Listen Live

(NSineVideo/Getty Images)

Beware! California lawmakers have broken free from the asylum once again and are presently engaged in a most vicious and horrendously cruel predatory hunt.

These legislative serial killers are without conscience. Their lust for blood – specifically the lifeblood of the California economy – is unquenchable. 

Federal authorities desperately urge all middle-class citizens of the Communist Republic of California to remain calm and take immediate precautionary measures to protect your loved ones, your livelihoods, and your quality of life.

DO NOT PANIC! 

Pack your family, your worldly possessions, and what little remains of your human dignity into a vehicle that meets or exceeds California emissions standards. Proceed in an orderly manner to the Republican-majority state of your choice, where you are instructed to immediately register as a conservative and forever vote accordingly.

EXCEPTIONS: Residents who self-identify as liberals, progressives, or democratic socialists are instructed to remain within the borders of California. Remove your pants, bend at the waist, and await further regulatory assault from your duly-elected progressive masters. 

These warnings come in the wake of the latest legislative crisis to hit the formerly golden state: a new bill that will destroy journalism and make freelance writing a financially unsustainable profession for California workers.

California’s Assembly Bill 5 was a punitive attempt to legislatively disembowel companies such as Uber and Lyft, who classify some workers as “independent contractors” rather than “employees.” 

California legislators – specifically those who have never built a business, never met a payroll, and NEVER managed to spend within their means – consider themselves the ultimate authorities on how to run a profitable private enterprise. All evidence points to the contrary, of course, but no matter. It’s been well documented by historians that facts, economic reality, and common sense are completely anathema to the California liberal. It is for this reason and this reason alone that the state in which they dwell has been deemed an uninhabitable sh*thole by anyone with an I.Q. above that of a delta smelt.

California’s AB 5, a monstrosity of government overreach authored by Rep. Lorena Gonzalez and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, was aimed directly at the state’s so-called “gig economy.” 

Legislators promised it would “create new good jobs and a livable, sustainable wage job.” In reality, it does just the opposite.

Like all nanny-state legislation that’s sold to the uninformed voter as “what’s best for you,” AB 5 brings unintended consequences. An “exemption” that was included to “protect” freelance journalists who write for a magazine, newspaper or other entity whose related to disseminating the news establishes an arbitrary cap of 35 “submissions” per year per “putative employer.”

As noted in an article from the Hollywood Reporter, “at a time when paid freelance stories can be written for a low end of $25 and high end of $1 per word, some meet that cap in a month just to make end’s meet.”

Simply put: a lot of California workers support themselves and their families as freelance journalists. AB 5 makes that impossible, and the financial burden it would place on major media organizations, which are bleeding subscribers and profit year-over-year is unsustainable.

Writers and journalists are fond of the well-known quote, “The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.”

Indeed, especially when that pen is in the hand of California Governor Gavin Newsom.