My Cancellation Only Proves My Point about California’s Illiberalism

E very year, the Valley Industry & Commerce Association, a Los Angeles chamber-of-commerce group, hosts “VICApalooza,” a fun- and fact-filled conference about the state of the economy. Among the “nationally recognized speakers” would have been me — Will Swaim! — serving in a minor role, on a panel discussing November 5’s statewide ballot initiatives.

Invited a month ago, I was looking forward to a reasoned debate today with my co-panelists, including state Democratic Party chairman Rusty Hicks. Multiple emails and prep calls ensued.

And then a VICA executive told me by phone that my appearance at VICApalooza “is no longer required.”

You see, in between the invite and the cancellation, I had spoken to VICA’s much smaller, monthly legislative committee meeting. That’s where I allegedly offended some VICA members. The apparent reason for the dis-invitation: During my remarks to the committee, the VICA exec informed me, I had endorsed rape and exhibited hostility toward LGBTQ people.

It hardly seems necessary to say that both claims are absurd.

While VICA calls itself “the most powerful business group” in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, its membership includes not just entrepreneurs and business leaders but also a seemingly larger contingent of other “stakeholders” — nonprofit executives, political consultants, government agency leaders, and elected politicians and their staffers.

The real reason for my excommunication is likely that I offended them by highlighting for 30 minutes the malignant role of California’s government unions in crafting new laws that undermine freedom — in business and in our private lives.

My only reference to rape came in my two-minute opening to the legislative committee. For hundreds of thousands of years, I said, rape was a grim and terrifyingly routine feature of human societies — alongside war, torture, theft, and slavery. Citing the inimitable Jonah Goldberg, I said that a miraculous change came about 300 years ago. At that moment, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes could still look over our species’ history and declare that life is and, as far as Hobbes could see, always would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

But at about the same time, John Locke, Hobbes’s near-contemporary, could see a more hopeful future already emerging throughout Europe. In these bright spots of human flourishing, Locke observed a common principle at work: the belief in these rare places that “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”

I observed that we 30 or 40 people sitting in that conference room in a Van Nuys office building — men and women, young and old from a variety of different racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds — are the beneficiaries of the transformation that Locke first documented. It should go without saying — though I said it anyhow — that that moment in human history marked by the juxtaposition of Hobbes and Locke was the beginning of a world in which torture, theft, slavery, and rape are considered outrageous. Shedding some of the gravity of our own dark impulses, our species has prospered as never before.

That took about two minutes. I explained that my purpose in mentioning our collective dark past was to celebrate the promise of human freedom — and to establish the framework for my analysis of just a few of the hundreds of bills recently signed into law by California governor Gavin Newsom. Locke declared that “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” Newsom, I observed, not for the first time in his five years in office, had signed multiple bills that, in threatening freedom, nudge our species backward toward authoritarianism.

By way of example, I noted new oil-industry regulations. For years, Newsom has accused “Big Oil” of price-gouging Californians. Weirdly, that price-gouging occurs only in California; Newsom is unwilling to acknowledge that the state’s highest-in-the-nation gasoline prices are actually a function of existing state regulations and taxes. Ignoring all that, the governor this week signed a law that will require the state’s oil refiners to maintain massive oil inventories. The governor says that will serve as a hedge against future oil shortages that might generate gasoline-price spikes. He ignored the inflationary costs of building, maintaining, and guaranteeing the safety of these new fuel depots. And he ignored the fact that, at the very same time he was scribbling his name at the bottom of the bill, his own California Air Resources Board announced a proposal to further “de-carbonize” gasoline — a proposal that (the agency admits) will raise gas prices by as much as 65 cents per gallon. Less than a week after Newsom signed the bill, Phillips 66, one of the state’s biggest refiners, announced it will close its landmark Los Angeles facility for good.

I went on. Another new law, driven by the Service Employees International Union, will require janitorial-services companies to pay union-friendly nonprofits for sexual-harassment trainings — at a cost of $200 per employee. With good reason, I observed that these “trainings” will be a union boiler-room operation, an opportunity for SEIU to achieve its decades-long dream of a union of janitors. In another gift to unions, California will now ban employers from making “religious” or “political” statements to their employees — that is, it will ban employers’ free speech on their own property. Another new law requires that public-school officials hide from parents evidence of changes in their child’s on-campus behavior, including teacher-diagnosed gender dysphoria: Parents, the logic goes, are simply too reactionary, too violent to be trusted with the information that their child is struggling in puberty. That law is already the subject of multiple lawsuits.

Another new law, driven by anxiety about artificial intelligence and deepfakes, requires that political satire and parody in California be marked “satire” or “parody.” It turns out that our social betters believe that Californians are so addled that we require a government applause sign before laughing at a joke. Siding with a social-media entrepreneur, a federal judge has already blocked California from enforcing that law while he considers its First Amendment implications.

In the face of these and other new laws and rising taxes, I declared my admiration for the people in the room who run the businesses that produce the goods, services, jobs, and, yes, tax revenue that Californians expect. They run a gauntlet of regulatory ass-whoopings, legal threats, and fines, fees, and taxes. I noted that speaking out — defending themselves against regulators — comes with risk. I noted that the California Coastal Commission, one of more than 200 state agencies, has just denied the Pentagon’s request for additional SpaceX flights out of Vandenburg Space Force Base. The commission’s reason: More launches might enrich SpaceX owner Elon Musk, a man who says things that some commissioners find repellant.

My remarks thus ended, and the meeting closed with a few administrative matters and a reminder that VICApalooza was just a day and a half away. Tickets still available. “Nationally recognized expert” speakers. Thrilling discussions of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Afterward, a few businesspeople waited patiently to introduce themselves and to recount their own challenges with regulation. The phone call came the next morning.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, VICA paid for its microphone, so of course the group has every right to prohibit a guy like me from speaking to its members. But I’m a huge fan of irony: In my remarks I said that California law reveals an emerging and powerful authoritarian impulse that threatens some of the victories of the last 300 years. Those laws are not solely the responsibility of Gavin Newsom or the 120 members of the state legislature. Their origin point is in the broader culture. My cancellation would seem to prove my point.