I Endorse Tom Steyer for Governor of California

Without reservation.

The primary is Tuesday. I am voting for Tom Steyer, and I am writing this so that you know why before you mark your ballot.

He is a billionaire. He founded Farallon Capital. He has two and a half billion dollars. He spent a hundred and thirty million dollars on this campaign. He spent thirteen million of his own money to pass Proposition 50 in November. He is, by every standard measure, the kind of person Notes from the Circus has spent two years describing as the problem.

I am endorsing him anyway, and the reason is the whole argument.

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In 2012, Tom Steyer walked out of the hedge fund he had founded and built, sold his stake, and stopped making the money. He had enough. He has said so plainly, in interviews, in book tours, in stump speeches. He had enough money. He could have kept making more. He chose to stop. He started NextGen America, he poured money into climate ballot measures, he spent a decade losing some and winning some. He wrote a book about how we win the climate war. He ran for president and lost. He came back to California and spent thirteen million dollars to redraw the congressional map so that the apparatus could not gerrymander the country into one-party permanence. And now he is running for governor on a platform whose core sentence is: I am the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires.

Yesterday I published a piece called Put Something Back. The frame of that piece was Steve Jobs in 1996, three months from returning to Apple, telling a Stanford interviewer that the people who built the things we use now were people who put something back. The framers put something back. The teachers put something back. The doctors put something back. Jobs’s argument was that you live inside an inheritance, and you owe it, and the question is whether you add to the deposit or extract from it.

And yesterday I published a piece called The Longest Relay. The frame of that piece was that three thousand years of witnesses across every continent and every tradition have been handing forward the same deposit, generation by generation, and the question facing any living person is whether you carry it or drop it.

Five days ago Peter Thiel fled the country. He bought a twelve-million-dollar mansion in Buenos Aires. He met with Javier Milei. He bought land in Uruguay. He may be applying for Argentine citizenship. The stated trigger is the California wealth tax on the November ballot — the one Steyer supports, the one Steyer’s whole platform is built around. Thiel had already given a lecture cycle in Rome in March arguing that the Antichrist is whoever tries to regulate artificial intelligence and that algorithmic dictatorship is the holy restrainer. Two months later, when the American pope wrote an encyclical asking that artificial intelligence be disarmed of its instruments of domination, Thiel called the pope the Antichrist on a livestream and left the country.

That is the contrast. That is the whole California ballot in two men.

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The argument against Steyer that you will hear in the next four days runs like this. He is a billionaire. He cannot represent working people. He is buying the office. He talks like a class traitor but he is a hedge fund manager. His fortune was made on fossil fuel investments. He is a hypocrite. He is doing what billionaires do, which is to purchase political power, and the fact that he is purchasing it for ostensibly progressive ends does not change what the purchase is.

I have heard this argument. I have made versions of this argument. I have written sixty thousand words in the last two years about the corruption of donor capture, the privatization of policy through philanthropic vehicles, the way that billionaire money distorts every democratic outcome it touches. I am not retracting any of that.

I am saying that the argument, applied here, mistakes the question.

The question is not whether Tom Steyer is a billionaire. He is. The question is what a billionaire does with the position. And the answer in his case, over fourteen years, has been a public record. He stopped making the money in 2012. He started giving it away to causes that explicitly call for taxing people like him. He put thirteen million dollars on the table to stop a partisan gerrymander he could not personally benefit from. He is running on a platform whose first plank is that California should tax wealth at a rate his own accountants will spend the next twenty years trying to minimize. He could have done what every other billionaire in this state has done, which is to use his fortune to buy regulatory capture, lower tax burdens, and a permanent legal shield against the public. He chose not to. He has been choosing not to for fourteen years. The pattern is not a campaign-season conversion. It is a decade-and-a-half of putting something back.

Peter Thiel, in the same fortnight, took everything he could and left.

The relay has a way of arranging the test cases. Two billionaires, the same week, the same ballot, the same wealth tax measure. One funds it. One flees it. One says that he should pay more. One says that anyone who says he should pay more is the Antichrist. The substrate sees the difference. The voter, mailing the ballot in the next four days, will register it.

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I want to say what Steyer is not.

He is not a progressive purity candidate. He has not signed onto every line of the Bernie Sanders 2020 platform. He has been careful about exactly how much he will commit to the wealth tax proposal. He talks about affordability more than redistribution. He talks about electricity when he is talking about climate. He has been a hedge fund founder, and the habits of mind a hedge fund founder accumulates over twenty-five years do not vanish at fifty-five.

He is not Katie Porter. He is not Xavier Becerra. He is not the candidate who came up through the public-interest ranks. He is a billionaire whose path to political office runs through wealth.

And he is also not what the apparatus on the right wants you to believe a Democrat is. He is not running away from the wealth tax. He is running toward it. He is not pretending to be a working-class guy. He is saying: I am a rich guy and I think rich guys should pay more, and I am the one running because the working-class guys cannot afford to fight this fight alone. He is not pretending to be neutral on climate. He has spent fourteen years and most of his post-Farallon time saying that fossil fuels are a death machine and that California has to lead the way out. He is not pretending the Trump administration is normal. He spent thirteen million dollars in October and November on advertisements that called Trump’s name and named the problem, while half the consultant class in California was telling Democrats to keep their mouths shut.

He is, by my honest read, the candidate in this race who has done the least pretending.

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The deeper case is structural, and it is what the last two years of writing have been about.

California is the place where the apparatus of extraction is most concentrated. The technology industry has its headquarters here. The hedge fund industry has its second city here. The venture capital that funds the entire surveillance-and-automation stack flows out of Sand Hill Road. The neoreactionary intellectual production that wants to dissolve democracy into a network of monarchies has its main publishing houses in Silicon Valley. The richest men in human history live within an hour of each other on the Peninsula. If a wealth tax is going to be tried anywhere in the United States, it has to be tried in California. If a state government is going to be the firewall against the federal apparatus the Trump administration is building, it has to be California. The next governor of California is the governor of the only state large enough and rich enough and bold enough to set the terms of the next four years of American resistance.

That governor needs to be someone who is not afraid of the people on the Peninsula. Who is not financially captured by them. Who is not waiting for their endorsement. Who is willing to be denounced by Peter Thiel on a podcast and treat the denunciation as the credential it is.

Steyer is uniquely positioned. He came up inside that world. He left it. He has been organizing against its interests for fourteen years. The Peninsula does not own him because he was once one of them and they cannot threaten him with what they threaten the rest of the political class with. The donor capture mechanism does not work on someone who has more money than the donors. The lobbyist mechanism does not work on someone who can hire better lawyers than the lobbyists. The threat-of-funding-the-primary-opponent mechanism does not work on someone who self-funds a hundred and thirty million dollars and laughs.

This is the inversion the relay has been waiting for. The mechanism of capture has only one weakness, which is that someone inside the mechanism, at some point, has to choose to turn it against itself. Steyer is making that choice.

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I will say a harder thing.

I have spent two years arguing that the apparatus the technology industry built is destroying the conditions for human freedom. I have written about Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, the network-state intellectuals, the neoreactionary writers, the captured podcast ecosystem, the donor-class capture of the Democratic Party, and the way the whole stack functions as a coordinated assault on the agora. I have not been kind. I am not going to be kind.

But the case that the apparatus is the problem does not mean every wealthy person is the apparatus. It means the posture toward power is what matters. The posture that says: I have more than I can use, and the question of what I do with the rest is the moral question of my life — that posture is not the same as the posture that says: I have what I have because I deserve it and you are coming for it and I will leave the country before I let you take it.

The posture is the thing. The posture is what makes someone a witness or a defector. Steyer’s posture, over fourteen years, has been the posture of someone who knows he has more than he can use and has been trying to figure out how to put it back. Thiel’s posture is the posture of someone who believes he is the only thing standing between civilization and the abyss and that anyone who tries to tax him is committing a metaphysical crime.

The voter on Tuesday is not being asked to grade billionaires on a moral curve. The voter is being asked to register which posture the next governor of California should embody. The voter, in California in 2026, is being asked to send a signal about whether the state thinks the wealth tax is the Antichrist or the answer.

I am voting for the answer. I am voting for the posture that says put something back. I am voting for the only candidate in this race who has spent fourteen years rehearsing the speech he is now going to have to give.

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The campaign will not be perfect. The governance will not be perfect. The wealth tax may not pass in November. The fights with the legislature will be ugly. Steyer will make decisions I will write columns against. The honeymoon will be short. I am not endorsing a savior. I am endorsing a candidate.

But I am endorsing him without hedge and without apology, and I am asking you, if you live in this state, to do the same on Tuesday.

Tom Steyer for Governor of California.

The relay has reached the ballot. Mark it.

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