Conservative activists staged a rally on the west steps of the California Capitol Sunday demanding a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, four years after a recall election failed and 11 months after the most recent attempt to recall him went kaput.
With one month until the deadline and 1 million signatures to go, activists tried to build momentum for Newsom’s ouster. About 80 people turned up for the Sacramento rally.
Before the speeches began, the event’s lead organizer, Edward Escobar of the Coalition for Community Engagement, asked the crowd to “congregate close in the seating area so that it doesn’t look so sparse.”
Newsom’s second and final term ends in January 2027. Last September, Rescue California announced it had failed to gather the necessary 1.3 million signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot. In 2021, another gubernatorial recall election failed before the voters, with 62% of them siding with Newsom and only 38% coming out against him. The 2021 election cost taxpayers $200 million.
Escobar addressed that issue, saying “a lot of times, the opposition brings up the cost of the recall. Well, the cost of the recall is nothing compared to the cost of the lives that are lost, and the communities that are lost, and the businesses that are lost. … What’s the cost of that? We’re talking about billions, billions of dollars.”
Speakers at the rally raised various concerns about Newsom’s administration.
They were critical of what they consider government overreach, as well as what they view as a lack of government response to the fires that tore through Los Angeles in January. One said that citizens do not have good enough health care, while undocumented immigrants’ health care is too good.
Another speaker, Ronald F. Owens Jr., railed against COVID-19 vaccines. Carol Pefley, who is running for a seat in the state Assembly, criticized Newsom for policies that allow parents and medical providers to decide whether children should receive gender-affirming treatment.
A few speakers invoked conspiratorial thinking.
One, the podcast host CharLee Simons, brought up Newsom’s story of witnessing someone shoplifting from a Target and then getting into a confrontation with a clerk who blamed the governor for the lack of shoplifting enforcement, without realizing she was speaking with the governor.
Simons posted footage of the governor’s comments online, and claimed that journalists didn’t report on it.
“Did you see any of that reporting on mainstream media news channels?” Simons asked. “No. Shocker.”
In fact, the news was reported in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, Politico, the Daily Mail and, among many other local outlets, The Sacramento Bee.
In addition to the current effort and the failure in 2021, the California Secretary of State lists six Newsom recall efforts that did not have enough support to qualify for the ballot.
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