A new book exposes how California’s leftist political machine is unraveling the Golden State—and, sadly, how socialist policies could be exported nationwide if Americans aren’t vigilant.
The book is “Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All,” co-authored by investigative journalists Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics and Jedd McFatter at the Government Accountability Institute.
“Violent crime is surging in California. Illegal drug use is off the charts, and it is subject to a daily invasion of illegal migrants crossing its southern border,” the authors write, mincing no words.
“Homeless addicts in once beautiful San Francisco shoot up, sleep, and defecate on its streets when they’re not stealing from what shops are still open in the city. Its economy is struggling. Tent cities block the sidewalks of Los Angeles as businesses leave the state’s crushing regulations, extortionate taxes, and unchecked property crime. Its police force is demoralized by negligent ‘Soros prosecutors’ who turn repeat criminals loose. Its universities, always a source of foment and dissent, have metastasized into playthings and espionage targets for America’s greatest adversary—the communist regime of China.”
“Fool’s Gold” is timely, given that polling shows two of the top five potential 2028 Democratic presidential primary contenders hail from California—former Vice President Kamala Harris (a former San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general) and former San Francisco mayor and current California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom is currently running an image-rehabilitation podcast after botching the fatal wildfires that ravaged his state earlier this year.
McFatter and Crabtree, a California resident and my former colleague at The Hill newspaper, also dig into Newsom’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party and his involvement in corruption. The book describes a nonprofit organization initiative started by Newsom called ChinaSF, which the authors report served as a gateway for Chinese Communist Party officials and Chinese criminals to exploit California.
“Fool’s Gold” is already having an impact, with Newsom publicly denying the book’s claim that he secretly funded a controversial City Hall bronze statue of his own bust.
The statue commemorates Newsom’s stint as mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. Newsom used what’s known as “behested payments” to fund the monument, with a reported three private organizations donating to the nonprofit designated for “Mayoral Bust at San Francisco City Hall.”
“Fool’s Gold” reports two of the three reported companies are companies owned by Newsom: Balboa Cafe Partners and PlumpJack Management Group donated a combined $10,000 to the $97,000 bust fund.
“We 100% stand by our Gavin Newsom bronze-bust vanity project story,” Crabtree replied on X in response to Newsom’s claim that the donations were not secret. “Team Newsom is afraid of the shocking revelations in FOOL’S GOLD—which is backed by more than forty-five pages of endnotes containing more than 1,000 open-source, reputable, and verifiable citations with zero anonymous sources—and that is why they are trying to smear this book.”
Crabtree also said “Newsom’s team has thus far refused to answer whether his companies got a tax break for funding this ‘charitable’ statue.”
“Fool’s Gold” also explains how Newsom’s horrific release of thousands of prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic created a huge spike in crime throughout the state. Its impact is still felt today as residents and businesses continue to flee California for better-managed red states, such as Texas and Florida.
It’s no wonder, in light of a new report from the United Ways of California finding that 35% of households across the state—more than 3.8 million—are struggling to cover basic living expenses.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity noted that a 2024 national survey found only 15% of respondents felt that California was a model for other states
The Public Policy Institute of California also found that only 1 in 3 Californians think the state is a good place to achieve the American dream.
McFatter and Crabtree pithily sum up the problem of exporting California’s policies nationwide: “if the fifty states are still America’s ‘laboratories of democracy,’ California is the Wuhan Institute.”
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice and author of “Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”
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