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Hi, I’m Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times. I survey more than 80 news and social media sites daily, then send you a tightly crafted email with only the most informative and delightful bits.
Each weekday at about 6 a.m., you’ll get an email like this.
Good morning. It’s Friday, Nov. 22.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom visits the state’s Trump country.
- Northern California deluge causes rivers to rise.
- And Los Angeles City Council welcomes socialist bloc.
Statewide
1.
Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped in Fresno on Thursday as part of a tour of California’s conservative-leaning regions after polling showed that economic and class divisions were key to Donald Trump’s rise. Fresno County, where one in five people live below the poverty line, is one of eight California counties on track to flip from blue to red in the election. Speaking at an automotive repair school, Newsom promoted a jobs program that he said would “leave no region behind.” “I don’t care who you voted for,” he said. Newsom is scheduled to next visit Colusa and Kern counties. L.A. Times | N.Y. Times
2.
A pair of professors sued Bakersfield College over alleged retaliation for criticizing “social justice” spending.
Another professor sued Madera Community College after facing discipline for using the pronouns “Do, Re, Mi.”
And a student sued Clovis Community College after the school removed anti-communism posters she had hung around campus.
Over the last five years, a small wave of conservative professors and students have been filing lawsuits against their California community colleges, and winning, a CalMatters report found.
3.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talked with Aaron Betsky, author of the new book “Don’t Build, Rebuild,” in which he argues for the reuse of existing structures in architecture. Betsky said we can’t afford to keep extracting natural resources to build when there are existing spaces waiting to be put to use, such as the third of San Francisco office space currently sitting vacant. One reason he wrote the book, he added, “is to try and show how many of these projects there already are and to show that they actually are beautiful.”
Northern California
4.
The Eel, Sacramento, and Russian rivers surged toward their flood stages.
In Oroville, the City Hall’s basement filled with water.
In Santa Rosa, nearly a foot of rain fell in less than 48 hours, submerging streets.
And in San Francisco, the airport canceled dozens of flights.
The first major atmospheric river storm of the season parked over Northern California on Thursday, unleashing more wild weather two days after roaring ashore. The storm was expected to peter out early Friday, but meteorologists said a second storm system was right on its heels, poised to bring a fresh deluge to already-drenched landscapes on Friday. “Mother Nature has the gloves off,” Accuweather wrote.
5.
In late 2021, a powerful newspaper story about a mother’s desperate effort to save her daughter from the grip of fentanyl in San Francisco ended on a bleak note: Jessica DiDia had no interest in getting sober. Nearly three years later, in October, DiDia showed up at a hospital reporting back pain. A doctor took an ultrasound. “Congratulations! You’re pregnant,” the doctor said. DiDia had no idea. She delivered a 5-pound, 6-ounce baby girl with a head full of dark hair. Four days later, she returned to the streets to smoke fentanyl. S.F. Chronicle
6.
The person who has been arrested the most in San Francisco’s crackdown on homeless encampments has been camping outside his childhood home, where his mother still lives. Geoffrey Frye, 35, has been arrested five times since July 30, but he refuses offers of shelter and returns to the same block. “It just seems like they’re wasting their time,” he said of the police. His mother, Deborah Dodson, said he needs time to recover from past trauma. In a statement, Mayor London Breed’s office said “Doing nothing is not an option.” SF Standard
7.
A faction of the San Francisco Republican Party has splintered off and elected a leader who was convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The new branch headed by Daniel Goodwyn, 36, is expected to be chartered in January. After Donald Trump’s election victory this month, Goodwyn described himself in a social media post as a Jan. 6 “political hostage.” “No man left behind! Free ALL J6ers!” he wrote. SF Standard | S.F. Chronicle
8.
One of the delights of California’s extreme topography is the long autumn. The season’s colors first emerge in the high Sierra in September, then roll lazily down the slopes, ending among the coastal vineyards, desert palms, and urban canopies near sea level as late as early December. That means the greater Bay Area has only recently been putting on its fall show.
Below, a few pictures captured over the past week:
Southern California
9.
A federal grand jury indicted Phillips 66 on charges of dumping 790,000 gallons of industrial wastewater into the Los Angeles County sewer system in 2020 and 2021, the Justice Department announced on Thursday. Prosecutors said the Houston-based oil company knowingly violated the Clean Water Act and then failed to report its actions to authorities. “Just like the rest of us, corporations have a duty to follow the law,” U.S. attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. A Phillips 66 spokesman said the company was “prepared to present its case” in court. L.A. Times | A.P.
10.
Ysabel Jurado, the Los Angeles City Council candidate who made headlines for saying “fuck the police,” stunned the L.A. political establishment when she defeated incumbent Councilmember Kevin de León this month. When Jurado, 34, is sworn in next month, she’ll be the fourth councilmember backed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, making the bloc a quarter of the Council. Upton Sinclair, the Depression-era crusader who dreamed of a socialist California, must be smiling down on them, wrote columnist Gustavo Arellano. L.A. Times
11.
A high-ranking member of a Mexican drug cartel faked his own death in 2023 and began a new “life of luxury” under a fake name in Riverside, the authorities said. The alleged ruse came to an abrupt end on Tuesday when federal authorities arrested Cristian Fernando Gutierrez-Ochoa, 37, the reputed son-in-law of the notorious Jalisco New Generation drug cartel boss known as El Mencho. Anne Milgram, the head of the DEA, portrayed the arrest as a major win in the fight against drug trafficking, putting the agency “much closer” to breaking Jalisco. CBS News | L.A. Times
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- The author Myriam Gurba wrote about Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother,” Florence Thompson, who became “a symbol of White women’s destitution” but was in fact Indigenous. On a research trip to Nipomo, where Thompson was said to have made camp, Gurba half hoped to find a shrine. Instead, she found indifference. Places Journal
- Tech companies have shed nearly 150,000 workers in 2024, according to the job-loss tracker Layoffs.fyi. The layoffs have bred despondency among many former workers. Then there are those like Sandy McClenahan, who pivoted to making hats. SF Standard
- The journalist J.B. MacKinnon wrote an empathetic deep dive on “the other side” of the Klamath River dam removals. “The identities of many people here — their memories, ways of life, worldviews, sense of purpose, idea of home — are bound up in the dammed landscape and even the dams themselves,” he wrote. Hakai Magazine
- A fabulously wealthy couple brought in the architect Robin Donaldson to build them a home that would integrate into a hilltop in Montecito. Then one of them asked a question that changed the course of the project: What if the house was the hill? Plain Magazine | Architect’s Newspaper
- A former logging town nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A quaint Gold Rush town that calls itself the “Queen of the Sierra.” And a serene community at the foot of the Topatopa Mountains. A travel journalist named her picks for the state’s 15 best mountain towns. Travel+Leisure
Correction:
An earlier version of this newsletter misstated the city where a City Hall basement was flooded on Thursday. It was in Oroville, not Chico.
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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