URGENT: CLICK TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE LEFT!
(DC Pundit) – If you were wondering whether California’s leadership had finally hit rock bottom, wonder no more. They just ordered a shovel.
The Golden State has spent years perfecting the art of driving businesses away. Crushing tax rates, suffocating regulations, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s heavy-handed COVID lockdown policies sent companies fleeing to Texas, Florida, and anywhere else that doesn’t treat job creators like the enemy. The exodus has been well-documented and frankly embarrassing for a state that once led the nation in economic dynamism.
So naturally, Sacramento’s response is to double down.
California is now moving forward with legislation that would force companies to dig through their historical records and disclose any ties to slavery. Assembly Bill 2599 would require businesses with more than $100 million in annual worldwide sales to search their records for evidence that they, their predecessors, or subsidiaries bought or sold enslaved people, or provided financial support for those transactions, including through insurance or loans.
Here’s the part that really deserves a moment of quiet reflection: California was never a slave state. It entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. So the state’s lawmakers are demanding that companies excavate 19th century corporate genealogy to answer for an institution that California itself never legally practiced.
You genuinely cannot make this up.
Hey big companies in California, just move to Texas. Get the heck out of the People's Republic of California.
As for Newsom, if you want to start forcing people to disclose historic links to slavery, why don't you start with the Democratic Party? https://t.co/XZ5HXeYQKE
— Ken Gardner (@KenGardner11) August 30, 2026
The bill is already drawing pushback from the insurance industry, which argues it largely repeats an earlier California law already requiring insurers to disclose past policies issued to slaveholders covering the death or injury of enslaved people. New York Life Insurance Company, Aetna Life Insurance Company, and American International Group, known as AIG, were among the companies that previously disclosed ties to enslaved people and slaveholders under that earlier measure.
So the state already has a law doing a version of this. Their solution? More law.
Meanwhile, the businesses still stubbornly hanging on in California are watching this unfold and quietly updating their relocation spreadsheets. Between the taxes, the regulations, the crime, the homelessness crisis, and now mandatory corporate ancestry investigations, the cost-benefit analysis of staying in California gets harder to justify with each passing legislative session.
Newsom, for his part, appears completely uninterested in addressing any of the root causes pushing companies out. No serious tax reform. No meaningful regulatory relief. Just more compliance burdens stacked on top of the ones that already exist.
At some point, Sacramento has to reckon with the reality that you cannot punish your way to prosperity. Businesses are not going to stay in a state that treats them as piggy banks and political props, and no amount of historical disclosure requirements is going to change that math.
Will whoever’s left in California when the last business finally bolts please remember to hit the lights on the way out?
URGENT: CLICK TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE LEFT!
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