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.
The California governor embraces the tech’s possibilities with one hand, imposes a mountain of regulations with the other. On a single day last week, Gavin Newsom showed that he remains one of the nation’s great political athletes, executing a Summer Olympics–grade threading of the artificial intelligence needle. All on September 9, the California governor attempted...
By Will Swaim
Teacher union activists are like dogs that chase cars—they wouldn’t know what to do if they caught one. Take the recent case of Darshan Smaaladen, a teacher union ally in the Orange Unified School District in Orange County. Trying to protect union-friendly board incumbents in the heat of a political campaign that ends November 3,...
By Will Swaim
A former aide who served and defended two disastrous DAs now offers advice on urban governance. Alex Bastian has lived and worked in California’s two most important cities, and he has advice for Los Angeles: Be more like San Francisco. San Francisco “is my hometown,” he wrote recently in The Hill, while Los Angeles “has been my...
By Will Swaim
Archaeological evidence and 16th-century Spanish accounts show that the Aztecs of Central Mexico sacrificed children to appease the rain god Tlaloc. Appalled by the ritual, one of those Spaniards, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, reported that Aztec priests regarded the terrified children’s tears as a favorable omen, believing their abundant weeping foretold abundant rainfall and...
By Will Swaim
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in the space of 365 days, in one of history’s best two-for-one deals, the world got Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence. There’s a third reason to celebrate 1776. That same year, on November 1 – All Saints Day for the liturgically inclined – the...
By Will Swaim
When I told a friend recently that I was sorry to hear she was getting a divorce, she replied, “You wouldn’t be sorry if you really knew my husband.” When I admitted that I knew him but not really, she followed with a painfully detailed catalog of his offenses and promised that I’d get an...
By Will Swaim
By now, almost every Californian with eyeballs and a memory of the recent past can tell you the story of the failed High-Speed Rail – how voters in 2008 approved a roughly $33 billion project to carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in lightning speed beginning in 2020. We’re six years past that...
By Will Swaim
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
a new form will got here