03/29/2024

Opinion: Progressive California’s growing race challenge

Under these conditions, California cannot create a successful multi-cultural society. As environmentalist Michael Shellenberger has noted, the way the state applies its “green policies” has transformed California from “the most progressive state” to “the most racist.” Recently, a coalition of hundreds of veteran civil rights leaders sued CARB over selecting greenhouse gas reduction measures that place disproportionately high cost burdens on minority working-class families and placing a new generation of discriminatory bureaucratic blockades against aspiring minority homeowners.

Immigration and ethnic diversity constitutes an essential part of California’s competitiveness and the bedrock of its identity. But the current challenges require less virtue-signaling and more real world results. California’s priorities have been increasingly limited to bold rhetoric about speculative climate catastrophes in the far future and defending the undocumented. They should focus instead on improving the lives of current residents of all races. The state’s impoverished resident population, native and foreign-born, deserves policies consistent with economic uplift and social mobility, not another scolding from privileged, but high-minded, classes.

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