Gavin Newsom ratchets up California’s social justice social credit system

Today California, tomorrow the world: For generations, this has been Democrats’ playbook for political transformation in America.

Just a few generations ago, the utopian vision driving the strategy looked like a meditation from the mind of Zen former Governor Jerry Brown: less corporatism, less consumerism, more nature, more humane thoughtfulness.

Today, however, that’s ancient history. After stewing for eight long years in Brown’s shadow as his toothless lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom is in the driver’s seat, baby, and under his leadership, California has replaced Brown’s American dream with a post-American nightmare.

Instead of anti-corporate leftism, the new vision of governance is the human resources department and ESG compliance. Instead of discouraging citizens from wasting their money on conspicuous consumption, the new vision encourages obesity and drug use in the physical world and hedonism, indolence, obsession, and addiction in the virtual world.

And instead of pursuing genuine environmental policies like healthy food, limited medical interventions, and conservationism driven by the protection of beauty and the encouragement of active life, the new California vision is animated by bogus “green” policy that replaces natural food with lab-grown sludge, quadruples down on permanent “booster” shots, puberty-arresting mutilations, and prescription drug dependency, and restricts citizens’ movement and enjoyment in natural spaces.

What explains this seemingly insane pivot? There’s a method to the madness: It’s all part of a lockstep agenda to refound America on the basis of a compulsory, inescapable social credit system, one where your rank and value are set by the dubious, shape-shifting standard of “social justice.”

With every passing month, California grows more brazen in centralizing control of the new system and cementing it into place. And while Newsom may be canny enough to trim some of its worst excesses — for now — he’s enough of a loyalist and true believer to ensure things rush along toward their destination with all deliberate speed.

The latest case in point is the state’s new mandate to force new and established tech companies — resident in California or just doing a lot of business there — to regularly submit costly and performative “diversity reports” to the social credit masters in Sacramento.

The annual survey requirement, on founders’ gender, race and ethnicity, disability, and other privileged identities, “will be submitted to a state agency, which then will publish it in a searchable online database,” according to Axios. “Firms that do not submit survey data could be fined an undisclosed amount.” Calling the approach “naming and shaming” — a hallmark of social credit systems — the Axios report notes that the scheme (displaying another hallmark apparent for years in China) can, at least for now, be easily gamed: “A billion-dollar fund could give two underrepresented founders checks of $50K each, and then a white, male founder a check for $50 million. Per the bill, it would look like that firm backs underrepresented founders two-thirds of the time.”

Patronage, unequal protection, corruption, busywork, lying for official favor — the situation bears all the marks of unjust and anti-American systems of yore, such as Soviet communism. Despite its novel, futuristic sheen, California’s latest great leap forward into social justice-driven social credit is a colossal step backward into the injustice of the past.