery, brought to California, liberated by a white sheriff and a white judge and a mixed race posse that helped get her and her friends and family out of there, who goes on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in Southern California at a time when the commission that has been appointed by the governor and the legislature are telling us it was impossible for black people to do anything here, even approximating a normal and free life as we would recognize it. So this hardly matches with the commission's sense that this was a terrifying place for African-Americans to be. There are other stories like this. There are countless of African-Americans who left what is undeniably a grotesque system in the South, even after the Civil War. We're all familiar with Jim Crow and the racist laws that crop up after the Civil War to basically carry out slavery by other means and certainly at least segregation throughout much of the American South. Many of those people come to California, not because it's perfect, but because it's far better than just about any other place they can go. Right. Exactly. So, you know, you find this in the 1920s, for instance, you find stories of Oklahomans who are black coming to California to just find work and escape from the oppressive quality of life in the South, the grinding poverty, the segregation, the just terrible. I mean, I would call it almost terrorist activity. In fact, with the Ku Klux Klan, it's absolute terrorism. But they come to California because guess what? They're treated far better here than they are just about anywhere else in the United States of America. I'm thinking of a particular oral history about a group of three or four guys in their 20s who arrive in a place called Weed, California, which is a lumber town north of Sacramento in Shasta County. And their stories, which they told to a local historian in the 1980s and 90s are just so remarkable. One of the guys says, I've got the quote here, can I read it from this paper here? Yeah, pardon me for popping out my notes here. But they get here in 1923 and one of them tells this historian, a guy named James Langford, he says, boy, as he arrived, he says, boy, I looked around and I thought to myself, I ought to have been here for years. You could just almost pick your jobs when I came here. And it was a lot of black folks around here. Now, that's not a place that was terrifying to black people. When this particular person got here, he sent letters back home to his friends and said, there's jobs, there's freedom. We can live here, we can make a living. And so other African-Americans hearing the story, this is how immigration always works, of course, right? One group of people get here and they tell their friends. They tell the story and others wanna come. Exactly. And I'm not saying that life was easy for black people in Weed, California in the 1920s, but I am saying it was far better than just about any other place. The work was horrible. I mean, just by our standards, you and I are sitting here in total comfort, drinking a cup of coffee, and we call this work. These guys were working in the lumber industry. It was hard, but they were delighted because compared to everything else, this was a kind of heaven. There's also the very famous Southern Californian, Ralph Bunch, spelled as you would think Bunch is with an E at the end. And Ralph Bunch was raised in South Central, Los Angeles, straight out of Compton, you might say. In the 1920s, he went to UCLA, graduated from UCLA. And while he was at UCLA, he gave a speech in which he tried to describe the story of a black man who came from Texas on vacation and went to Los Angeles in the 20s and experienced a kind of freedom he had never, ever seen in Texas. And that man, Ralph Bunch tells his audience in a speech that's still in the UCLA archives, that man returned to Texas, that black man did, and he ran into his old boss. And the old boss offered him his old job if he wanted to stick around. And he said, are you kidding? I've been to California. There is not a chance I'm sticking around here. And he went back to California. Ralph Bunch's observation was, you let a black man in America see California, they're not going back where they came from. They will stay here. So this is absolutely at odds with the reparations commission's notion that somehow blacks were treated exegerably here or worse than elsewhere. In fact, given the options of many black people, this turned out to be a place of relative freedom, an opportunity for real flourishing and prosperity that does not mean that they did not run into bad people as individuals, or in some cases run into corrupt public officials. You know, it's unfortunate that this side of glory, as a friend of mine likes to say, there are sinners, there are bad people. And some of those bad people are racist and some of them are just plain old bad people. So this is not to deny that black people have had a hard time of it anywhere in the United States. It is to say that California is clearly an outlier, but an outlier in a significantly better way than the commission suggests. Before we continue, we would like to thank Shen Yun for sponsoring this channel. I lived in China for two years and experienced two different Chinas. One is the China we know now, unfortunately with communism. And the other is ancient Chinese culture with 5,000 years of history, strong values, ethics and morality that has been lost. Shen Yun Performing Arts is reviving this 5,000 years of Chinese traditional culture. It takes you back in time to magical world of ancient China with a unique blend of brilliant dancing, beautiful costumes and legends coming to life. Go to Shenyun.com to find out the schedule and theater information. It's a lifetime experience you don't wanna miss. Book your tickets today. Now let's go back to the interview. Now, why do you think we are going down this path? Do you think California is doing this to actually acknowledge that this was horrific to these people that was happening in other areas? Or why do you think the California state is going down this path? Well, now you're asking me to hypothesize about the motives of the people behind the commission, but I can certainly tell you that one of the reasons for it is that it provides good politics for a certain group of people. I think there are a small number of people in California, and I really do believe this, a tiny number of people who are motivated by what they recognize as a horrible system, that is slavery and the racist system that followed afterward, especially in the South, and who believe we've just gotta do something somewhere. We live here, let's do it here. And they are willing, either purposely or because they're ignorant, they're willing to overlook the reality of what the world has been like. And the relative prosperity and freedom of California in order to make a point that we're all guilty in this, it was a kind of collective guilt, and so we're all gonna have to pay. I think that's one reason. I think the other reason is it provides some people who are unscrupulous with an explanation for enduring black poverty that lets especially Democrats and the left off the hook. For 50 or 60 years, California has been at the front end of the kinds of social welfare programs that were supposed to really lift people out of poverty. And those very programs have in fact damaged people, especially people who are from minority communities and especially black people. There's zero doubt. There is absolute correlation between the fact that you get the rise of social welfare programs nationally and the decline of the African-American family. And how do they damage the community? Because they're supposed to help. Of course, yeah. So I'll give you one example. We have a public education system in California that has produced the most baleful, the worst results for African-Americans in the entire state. African-American children who graduate from the 12th grade in California frequently cannot read or do math at grade level. In fact, about 10% of kids who graduate, who are black, who graduate from high school, 10% of them can do math at grade level. About 30% can read at grade level, read and write. So the public education system is bad and has gotten worse over the last, say, 40 years. And that correlates with teachers' union control of the system. Teachers' unions, and I'm not talking about rank-and-file teachers, I'm talking about the unions, are absolutely against giving up, surrendering any kind of control over public education. This is their money machine. It's their ATM. They are not going to reform the system. But they can't acknowledge that black performance, student performance on achievement tests has collapsed because that would indict the system. And that would endanger the teachers' union. And that would endanger the politician, like Gavin Newsom, whom those teachers support. The California Teachers Association raises and spends about $300 million per year. $600 billion every election. I'm sorry, million dollars every election cycle. $600 million every two years. And 95- $600 million. $600 million every election cycle. And it's spent primarily in organizing at the local level and bargaining and lobbying local officials. But it's on politics. And they spend it on campaigns. They spend it sending out volunteers to support campaigns. We could go on. But the point is, it's all raised and spent on politics and lobbying. So they have a power that is unmatched by anybody else to help get people elected. There's not a politician in Sacramento, on the Democrats' side, who, if they take money from the teachers' union, they almost all do, is willing to go after the teachers' union and say, hey, look, black achievement is a catastrophe. It's racist in its outcomes. And we need to fix education. Teachers' union won't go for it. If you doubt that, we could talk a lot about school choice and how to enhance schools. But the bottom line is, the teachers' union is not open to reform and its cash flows into Democrats. So the Democrats who created the Reparations Commission are not going to suggest the first step we ought to take is to fix public education. They will say we should give all that money to the teachers. I'm sure of it. You know, let's pour money into the public education system that has failed black people for 40 years. So the most racist institution, I would argue, in California isn't your individual corporation or your business who are just trying to make money and will take it from you, whether you're black or white. They don't care if they're smart. It's government. Government has created a catastrophe for black people. And if you doubt that, then take a look at what critical race theory tells us. Do you think they are actually trying to create these kind of programs to compensate for things that they have not done well at? Yes. You mentioned the public school. Yes. But a program like this, it will cost a significant amount, right? That's right. And there's another proposal in San Francisco to do $5 million. Can you tell us more about that one? Sure. San Francisco, not to be outdone by the, gosh, what can you call it, the lunacy of the state's proposal, decided that they were going to have their own system and their own reparations commission. So they've created a commission in San Francisco that has determined that every black resident who can prove descent from a 19th century African American, and there's a few other qualifiers in there that could allow you into this system, that everyone who lives in San Francisco and has identified as black for 10 years and can prove ancestry to a black American in the 19th century should be given $5 million. Now let's check that number against the state recommendation, which is 223,000, which some of our... 20 times more or something. It's a lot of money. And it's something that is so utterly remarkable. If just half of San Francisco's black residents qualified for the program, you're talking about a program that's nearly $120 million. Billion or million? Million. I'm sorry, billion. So sorry, gosh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Thank you for correcting me. We have to do something about those two numbers to fix them so we don't keep making these mistakes, or at least I don't. So right now, San Francisco's annual budget is about $14 billion. This proposal would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 billion or so. And that's just if half of the people qualify. If all of them qualify, look out. I mean, you're talking about a cost to that city of about a quarter of a trillion dollars, $250 billion. And now who's going to pay for this? Because I assume the rest of the Californians. Well, in San Francisco's case, it's only San Francisco. OK. So this would probably bankrupt the city. I don't understand the math. They likely don't either. But this would bankrupt the city. The other thing that it would do that's interesting, I think, is create a racial crisis where there hasn't been much of one yet. But if you want to go back and see what might happen, here's what I would argue is going to happen. You're going to have a revolt. Because a lot of the immigrants, they say we came here, like myself. And we had nothing to do with this. We had nothing to do with this. That's right. And essentially, we kind of have to pay for it. You've got it exactly right. The Asian-American community is a really good example of that. Asian-Americans in California historically were treated terribly. Like Chinese, right? Chinese especially. Virtually everybody who's watching your show knows the Chinese built the railroads, worked in gold mines, lived in Chinatowns that were occasionally ransacked by angry white mobs and their homes were burned to the ground. Chinese are not considered likely candidates for reparations. Japanese were interned in a series of concentration camps during World War II. They got reparations from the federal government because it was a federal order that did that, and that was just. And they got it at that time, right? Or did they get it right? No, they got it about 40 years later. But what's interesting is that San Francisco just a couple of years ago had a school board that started getting involved in this kind of like critical race theory and talking about and really redressing the racism in San Francisco. And what they meant was they pointed at a couple of schools in San Francisco that are very, very good schools that are application only. One of them is called Lowell. And to get into Lowell High School, I have a point here, I swear to you. To get into Lowell High School, you had to apply in a blind sort of application process, school grades and testing. And then you got in on merits only. We didn't know who you were. We didn't know your name. We didn't know your race or ethnicity or gender, nothing. Well, the result of that total blind application process was that the school suddenly became 70 to 75 percent Chinese and Asian-American. Chinese and Asian-Americans in general just out-competed everybody else, whites, Latinos and blacks. They study and the tiger mouths. They turn out, yeah. Whatever the reason is, Asian-American kids in San Francisco turn out to be far better students than their peers in other ethnic groups, right? They just outperformed. Well, the San Francisco school board comprised of a number of progressive people, many of them of African-American descent, said this is clearly a racist outcome. Therefore, the school has to drop its lottery, its system of allowing students in and has to accept people based on race and ethnicity. Well, Asian-Americans said, well, wait a minute. We worked hard to achieve entry into Lowell High School. And Lowell is a feeder school into Berkeley and Stanford. Our kids worked for this and they organized a recall. Some of your listeners. We actually had that. We had the organizers, one of the organizers on the show. That's great. Well, then, you know all about it. They organized this and they recalled the three members of the board who are eligible for recall. And they just shocked the entire county up there and the world. I mean, this was an international story that a school board that had gotten so deeply into the progressive policies of critical race theory and trying to carry that out in practice in the education system in San Francisco, an education system, which, by the way, has utterly failed black kids, utterly failed black kids. Their response was got to be racism, can't be anything else. And so they launched what I would argue is a racist attack on Asian-Americans. Never mind that white people are not performing very well and getting into Lowell or that Latinos aren't. And they won. The Asian-Americans primarily came out over 90% to fight for that recall and vote for it. And it seems like we're getting more and more divided as the race conversation goes on and on, because when I came here like 20 years ago, I felt like everybody was the same. Everybody was pretty cool. You know, and everybody was. Now you have to watch out, like if this person is Asian, this person is black, this person is white. That's right. You have to think like how you're going to talk to them. That's right. Well, I think, you know, what's what's unfortunate is I think that's still generally true is that there is a noisy minority of people who will hound you and will try to destroy you. And sometimes with the help of major institutions will, in fact, succeed in destroying you. So the fact that a guy with this face is talking about race is very, very dangerous. And, you know, my my hope is that people will understand that both you and I are really here because we believe that if you follow the constitutional logic of the entire American experiment, it's about equality under the law. It's about giving everybody a chance to succeed on their own merits in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. So what's changed is we've lost our affection for the Constitution and for that lofty goal. As recently as the 60s, when I was a little kid, you could hear Martin Luther King asking that people be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. And that's that was the sort of formative logic in the home I grew up in was you never judge people by gender, by race, by any of what my dad used to call the superficialities. You judge them by their heart, by their their earnestness, by their talent. That's how you judge people. And let merit win out. That's what made America great. Is this the reason why you wrote this article and you wanted to kind of get into this debate? Yeah, it is. Because I think that the real goal here on the part of the state of California is to ignore the racist outcomes of virtually every public education system that we have set up in this state, the public education system we've set up in the state, that we engage in climate regulation, that most grievously affects the poor, including poor black people. When gasoline prices go up, poor black people pay more for transportation. How is that fair? When the government raises the electricity rates, poor people, including poor black people, pay more than their fair share for energy. How is this fair? So the government is truly the thing that the reparations committee should be looking at. All these government social services, and I really singled out education because I think that's the thing that makes a difference in a person's life. Quality education for young people, black, white, whatever, that makes the difference. The reparations committee, CMAC, they legitimately pointed out the problem of what they call, what many people have come to call the school to prison pipeline, that kids who can't read by the third grade can't really read to learn, right? The old saying goes, first you learn to read and then you read to learn. If you can't read by the third grade, you're in trouble. And yet the results are in. Black kids can't read by the third grade. And so the commission says, see, it's a racist system. So why are we trying to double down on a system that has been in existence for 120 years, our public education system, and has been made worse by the application of a union layered over the top of that system that is against any kind of reform, any kind of parental choice, anything that would significantly change this. Why have we opted instead for the language of racism to explain the failure of a public school system that is run in many counties, including Los Angeles, by a teacher's union that is dominated by African-American activists? What's going on here? So the real racist outcome, the logic of the left is always that you can judge a system racist if its outcomes are racially disparate. Our public education has disparate impacts for blacks, whites, Asian-Americans. It is, by the definition of the left itself, the most racist institution in California. Now, Will, you're talking about this topic. This is a very touchy topic. Yes. And you decided to write this. Aren't you afraid of getting canceled? Because this is a very tough environment right now to discuss anything with race, right? Yes, it is. And yet, if people don't step up, regardless of their race, color, gender, ethnicity, if they don't step up and really push back against this thing, California is headed for a new dark ages. And I'm talking about the medieval dark ages of totally... This reparations payment will not do what its adherents say. What it will do is spark ethnic rivalry and racial conflict. That's what it'll do. Very quickly, you're going to find people in San Francisco who are paying huge amounts of money for a crime they didn't commit to people who did not suffer from that crime who are enraged. They came here expecting a fair deal, whether they came from Mexico or Central America or Africa or China or wherever. They came here expecting a fair shake. They came here under the old understanding that you encountered when you got here that everybody would be given a fair deal. People weren't going to judge you on your skin. And if they did, it wouldn't matter because you were still going to be able to succeed under the law. The system wouldn't judge you. That's right. Yeah. Now, why are you doing this? Why are you talking about this issue? Like, it seems like you're passionate about it. I am. Yeah. I do think there's a problem of race in the system in California. I just think the reparations committee is way off track. Its history is bad. We've already talked about that. They don't understand the history of race in California or slavery. So they start from a false premise before that. And that is that people who didn't commit a crime have to pay people who didn't suffer from it. So then they make up a bunch of stories having to do with critical race theory, which suggests that the real problem, the real failures of California's black African, its African-American population can be ascribed to slavery instead of ascribed to the government programs that have immiserated them. And was there a moment you realized that you've got to jump in because this is... Yeah, when I read the commission's 500-page report, it's really, it makes for, it's comic in its misunderstanding of California history. And you can only laugh until you realize that, of course, the implications of this report are going to be damaging to California, to Californians. And if California fails, I'm telling you, the United States fails. We are too big. California is about almost 15% of the nation's population. If we fail, we take down an entire country with us. And our ideas, you and I have talked about this before CMAC, California's bad ideas go national really fast, especially like under a democratic federal administration or a democratic Congress. Ideas that seem very faddish and sort of culturally of the moment in California are amplified by the federal government quite frequently, whether it's on climate or race or water or energy, you name it. Federal government always finds California's ideas very sexy, very attractive. And the challenge with that is, if California fails, America fails with it. If America fails, the lights go out all over the world. And it seems like we're painting ourselves in the wrong way as the history of California tells a different story, right? That's right. The history of California is like the history of human beings almost everywhere. Life is difficult wherever you are. This is the dark secret of human life. Life is tough. And once you acknowledge that it's tough universally, then you can start to say, what makes it a little better? It's never gonna be perfect. But utopian thinking that it is perfect or could be perfect is damaging to what works so that you have bad ideas pushing good ideas out of the marketplace. Bad ideas like reparations commissions or a teacher's union-run public education system chase out all the good ideas of human freedom and human flourishing. And we were talking offline. You kind of believed in these ideas back in the day, right? I did. You were a journalist. Well, before I was a journalist, I was a communist. And I'm not proud of that. I went to the University of Southern California, which for people who understand what USC is supposed to represent, a very conservative place, is sort of surprising and weird. But I was there in the late 1970s. I was a theology major. I was studying. I hoped to become a priest, but I fell in with something called liberation theology, which was the then very fashionable idea that Jesus had come primarily to support the poor, the materially poor against the rich, and that the best way to implement Jesus' ideas of the gospels was to become a Marxist, literally, to engage in class conflict. So at one point, I was playing a little punk rock band, and I had a little crucifix that I wore to our shows that was two AK-47s. Yeah, I know. It's rather embarrassing. It's a different time, brother. And yeah, I really believed this. And then I went to UC Irvine and studied Marxist theory there and history. And it took me a while. What is it Churchill says? If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. And if you're not a conservative by 40, you have no brain. It took me a while. It took me a while to see the flaws in my thinking. And that doesn't mean that I think liberals are bad or Democrats are bad. It does mean that I think the results are in. There's a great book by a guy named Francis Fukuyama called The End of History. And he's writing about the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989 and the rise of democratic movements in China at that time. We all remember Tiananmen Square. And he was saying like, look, man, the results are in. The West has won. It has won the ideological battle to prove what works. And what works is Western enlightenment. And that's not a racial idea. That's not a white people are better than black people argument. That's an argument about small d democracy. Free markets, freedom, the 10 amendments, our Bill of Rights. It is about human freedom. So it took me a while to sort of figure that out. And in my 30s, I began to figure it out. And by my 40s, I'd come to the conclusion that I had been badly mistaken in my youth. Now, do you have any other thoughts for our audience? Oh my gosh, where do we start? Of course I do. We live in a very difficult place. I do want to underscore one thing I've said because I don't mean to sound hyperbolic when I say that California is important, significant. It is critical to the survival of America. If you look at energy policy in America and global markets on oil right now, or natural gas, California could end much of this if it simply opened up drilling again and the production of natural gas deposits that are everywhere. But here again, the sort of the racial theories of the moment kick in. And what we're told is that pollution is directly designed almost directly to affect minority communities worst. And how do we know this? That if you go and look at the refineries just up north of us here, you and I are in Orange County as we talk but just north of us off the 405 freeway to the Pacific Ocean side, you can see the big refineries right near the port of Los Angeles. And some people on the left will note that the people who live in the area of the port and of those refineries tend to be poor Latino people. Therefore, they call this an economic injustice. But the fact is those refineries have been there since long before I was born. And many of the people who live there moved in because they could afford to live there. And they could afford to live there because houses next to a refinery are rather cheap for a reason. Now, if you really wanted to treat those people well, you wouldn't shut down the refinery. I guess you'd buy them a home someplace else or you wouldn't allow people to live near refineries anymore. But those refineries were there before the residents were there. And every time we in California try to protect the poor or protect black people or Latino people from environmental impacts, we almost invariably end up hurting them through energy policies that make energy more expensive. And they are also, in addition to being black and Latino, they're also humans who rely on energy policies that make sense. And our energy policies make life more expensive for them. Here's a thing for us to think about. The young man who was just murdered by five cops in Memphis, Tennessee, Tyree Nichols. I didn't know this until quite recently. Tyree Nichols was from Sacramento. He was a skater kid from Sacramento. He's a black kid who was raised in Sacramento and who left for Tennessee because California had become oppressive. Think about that. In 2020, when he was 26 years old, he looked around at what his options were. 26 year old man in California and decided, you know what? Everything's too expensive here. The jobs don't pay enough given the cost of everything. I'm gonna move to Memphis and be close to my mom and stepdad. Three years later, he's murdered by five black cops. I'm not saying that Gavin Newsom or the Democrats or bad California policies murdered Tyree Nichols. I am saying that he'd probably still be alive and living in Sacramento if we had a different government. Will Swain, President of California Policy Center, it was great to have you on California Insider. Thank you so much for having me, Samak. I look forward to the next time. If you like the show and our content, you should go to InsiderCA.com and sign up to our newsletter because we never know what can happen with social media and other platforms in terms of distributing our content. If you'd like to come on the show and be an insider, you can reach out to us at cainsider at epochtimesca.com Again, it's cainsider at epochtimesca.com. We'd love to have you on the show to tell us what's going on in your field in California. Thank you for watching. Please click the icon on the left to subscribe to our channel. We bring you the most pressing issues California is facing with straightforward and in-depth interviews. See you in the next video.