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California Primary Debate Collapses Under the Weight of DEI

Former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., speaks at the NUHW Governor Candidate Forum. (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past." Send an email to Jarrett

It’s amazing how much California does these days to roll into its stereotype as a dysfunctional, woke-ified political wasteland.

On Tuesday, the University of Southern California canceled its scheduled gubernatorial debate after several top Democrats reportedly waged a pressure campaign to put a halt to it.

The field is currently wide open with Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom being term-limited out of office. One would think that would be a reason to give voters a chance to learn about the policies of the new candidates, a mix of Republicans and Democrats competing in the state’s “jungle” primary that lumps the parties together.

You see, the leading candidates set to appear on stage had a BIG problem. They were all WHITE. None of the non-white candidates crossed the polling and fundraising thresholds set ahead of time by USC.

“The ‘data-driven’ candidate viability framework produced a lineup of Republicans Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, as well as Democrats Tom Steyer, Matt Mahan, Katie Porter, Eric Swalwell—all White candidates,” Fox News reported. “The same criteria, developed by a USC professor and defended by the university, ended up axing Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa, Betty Yee, and Tony Thurman, all Democratic Party minority candidates, due to lower polling and fundraising scores.”

In modern California, democracy without DEI is canceled it seems.

It’s rather amusing to read USC’s defense of its criteria for those who would be allowed on stage. You can feel the creeping panic through the words of whatever committee put the statement together.

They knew they were going to be labeled racists for using a colorblind, nonbiased metric and getting undesirable diversity results.

“We want to be clear that we categorically, unequivocally deny any allegations that the debate criteria was in any way biased in favor or against any candidate,” the USC statement read. “ … The methodology was based on well-established metrics consistent with formulas widely used to set debate participation nationwide—a combination of polling and fundraising—and developed without regard to any particular candidate.”

That’s the sound of technocrats naively pleading their case in a kangaroo court.

Did they learn nothing from the COVID-19 years? The real pandemic was racism. You are supposed to believe in science up and until the moment that “science” collides with left-wing cultural narratives, then it’s flushed down the toilet along with self-government, constitutional rights, or any of that other fluff Americans bitterly cling to.

That’s the trick to staying on the right side of history and all that.

Just a few days after defending their reasonable debate rubric, USC folded and said that it couldn’t come to an agreement with the Los Angeles TV station KABC set to air the event.

“As a result, USC has made the difficult decision to cancel tomorrow’s debate and will look for other opportunities to educate voters on the candidates and issues,” it said in another statement, according to NBC News.

This primary is now set up to be a indictment of the failed governing ethos of the Golden State.

California voters have time and again overwhelmingly rejected affirmative action at the ballot box. Even in a state that practically defines the “Left Coast,” regular people don’t want race-based school admissions, quotas, and policies that fly in the face of equality before the law.

But the Left’s activist class and their ruling elites just can’t quit it, no matter what. So, they’re even willing to blow up the electoral process to ensure that something like a racial quota remains, even for an endeavor as narrow as running for governor.

Competence isn’t really a criterion for high office in California these days, but blowing up a debate for DEI-related reasons is a little too on the nose for why so much in the state seems broken.

DEI nonsense proves once again to be an un-American plaything for elites to play with in their manic scramble for power and recognition in institutions captured by the Left.

The California gubernatorial race is so filled with Democratic Party aspirants that the two Republicans in the race have a real chance to emerge as the two winning candidates in the primary, despite the deep blue hue of most statewide elections.

If that somehow holds, it would be one of the more hilarious self-owns in modern political history, but it’s a calamity the Left is pushing the party into.

Despite Democrat success in running vanilla, often white candidates who campaign like centrists and vote like Mao, they just can’t escape the gravitational pull of the Left’s toxic, identitarian ideology. And so, they end up with what happened on Tuesday.

The most absurd demands for DEI can never really be met, therefore a barely functioning political system grinds to a halt because too few people in power are willing to publicly question its fundamental premises.

That’s the world under Democrat one-party rule and left-wing institutional dominance. The whole nation practically fell under that model during the Biden White House years. Now, it’s just playing out in places like California that provide a harbinger for the stupidity to come if we follow that model toward oblivion.

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Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE

Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.

The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.

In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.

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