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In Fool’s Gold, authors Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter reference the Radicals and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. The new book contains material about Kamala Harris, Willie Brown and such, but the central character is Gavin Newsom. As it turns out, the coiffed California governor, with ties to the Brown, Pelosi and Getty families, is key to the battles the Left is now escalating. Central to the story is Vincent Lo, chairman of the Shui On Group, a large China developer.
In 2006, Lo hosted San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom in Shanghai and the pair “hatched a long-term plan to turn San Francisco into the premier gateway through which Chinese companies could invest and expand their businesses in the United States.” Newsom set up “a public-private partnership called ChinaSF that would open the floodgates to Chinese money and business like never before.” Three years later, “Newsom and Lo joined forces in Shanghai to co-launch ChinaSF.” As the authors note, conditions were favorable.
Before the Golden State opened an official trade office with China, it appears San Francisco had three, and no other US city, or even state, had as many “China offices” as San Francisco. A prime mover was Gavin Newsom, a bullhorn for the left’s standard narrative.
“The self-evident fact is that China will clean our clocks in terms of addressing the green economy if we don’t wake up to the opportunity to do the same,” Newsom told a press conference in 2010. “China gets it, the United States needs to wake up.” Like Lincoln Steffens on Stalin’s USSR, Gavin Newsom had seen the future and it works, and it wasn’t just rhetoric. As Fool’s Gold notes, “ChinaSF has been operating as de-facto satellite of the mayor’s office in Shanghai since at least 2011,” and that reality has consequences.
“In effect, this private funding mechanism prioritized streamlined services for Chinese companies while shielding them from the oversight and accountability that local companies faced while taking part in a government program.” ChinaSF was “structured to operate as some kind of hybrid international joint venture between the mayor’s office and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce,” so “Newsom and subsequent mayors could personally involve themselves in every deal without having to answer for any conflict of interest.”
By late 2018, the authors explain, “ChinaSF had expanded and evolved into an actual 501(c) 3 nonprofit called GlobalSF, registered a few weeks after Newsom was elected governor.” For its part, ChinaSF “became an official partner of California’s newly formed China Trade and Investment Network, which operates directly out of Gov. Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development, also known as GO-Biz.”
In other words, “somehow, stealthily, Gavin had managed to drag his signature program along with him as he ascended in state politics, and then embed it into the operational structure of California’s bureaucracy.” (emphasis added) So no surprise that in 2018 ChinaSF was “exploring ways to take part in the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China” and even recruited the Communist regime’s China Daily to the Bay Area. Newsom called the PRC propaganda organ an “important media organization.”
ChinaSF “is the branded name of a complex bureaucratic mirage used as a cover to legitimize the massive transfer of Bay Area technology, property and wealth to China while streamlining the establishment of Chinese business in the United States.” For all but the willfully blind, Gavin Newsom is an agent of the People’s Republic of China. Should that be doubted, consider his actions during the Covid pandemic, sourced in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
California was the first state to impose rigid lockdowns and in March, 2020, Gov. Newsom issued a stay-at-home order and mask mandates. The following month, he announced a no-bid $1 billion deal for masks with the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD), and as the authors note, “refused to release details to legislature.” Gov. Newsom demanded that, when dining, Californians “keep your mask on in between bites,” but the governor and his pals partied sans masks at the upscale French Laundry.
As Fool’s Gold notes, in the summer of 2020, Newsom closed beach parking lots but the governor “allowed Black Lives Matter to hold protests there.” Newsom ordered churches to “stop holding in-person services” and some were “fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.” As readers should know, it was much worse.
Newsom’s orders for holiday gatherings warned against singing, chanting and even the playing of musical instruments. Cops busted solitary paddleboarders and Newsom even proposed a delay on the fishing season. The lockdowns forced many Californians out of work and the state Employment Development Department (EDD) shelled out $188 billion in unemployment benefits, with “$31 billion going to fraudsters,” some of them convicted murderers whose sentences Newsom had reprieved. While this went down, “TikTok donated $300,000 at Newsom’s behest to a nonprofit promoting pandemic lockdowns and mask mandates,” as the authors note, one of those “behested payments” some states don’t allow.
Newsom did not lift the mask mandates until March 1, 2022. That year, state senator Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat, authored SB-1084 the Food and Farm Security Act requiring the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to complete an annual report on ownership of agricultural land, water rights and other assets. The state Assembly and Senate passed the measure, promptly vetoed by Gov. Newsom. The governor claimed it would be “arduous” for the CDFA to complete this task but the authors aren’t fooled: “The bill would thwart future plans of Chinese collaboration he [Newsom] had in mind.”
Could such close collaboration with the People’s Republic of China pose any kind of security threat? The authors track down Newsom’s statement on the matter:
Obviously that generates a lot of headlines and concerns. We always need to be considerate of those things. . . but that doesn’t mean that because you’ve had some bad experiences or there’s a general climate of concern that you just give up and walk away. Those that do will pay the price in the future. We’ve got to keep at it. . . China gets it in a very pragmatic way. There is just no other choice.
And so on. According to The Black Book of Communism, the PRC is responsible for 60 million murders, surpassing Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. If the Stalinist PRC ever did anything with which Gavin Newsom disagreed, it’s hard to know what it might be.
As Fool’s Gold notes, in 2012 San Francisco hosted a torch rally for the Beijing Olympics. but Mayor Newsom changed the route to avoid the human rights protesters. In similar style in 2023, Gov. Newsom cleaned up San Francisco for the visit of Xi Jinping, taking care to wall off any protesters of the PRC regime. This took place in a state already allowing China to build critical infrastructure.
For the new span of the Bay Bridge, California Democrats rejected US funding and hired a Chinese company that at the time had never built a bridge. The poorly designed project, built with Chinese steel and labor, came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and riddled with safety issues.
Gov. Newsom is now panting to extend CaliforniaPRC coast to coast, and as the authors say, that “threatens us all.” For discerning readers in high places, the book shows the way ahead.
Gavin Newsom should be made to register as an official agent of the PRC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The semi-literate Newsom, a lot like Joe Biden, is hardly the only candidate.
Members of Congress and government officials who allow unvetted foreign nationals into the country, and waste Americans’ tax dollars on their support, must register as agents of Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, and so forth. The same standard applies to groups such as the ACLU, pro-bono lawyers for the Tren de Aragua gang, and the racist National Council of La Raza, now calling itself UnidosUS.
While registering these groups and persons as agents of the regimes they represent, Congress should impeach corrupt district court judges like James Boasberg now “trying to usurp the responsibility of the president in the national security area,” according to former attorney general William Barr.
Impeaching corrupt judges, and applying FARA to agents of foreign regimes, will serve as strategic weapons of the people moving forward.