California is now and always has been the frontier of the American continent, its booming industries built on forever expansion. What happens when the frontier comes to an end? redford writes
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux In 2018, Gavin Newsom ascended to the governorship of California with an unprecedented mandate.
For almost two centuries, California has been built on extractive industry, industrialized agriculture, and, most importantly these days, real estate. But the gold’s all gone now, the money from the tech boom has been mostly hoarded, and the Central Valley heartland is becoming increasingly dystopian, thanks to the megadrought and global-warming–amplified wildfires.
This is only one of several oddities about the election. The signature-gathering campaign would have fallen well short if Trump-appointed conservative judge James P. Arguelles hadn’t granted a five-month extension to the campaign, which was being represented by Arguelles’s former partner Bradley Benbrook. Voters have two questions on their ballots, a Yes/No on the question of whether to recall Newsom and then an option to choose one of 46 candidates to serve as governor if Newsom is recalled.
A somewhat similar dynamic is playing out this time around — which brings us to Randy Economy. Like Hogue before him, Economy is an AM-radio yeller who’s leveraged the loss of his right eye into a persona as a “superhero pirate” who can “spot fake news a mile away.” He lives in the Coachella Valley, and before he started devoting an alleged “17 hours per day” to juicing the recall effort, he spent a few decades flitting back and forth across the line between local journalism and local politics.
Elder has been a prominent libertarian AM-radio host since 1993, and he’s used his platform to cast a skeptical eye toward global warming, rail against women’s rights, and let COVID conspiracists take center stage. He’s taken money from the far-right Epoch Times, and even the state’s leading Republicans are like, “Go home, man.” Elder has also been accused of brandishing a gun at an ex-girlfriend during an argument in 2015.
Take the fires, for example. Gavin Newsom did not personally doom California to a drier, smokier future. He did not make the choice to mangle fire management by militarizing it rather than ignoring centuries of effective Native mitigation and prescriptive burn strategies, or start the practice of using incarcerated people as an essentially free labor force .
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