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The Hedge-Fund Arsonist Now Campaigning as California’s Savior
Who is the most insufferable figure in California? For most conservatives, Gavin Newsom’s name instantly floats to mind: the hair, the smirk, the plastic piety, the barely disguised White House fantasies. But lurking behind the governor’s lacquered mane is someone arguably worse. A man who helped break California long before Newsom realized a good hair day could excuse a bad decade.
His name is Tom Steyer.
You almost have to admire the nerve. Almost.
Steyer is the billionaire hedge-fund alum turned full-time climate scold, now running for governor on a platform of “affordability” and “fairness.” If that sounds like arsonists for fire chief, you’re not far off. For years, Steyer has treated California as his personal policy playground. He poured his fortune into the very measures that sent the cost of living into the stratosphere, then turned around and announced that he, of all people, is here to fix it. (RELATED: Bill Gates and the Redemption Racket)
You almost have to admire the nerve. Almost.
Most Americans first met Steyer in 2020, squinting at the television and wondering why a man who looked like a nervous substitute teacher was spending a fortune to lose the Democratic presidential primary.
But his real damage wasn’t done on a debate stage. It was done in California’s ballot initiatives and back rooms.
Back in 2010, when ordinary Californians were still trying to cling to something resembling affordable energy, Steyer opened the checkbook. He bankrolled the effort to kill Prop 23, which would have rolled back the state’s sweeping climate law, AB 32. That law baked cap-and-trade, low-carbon fuel rules, and aggressive renewable mandates into the state’s DNA. Voters, bombarded by green advertising funded by people like Steyer, voted it down. (RELATED: California’s Hypocrisy on Property Rights)
Fast-forward to today. California’s electricity rates are about 33 percent higher than the national average. Across America, many people are paying more at the pump. But Californians are paying the most, by a margin wide enough to make the rest of the country almost grateful for their own misery. In-state oil production has collapsed while production elsewhere has surged. Manufacturing jobs are vanishing. But Tom Steyer now peers into the camera and laments that “Californians deserve a life they can afford.” (RELATED: No, Trump Isn’t Raising Your Electricity Bill)
They did. Then he got involved.
This is the pattern: he makes a fortune in coal and finance, buys moral absolution by attacking fossil fuels, and forces working families to pay the bill for his newfound virtue. What looks like climate policy is closer to class war in recycled packaging. The wealthy green set feel good. The working and middle classes get higher bills and fewer jobs. (RELATED: Solar Plant Closure Is Latest Sign California’s Green Agenda Isn’t Working)
Steyer’s mischief doesn’t stop at energy. In 2012, he championed a corporate tax change sold as “fairness” but designed with surgical precision. Under his preferred formula, companies must pay California’s corporate tax based on the share of their national sales that touch the state. Move your headquarters to Texas, shrink your payroll in Los Angeles, cut your property footprint in San Diego — it doesn’t matter. If a fifth of your sales happen in California, Sacramento wants a fifth of your profit.
Steyer spun this as closing loopholes and making corporations pay their fair share. In reality, it sent a very simple message to employers: leave if you like, we will still clip you on the way out. Many left anyway. Schwab, Tesla, Chevron, countless smaller firms — out the door they went, taking jobs and investment with them.
And now the architect of this mess is running for governor on affordability.
You don’t need a degree in economics to see the pattern. California’s energy gets more expensive. Its tax code gets more punitive. Its regulatory climate becomes more suffocating. Businesses bolt, wages lag the rest of the country, and the working poor are crushed between high rents and high utility bills. Then Tom Steyer steps forward, eyes full of concern, to explain that greedy corporations and heartless Republicans are to blame — and that only more of his ideas can save the day. (RELATED: Bill Gates Has Discovered Something More Profitable Than the Climate Apocalypse)
There’s a particular kind of progressive billionaire that thrives on the West Coast: wealthy enough never to feel the consequences of his own ideas, self-righteous enough to impose those ideas on everyone else.
It would be funny if millions of people weren’t paying for it every month in their electric bills and grocery receipts.
There’s a particular kind of progressive billionaire that thrives on the West Coast: wealthy enough never to feel the consequences of his own ideas, self-righteous enough to impose those ideas on everyone else. Steyer is the San Francisco specimen in its purest form. He made his money in the very system he now denounces, then spends that money promoting policies that guarantee no one behind him can climb the same ladder.
And like so many in his class, he has developed a talent for projection. When he says that “the richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves,” he’s really describing his own crowd — people who want to lock in their gains and choke off competition under the banners of “climate justice” and “equity.”
The dark joke, of course, is that he may actually believe he’s the hero here. That’s almost more frightening than simple cynicism.
Even Californians who can’t stand Gavin Newsom should be careful what they wish for. Newsom is vanity in a suit; Steyer is ideology with a checkbook. Newsom craves cameras and cocktail parties. Steyer prefers binding the state to long-term schemes that raise costs and export the California disease wherever he can. They’re both bad — spectacularly bad — but Steyer edges into a darker category. For those who think Newsom is the worst of the worst, perhaps you’re right. But hell does have a basement. And Steyer is probably down there drawing blueprints.
READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:
A Passionate Defense of Christian Nationalism
The Slow Suffocation of Christian America
God in the Age of Pronouns: Father, Mother, or Neither?
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