Steven F. Hayward, UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies resident scholar, reviews the endemic failures of California’s fourteen-year-old high-speed rail project: Bulging construction/ticket price estimates. Environmental concerns. Scant support from HSR operators or the private sector. Is an L.A.–Bay Area HSR feasible at this point — or worth it? asks Hayward.

Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow Dominic Pino summarizes the failures of California’s ever-delayed high-speed rail rip-off. From the very beginning, Pino posits, the HSR project has prioritized political quid pro quo over taxpayers and residents’ best interests — and fourteen years later, it’s debatable whether it will ever reach completion.

This election cycle, a flurry of articles have come out to accuse right-wingers of “infiltrat[ing]” and “target[ing] school board races across [the] Bay Area.” How does the Left profit by aggressively imposing party distinctions on elections? Verlan Lewis explains in Party Politics that the strict Left vs. Right scale paradigm — called the Static Spectrum Fallacy (SSF) — is an illogical, intentionally divisive manner of demarcating ideologies.

Edward Ring of the California Policy Center takes to the Epoch Times to examine how progressive environmentalism has destroyed our woodlands. Relegating true concerns as secondary to politically motivated “special interests,” local leaders’ decisions to block important projects have effected overcrowded and dying forests — leading to superfires.

Professional city planner Nolan Gray purports that zoning codes — laws through which gov’t planners dictate what can/must be built where, and to what extent — have led only to sprawling, unequal, and exorbitantly pricey living areas. Gray advocates for abolishing zoning codes in favor of privately managed regulations like deed restrictions. This interview originally appeared in City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast.

Nationally-recognized linguist and political commentator Dr. Alan Perlman daylights the intellectual emptiness of local lefty's claims that their opponents' language has hidden meanings—which, of course, only they can understand.

Zócalo Public Square columnist Joe Mathews argues in the Merc that the recent LA Council racism scandal indicates our “thoroughly broken system” of small, powerless, unrepresentative city councils. His proposed solution? Get rid of the council in favor of a larger, lottery-selected Citizens’ Assembly. Mathews’ coverage below.