Given my last piece on Governor Gavin Newsom, which outlined all the bills he vetoed over the weekend, I held onto a sliver of optimism for California. Maybe it wasn’t the dystopic hellhole I purported it was.
I should have known better than to get my hopes up.
With all the chaos and challenges in the Golden State alone, never mind the world, Gavin Newsom decides it’s of vital importance to once again, virtue signal rather than govern.
The New Ebony Alert in California
This week, Gavin Newsom signed a bill to create a special alert system for missing black children and young women. The newly enacted “Ebony Alert” law is the first of its kind, to distinguish the tragedy and horror of losing a black child from that of losing a white child.
The alert will be used for black people between the ages of 12 and 25 and notifies law enforcement and California Highway Patrol to search for the individual.
According to state Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat and creator of the legislation, “Data shows that Black and brown, our indigenous brothers and sisters when they go missing, there’s very rarely the type of media attention, let alone AMBER alerts and police resources that we see with our white counterparts.”
First, we won’t even address Bradford’s misuse of the term indigenous, which means inhabiting or existing in a land from the earliest of times. Let’s address the data issues. Having become a huge skeptic of data and how it can be manipulated to support a certain narrative, I’d love to see exactly the information Sen. Bradford references.
Second, if for some reason Bradford’s statement is true – that AMBER alerts fail to create the appropriate alarms when a black, brown, or other minority goes missing – can we address the flaws in the system and not waste taxpayer money to create an entirely new system?
Timothy Griffin, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno, says there’s no good data Amber alerts are effective in finding missing children in the first place so it does little good to replicate a flawed system for another racial category.
“There’s just not a lot of reason to believe that when there’s an Amber Alert success it’s successfully rescuing children from threatening situations,” Griffin explained. “Thus, I would strongly suspect that that would be the experience of any implemented Ebony Alert in California.”
California Creates Racism
Many online have called the new law – which goes into effect on January 1 – a new kind of segregation.
I agree. How will this country ever heal from its past and move forward when we force people to see the differences in each other, particularly under horrific circumstances that should unify us all, such as a child abduction?
Public Response Gets Heated
Predictably, tensions flared on X, formerly Twitter, in response to Newsom’s passing of the bill.
Thank goodness one social media user still has a sense of humor. In a video on TikTok she said of Newsom’s new law, “That ain’t racist?”
The young black woman continued, “First of all, my name is Amber and I’m black! So why can’t black people have Amber alerts? My question is, who is the black girl named Ebony? Cause that’s racist. The only time I see black people called Ebony as a collective is in ****.”
She summed up my thoughts exactly, “This is just another way for Gavin Newsom to virtue signal to make it look like he’s a good person, but California looks like ****.”
And she went a step further. “Pay attention right now to how Democrats are still, in two thousand 23, telling black people that we need to be segregated from white people in order to get them to pay attention to us.”
One user summed up mounting public frustrations by Tweeting, “Can’t we just go back to ‘missing person’ and call it a day? My god.”
Living in today’s culture has truly become exhausting. The walking on eggshells for fear of offending some victim, class, or another, all the specific pronouns and identifiers that must be used if one is not to be subjected to swift and severe punishment. Who has time for this?
Apparently, Gavin Newsom has time for this, which would explain why California’s critical problems continue to go unsolved.
Jennifer Galardi is the politics and culture editor and opinion writer for 19FortyFive.com. She has a Master’s in Public Policy from Pepperdine University and produces and hosts the podcast Connection with conversations that address health, culture, politics, and policy. In a previous life, she wrote for publications in the health, fitness, and nutrition space. In addition, her pieces have been published in the Epoch Times and Pepperdine Policy Review. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
