Will Swaim is CEO 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 CEO of the California Policy Center. To contact Will, email him at will@calpolicycenter.org. You can also follow him on Twitter @WillSwaim.
California’s teacher unions aren’t accustomed to losing elections, but they’ve lost control of the Orange County Board of Education, the state’s third largest county board. In just five election cycles, the Orange County board slipped the grip of teachers unions, and is now a 5-0 board of average citizens laser-focused on student achievement and parent rights....
By Will Swaim
An adverse legal ruling by a federal court in Texas may mean legal trouble for California Attorney General Rob Bonta in more than one way. The Texas court’s decision not only allows Exxon to continue to prosecute a serious defamation lawsuit against Bonta, but a key finding by that court may also implicate him in...
By Will Swaim
It’s been an amazing week in California news, both for what’s in it as well as what’s not. The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that sex-assault claims are so widespread in Los Angeles Unified schools that board members took a break from their liquidation of the bourgeoisie to ask Evil Wall Street bankers to...
By Will Swaim
California’s scandal dwarfs Minnesota’s. Tim Walz perp-walked himself out of the Minnesota governor’s race this past week, beset by evidence that fraudsters have plundered his state’s federally funded food, housing, daycare, and Medicaid programs. It’s “what has been described as the nation’s largest COVID-era scheme,” says Fox News, with the U.S. attorney in Minnesota estimating “the fraud...
By Will Swaim
During this week’s Radio Free California podcast, cohosts David Bahnsen and myself discussed the return of the Monroe Doctrine, now offered as the logic behind the Trump administration’s decision to blow up Venezuelan drug boats and to invite that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to step outside. It’s unlikely most Americans know that the doctrine, which President James Monroe...
By Will Swaim
The real story is not ‘climate change.’ Most good news editors, whether they admit it or not, believe themselves Michelangelo’s heirs — men and women who chisel off the unnecessary bits of a reporter’s copy in order to reveal the angel within. Sadly, the Los Angeles Times often seems bereft of these judicious hacks. Take, for instance, a...
By Will Swaim
And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. California has a problem with antisemitism in its public schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to...
By Will Swaim
Politico: “Why Sacramento is fighting over antisemitism in schools” CPC’s answer: Because the California Teacher Association (CTA) would rather yell about foreign policy than answer for its documented failure to educate California’s students. To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach – and those who can’t teach math or writing fall back on...
By Will Swaim
The British philosopher G.K. Chesterton is most famous for his mystery series featuring Father Brown, a Catholic priest who moonlights as a detective. But geeks also rightly honor his anti-populist defense of time-honored principles neatly summed up in what we’ve come to call Chesterton’s Fence. Chesterton (1874–1936) put it this way: if you’re walking through a forest...
By Will Swaim
California’s first Fourth of July was celebrated in the rugged hills of present-day San Bernardino, when the region was still under Mexican rule. On that day in 1842, Daniel Sexton, a Louisiana-born carpenter and early American settler, raised an American flag and celebrated Independence Day with an unlikely group: Native Americans of the local Cahuilla...
By Will Swaim
SEIU California expands its membership and its coffers by trying to bring open borders. The week’s riots in Los Angeles kicked off with the June 6 arrest of David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union’s California chapter. You might expect a union boss to favor immigration enforcement in the name of protecting his members’...
By Will Swaim
All social movements require a patron saint. Californians who support illegal immigration believe they have theirs: David Huerta, president of the state’s Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. Federal officers in Los Angeles arrested Huerta during a protest outside a business where ICE was executing a search warrant Friday — just one skirmish in what...
By Will Swaim
A bill to allow more time to track down and file charges for these massive fraud schemes is languishing in the Senate. For all of the five-year remembrances of Covid-19, few have paused to recall the cyber smash-and-grab that hoovered billions of dollars out of state unemployment offices. Inmates in California grabbed thousands of dollars from prison library...
By Will Swaim
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
a new form will got here