Butch ware is the Green Party candidate for Governor of California, where the gubernatorial race has seen some chaotic ups and downs in recent months. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the election, his controversial exclusion from the California ballot, the dramatic rise of the Green Party in the U.K., and whether third parties can finally break through the obstacles that face them in the United States.

 

Nathan J. Robinson

We are privileged to be joined today by Dr. Butch Ware. He is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the 2024 Green Party vice presidential nominee, and now he is the Green Party candidate for Governor of California. Dr. Ware is a public intellectual, an activist, an artist, and an organizer. He has been a hip hop musician. He has been a baseball player. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is the author of the book The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. We welcome Dr. Ware to the program.

Butch Ware

Delighted to be here, and I am just literally thrilled that you read out not only my academic stuff and my publications, because I’m actually here at my office on the UCSB campus, and I do love my day job. I’ll serve the people when called into action. But I especially love that you mentioned that I got to live my two childhood dreams. I got to become an emcee and a professional baseball player and still finish a PhD and run for vice president. So thanks for the fulsome introduction.

Robinson

I had to mention this because as I was doing my research, people need to know that you have a very interesting background. It says on your website you played baseball in France?

Ware

Yes. Thank you for letting me tell the story. I’ll just tell the short version of it. I was on research leave in France at the Institute for Advanced Study in Marseille in the south of France, and I was a minor league baseball player coming up. I was a scholarship athlete. I became a PhD because I found out in school that I was better at school than I was at baseball. But before that, it was all sports for me. So, long story short, I still played in a wood bat baseball league in Michigan. I was teaching at the University of Michigan at the time. I looked for a place to stay in shape, and I ended up getting recruited for a team in the French Elite League, and as a 40-year-old, I took the team from Montpellier to the championship, and there were write-ups in the French media about this 40-year-old university professor. Because my research literally was over, they flew me back and forth for the playoffs between Detroit and Paris. And yes, I carved them poor French boys up for a good summer. The league batted 175 against me because I was still throwing 90 miles an hour at age 40.

 

Robinson

Yes, and people who might recognize you from the 2024 [presidential] campaign need to know that your background is deeply fascinating. You also are a weightlifter. You have all sorts of interesting things. People should look you up and check out your work. But I want to talk today about the [California governor] campaign. And I want to talk especially because there was just news that came out. I’ll just read a headline here from the Santa Barbara Independent. “Judge Rejects Green Party Candidate’s Bid to Appear on California Governor Ballots”:

 

A Sacramento judge recently ruled against the Green Party candidate, Butch Ware, in a lawsuit against the Secretary of State seeking to get on the primary ballot for governor, concluding that he did not file the correct tax returns on time; he had to submit five years of tax returns.

Now, first, Dr. Ware, could you explain what this five years of tax returns thing is?

Ware

So this is a provision that the Secretary of State has added that has actually been challenged as unconstitutional. There are lawyers who are challenging the constitutionality of this. But while those are being decided, they still have this rule in place. So just to be clear, we complied with the rule. They asked that you submit five years of one unredacted copy, and one redacted copy, of tax returns. The unredacted is for the Secretary of State. The redacted version will be made public. So what happened in my case is that you’re required to submit these by March 6. We submitted ours on March 5; they sent us an email on March 7 saying that there were deficiencies in our filing. But their email, it said, “No, not redacted, not submitted.” Triple negative, in the sense—

Robinson

Okay, I’m trying to figure that one out.

Ware

We didn’t understand what they were saying was deficient in our files. They said [in sections] 21 through 24 there were deficiencies. They couldn’t tell us what they were. Then they sent us a message: “You have until March 16 at 5pm to correct these ‘deficiencies’ in your filing.” So we’re like, okay, fine, let’s just write them back to see what it is they’re asking because we can’t read this email. On March 10, they send an effort to clarify this, but now they’re only asking for [sections] 22 and 23; they’re not asking for 21 or 24 anymore. So then we write back and say, “So do you want all four years? Or do you want two? Because it wasn’t clear from your email.” So then they said, “No, we want all four.” Long story short, they keep moving the goalposts with a different email. I respond within an hour to every message that they send; they take a day and a half to respond back. It’s finally Friday the 13th. The office is closed on the weekend. We have to have the paperwork in by Monday at 5pm on the 16th. On Friday the 13th, they finally give us an order that we can comply with. They’ve given us instructions. This is what we need to submit. I’m sitting with my CPA because these are my tax returns from years ago. They’re already prepared. They’re filed. They’re done! It’s just a question of whether they’ve been redacted to match what they’re asking for.

So we send them in by 12:46, overnight mail. They receive them at 9:17 am, Monday morning; at 9:17 am, they have them in their possession. They can fix whatever they said are deficiencies, which they still haven’t defined, by the way. Nathan, listen to this part. At 4:50 pm they send me an email saying that “your phone number is not redacted on your 2024 tax return, and you have an over-redaction; your business name is removed, and it should be showing. And therefore, on the basis of these two forms in 100 pages of tax documents, we’re going to disqualify you from the ballot if you do not submit a hard copy in person”—I live in Santa Barbara, as I just established—“these two pages for this document within the next 10 minutes.”

Robinson

Okay. All right...

Ware

Hold on, hold on. Respond to that, and then ask me how it gets worse. Because I’ll tell you how it got worse. It got worse in court yesterday, but continue.

Robinson

Okay, let’s finish the story, and then let’s talk about the issues that this presents.

Ware

I have been calling these people all week. They will not take a call; they will not return a call. So I actually don’t get the case worker, one Wesley Keller, on the phone until after they have already disqualified me. I’m at work. I don’t even see the message saying, “You have 10 minutes to comply with our document request, otherwise we’re throwing you off the ballot.” So I get it that evening, and I assume that it must be a typo, because only an insane person would say that you have 10 minutes to comply, otherwise you’re being disqualified from the ballot. So I call for clarification at 8:00 am Tuesday morning; they say that they’re going to have the case person call me back. They still don’t call me back. It’s been a week, and they haven’t called me back. I call back at 11. They finally put the person on the phone. They say, “No, that’s correct. You didn’t submit it in time, and therefore it’s invalidated.” I said, “I have somebody coming to the office right now with the two pieces of paper that you’ve asked for. It’s literally just my phone number being blacked out.” 

By the way, it’s my personal phone number. If it ends up in the public, I’m the only one being harmed. The purpose of the law is so that the financial disclosures are known to everybody. All the financials are exactly as they’re asking. They’re literally just saying, “Your business name is not showing in one, but it’s showing in all the other documents.” So the point is, somebody was sent to go through with a fine-tooth comb to find an excuse to knock me off the ballot.

Here’s how it gets even worse. We were in court yesterday. We have the lawyer that beat the Secretary of State on exactly this kind of case in multiple previous filings, and we hired that guy on 48 hours notice. I got the defense ready. Our lawyer went through the opposition submission. This is what the Secretary of State put into evidence: that they had falsified the email thread to make that first March 7 email read as though it had been correct. Instead of saying “not redacted,” they changed it, and so we presented exhibit one and exhibit two, two emails that have the same date and timestamp but different language, and it was in the opposition’s filing. And you know what? The judge didn’t care, didn’t even bat an eye. And I’m going to tell you why in just a second. And if you thought that was bad, it gets worse. It gets worse. So to prove their case, they put in both of the mail-in submissions, the one that we sent in on March 5 and the one that we sent in before the deadline on March 13, which they opened at 9:17 and sat on until 4:50. My lawyer went through and made it clear. So they claimed that in the second submission, everything was in order, except for these two redaction errors, which apparently, by the way, were caused by an Adobe glitch. Because my CPA was not going through with a pen, he was going through and redacting them in Adobe to make sure that the information was actually redacted. But here’s the worst part: my lawyer showed that in the initial filing those two pages were correct in the first place. So they had the full copy of both tax returns, and they admitted it in court. And their argument was, they said, “It’s not our job to collate the candidates’ tax returns.” So they admitted that they had it in their possession, and the judge, unmoved by the fact that we had complied—they had everything they needed; we submitted it on time and they had it all; despite the moving goalposts, we complied—he said, “We’re denying your writ.” And he literally read out a prewritten order. The fix was in before he ever got in the court, because the goal of all of this was to get me, the only third-party candidate to poll at 5% in the last 100 years—I’m eight points off the Democrat leaders right here, right now—out of the race.

Robinson

So what are the odds, do you think, that the candidates that they let on the ballot, if you went through it with the same level of scrutiny, you couldn’t find a couple of things...?

Ware

None of those candidates would have survived. It was essentially a poll tax. They were saying, “Count how many jelly beans are in that jar, boy.” They were giving a disenfranchisement test that was designed to disenfranchise. And by the way, we have put in a Freedom of Information Act request regarding that. And listen, just to be clear, we’ve already prepared the appeal, but we’re appealing to the same crooked court. Because, just to be clear, if we had walked in with a video of Gavin Newsom telling Secretary of State Shirley Weber to get Butch Ware out of the race, that judge was still going to issue the ruling that he issued. They’re there to do a job.

Robinson

You’ve told the story of this maddening, absurd encounter with the state bureaucracy. But I think what’s important now is we’re getting to the context in which this occurs, which is to say that it is pretty well documented in this country that there are strenuous behind-the-scenes efforts in the Democratic Party to throttle the Green Party and make sure that third-party candidates do not end up on the ballot. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about those kinds of efforts and the context in which this denial of you on the ballot occurs.

Ware

So during the presidential election in 2024, they sued to get us off, if I’m not mistaken, at least nine different ballots, four of them right before the election. We prevailed in three of those lawsuits. In the end, you were able to vote for the Green Party, I think, in 47 of 50 states, which is why they’re so afraid of the Green Party. But in several of those states, you had to be a write-in. So I think that we only actually appeared on the ballot in 41, because they were successful in getting us off the ballot. Listen, the Republicans, Bush and Trump, try to steal elections after they’re already finished. The Democrats try to steal them before they take place by taking out candidates that actually threaten them. I spoke to Jill Stein about this. She said, “Butch, I’ve never run for office since 2000 where the Democrats didn’t either try to knock me out on some technicality like this or just sue directly to get me out of the election. They are the anti-democratic party.” So the history is long, and the reason why they do it is because, and I want you to clock this number: in the last three years, nationwide for elections at mayor and lower, Green Party candidates have won 57 percent of the elections in which we have stood. There are hundreds of Greens serving across the country. But when you get up to statewide elections for Congress, Senate, Governor, or President, the money and the lawsuits drown us out. So people are like, where’s the Green Party between elections? We’re literally beating Team Blue and Team Red combined in regular elections. But they turn on this fire hose of lawfare and of financial warfare. Because that was the goal of this. They know that this isn’t going to hold up on appeal. It’s nonsense, but their goal was to get me off the voter’s guide, which gets mailed out yesterday. That’s their goal. They know that I’ll still probably appear on the ballot, but they want 3 to 5 percent of the voters to not hear of me because I didn’t appear in the voter’s guide.

Robinson

And to waste your time.

Ware

Yes, of course. And money.

Robinson

Every moment you’re spending dealing with this, you have to pay your CPA, and you have to pay a lawyer. The amount of time and money just makes it harder and harder and deters third-party candidates from even trying.

Ware

It’s not going to deter me, because the thing is, I love a good fight. Even when the bully doesn’t fight fair, I’ll still knock his ass out. You mentioned my weightlifting background; just for the record, 225 on the bench for 30 repetitions at age 51. So I just want people to understand, those are NFL Combine numbers. They do not want these hands. And that’s the reason why they’re trying to sneak around to get me out, because they know that in a fair fight, and it’s not a physical one, not only are we close to them in the polls, but every time that there has been an actual candidate forum or debate where I’ve been allowed to participate, I destroy them, and they know it. So they’re doing everything that they can to make sure that as few people hear about me as possible, but we’re going to keep fighting. Not only are we filing the appeal in the state court, but we’re preparing the federal appeal as well. And even if those are unsuccessful, because they continue to practice this kind of lawfare, then there’s nothing that they can do to exclude us as write-in candidates, and write-in candidates have won primaries multiple times in the recent past. We’re not going to lie down just because they cheat.

Robinson

I think one of the important parts here is that people should be outraged by this, regardless of how they feel about your platform. Even if someone is a supporter of one of your opponents—even if someone’s a supporter of Senator Katie Porter, or someone else—I think many ordinary people, not politicians, will probably believe that the candidates they support should have to prevail in a fair fight. I think many voters genuinely believe in democracy, so even if they disagree with you, this idea of pulling these shady tricks—you have 10 minutes to correct this redaction, or else you don’t get to appear on the ballot—I don’t know any honest person who wouldn’t be outraged by that.

Ware

Yes, that’s the reason why they didn’t allow recording inside the courtroom, and it’s the same reason that police turn off their body cameras before they try to take someone out. They don’t want the public to hear, but I have a voice, and the people are still going to have a voice. We’re going to fight them. They may be successful in writing me off the ballot, but the point is you can write us right back in, and you can protest. You can say that we’re not going to allow them to disenfranchise the voter with this kind of madness. You said we can put differences of ideology aside. Even the Democrat voters that might look askance at a Green Party candidate, I want you guys to consider this. You know that Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh are there to do a job for the Republicans. They are there to serve a particular purpose. You know that’s not an independent judiciary; that the Republican-controlled Supreme Court is designed to produce political outcomes. Well, understand that the judiciary in the state of California, if Gavin Newsom says “jump,” they say, "“How high, boss?”

Robinson

A lot of people may be reluctant to support Green Party candidates because they reason that the United States is a two-party system, and the two parties nearly always prevail. They think of Green Party candidacies as doomed, and therefore, there’s the spoiler argument that if you vote Green, you’re effectively handing the election to the Republicans. I don’t want to get into the spoiler argument, because I think we’ve litigated that plenty. Instead, I wondered if you could actually talk a little bit about Britain, because a really interesting thing has happened recently in Britain that people might not know about. They had a system where you have the Labor Party and the Tory [Conservative] Party, and you have the Liberal Democrats and a Green Party that was small. But suddenly, recently, in Britain, something has happened that’s taken people wildly by surprise, which is that the Green Party has really come up in British politics. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

 

Ware

Of course, because it’s a really important, relevant example of why they are so threatened by my candidacy in California. So the biggest single indicator of the transformation in British politics is the win by Hannah Spencer in Gorton and Denton in a by-election—that’s the equivalent of a special election for a congressional seat—in this district that is one-third Muslim. Okay, this is important, because this is going to come back to why they’re after me in California, and it has to do with that. The Green Party, like our Green Party here, is anti-Zionist, running against genocide, whereas teams Blue and Red, like all the candidates for governor here, are committed Israel Firsters. So what happened there is that Hannah Spencer, a plumber, won this by-election, and within a week, national opinion polls in Britain had the Green Party ahead of the Labor Party, the equivalent of the Democrats, essentially, in national public opinion polling, winning one congressional seat. So what would happen if we turned the governor’s mansion in California Green?

Greg Stoker, an anti-imperialist war veteran, is running as a Green Party candidate for Congress in Texas. And Brian McGinnis, who had his arm broken for saying, “We don’t want to go to war for Israel”—I know you saw the video of that former Marine having his arm broken. They’re burying the lede: he’s the Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina. So what they are most afraid of, and this is the reason why they’re always attacking us and trying to sue us off the ballot, is that they know that all it takes is one election, and the jig is up. If California opts out of the imperialist war machine at the executive level, with the appointment and budgetary powers that the governor of California has—that’s the third-largest economy on the planet. It goes China, Germany, and California; those are the three largest economies on the planet. If California is now divesting from war and genocide, and it is running a people’s agenda, that breaks the control of the duopoly. And the last part around this is that they are fully aware of the structural threat that this election poses to the system. The system tells you where its pressure points and weaknesses are. If they lose this election in the state of California, if I finish in the top two, even, then their lesser of two evils arguments disappear. So it’s a jungle primary; only the top two candidates advance, irrespective of field. It’s only going to be about 15 percent of the vote to finish second. What’s going to happen if I go from five to 15 and finish in that top two? [...] What’s going to happen to their “lesser of two evils” arguments when the Republicans are out of the race and it’s just them versus Green?

Robinson

Because we know that the Democratic Party in national polls is incredibly unpopular, but even progressives and democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have reasoned that—there’s certainly a great difficulty to running third-party candidacies, and so running in the Democratic primary and getting on the Democratic ballot line kind of makes sense. I’m sure you understand that reasoning. I’m sure you understand why Mamdani made the choice that he did. But as you say, that’s because of people’s understanding of present political reality. But what is happening in Britain is we’re seeing that political reality shifts, and all of a sudden, the party that you thought was the number two or number one party turns out to be the number three party. And it turns out that everything can change very quickly.

Ware

They are well aware of the shift that happened in the U.K. So when Zack Polanski took over as the leader of the Green Party, there were 70,000 registered Greens in the U.K. That number had gone to 250,000 after this by-election just a month ago, and it’s still rising. But just for clarity, the United States Green Party is many factors bigger than that one. We already have this infrastructure, but the problem is that we have a media machine that is telling you you’re throwing your vote away. They’re not telling you that there are hundreds of elected Greens serving across the country. We have already built the electoral infrastructure and the electoral access to contest at a national level, even beyond what the U.K. Greens are doing. It’s just going to take one election to break through that narrative that Greens can’t win, and they know that my election is the most severe threat, because there’s no one in the governor race that received a million votes for the White House. They know that it’s very difficult for my candidacy not to be taken seriously, even though they try to quiet it.

Robinson

Well, let’s assume that you have successfully persuaded our listeners to seriously consider voting Green, but they want to hear why they should vote Green on substance over the Democratic Party. First, let’s talk about the present governor of your state, Gavin Newsom, who’s widely considered one of, if not the, frontrunners for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, should he choose to run.

Ware

He’s already chosen to run, so let’s not pretend.

Robinson

Tell us, what is the Green Party’s critique of Democratic politicians like Gavin Newsom?

Ware

Gavin Newsom ran on single-payer healthcare back in 2022, and then as soon as he was in office, he didn’t stab the people in the back; he stabbed the people in the face. The healthcare industry dumped $2.7 million down on the California Democrats, and Gavin Newsom made sure that universal single-payer healthcare was not even brought to a floor vote. He ran, saying that he was going to get it for us. And right now, the corporate Democrats, Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, and Eric Swalwell, are all saying that they’re going to get single-payer health care, despite the fact that just a few months ago, Katie Porter called single-payer health care a non-starter at a Politico event. So all of this is just to say they play in your face. They promise you things that they know that they’re not going to deliver. As James Baldwin, the great Black intellectual, put it, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” 

So what’s the difference that you’re going to get from the Greens? No corporate donations, therefore no obedience structure to the corporate establishment. The Dems passed universal single-payer healthcare in 2006 and 2008, when Schwarzenegger was governor, because they knew the Republican would veto it, but they have killed it every year since then because whoever funds you runs you, and the corporate interests fund and run the Democrat party in the state of California. We’re only funded by the people, which is why they’re trying to take us to court, because they know we don’t have deep corporate pockets that are swimming in blood money.

Last point, you asked, what’s the alternative? What are we offering? I lived in West Africa for years. I teach African history. I teach revolutionary history. You pointed to my academic books in your introduction. In the Wolof language, which I learned to speak fluently while living in Senegal—I learned to speak fluent French and Wolof and read Arabic for my research and for liturgical purposes to pray. In Wolof, they say “the child of Adam,” which is how you say “the human being” in the Wolof language—it’s a Quranic reference. They say, “The child of Adam will never release what their hand is holding until they’re reaching for something better.” 

I actually don’t think it’s about attacking what’s wrong with Gavin or what’s wrong with the Republicans. I think that it’s about what we’re offering. And what we’re offering is universal single-payer healthcare, no copays, no deductibles, and we can pay for it with what we’re paying right now if you get the healthcare companies out of the middle. Housing first, which means for housing, it’s the same rule that you have at Thanksgiving: nobody gets seconds until everybody eats. So we can’t have 14 vacant properties in the city of San Francisco for every one homeless person that’s on the street. We’re going to tax Blackstone and BlackRock and the private equity firms that keep hundreds of vacant properties so they sell those back to the state, and that becomes the basis of social housing that’s operated at cost, on the model of Vienna, Austria, where 60 percent of the market is publicly owned, and your average renter pays 25 percent of their income for rent. So healthcare, housing, and then human rights. As governor of the state of California, I’m not complying with any unconstitutional federal orders, which means that ICE is going to have to go through every lawyer and law enforcement officer in the state before they so much as touch a hair on the head of any California resident. We will not be weaponizing the court system to get third parties out. We’ll be using the legal system to protect people.

And then the last part is divestment from war and genocide. Right now in the UC system, where I teach, part of our students’ tuition is going to Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. From where I sit, Raytheon has an office that’s three-quarters of a mile behind me. Northrop Grumman has an office that’s three-quarters of a mile to my left. The state systems should not be funding mass murder and imperialism abroad, and that’s why they’re trying to knock me off the ballot, because they know that the young generation learned what American imperialism is. The young generation is anti-Zionist, and across identity and ideological divides, people want elected officials that represent California, not Israel.

Robinson

But what about all the important jobs in the death industry, Dr. Ware?

Ware

“Have you considered how profitable it is to kill people?” Believe it or not, I actually have, and I believe that actually investing in an economy that is built on sustainable growth, an economy of care, is a swords-to-plowshares argument. That if we take the money that is currently being squandered on military adventurism, torturing the rest of humanity through these global wars, and invest that in infrastructure and education here, this republic, such as it is—and it’s a republic where my people couldn’t vote for most of its history—might just survive the fall of its empire, because the fall of its empire is now inevitable. It is written on the wall. But if we continue to throw money away on military adventurism that benefits a tiny oligarchy of corporations and billionaires, then it will hasten our collapse into fascism.

Robinson

I know you said it’s more important to talk about the positive agenda than to criticize the existing politicians, but I did want to just get your comment on this. I’m sure you must have seen that your state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, recently backtracked on a comment that he had made. He had first endorsed the conclusion of human rights groups, basically the universal conclusion of human rights groups, that Israel is an apartheid state, and then said that he regretted calling Israel an apartheid state. I wondered if you could just comment on how you feel when you see that kind of maneuver.

Ware

So Malcolm X is my hero, mentor, and role model. I didn’t meet him in person, but I converted to Islam when I was 15 years old after reading his autobiography. I read it in one night. I went out to my library and got an English translation of the Quran. I read that and converted to Islam by the end of the week, and that was the birth of both my personal faith tradition within me and also the birth of a Black radical. So I often go to Malcolm when I’m trying to understand things. Here’s what Malcolm said in 1964: “The white liberal is the most dangerous thing in the Western Hemisphere.” 

So you asked me about Gavin Newsom. I’m more worried about Gavin Newsom than I am about Donald Trump. I’m not just worried about his Israel-first policies. I’m worried about the fact that he just floated compulsory military service for a year or a year-and-a-half to build camaraderie and esprit de corps, and that the people are just going to smile and nod because they like to be lied to by a smooth liberal criminal, as opposed to a blunt conservative criminal. Malcolm said, “The liberal is a fox. It bares its teeth. You think that it’s smiling at you, but you are on the menu. The conservative is a wolf. When it bares its teeth, it’s into a vicious snarl that leaves the Black man with no illusion as to where he stands.” Malcolm believed that we were caught between two predators that differ only in the modality of the hunt, and he suggested that the hidden enemy is more dangerous to you than the overt enemy. And for you to understand what he meant when he said the white liberals are the most dangerous thing in the Western Hemisphere, you have to think about what white conservatives were doing in 1964: they were hanging Black people from trees; they were turning dogs and fire hoses on Black youth; they were putting bullets in the brains of white voting rights activists and burying them in shallow graves next to Mississippi roads. And Malcolm said what he said, and he wasn’t wrong. Gavin—you see how he’s weaponized the judiciary to get me off the ballot, and liberals are going to co-sign for it. Last part on Gavin: he’s Bill Clinton 2.0. People like a smooth liar that allows the right-wing policies and imperialism to go down easy. So yes, he’s dangerous.

Robinson

But what about someone like Katie Porter, who has sort of branded herself an anti-corporate Democrat, who would probably affirm a number of things that you say about inequality, climate change, and what have you, if you asked her? And there may be some progressive-minded people who are considering voting for her. Why would you say that they shouldn’t?

Ware

Adam Schiff, when he beat Katie Porter, she decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. She’s no longer a progressive. She’s just become a corporate Dem, and they’re all running to become the new Gavin Newsom. There’s not an inch worth of difference between any of those Dems, which is why none of them can get past 10 percent in a poll. And it’s the reason why they’re trying to knock me out, because I’m at five. Tom Steyer is outspending me 4,000-to-one, and I’ve got half of his polling number. So do you see the fundamental problem? They are such a mediocre, sorry field that they are terrified of me. Literally, I’m like the Candyman to these people. They’re afraid that if you say “Butch Ware” three times, you’re going to lose the state of California, which is true. They don’t want people to know my name.

Robinson

Then, I just want to give you a chance to respond to a critique that I’ve heard of you from some progressives. There were some comments that you made about abortion and trans rights that people criticized, where I believe you said that you thought trans athletes had an unfair advantage and that there should be some restrictions on abortion, or at least that’s how your comments were interpreted. And I wondered if you could just take the opportunity to reassure progressives who might be concerned by what they’ve heard about your statements.

Ware

If I had heard about the hatchet job edits that the Democrats did with what I actually said, I would be very concerned too. So just on the first point, this was very easily dispensed with after the electoral cycle back in November 2024. I’ve been pro-choice my whole life, and so I refer to medical restrictions regarding abortion that were about medical conditions. I have never advocated—never have, never will—for restrictions of the state of any kind on abortion. I marched with my mom for a woman’s right to choose when I was 13 years old, the same time that I was marching for the life of a Black kid who got shot in his backyard in my neighborhood for playing with a water pistol. I have been for women’s liberation and for bodily autonomy, literally, since I was a child raised by a 15-year-old single mom. And just for clarity, why Malcolm’s autobiography spoke to me so deeply was because Malcolm was brutally honest about what white supremacy had done to him. My mom was 15 years old, pregnant with me, and told by her high school guidance counselor to abort the child because she was pregnant by a Black man. My mom’s white, and I have still been pro-choice my entire life. So that is pure nonsense. Nonsense.

Now, with respect to the trans issue, what happened is that I was in a hostile interview with a transphobic host, and he said, “Do you think biological males should be allowed to compete in female sports?” And I repeated the framing that he had used in my answer to the question, which was a terrible mistake on my part. I was in a combative interview with a xenophobic racist, and so I literally just did not push back on the categories in the question. But for the record, I have never supported and will never support any state or federal ban on trans athletes’ participation in sports. And in point of fact, one of the things that I was most widely known for in the Muslim community was for being a scholar who had lived and studied with traditionally trained scholars and argued both for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights from within a religious framework, in addition to arguing that the basic secular rights that we have, that we need to fight for people, no matter who they pray with or who they lay with. And if you didn’t believe any of that, I put my money where my mouth is, because I hired as my communications director Angelica Ross—yes, that Angelica Ross, NAACP Image Award nominee, known to many from Pose, and a trans activist. And now she has been in her first month on the campaign, promoted to deputy campaign manager, because I do not discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity or expression, and I will fight for a California where no one experiences discrimination, oppression, violence, or moral injury due to their gender identity or expression or sexual orientation. Ten toes down for trans rights. Period, full stop.

 

Robinson

Let’s just conclude here by giving us a picture of what a California with a Green Party governor would look like and how it would be different from what Californians have gotten so used to in the form of this long string of corporate Democrats.

Ware

Yes, so California, as I already mentioned, is the third largest economy on the planet, but it also is the state in the union that has the greatest wealth inequalities of any state. And despite the wealth—a GDP of over $4 trillion, which is twice that of the next largest economy in the U.S., the state of Texas—we have the highest poverty rates in the country, tied with Louisiana. They can’t blame that on Team Red. That has all happened over the last 60 years of Democrat majorities and supermajorities in the state legislature. Because, as we stated at the outset of this interview, the Democrat establishment inside the state of California is the most corrupt mafia organization in politics. Tammany Hall ain’t got nothing on Gavin Newsom, and if you think it’s bad now, wait until Gavin is in charge.

So how will it differ? Income tax on those billionaires. A 2 percent income tax increase on the 186 billionaires that live inside the state of California would not only make it so that nobody who lives here that makes 100k or less would pay a penny in state taxes, but it would also finance a great variety of social services. And I’m going to tax them twice, not just on the income, but with a wealth tax as well. So there are 186 billionaires, and in this state, there are 187,000 homeless people that sleep on the streets every night. There are nine families in Silicon Valley that control $683 billion worth of wealth. We will not be working for them because, as I said before, whoever funds you runs you. We’re funded by the people. I don’t owe corporations or billionaires any favors, and we are cleaning house. And part of the reason why they’re so afraid is that they know that independents and Republicans also want to vote for me, because I do not think that all Trump voters are inherently any more racist than your average liberal. I think that’s a fairy tale that liberals tell themselves to make them feel better about themselves. I’m not talking about the KKK types, but the average Trump voter, I think, doesn’t see a difference between Blue criminals and Red criminals and, all other things being equal, would rather pay lower taxes. So we’re going to lower your taxes by cutting out the corruption, because it is not a moral failing not to want to pay a bunch of taxes for Gavin Newsom to hand out to his developer buddies or to hand out to judges so that they can issue corrupt rulings. We are the power of the people, and this party has stood on representative democracy, ranked-choice voting, multi-member districts, and proportional representation. There are no politicians in the Green Party, only public servants. And that is the message they’re afraid of. It’s the same message that the Panthers brought, which is all power to the people, because if we restore democracy to the people, the people’s voice will be heard. That’s what you can count on from me as governor of the state of California.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.