Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. A journalist for nearly three decades, he began by covering international business in 1990, was founding editor and publisher of Village Voice Media’s OC (Orange County) Weekly, and editor of Watchdog.org, a national network of investigative reporters. Will graduated summa cum laude (in journalism and with honors in theology) from the University of Southern California. He earned an MA in history from UC Irvine where he was a California Regents Fellow. A seventh-generation Californian, he has written extensively about California business, media, politics and religion, and is the winner of several print journalism awards and a Southern California Broadcasters Golden Mike award for public affairs commentary. With CPC board member David Bahnsen, he hosts National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and National Review.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. To contact Will, email him at will@calpolicycenter.org. You can also follow him on Twitter @WillSwaim.
California’s governor tries — and fails — to blame the state’s homelessness epidemic on someone, anyone else. Confronting yet another calamitous state budget deficit, California Governor Gavin Newsom took time last week to blast the real public enemies: Donald Trump and someone called Amy Bublak. You know Trump. His tariffs have indeed produced volatility in the stock...
By Will Swaim
Times are tough in Orange Unified, Orange County’s fourth-largest school district. Already facing a years-long decline in state funding that followed the district’s plummeting enrollment, school officials in June 2024 nevertheless agreed to a teachers union demand for a 10 percent pay hike. Union officials celebrated – but only briefly. In September, internal documents show,...
By Will Swaim
President Trump has pushed aside Governor Gavin Newsom and driven the nation’s most populous state toward something approaching sanity. President Trump’s (second) first 100 days have generated some amount of horse excrement. It’s hard to see how it serves Trump’s interests to anger allies in advance of a trade war with China, to drive the economy into...
By Will Swaim
Biden’s wannabe labor secretary brought one of California’s worst workforce ideas to the entire country. There’s much harrumphing in the media about President Donald Trump’s penchant for norm-busting, but he’s hardly the first to engage in it. Under President Joe Biden, the media generally cheered student loan forgiveness, talk of packing or ignoring the Supreme Court,...
By Will Swaim
A bill that would allow state residents to sue private companies for restitution is only the latest front in California’s ongoing war on oil producers. L.A.’s wildfires are still burning, but that hasn’t stopped anyone with eyeballs from identifying the likely causes: America’s costliest natural disaster isn’t “natural,” really, or not entirely. It is, in fact, the...
By Will Swaim
History repeats itself, Karl Marx wrote, “First as tragedy, then as farce.” But he didn’t say what happens the third time, when tragic farce strikes again and the whole benighted process repeats itself. Take the case of Julie Su, President Joe Biden’s acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor. In the past four years,...
By Will Swaim
They may not care much about education, but give teacher union leaders in the city of Orange, California, credit for speed and political ingenuity. Shortly after a successful March recall campaign in which leaders of the Orange Unified Education Association replaced two conservatives with two union-backed trustees, the newly configured board promptly awarded teachers a...
By Will Swaim
We don’t generally discuss national politics here at CPC World HQ – we’ve got our hands full dealing with Gov. Gavin Newsom and his confederacy of dunces in the state capitol. But let’s acknowledge some of President-elect Donald Trump’s great choices for key administration positions – including Scott Bessent at Treasury, Chris Wright at Energy,...
By Will Swaim
Early this week I was in Menlo Park, “The Capital of Venture Capital.” It’s a place so lovely, leafy and wealthy, so obviously preserved in amber by anti-growth regulation, that it might have been created by Walt Disney. It’s America’s real California Adventure. Coming down the elevator of my jewel-box hotel in the city’s Tiffany...
By Will Swaim
Presiding over the decline of California’s public schools ain’t enough, so California schools chief Tony Thurmond wants to enter the real estate game, building 2.3 million homes on public land for the benefit of teachers. He’ll fail in that endeavor. But building millions of homes for teachers isn’t really Thurmond’s goal. His real purpose in...
By Will Swaim
There’s been much speculation about the financial damage to California following Elon Musk’s high-profile exit from the Golden State announced Tuesday. But there’s more — and more deeply — unsettling news about California: A state auditor tells National Review that California’s economic fundamentals are so unstable that he’s unable to predict repayment of a key federal loan. “Our earlier...
By Will Swaim
Though he’s still banging the drum for Joe Biden, California governor Gavin Newsom is fading from White House consideration in 2024. But 2028 is still in sight. And because four years is an eternity — in politics, for dogs’ lives, and to your average five-year-old kid — it’s good to mark now the governor’s problems...
By Will Swaim
The state will continue to operate as an island in the land. The Supreme Court’s 6–2 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which ended the Chevron precedent, sparked something like hysterical vomiting among California reporters and columnists and progressive legal scholars. “An earthquake in U.S. law,” attorney Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, called it....
By Will Swaim
Gavin Newsom promised Californians there’d be no new taxes to fix the state’s historic deficit. One new tax is already squeezing the state’s businesses. Confronting the nation’s largest-ever state budget deficit, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has been throwing overboard almost every government program not tied to a legal mandate. Despite progressive demands, he’s sounding for once...
By Will Swaim
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