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March 22, 2021 - Epoch Times
30:44
Gavin Newsom Recall: ‘Last Chance for the Middle Class?’ | Shawn Steel
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It's getting closer to 97%.
And I say that you never know.
Sometimes Supreme Courts in a state will just make a radical decision that nobody likes.
So there's always that possibility.
And I'm hearing that some people in the legislative body that are Democrats, they are frustrated with the way the governor has taken the authority from them.
What happens here in California, it's a lot of policy disasters.
California has become a place where only the wealthy or the poorest can live.
Our middle class are being pushed out of California, and that's who signed a petition.
Do they see that the government can run out of money if we're losing the businesses, if we're losing the middle class?
So we have what's called a growing feudal state in California.
It's like the Middle Ages in Europe.
This is a really last chance for the middle class.
Who do you think should be qualified to do this job?
Somebody with really thick skin.
Is their only option leaving California, or can they do something about it?
Well, they can sign a recall petition.
There's two questions.
You want to recall this governor, yes or no?
If it's a majority, yes, then the next question is, well, who shall replace him?
Once the recall election date is selected, then it gets funded.
The grassroots effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom obtained over two million signatures just before the March 17th deadline.
My guest today is Sean Steele.
He's a Republican National Committee member in California.
Today he discusses who's behind the recall and the likelihood of Governor Newsom retaining his governorship.
Welcome to California Insider.
Sean, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
It's great to be here.
Looking forward to talking to your audience.
We want to talk to you about the recall.
So they got the signatures.
It's about 2 million?
Yes.
It's over 2 million.
They're still coming in.
Remember, they're being emailed to hundreds of thousands of people.
They're being mailed to millions of people.
And you can get one or two signatures on a petition.
There's room for five.
And you just mail it to the headquarters.
And that just keeps coming in.
Probably by the time they're finished, it'll be 2.2 million signatures.
Yeah.
And would these go through the process?
All of them would go through the process?
There's an entire mathematical formula.
The Secretary of State sets out the rules.
It's in the law.
They will look at like, depending on the county, and the county has some flexibility, look at one out of ten to get a statistical sample.
For them to do every single one would be very, very expensive.
So they'll do one out of ten to get a sample.
They'll see what the reliability rate is.
So unlike a normal election, they're actually going to check the signatures.
But in this recall, because we're going after the governor of the biggest state of the union, they're going to check those signatures based on a formula, and they'll see if, oh, well, look, it looks like 50% of the signatures are no good.
They can then say, well, the 1 million you gave us, only 500,000 are good.
So you're supposed to get 1.6 million, I believe.
That's why they decided to go for 2 million signatures, just to make sure there's insurance.
But they did something else.
The recall people did something else.
It's brilliant.
They're pre-checking their own signatures before they give them to the Secretary of State.
So if they got a bad signature, Or somebody that's signed it twice or three times, sometimes the Democrats will go in and put in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and just to follow up the circumstances, they won't turn those in.
So you think the chances of this recall, the election happening is almost 100% at this point?
It's getting closer to 97%.
And I say that you never know.
Sometimes Supreme Courts in a state will just make a radical decision that nobody likes.
So there's always that possibility.
There are lawsuits against the recall.
They're saying that the language is bad, even though it was approved by the Secretary of State.
They're going to say maybe you shouldn't have paid people to get signatures, which is how it's always been done, including the Democrats for 100 years in California.
They may come up with the technicality.
So you can never say certain.
And there will be amazing delays.
Once you get the signatures, which we should have approved of in April, under normal recall elections, remember I did this 20 years ago, then the Secretary, then the Governor and the Secretary of State have to call for an election.
But they've since changed the law, so there's going to be more procedures to vet, check and double check.
So we're expecting maybe the election to take place in the fall.
The odds are good.
The whole nation's talking about it.
The media's talking about it.
So it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the media can't keep their eyes off of it.
You know, the left-wingers in the media would rather not talk about it and hide it and pretend it's not real, but it's Just constantly, every single day.
And the nice thing about it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, so Newsom is now campaigning against the recall.
So he's now getting the Democrats to work together, and he's claiming it's a Republican initiative, although most of the people that signed it are not really political.
The vast majority of people that signed it are people that have been personally burned by the governor.
With the lockdown, the arrogance, the elitism, the fraud, the $10 billion of unemployment money that went to prisoners in the state penitentiary, $10 billion?
They're never going to get that money back.
Not many people are being prosecuted.
The soft on crime and the rise of crime in California.
All the things that really make the governor look bad is kind of coalescing together.
And so he's going to try to make it a partisan.
It's really not.
So, I've seen some data that in LA, there was about 50% of the people that signed this recall, they actually were Democrats.
Yes.
Do you think calling this partisan would work?
They're going to try.
Remember, the Democrats have...
An endless amount of money.
They will have hundreds of millions of dollars.
And that's wickedly huge amount of money from the unions, from the government unions.
Not the carpenters or plumbers or electrical or drivers.
Those are business unions.
But government unions are the folks that work at the DMV. Teachers are particularly notorious.
People that work in Sacramento for the government.
It's those unions that have the money because they tax each of the union members $50, $100 a month, maybe more than that, and you multiply it by a million.
That's how many government workers there are.
That's a tremendous amount of money.
They're going to flood the TV, flood the radio, flood the newspapers, flood the internet.
It's They're gonna call it white supremacist, they're gonna call it right-wing, they're gonna call it ultra-conservative, they're gonna call it Republican.
Anything they can use to make it look bad and wrong-headed.
Even though, you're right about Los Angeles, over half were registered Democrats.
And I'm hearing that some people in the legislative body that are Democrats, they are frustrated with the way the governor has taken the authority from them.
Yes.
We're seeing this in two states, New York State and California.
These are the two biggest Democrat states.
They don't work very well.
They're high taxes.
People are leaving them.
Both states are losing population.
They're not run very well.
The COVID was a disaster in New York State.
Both these governors could be out of power in six months.
So what happens here in California, it's a lot of policy disasters.
We still remember the blackouts.
When entire parts of the state didn't have electricity because of this anti-energy policy that the Democrats have embraced.
We have more oil in California than most any other state.
We have fracking potential for oil, which is one of the greatest deposits on Earth.
Can't touch it at all.
So, these are good jobs for young people without college degrees that can make $100,000 a year.
Those jobs are not happening in California.
California has become a place where only the wealthy or the poorest can live.
Now, that's interesting.
We have tremendous welfare, giveaways, free medical care, and so we have now the highest number And the highest percentage of any state of poor people.
Now, California didn't used to be that way.
It used to be Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana.
They had the highest percentage of poor people.
No longer true.
It's more middle class in those states.
Our middle class are being pushed out of California.
And that's who signed the petition.
The middle class is not a political animal historically, but they're the engines of a healthy and free society.
So you got some super wealthy people.
They don't care about taxes.
They hide it anyhow.
They got money all over the world.
They don't live in California half the time.
And then you got the poor.
That's the core of the debt.
And then the engine for the Democrat Party of the government employs because they pay the dues that keep the Democrats in power.
Some Democrats feel marginalized.
They feel pushed away.
They're not happy.
And I'll tell you something that is getting some traction.
Once the recall election date is selected, then it gets fun.
Because now you're going to have anybody, including you, anybody, anybody in this room can run for governor.
Last time we had 130 people that ran for governor.
The only person in California who can't run for governor is the guy that was just recalled.
So his name, Newsom, will not be on the ballot.
There's two questions.
Do you want to recall this governor, yes or no?
If it's a majority yes, then the next question is, well, who shall replace him?
And we already have a number of candidates that are looking, talking.
Some of them are actually announced.
But there will have to be one Democrat.
The Democrats have to run a Democrat.
Because if they don't, and Newsom loses, it's automatically going to be a Republican governor.
So the question is, who would that Democrat be?
Is he a traitor to Newsom?
Or is he a hedge bet for the Democrats?
That's a good question.
Do they see what's going to happen if they continue these...
Do they see that the government can run out of money if we're losing the businesses, if we're losing the middle class?
This goes back to Marx in the 19th century.
Marx could not stand the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, to him, these are middle class folks, ran stores, were professionals, you know, were farmers, and he couldn't stand them because they were too happy.
They were productive.
They were the engines of success and the engines of civilization and you couldn't control them.
His model was workers and people working for the man and working for the companies.
And so he wanted the revolution to wipe out, literally wipe out, exterminate the bourgeoisie and that's what Lenin and Stalin proceeded to do.
You know, if you're bourgeois, of course, China is the same thing and North Korea and that sort of thing.
So the middle class who is bourgeoisie has always been the enemy of the Marxists and the Democrats, because it's the same kind of thing.
The Democrats are Marxist-lite.
They're not total communists, but they're very light, and the philosophy is the same.
Nowadays, in the last 20 years, we've seen this dramatic shift to the left that's more Marxian than ever.
And, of course, they'll deny it, they'll deny it, but some of them are not.
Some of them are admitting, yeah, Marx had some nice ideas.
Yeah, Marx was on it.
So, yes, you've got nice academics, but there's a fundamental Marxist anti-middle-class attitude.
It's basically the same thing.
You've got a sophisticated Berkeley professor who hates America, lives in a nice home, And he flies over to New York City to visit his friends, and the people between San Francisco and New York, he thinks they're rubes, they're ignorant, they're racist, they're white supremacists.
He's never met any.
And they voted for Trump, and they're trash, and they live in trailer homes.
Many of those professors are genuine elitists in their soul.
And the funny part is, They have some person that comes to their apartment, their home, that cleans up for them.
And that is poor.
And they're allies.
But the irony is that the professor who makes a quarter of a million dollars a year and works 10 hours a week, the person that comes to do us home at minimum wage or less than that, they're actually allies, but they don't talk to each other.
They don't talk to each other.
They have nothing in common.
They don't go to the same restaurant.
They don't read the same books.
They don't do anything.
But they're just kind of a...
So we have what's called a growing feudal state in California.
So it's like the Middle Ages in Europe, where you have a certain aristocracy.
These are wealthy, elite professors.
These are business tycoons.
Then you've got the guild leaders who are in charge of the unions.
Then you've got the clerisy.
That's what I call the clerisy.
Joel Kotkin calls it that.
You have religious leaders that will tell you, and many of them are university professors that are The new clerisy, they'll tell you what's morally correct and morally wrong.
And the clerisy in the Middle Ages will say you are morally corrupt if you don't obey the king.
You must obey the king.
The king is divine because of God.
And so if you disobey the king, you're disobeying God.
Well, that kind of his return to California.
The thing that destroyed monarchs, the thing that destroys dictators, the thing that destroys tyrants is the middle class.
Middle class won't stand for that kind of tyranny.
If you push them out of California, you get a feudal state in its place.
So that's the big issue.
Does California continue becoming more of a super rich and a lot of poor people state or is there a chance for the middle classes to survive and grow?
Do you see this recall as being a movement by the middle class?
Yes.
This is really a last chance for the middle class.
This is the last chance to try to get the elites from controlling every part of their lives, making their lives unbearable in California.
That's really the best way to put it, is that this is the last chance for the middle class.
Now, some people argue that why do we do this recall?
It's going to cost the state $100 million in the middle of the pandemic.
And some people say they don't support the governor, they don't want him to get reelected, but they also won't vote for the recall.
We're desperate.
The pandemic is largely over.
I just hate to be a spoiler on that, but in Orange County alone, over half a million people have had COVID and have recovered very nicely, thank you, and over a million have had shots.
A million and a half of a population of three million.
And most of the most vulnerable people, the older folks, have got their shots at close to 80 and 90 percent.
So it's kind of old news now.
And we're all beginning to see that.
Places are opening.
People are not as paranoid as they were.
So we're not in the middle of anything bad in that sense.
It was the governor's reaction to lock down, close down California that has ruined Tens of thousands of businesses and millions of lives and made a lot of people poor and pushed people out of California.
So it's a desperate move.
Remember, this law, the recall, was passed in 1910.
You had to give democracy a chance For people to say something and not be just frozen when there's a certain emergency.
So it's a tough business recall.
And we've only recalled two governors in American history.
South Dakota and then what we did in California in the early part of this pandemic.
Some 20 years ago.
So it's rare.
It's difficult.
There's a lot of recall elections.
They generally fail, especially against governors.
But this time it's different because there's just too many things going on that people feel that California is on the wrong track.
So is it expensive?
The unions don't care how expensive it is.
They're going to spend whatever it takes to try to keep their hooks on the power.
Now, you mentioned Republicans and Democrats.
I wonder how much is the gap between the people of California versus the politicians.
Politicians look at things, is this Republican or Democrat movement?
But do people think about it that way?
Or do they just think about how these policies are impacting my life?
I think that's a difficult question.
I'll say there are three political parties in California.
Republican, Democrat, and nonpartisan.
They call them nonpartisan party.
They do not choose to join either party.
The fastest growing party is the nonpartisan party.
These are folks that say, I don't want this party, I don't want that party.
And keep in mind, the Democrats have a good corner.
They have great wealth behind them, many of the high-tech corporations, that woke generation.
They live in bubbles.
And then there's this great poor class that The ones that are working get minimum wage.
And then you have the wealthy, when I consider wealthy, $100,000 a year for a government employee.
That's what many of them are getting, $100,000 a year.
If you include the benefits, so they've become middle class and buying homes now.
But they're all dependent on the government.
And that can only go so far.
So the real middle class has been pushed out of California.
And, you know, you've got relatives.
We all know somebody that's leaving California that has left California or is about to leave California.
And that's why California's population is shrinking.
I think the average person wants to be left alone.
The average person doesn't want to get involved in politics.
Now, I'll tell you, in California, there's five million registered Republicans.
That's a lot of people, but the Democrats have seven and a half million, so they got a lot more.
And then everybody else is not affiliating with either party.
So I think that's the key.
The so-called independents.
And they could be very conservative to very liberal, but they don't choose to affiliate with either party.
Now, I looked at the job of a governor and it's a difficult job, right?
And who do you think should be qualified to run?
What kind of people can be qualified to do this job?
Somebody with really thick skin.
Let's assume Mr.
Newsom is recalled and he loses his job.
Then the replacement is going to be the person, the hundred plus candidates who gets the most number of votes.
He could become, he or she could become governor with 20% of the vote.
So let's assume, and that's what happened with Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger got like a third of the vote.
So it wasn't like 50%.
When they take over, they take over almost immediately.
And there is a range of options, but one is the message.
Because then all the cameras will be focused on that governor.
What's he like?
What's he not like?
Of course, the left-wing media, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The TV stations are all going to be hostile automatically.
No matter who the Republican is, they're going to try to find something terrible about that person.
So there'll be a constant hate campaign going on.
But the governor, if he's good, smart, sharp, will have to be prepared to have an ongoing message to keep the Republicans and the independents united.
That's gonna be important.
So who he surrounds himself or who she surrounds himself is gonna be very, very important.
You got some good, clever, smart people that can take over these different departments and make things work better.
That's gonna be a big challenge.
And then there's a whole bunch of appointments that the governor makes.
So he's gonna have to build, he or she's gonna have to build a new coalition.
The way you're mentioning, you're assuming it's going to be a Republican if Newsom doesn't get really.
Can it be a Democrat?
And it could be.
Now, here's the X factor.
There's a former mayor in Los Angeles who's Hispanic, sharp, articulate, and has got a name and a reputation.
He's out of a job.
Villa Ragosa.
And some people remember that.
And there's been a lot of discussion, talk among Democrats saying, well, that could be our safety valve.
So let's say you have 99 Republicans running and one Democrat, Villagosa, he gets 21%.
He could become governor and the Democrats are safe.
So it's a mathematical quandary that the politicians have to set aside.
Give me an example.
20 years ago, Gray Davis was trying to defeat the recall, but like Newsom, he's underwater.
More people don't like Gray Davis than Newsom.
So they were both below 50%.
So you had Schwarzenegger run, you had a lot of different Republicans and independents running.
The one Democrat showed up was Gray Davis's Lieutenant Governor.
Carlos Bustamante, Hispanic, but his job was, he was lieutenant governor.
So many people thought he was, he's a traitor.
How dare him?
The Democrats said that.
How dare him do that?
But everybody else understood, well, he's the one Democrat, he's lieutenant governor.
If you don't like Gray Davis, at least you can vote for this other Democrat.
So it puts the Democrats in a beautiful conflict.
Now, going back to looking at the governor's job, it seems like we compensate them $200,000, about $210,000 a year.
It's a very tough job.
It's hard to get elected.
You get scrutinized, your family, your life.
And you make less than a city manager.
Right.
How does that work?
Well, you make less than a fire captain in Los Angeles' fire department.
And no, you're certainly not doing it for the money.
Schwarzenegger, for example, he didn't take his salary.
He gave it to charity.
Same thing that Donald Trump did.
I can guarantee you Obama kept every penny and gave none of it to charity, and Joe Biden's taking every penny, and Newsom, I suppose he takes his money too.
It's not about the money.
It's about the fame, the glory, and the power.
And they have, let me tell you, a governor will never have a problem getting a meal.
He'll always have a place to stay and his transportation is taken care of.
Do you think people would want to do this job?
People that really are not into it for the power or fame?
Politics has always been a tough sport and in many countries throughout the world it's a blood sport.
If you back the wrong side you can never work again or you might get killed.
So politics is about power.
It's only about power.
And our framers in America wanted to make a weak government and not having one person in charge of everything.
So they wanted to disperse power with a bunch of representatives, with the senators, with the judiciary, independent judiciary, and an executive branch.
So they wanted to have power dispersed.
Newsom's done a nice job in centralizing the power to himself.
So it's become, you know, you're not going to get an idealistic Buddhist that will not step on an ant because he values life to become governor.
So it takes a certain kind of person to do that, to think that they can...
And here's...
If a conservative runs and gets elected, they don't want more power because they realize that human beings with too much power do terribly bad, evil things.
So he wants to disperse the power, return it to the county, return it to the city, return it to the neighborhood.
The Democrats grasp and want the power coming up and up and so they make all the decisions.
A conservative that would become governor would do everything he could to try to make the government smaller and less oppressive.
Big government is, by definition, oppressive.
You mentioned that this party, both Republican and Democratic parties are losing to the independent parties.
Doesn't it seem like people want the government that's less powerful?
I think the majority of people don't want to be bothered.
The trouble is, when you have a small union that pays a lot of money to buy politicians, that's exactly how it works.
You got some guy in Pasadena, So it may be a 50-50 assembly district.
And so you get a guy that's running as a Democrat.
But to get as a Democrat, you got to get so much money to win that local election.
So to be successful, you'll need a million dollars.
Who's got a million dollars?
Well, most people don't have a million dollars to spend, but the unions do.
The unions, for them, the prison guards are a good example.
Really small union, maybe 100,000 members.
They spend tens of millions every year, and they basically say, we'll back you, but work with us when you get elected.
Well, basically, it's a bribe.
So we'll give you, for your race, $200,000, but you've got to support us, or we'll go after you next time.
Give you an example.
Right here in Orange County, The Orange County Sheriff's Union went against a former Senator John Warlock who was running for supervisor.
It's a big deal race.
Orange County is a big deal.
They put up $600,000 to defeat him, not to support anybody else because he had resisted and fought against pay increases to the Sheriff's Department.
So they're telling everybody You mess with us, we may not get you this year, but we'll get you five years from now.
We've got the money to do it.
They did it successfully.
Morlock lost his election for supervisor and a radical progressive just became supervisor in a really conservative area.
So that's the power of money.
And the people that have that kind of money, it's what Bob Dylan said, you know, money swears if you got too much.
Money is just a brutal force.
The unions are very skillful getting the money out of their members and then putting it to the most radical people they can control.
Now, these people that are in the middle, that don't have the money, they don't have the party, and they want to be left alone, is their only option is leaving California, or can they do something about it?
Well, they could sign a recall petition.
That's the beauty.
It's very, very Democrat.
And the other option is, and look, a lot of the folks that are leaving California are younger people.
They were born in California, They lived in a nice home, but many of the younger people that are growing families don't have a job that can afford to buy the home they were used to living in.
So many of these young people can't afford to have the same lifestyle that was given to them by their parents, but they can in Texas.
They can in Tennessee.
They can in Florida.
And that's why those states are red.
So you have this out-migration of California.
Younger people, also retired people, but you know, it's a whole stratum.
But you got a lot of younger people that make up the core.
So that means we're getting fewer younger people growing in California.
They just can't afford to live here.
Do you have any other thoughts?
I'm hopeful that the recall is successful so that we have a new opportunity in California.
California is too beautiful of a place to let it be run down by government unions.
Well, thank you.
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