Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Friday requiring large companies that operated before 1965 to comb their archives for connections to slavery going back to 1849, and to publish whatever they find. He did it on camera, during the opening of his own podcast, as a lead-in to an interview with Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.
“Before we get into my episode with Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, some news reflecting on our conversation,” Newsom said. “He got me thinking a lot about a lot of issues and I think he’ll get you thinking as well.”
“I have a bill in front of me, privileged to have this opportunity, a bill in front of me that I’m signing quite literally right now,” he continued, “this is a bill that requires large companies that operated before 1965 to search their records for ties to slavery going back to 1849. And then we make it public. These are insurance policies on enslaved people, human beings used as collateral, quite literally collateral for loans.”
“Accountability, as Bryan said, starts with truth, and that’s what the two of us got into: what repair actually looks like,” Newsom added.
Let's start with the Democrat Party. That's the only California institution that has real ties to slavery.
— pugster (@pugster92475174) October 2, 2026
Consider the staging. Not a ceremony in Sacramento with legislators and advocates. A content segment. A governor signing legislation as a cold open, because the signature was the hook for the episode.
That isn’t sound policymaking. That is a man building a primary campaign, and the audience isn’t in Fresno. It’s in South Carolina, where a Democratic presidential nomination gets decided and where this exact material plays well. California is simply the set.
Now the substance, which has its own problems. The mandate reaches back 177 years and applies to institutions whose current employees were born a century after the conduct in question. Records from the 1850s, where they exist at all, sit in warehouses, county archives, and the files of predecessor firms absorbed through a dozen mergers. Producing them means paying lawyers and historians to conduct a forensic audit of ancestors — and a company that searches diligently and finds nothing has no way to prove it searched hard enough. And never mind that California was never a slave state.
That's all businesses need in California "more ridiculous red tape." Like Newsom hasn't run enough companies out of California; eg Tesla, Hewett Packard, Chevron, Toyota, Valero Energy, the list goes on "because of Democrat Policies" Vote Republican to SAVE CALIFORNIA
— MAGA ?? MAN ? (@PatriotSynergy) October 2, 2026
And disclosure is never the terminus. It’s the predicate. You compile the list first, publish it, and then the litigation and the legislation arrive with the research already done at the targets’ own expense. Newsom referenced that himself when he talked about what ‘fixing the injustice’ actually looks like. ‘Fixing’ means payment. Everyone in the conversation knows it.
And what exactly comes of this bill? Public shaming for sins of the long dead?
This guy… God willing… will never be President.
— CharlieOscarCharlieOscar (@CoCoDeSoFlo) October 2, 2026
Meanwhile, look at the ledger in the state he actually governs. Insurers are abandoning the California market. Electricity rates are among the highest in the country. Homelessness has absorbed tens of billions with zero positive results. Businesses and residents have been leaving for a decade. The Democrat supermajority legislature spent this week also trying to regulate which equipment federal agents can and cannot use in the state, which a U.S. attorney correctly told him was a non-starter.
He is really trying hard to get businesses to move out of California.
— kornfed (@GeeWillyQue1) October 2, 2026
A governor with that record has decided virtue signalling for ‘the black vote’ at the expense of California’s employers is more important than fixing the problems his businesses and residents face. They’ll comply, or they’ll relocate. Plenty have already chosen the latter, and this gives those that remain a great reason to follow suit.
