'California Republic of the CCP': 'Blood Money' Billboard Truck Bashes Newsom for Ignoring Fentanyl Crisis

A truck billboard slamming California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) for ignoring the fentanyl crisis was seen circling the California State Capitol in Sacramento on Thursday.

“Gavin, why don’t you care that Chinese FENTANYL is killing Californians?” one side of the billboard truck reads, along with the words: “We know why.”

The other side of the truck was an image of the California flag with the communist symbol of the hammer and sickle on the top left corner of it, along with the words “California Republic of the CCP” in yellow, alongside yellow stars, in reference to the Chinese flag.

The billboard truck was an ad for Breitbart News Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer’s new book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.

As Breitbart News reported, Newsom partnered with a Chinese Communist Party-tied businessman, allegedly connected to the triads, on an initiative that brought Chinese mafia-linked businesses to the state’s Bay Area while the California governor was mayor of San Francisco, according to Schweizer’s book.

On Wednesday, street art hit various iconic locations in Hollywood and West Los Angeles, shining a light on the fentanyl epidemic in the United States and taking a shot at politicians, including Newsom, President Joe Biden, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Notably, the art was in Schiff’s congressional district.

In an interview with Breitbart News about his new book Blood Money, Schweizer explained the connection between China and the North American fentanyl trade:

“A lot of the people involved in the fentanyl trade actually have senior positions in the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] or they’re advisers to the CCP government, but the links in this chain of fentanyl that is poisoning 100,000 Americans, every link in that chain is a Chinese operation,” Schweizer said, explaining that the Mexican cartels are “really the junior partners.”

“We all know the precursors come from China,” Schweizer said, explaining that we have been unable to stop the precursors because the International Terminal in Manzanillo in Mexico is “actually run by a Chinese company that’s very close to the Chinese state,” he said, explaining that those precursors “come into the port of Manzanillo” and are “moved to a town in northern Mexico where, according to leaked documents from the Department of Homeland Security that I obtained, 2,000 Chinese nationals essentially operate as chemists.”

In other words, these Chinese nationals are on our border doing it in our backyard. It does not end there, either, because the Chinese are selling pill presses to the Mexican cartels “at cost,” and the cartels are using communication devices and apps that are Chinese “because they know that the Chinese will not share those communications with U.S. law enforcement,” Schweizer said.

Schweizer added that the “final part of the puzzle” in fentanyl trafficking is the issue of money laundering, which he says the Mexican cartels are now doing using Chinese state-owned banks.

“According to our law enforcement, they use Chinese students in the United States on education visas to actually launder the money in those banks,” Schweizer said.

“So, this is a Chinese operation much more than it is a Mexican drug cartel operation,” he concluded.

Schweizer’s Blood Money reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list this week, just one week after its release by publisher HarperCollins.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.