John Cox, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, said Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is “the worst governor in the country,” highlighting the Golden State’s rising costs of living, increasing rates of crime, and growing numbers of homeless persons.
“[California] is unaffordable, and it’s unlivable in its present state,” Cox stated on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak. “The people are going to vote to recall this guy.”
Newsom is failing to address “basic things” that “are all fixable,” Cox held. He highlighted California’s problems with wildfires related to poor forest management, electricity and water shortages, and government-decreed lockdowns.
“We should be doing desalination,” Cox remarked. “We should be building more reservoirs. We should be recycling water in California. We’ve got the most fantastic weather, the best farmland, and the California [State] Water Project was a wonder when it was built in the 60s, but the last 40 years, the politicians in this state have just let it go to seed, and they’ve not improved it.”
“Newsom wants to have everybody driving electric cars … but we don’t have enough electricity to power our air conditioners on hot August or July days,” he stated. “The idea that we’re going to have enough electricity for cars is ridiculous. They’ve been decommissioning nuclear power plants as well as natural gas power plants which are both very clean. They won’t let anybody drill for oil or natural gas in California. So we’re importing it from other states and around the world. It’s just a complete and incompetent management.”
Cox recalled Newsom’s attribution of forest fires to “climate change.”
He remarked, “Newsom blames [wildfires] all on climate change, but he doesn’t do much about fixing the forests, about getting dead trees picked up, or making sure that we have prescribed burns or roads or fire breaks. We’ve run the timber industry out of California. We used to have a hundred or more sawmills. That business has now moved to Canada. We still use lumber, but we import it and give jobs to Canadians. This is all just mismanagement.”
Pollak asked about California’s policy of buying hotels to house homeless people.
“Newsom and others think it’s okay to just buy a hotel room — and they’re buying complete hotels — and putting people in them,” Cox replied. “Well, that certainly may get a few of them off the street, but it doesn’t fix the problem. Most of the people that are living on the street, let’s face it, are either mentally ill or addicted to some substance, and moving them into a hotel room isn’t going to fix that.”
He continued, “We’ve got to force treatment of these illnesses and addictions [to] fix this long-term. We can’t keep spending hundreds of millions — or billions — every single year housing people, and then just watch them destroy their lives. We’ve got to get job training for people. We’ve got to get them back into productive life.”
According to a poll published Wednesday, 51 percent of likely voters in California would vote to remove incumbent Newsom from office, while 40 percent would vote to retain him.
Newsom will face a recall election on September 14. Californians will be asked if Newsom should be recalled and who should succeed him.
Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.