California’s thoroughly terrible governor, Gavin Newsom, survived his recall election by joining the state’s captive news media in calling a black challenger a racist and a white supremacist. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said, but there so much more. For example, a woman in a gorilla mask, which would clearly have been interpreted as a racial slur if that black challenger had been a Democrat, pelted the accused white supremacist with eggs without any outrage being expressed by major California publications. There is still more…

• California’s recall law is itself a looming travesty waiting to happen. Responsible states elect officials to office for a set term, evaluate them on that basis, and then either re-elect them or not. If an official violates the law or otherwise proves so corrupt and untrustworthy that impeachment is called for, that process is available. A system that allows citizens to just gather names of disgruntled people at a low point in a governor’s administration to trigger a free-for-all election in which a duly elected executive must run against assorted demagogues, celebrities freaks and wackos is incompetent and juvenile—but then this is California.
• Newsom is an arrogant and incompetent ideologue and an unethical man. You can read the Ethics Alarms dossier on him here, but I confess, I stopped paying close attention to him a while ago. He was an unethical Lt. Governor and an unethical mayor of San Francisco, but if Californians won’t learn—they appear to be getting worse— they deserve to suffer the consequences of their ignorance and stupidity or start being responsible in regularly scheduled governor elections, like, say, in New York. OK, that’s a bad example; I meant Virginia. Oops, I misspoke…Washington? Oregon? Michigan? Wisconsin…wow, this country sure has a lot of terrible governors right now.
• The last successful recall ended up with California electing an Austrian immigrant body-builder whose one useful political skill was experience as an actor. All he was good for was being the butt of bad jokes about his accent, back when such mockery wasn’t decreed politically incorrect by the California woke. Actually, maybe such jokes are still OK in the Golden State if they are made about Republicans, I haven’t looked into it. This time, the most prominent challengers to the governor at risk were  a former Olympics champion transexual who co-starred in “Meet the Kardashians,” and  Larry Elder, a talk show host. Talk show hosts have no experience to justify running for governor of a huge, complex state like California. California’s former Attorney General, Kamala Harris, who is wildly unqualified to be Vice-President, is still better qualified to take Newsom’s job than Elder.
• When polls indicated that Elder might beat Newsom, Democrats resorted to playing the race card, as ridiculous as that was, against a black man, and began fear-mongering to its Trump Derangement marinated population by using the former President’s name like it was Hitler, Simon Legree or Beelzebub.  It worked, because Californians are so far gone they’ll believe anything. The race became Newsom vs. Elder and Trump, instead of about Newsom’s  gubernatorial tenure, which is self-evidently awful, most recently demonstrated by the revelation of $30 billion in pandemic relief fraud  and his skirting his own edicts when it pleased him, such as by dining unmasked at an exclusive restaurant with lobbyists during the lockdown.
• “If the recall were simply a referendum on his record, Newsom would have a big problem,” Claremont McKenna College professor John Pitney Jr. said in his recent analysis. “But he successfully framed it as a choice between a Democrat and a Trump-worshiping extremist Republican.” Wait; what makes someone an “extremist Republican”? Surely not supporting Trump, since Trump isn’t a Republican except in name. Does supporting the rule of law make a Republican an extremist? Newsom certainly doesn’t: as mayor, he allowed same sex marriages when they were illegal; as governor, he has blocked the arrest of illegal immigrants. Or is it extremist to believe in the Bill of Rights? Newsom has made it clear that he would ban guns completely if the courts let him. Maybe it’s believing in Equal Protection of the law that makes one an “extremist,” as California’s Democrats support racist and sexist quotas wherever they can get away with them.

In short, California is an ethics wasteland, and no recall was going to fix that no matter who won.