Gavin Newsom Builds His Dream

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Back in 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that by 2035 all new car and truck sales in California must be electric vehicles. President Donald Trump recently canceled that order and Gov. Newsom’s head promptly exploded.

“Trump’s all-out assault on California continues,” said the governor in a statement, “and this time he’s destroying our clean air and America’s global competitiveness in the process. We are suing to stop this latest illegal action by a President who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.” And so on, without any inkling of where the governor is really coming from. That requires a look back to March 2020, when he locked down California while hailing the “leadership” of his one-time aunt Nancy Pelosi.

The next month, Nancy’s boy appeared on MSNBC to announce a $1 billion deal for masks with “a company here in California,” a reference to Build Your Dreams (BYD), a Chinese company with no experience making protective equipment. BYD makes electric busses and Los Angeles and associated agencies ponied up $330 million for the company, but there was a problem.

As a Los Angeles Times investigation showed, the BYD busses fell short of their advertised range, stalled on steep hills, had doors that failed to close, and required more service that the busses they were supposed to replace. It soon emerged that officials involved in awarding the grants owned BYD stock and received campaign contributions from the China-based company. Newsom had to know those realities, and what was going on with BYD in Brazil. In 2015, BYD opened its first factory in the city of Campinas, for manufacture of “the world’s only long-range pure electric transit bus” and “all of their batteries.”

In 2023 in Brazil, BYD launched the all-electric BYD SEAL, which bears strong resemblance to the Kia EV6. That year Newsom visited Shenzhen, the birthplace of BYD, and drove their flagship YangWageU8 electric car, which the California governor called “another leap in technology.” Newsom told reporters “we’ve got to get these in the states” but failed to note BYD’s failure to deliver on his $1 billion mask order. The governor also failed to call out BYD’s faulty busses and the company’s problems in Brazil, where prosecutors are suing BYD for conditions “analogous to slavery” at its factories.

BYD bosses confiscated workers’ passports and forced them to work “exhausting” hours with no weekly rest. In cramped quarters, workers slept on beds without mattresses, and 31 workers shared one toilet. BYD also withheld up to 70 percent of workers’ salaries, and charged them to terminate contracts. Those conditions doubtless replicated those in all factories in China, the closest thing to a slave state on the current scene. Not a word from the governor, who signed a bill to create a task force for slavery reparations in California, which was never a slave state. And for his part, the carefully coiffed Newsom was never a worker.

Gavin Newsom is tied into the Brown, Pelosi and Getty families, the primary source of his wealth and influence, but there’s more to him.  Like Joe Biden, Newsom is a semi-literate, showing little if any familiarity with the great books of our time, and world-class scholars such as Thomas Sowell, a longtime California resident. Like Biden, Newsom tends to exaggerate his past, claiming that he attended college on a “partial baseball scholarship.” The coiffed governor is a polished poseur, adept at bleating Democrat Party platitudes, but that’s not the best way to understand him.

If China’s Communist dictatorship  ever did anything with which Gov. Newsom disagreed, nothing has publicly emerged. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, for example, seems to have escaped notice. On Xi Jinping’s 2023 visit to San Francisco, Newsom cleaned up the city and walled off the PRC boss from any demonstrators. But it wasn’t all for show.

In Fool’s Gold, authors Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter chart Newsom’s ChinaSF, a partnership with the People’s Republic of China now embedded “into the operational structure of California’s bureaucracy.”  ChinaSF “is the branded name of a complex bureaucratic mirage used as a cover to legitimize the massive transfer of Bay Area technology, property and wealth to China while streamlining the establishment of Chinese business in the United States.”

For all but the willfully blind, Newsom is gearing up for a White House run in 2028. His dream is to replicate California’s one-party state, sustained by an imported electorate of illegals. The governor’s EV mandate is all about getting those BYD vehicles on American roads. In Gavin Newsom’s America, as in California, the people get only what the government wants them to have. So no surprise that the governor explodes at President Trump, who wants Americans to choose their own cars in a free market.

To adapt his own language, Gavin Newsom is a “wholly owned subsidiary” of Build Your Dreams, and by extension the People’s Republic of China. Congress should require Gov. Newsom to register as an agent of the PRC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). That will clarify the issues for the people moving forward.