Nick Shirley is back, and this time he's gone to California.

🚨 Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger... We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP.

We ALL work… pic.twitter.com/7nWX9jL6NI

— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) March 17, 2026

Is the California open primary going to produce 2 Republican candidates for Governor?

 

Link.

Some headlines from the last few weeks: "Democrats' fear rising that too many candidates in governor's race could lead to a Republican victory," "Another poll shows two Republicans leading governor’s race. Should CA Dems fret?," "The Nation’s Most Democratic State Might Elect a Trump-Friendly Governor," "California’s Governor Race Is a Democratic Nightmare, But There’s One Easy Fix," "Are too many Democrats running for governor in California? Republicans see an opportunity," "Crowded California governor’s race creates opening for Republicans," and, my favorite, "Commonsense reform: preventing an 'only in California' cluster f*ck."

"In truth, Republicans may have more cards to play in an all-out redistricting war in 2026 than Democrats do."

The NYT concedes in "California Democrats Look to Redraw House Map to Counter Texas G.O.P./As a Texas senator summoned the F.B.I. to round up Democrats, the redistricting war that began in Texas was spreading, with California aiming at five Republican House seats."

... House maps and redistricting laws in Democratic states present significant hurdles. Illinois, for instance, is already so skewed to Democrats that flipping even one of the three Republican seats left would be extremely difficult for mapmakers.

That's a funny use of the passive voice: "is already so skewed." In other words, Democrats have already done what they could to advantage themselves in Illinois. They've already used the practice they now want to condemn as nefarious.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker is quoted saying: "If they’re going to cheat, then all of us have to take a hard look at what the effect of that cheating is on democracy. That means we all have to stand up and do the right thing. So, as far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table."

"If they’re going to cheat..." — as if the Republicans started it. You've just accused your own party of cheating. What is the "right thing" — cancelling the other side's cheating? You are essentially crediting your adversaries with doing the "right thing."

Meanwhile, in California, Gavin Newsom is also talking about the "right thing":

Unlike in Texas, where politicians control the process, California’s congressional districts have been set by an independent commission that is not allowed to consider partisanship in drawing the lines. Mr. Newsom has proposed putting that system on hold for the next three elections to help Democrats counter the Republican plan in Texas. He wants the California plan to contain a provision saying that it goes into effect only if Texas approves new maps mid-decade.

“It’s triggered on the basis of what occurs or doesn’t occur in Texas,” Mr. Newsom told reporters on Monday. “I hope they do the right thing, and if they do the right thing, then there’ll be no cause for us to have to move forward.”'

But if they don't do "the right thing," then Newsom is ready to do the wrong thing. But can he? The system he is talking about putting on hold is a matter of state constitutional law. To amend it, he would be asking the people to vote on a ballot initiative to undo the reform they voted for in 2008 and 2010. 

Imagine the campaign against that reform, so recently touted as the right thing to do in California: We're doing it right, but if Texas is doing it wrong, we've got to seize the power to do it wrong like the way we did in the bad old days.

"Los Angeles and California surely need a daily dose of The Post as an antidote to the jaundiced, jaded journalism that has sadly proliferated."

"We are at a pivotal moment for the city and the state, and there is no doubt that The Post will play a crucial role in engaging and enlightening readers, who are starved of serious reporting and puckish wit."

Said Robert Thomson, CEO of The Post’s owner News Corp, quoted in "Start the presses! New York Post will expand to LA with launch of The California Post" (NY Post).

I like the illustration, featuring the Post's best claim to fame, Alexander Hamilton:

"Think of us as the 'Inglourious Basterds' of the House Democrats. We will do anything to win this."

"Trump has fundamentally changed the rules of political engagement in this country. If they attack, you attack back."

Said Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California), quoted in "Blue-state Democrats face hurdles countering Texas GOP’s new election map/Democratic leaders in California, Illinois and New York are exploring retaliatory measures to offset the creation of more safe red seats. Moving as swiftly as their GOP counterparts will be difficult" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I saw the movie "Inglourious Basterds," but I don't remember what the characters did other than that they felt justified in doing it because they were fighting the Nazis, so I sought out help from Grok —  How unscrupulous and awful were the Inglourious Basterds?

From Grok's answer:

"The first waves began hitting the U.S. West Coast after an 8.8-magnitude quake off Russia’s coast put a swath of Pacific nations on alert."

Live updates from the NYT. Gift link, here.

ADDED: "The Kamchatka Peninsula is so known in Russia for its wilderness and lack of communication links that it has become a byword for 'remote.'... Unlike Turkey and Syria, countries that have been devastated by earthquakes in recent years, Kamchatka is sparsely populated — and the Soviet-era housing there typically has only one or two stories.... Moving around Kamchatka is difficult: The peninsula has just a few hundred miles of paved roads, mostly around major towns, and there are no roads to cross the swampland separating it from the mainland. Kamchatka has become a popular destination for tourism in recent years, with travel companies offering camping, helicopter rides and off-road tours for the visitors to see the volcanoes or admire the pristine forests and rivers.... A tour guide in the Kuril Islands, Yelena Kotenko, posted a video of tourists running out screaming from a two-story building as tiles rained down from its roof. The tourists went up the side of a volcano while a tsunami was rising on the coast, she said."

"The idea of high-speed rail has a nearly erotic appeal to progressives, who love communal trains over individualized autos..."

"... and think cars are destroying the planet whereas trains can save it. High-speed rail is to transit what windmills are to energy — an environmentally correct, futuristic technology that will always under-deliver.... The current focus is a line between Merced (pop. 93,000) and Bakersfield (413,000).... The original estimated $33 billion cost is now $35 billion for just the scaled-back line, and more than $100 billion and counting for the whole shebang. There is no reason that the feds should pour good money after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn’t have any national significance. California governor Gavin Newsom — too embarrassed to admit failure or too drunk on visions of European-style rail — remains fully committed. In a statement, he said Trump’s defunding decision is a 'gift to China,' as if Beijing cares whether people get to Bakersfield by car, plane or high-speed rail...."

Writes Rich Lowry, in "Behind the ‘boondoggle’ of Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail dream" (NY Post).

Why don't people who care about the environment simply stop traveling? Even if the line did connect L.A. to San Francisco, as it was originally sold, what is the need to go back and forth between these 2 cities... or any 2 cities in America? The high-tech solution is not high-speed rail. It's virtual connection. The amorphous interest in appearing somewhere in the flesh does not deserve a taxpayer subsidy. 

"Eisenhower said that politics is like the road, the left, the right is the gutter, and the center is drivable."

"And it's exactly the way it is in politics. You have to understand that there's a sweet spot. You know, like the teaching in golf, hit the sweet spot, or in tennis to hit the sweet spot. All this, there's a sweet spot to find exactly so you can get a deal made... It's not exactly your way.... I wanted to wipe out, you know, the deficit. And I was not able to do that with all these Democrats around it. They, they love to spend money. So, so, so I was, I was stuck with it. So, but the fact of them is we could improve the situation and I was able to work together with the Democrats on environmental issues and infrastructure issues... education and all of this stuff. And we, we, we did really fine and had a great time up there being governor of the state of California.... You have to face reality. The trick is just to be, to not hate the other side because they think differently. It's just kind of like figuring out how can we work together and how can we do something that's really good for the people...."

Said Arnold Schwarzenegger, on Theo Von's podcast the other day.

"We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have."

"We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!"

Writes President Trump, at Truth Social.

I like how he capitalized all the C words — Canada, Cars, Country, Cherished.

AND: There's one question — and I've raised it before — which is why would Canada be only one state? Why not 2... or 10... or more? The answer is:

"The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."

"The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

"Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California state officials... to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments..."

"... the nation’s most sweeping response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets....  His executive order could divide Democratic local leaders in California, some of whom have already begun to clear encampments while others have denounced the decision from conservative justices as opening the door to inhumane measures to solve a complex crisis. The order also comes as Democrats are uniting around Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator and prosecutor from California.... Republicans have frequently pointed to homelessness in California as an example of the state’s purported decline.... In his executive order, Mr. Newsom advised California cities and counties on how best to ramp up enforcement on a signature issue of his administration. He cannot force them to take action, but can exert political pressure through billions of dollars the state controls for municipalities to address homelessness...."

From "Newsom Orders California Officials to Remove Homeless Encampments/The directive from Gov. Gavin Newsom is the nation’s most sweeping response to a Supreme Court decision last month that gave local leaders greater authority to remove homeless campers" (NYT).

It's Super Tuesday, and the only interesting thing seems to be whether the California Senate race will be between Adam Schiff and Katie Porter or Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey.

I'm reading "Schiff’s insider support trumps Porter’s outsider appeal/Polling shows Rep. Katie Porter running in third place, behind fellow Rep. Adam Schiff and a Republican he helped boost" (WaPo).

The two popular Democrats [Schiff and Porter], who are both prodigious fundraisers, had long been viewed as the probable victors Tuesday in California’s jungle primary, in which the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election regardless of party.

"Jungle primary"? There's some outmoded slang.

But with Schiff, Porter and their Democratic colleague, Rep. Barbara Lee, splitting their party’s vote, Schiff has wielded his enormous war chest to boost support for their top Republican rival, former Major League Baseball player Steve Garvey.

Oh? So Garvey's success has been Schiff's shifty doing?

"Working as a grade school teacher in Waubeka, Wisconsin, in 1885, Bernard J. Cigrand held the first recognized formal observance of Flag Day...."

"From the late 1880s on, Cigrand spoke around the country promoting patriotism, respect for the flag, and the need for the annual observance of a flag day on June 14, the day in 1777 that the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes. He moved to Chicago to attend dental school and, in June 1886, first publicly proposed an annual observance of the birth of the United States flag.... On the third Saturday in June 1894, a public school children's celebration of Flag Day took place in Chicago at Douglas, Garfield, Humboldt, Lincoln, and Washington Parks. More than 300,000 children participated, and the celebration was repeated the next year.... Cigrand generally is credited with being the 'Father of Flag Day,' with the Chicago Tribune noting that he 'almost singlehandedly' established the holiday."

From "Flag Day" (Wikipedia).

"When California was drawing up its Constitution to join the Union, the state debated excluding Black people."

"The delegate who brought forth an exclusion resolution said that with migrating free Black people, the state could find itself 'flooded with a population of free Negroes,' which would be 'the greatest calamity that could befall California.' In that way, what [Scott] Adams said, while racist, was less outside the bounds of America’s troubled ideological canon and more in step with it on the question of having a functional, egalitarian, pluralistic society."

The last 2 paragraphs of "The ‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist and the Durability of White-Flight Thinking" by Charles Blow (in the NYT).

The population of California "dropped by more than 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022."

The L.A. Times reports.

We're told that "experts" attribute the sharpness of the decline to the pandemic, given the "high housing costs... long commutes... crowds, crime and pollution" and the new freedom to work remotely.

The experts, we're told, think the "rate of the exodus may now be slowing as the pandemic’s effects ease."

"I couldn’t really picture that weight. It’s like five circus elephants. Or 50-something grand pianos."

"It was a beautiful tree, it really was, but I kind of have a difficult feeling about it right now."

Said Eben Burgoon, after a 65,000-pound redwood fell on his house, quoted in "Trees were a California city’s salvation. Now they’re a grave threat" (WaPo).

Sacramento was once called "the 'city of Plains' because of its treeless vistas," but it became "The City of Trees" after the humans worked to develop a lush, shady canopy. But:

"[A]s of Jan. 1, we Californians will be able to jaywalk to a film audition, jaywalk to buy pot, jaywalk to meet an angel investor for a start-up, jaywalk for hot baby yoga classes..."

"... jaywalk for the benefit of paparazzi alerted earlier about where and when the jaywalking will occur, and jaywalk to any of the countless California-centric pastimes that the rest of the country finds so amusing. Or we might jaywalk across the street just to get to the other side.... [A]n enterprising individual can shoplift goods worth up to $950 without worrying about being tagged with a felony. Parking in L.A. is always a pain; if you’re hotfooting it out of a Macy’s or Target with an armful of pilfered goods, your ability to jaywalk worry-free to your getaway car is a cultural advantage right up there with being able to make a right turn on a red light. On a more serious note, the Freedom to Walk Act is a social-justice victory. As the bill’s author, state Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) told CBS Bay Area news, jaywalking laws 'are arbitrarily enforced and tickets are disproportionately given to people of color and in low-income communities.'"

From "California greenlights jaywalking. It’s a step in the right direction" (WaPo).

Yeah, don't have a law you're not willing to enforce equally against everyone. We don't want chaos, but you've got to draw the line where you'd want it enforced against you and the people you personally favor. 

6 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. People in 5 different countries show what they would make with an orange.

2. How well could you do if you had to adapt to walking on all fours?

3. Hiking from one coast of Scotland to the other.

4. A West Coast Trail hike.

5. What it's like being one of the infinite monkeys who will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.

6. The history of Roland the Farter.

"To distinguish themselves from NIMBYs, the current generation of housing activists has adopted new 'back yard' variants (YIMBY, 'Yes in my backyard'; PHIMBY, 'Public housing in my backyard'; YIGBY, 'Yes in God’s backyard')..."

"... to declare how they are for things (everything, subsidized housing, building on church parking lots) that a NIMBY presumably is not.... [Governor Gavin Newsom said] 'NIMBYism is destroying the state.' .... Encoded in YIMBY ideology is a belief that the best thing to do with NIMBYs is discard them. But since the successes of one generation become the burdens of another, they should first understand them.... Susan Kirsch was partial to 'Small Is Beautiful,' which was published in 1973 by the economist E.F. Schumacher. The book cast doubt on a growth-at-all costs mentality.... 'Part of how it influences me is I think greater self-reliance and self-resiliency are qualities that keep a community or culture strong,' Ms. Kirsch said of the book. 'And the trends we have now, with being able to have efficacy in your own life, is part of what I think is being diminished.'... Environmental activists came to define themselves by what they could stop.... Marin County, a woodsy enclave that sits across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, enacted some of the strictest growth control measures in the country — proudly.... Today Marin County is the most segregated county in the Bay Area."

From "Twilight of the NIMBY/Suburban homeowners like Susan Kirsch are often blamed for worsening the nation’s housing crisis. That doesn’t mean she’s giving up her two-decade fight against 20 condos" by Conor Dougherty (NYT).

I didn't notice that the acronym "NIMBY" had come to refer not only to the attitude but to the person with that attitude.

"I live in Los Angeles. Everyday I witness filth and disease laden encampments. What I see with my own eyes are people living in squalor..."

"... who are either drug addicted or mentally ill. Los Angeles does not have an affordable housing problem nearly as much as a mental health and drug addiction crisis. The status quo is not acceptable. It is hardly humane to enable people to suffer in illness and addiction as if it is somehow that’s a life style choice. Local residents and businesses are totally fed up. Governor Newsom’s CARE court approach is worth a try, along with a new mayor who actually is committed to solving the root causes of the problem."

And:

"At this point, I’m beyond caring what type of housing or treatment or support the tent camping homeless get (as long as it’s compassionate, not abusive). It’s simply long past time to insist that sidewalks, parks, beaches be returned to the general public, for ordinary use. No more camping, period."

Those are the 2 highest-rated comments on a Washington Post column titled "Forcing homeless people into treatment can backfire. What about a firm nudge? California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed Care Courts have set off a debate about civil rights and human needs." It's by Neil Gong and Alex V. Barnard,  "sociologists who have studied California’s public mental health system."