Below is my column in the California Post and New York Post on the recent claims made by Democratic candidates in the debate for California’s governorship. As expected, the race-baiting rhetoric flowed from each of the Democratic candidates, including a claim that requiring English proficiency is “racial profiling.”
Here is the column:
If you go to NASCAR to watch the cars crash, the Democratic gubernatorial race in California has been a thrilling pile-up.
The recent debate saw all the Democratic candidates play the race card over a curious issue. When asked if they supported the move to rescind at least 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, every single Democrat declared the policy racist. The candidates also pledged to support truckers who cannot speak or read English.
When Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate, said that being able to read English (and particularly English signs) should be mandatory, Porter lectured the Hispanic sheriff on racism, saying that his support for English proficiency by truckers disqualified him from being governor of California.
Not to be outdone, Democratic candidate Tom Steyer declared that requiring truck drivers to be able to read English is “racial profiling.”
Steyer, a billionaire, has been funding his own campaign with almost $120 million and has tried to capture the far-left supporters of Swalwell. In so doing, he has increasingly looked like Howard Hughes with better-trimmed nails.
Steyer grabbed Swalwell’s platform of pledging to arrest ICE officers and take punitive measures against them. He cannot fulfill that pledge, and the Ninth Circuit recently shot down the flagrantly unconstitutional California law seeking to dictate the conduct or appearances of federal officers. The law was supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom and all of the Democratic candidates.
Steyer’s claim that English proficiency rules are “racial profiling” is more Looney Tunes than law.
Racial profiling occurs when a person’s racial appearance alone is grounds for reasonable suspicion for a stop or search. English proficiency requirements are race-neutral conditions to ensure basic safety in the operation of large trucks. We have seen several fatal cases involving undocumented persons who could not read or speak English proficiently.
Even the use of apparent race or ethnicity is allowed when part of a totality of circumstances or observations by law enforcement. Last year, the Supreme Court stayed a racial profiling case from California on that ground, in favor of law enforcement, in a 6-3 decision in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo.
If requiring English proficiency is racial profiling, a wide array of jobs in the United States are the products of racism, including airplane pilots, air traffic controllers, U.S. military, astronauts, mechanics, and baseball umpires. Even the European Space Agency has required English proficiency.
By Steyer’s standard, he may also be the product of a racial profiling system. In order to appear on the ballot, Steyer certified that he is a U.S. citizen. To be a U.S. citizen, you must be proficient in English. Thus, a candidate must certify that he is both a citizen and English-proficient. He can then go on a stage and call such requirements racial profiling without any basis in the law.
Ironically, Steyer made much of his money managing Farallon Capital Management, which profited from owning private prisons and, in the case of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), actually runs one of the largest ICE facilities. Now called CoreCivic, the company requires not only U.S. citizenship but also English proficiency.
As with the pledges to arrest ICE officers and dictate how they conduct their operations, the racial profiling claim is knowingly misleading and unfounded. It is designed to pander to the far left by suggesting that requiring basic English skills of large-truck operators is somehow unlawful or unconstitutional.
The only thing that Steyer proved, again, is that there are sadly few requirements to run for governor of California beyond a large fortune and little shame.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
For anyone who thinks this debate about language is just “academic,” take a look at Rob Lockwood’s recent Washington Post column, It’s 2026. Why are we still speaking ‘English’?”) He argues that what we really share here is not the Queen’s English but a distinct civic language shaped by our own constitutional experience, and that an official language only matters if it reflects a real common tongue in public life.
That is exactly the point in this trucker debate. Either we strengthen a shared American language that lets citizens understand the law and each other, or we keep Babelizing it with spin terms like “undocumented citizen” and “racial profiling” until even plain English arguments are treated as nonsense.
The fastest growing group of voters are “Independents”. The best longterm solution is open primaries by both parties.
Closed primary elections let the extremes on the left and right take the country in the wrong direction.
Both parties, in every state, should have open primary elections. Also ranked-choice open primaries would be even better. Every voter could rank their favorite candidates and the winning candidate would receive more than 50% of the votes – unlike our current system.
Then you end up like California. One party rule.
exactly
Independent means no party. That’s a no party rule.
If I remember correctly, Ross Perot ran on an independent party label for president. To maintain control the Democrats would run so many candidates as to confuse and or overwhelm the system so that their candidate would win. The best is for people to do is get involved, read the positions of each person and vote intelligently. This is what the system is set up for and I am sure it worked pretty good in the beginning of the country since most people knew who was running. As time has passed the level of interest in learning about the candidate, propaganda, manipulation and fraud have taken place. Just look at Virginia as to Spanberger.
I concluded sometime ago that whenever I see an individual or group of people who identify as Democrats I see them as a threat to the continuation of the written, constitutional, rules based order of this nation. I know of only one Democrat who I find reasonable and unthreatening. Democrats running for office hide their intentions with a claim of being moderate but many VA voters and the nation have learned to avoid taking another bite of a Spanberger.
“I know of only one Democrat who I find reasonable and unthreatening.”
would that person be Turley?
And oddly it is the Rs who are the ones ignoring the Constitution.
Nothing like Rich White Folk telling people of color how Rich White Folk are keeping them down. Enlightenment from Low IQ Illuminati.
That’s a corollary to rich white folks telling other white folks what isn’t racist to the point where nothing is.
For what it’s worth, comments that just shout “gobbledygook” at an argument about language actually prove the point I was making. If you can’t or won’t point to a single sentence and say “this is wrong because…,” you’re not engaging the English, you’re just trying to make people feel like plain speech is nonsense.
That is exactly what happens when we lose a shared public language. Debate collapses into labels, and “word salad” becomes a way to dodge the substance instead of answer it. My comment was written in clear English. If someone truly can’t make sense of that, they’re not exposing my confusion, they’re underscoring why a common language and a common vocabulary for self‑government matter in the first place.
Sounds like an off-ramp of 1984. Newspeak so the state can change the meaning of words or eliminate them from the language in total and by that control thoughts.
Calspeak-language of the Democratic Party of California and a subsection of Demspeak
Newspeak- 1984
Demspeak- Language of of the Democratic Socialists of America, “Progressive”, Black is White, Up is Down, etc., Contains some words mistaken for English. See subsection on Calspeak, Illinispeak, Masspeak, NYCspeak,
Virginiaspeak – promises are negotiable
English – American version or UK Version
Corollaries – New World Spanish vs Old World Spanish
– Brazilian Portuguese vs Portugal (old world) Portuguese
Conclusion-Insanity
English as racist is not just stupid. It is Forrest Gump stupid. Justice Oliver Wendell Homes wrote that a word is the skin of a living thought. By extension learning all the words used in the language of the nation you are in unlocks understanding of the core values of the people there who speak it. The idioms, the multiple meanings behind the words themselves. It’s not just the English of We The People. If you take the trouble to learn Spanish, you unlock for yourself the cultures of all the good people between here and Tierra del Fuego. Same for Portuguese in Brazil. Steyer’s and the Democrats’ pitch that English is racist doesn’t just attack proficiency and road safety. It seeks to amputate the limbs of the Indispensable Right that make the cultural melting pot of America work. Why would you do that?
Mike, this is really well put. A shared language in a republic works like a civic Rosetta Stone: it lets people actually decode the laws, arguments, and stories that hold the country together. Treating English as “racist” flips that on its head. It takes away the very key that lets people step into the same constitutional conversation and stand shoulder‑to‑shoulder in public life. That is not liberation, it is a quiet way of Babelizing the language so fewer people can fully share in self‑government.
Olly, when I see Babelizing it makes me think of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel from the Bible. If I am seeing it right, it is telling me that it brands the activity as the acme of hubris.
Mike, you’re reading it the way I intend it. When I say Babelizing, I mean the Nimrod move: people so sure of their own project that they try to refashion the community’s shared speech to serve it. It is a kind of supreme arrogance to think you can tinker with the basic language a free people uses to understand law and each other, and that nothing fundamental will break. That is why I wanted a term that points straight back to the Babel story.
“By extension learning all the words used in the language of the nation you are in unlocks understanding of the core values of the people there who speak it. The idioms, the multiple meanings behind the words themselves.”
Based on your belief that we must unlock understanding, do you believe our Supreme Court Justices would be improved if they knew Latin and Greek? Since many who wrote our original documents were fluent in them, so many of our foundational meanings are rooted in those languages.
The Framers looked at Latin and Greek. What they built was a design that surpassed that history. A triangle of co-equal branches with one nonpolitical, given the final say on what the law is. With life tenure. Nobody ever had that before. In a way that was like discovering the Area Rule that lets an an airframe go faster than the speed of sound. What does an Article III branch, including SCOTUS, knowing Latin and Greek language have to do with learning core values of We The People from leaning our English today?
Mike, your use of the Area Rule is a brilliant way to describe the Framers’ breakthrough. They truly did discover a “political physics,” if that is what we should call it, allowing our nation to surpass the ancient failures.
However, even your supersonic airframe requires precise instrumentation and a flight plan to stay on course. I am an “old timer” who views the original Latin and Greek roots not just as old words, but as the anchor that prevents the ship from drifting and sinking in dangerous waters.
While your triangle provides the structure, I believe those root words are the essential part that holds the design together. They provide the originalist intent. Without that basic truth, I fear the airframe is flying blind, and we risk the very “unwinding” that the Framers sought to avoid. My appreciation for those old languages is really a desire to ensure the “engineers” of today are still reading the original blueprints.
This Virginia fight ought to be taught as a case study in how to Babelize a people out of self‑government. The whole scheme depends on rewriting the ballot in feel‑good words so voters no longer share a common understanding of what “yes” and “no” actually do. Here it is “temporarily adopt new congressional districts … to restore fairness,” when the reality is a mid‑decade remap that takes a 6–5 split and turns it into 10–1. The Tazewell judge called that “flagrantly misleading,” which is a polite way of saying the political class has broken the shared language between rulers and the ruled.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/04/24/va-gerrymander-language-is-so-dishonest-dems-refuse-to-defend-it-in-court/
We have lived the same thing in California. Gas‑tax repeal became “Eliminates Recently Enacted Road Repair and Transportation Funding,” and people walked into the booth believing they were protecting roads when they were really protecting higher taxes.
When you do this over and over, citizens stop feeling like one people with a common language. They feel isolated, second‑guess themselves, and start to assume the problem is their own understanding instead of the wording that was engineered to confuse them. That is the danger of Babelizing the language of law: it fragments the culture, atomizes voters, and turns the ballot itself into a weapon against the people’s ability to govern themselves.
“The candidates also pledged to support truckers who cannot speak or read English.”
While we’re at it, let’s have pilots who cannot understand the words “hold short,” and surgeons who cannot understand the words “maintain sterility.”
Thus the Left’s motto: *by any means necessary,” pack the country with illiterate immigrants. Let them do whatever they feel like doing. All to gin up the census numbers to secure power for Leftists. Rules of the road, the safe operation of a 25-ton tractor-trailer, protecting innocent Americans — none of those count in the Left’s mad dash for control.
Indeed. And the collapse that will follow the imposition of those extreme views allowing English illiterates in key occupations will destroy the republic. That is the goal. On the left there are true believers surrounded by ” useful idiots”. It is sometimes to know which is which.
Three candidates, Steve Hilton, Chad Bianco, and Matt Mahan all pointed to political activism at CA DMV in their lax screening of foreign CDL applicants. The law as written is race neutral. Bianco put the 3 leftist candidates in their place by insisting that law has to be enforced regardless of race or immigrant status, and said of cheap race-baiting in politics “We’re sick of it”.
Democrats can find a race angle to any problem. In fact, it is only angle they can find.
If Americans were not so brazenly racist and bigoted the issue wouldn’t be a problem – right? Then liberals wouldn’t have an issue to fight about. Whites handed it to them on a platter.
If Americans are so brazenly racist and bigoted why do so many black, brown, and Asian people fight so hard to come here? Wouldn’t that imply that the rest of world must be an even worse place to live – right? Or they’re just coming for free stuff. Maybe liberals like to fight about the issue because it creates a class of victims and allows politicians to reward these groups for their political support.
“Or they’re just coming for free stuff. ”
Too much of this, unfortunately. Thanks largely to Obama and Biden.
Democrats consider the First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and Tenth Amendment to be un-American. So it is not in their best interest for people to be able to read the Bill of Rights.
So it is not in their best interest for people to be able to read the Bill of Rights. ……… And that’s why non-lawyer Americans, even foreigners, need lawyers to guide and help them understand the BoR and state laws. Oh, and empty their wallets in the process.
The left needs/wants the people to be as ignorant as possible. That is the only way to get votes.
““I love the poorly educated.” –Donald Trump
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/did-trump-say-he-loves-the-poorly-educated-e7e594?utm_source=copilot.com
In a nation where “educated” has come (through the long term efforts of teachers’ unions, among other interests) to be semantically equivalent to “indoctrinated”, that statement is reconcilable with the OPs premise…
Trump embraces every American, regardless of status. It’s a total contrast to the Democrats, who only value people as tools for power and actively sabotage anyone trying to climb the ladder. They target everyone, educated or not, unless they fall in line.
You need to look at who you are.
This is not just about trucker “skills.” In a constitutional republic, a common language is one of the basic tools for forming citizens who can actually govern themselves. You cannot argue about a statute, follow a trial, or read a ballot if you cannot even share the same words in public life. The Babel story makes the point in human terms. Once God confuses their language, the people cannot understand each other and their whole project collapses. That is what happens to a republic if it tries to live in ten different civic languages at once. You are not being compassionate when you pretend language does not matter. You are lowering the floor of citizen capacity and with it the ceiling of how competent your government can ever be.
excellent!!
You completely missed the point: The State of California. It can make any law it desires regarding driver licensing.. any! And “constitutional republics” (whatever that is), let’s just call it countries, can and do have multiple recognized languages i.e., the USA and it 50 states and it territories use at least American English and Spanish as business languages. Think UK, uses English but recognizes Gaelic, Welsh, Irish etc. in daily usage and in government business. Then Russia, Turkey, Iraq, etc asll use multiple languages in business and commercially.
You made no point, only that you do not know the subject and pasting a bunch of unconnected and irrelevant concepts, proves it.
The best course for the trucking industry is to purge itself of these rogue firms paying chump change to desperate illegal immigrants with no English skills. And then, to insist that autonomous trucks be able to go to the DMV and pass the same Commercial Driving Test administered by an inspector as human drivers have to pass. This will save their industry from AI because those trucks won’t be able to interact spontaneously with the human inspector verbally calling out the test moves.
“The State of California. It can make any law it desires regarding driver licensing”
Not when the license in question is recognized nationally, it doesn’t. Unless you would be OK if ALL California drivers’ licenses of any kind were no longer so recognized, and any California driver would need to obtain a separate license recognized by another state to drive there.
Anonymous, you are helping make my point. A constitutional republic is not a mystery term; it is a country where the people are supposed to rule through a written constitution that limits government and structures how law is made. California does not get to “make any law it desires” about anything it wants. It is bound by that higher law, by federal statutes, and by the conditions that come with federal programs, including safety and language rules for commercial drivers.
I also did not say a free country can only have one language in private life. The point is that citizens need a common public language for law and self‑government. You can have Welsh or Gaelic in local culture in the United Kingdom, but Parliament conducts its business in English so everyone can follow it. That is the kind of shared civic tongue I am talking about. If we cannot keep basic terms straight, such as what a constitutional republic is and what “common language” means, it becomes easy to dismiss real arguments as “irrelevant concepts” instead of dealing with them on the merits.
They are not “undocumented” persons. They are noncitizens. If documentation was legally created, it would document that the person in question is not a citizen. The woke term “undocumented citizen” was created to influence people to think of noncitizens as citizens. Many are here illegally and are clearly “illegal aliens”, but many were allowed in and are waiting a judgement to determine if they are legally considered refugees. These people are legally documented noncitizens. We need to use correct descriptions to counter the attempt to deceive people with false labels. There comes a point where “spin” becomes an unjustifiable lie.
This is how the game works. First you swap out the plain legal words so people lose their footing on what the law actually says and what the categories actually mean. Call illegal presence “undocumented,” call noncitizens “undocumented citizens,” call a safety rule “racial profiling,” and suddenly nobody is sure what is really being talked about.
Once the waters are muddy, the only thing that still lands is the emotional language of “racism” and “profiling.” Ordinary people start to wonder if they are the problem instead of realizing the language itself has been re‑engineered to make them doubt their own common sense. That is a modern Babel strategy. You confuse the speech first so you can scatter the people and shame them out of defending the ground the law actually sits on.
Gobbledygook.
I can point to the starting point when liberals in the early ’90s began using militant verbal tactics to take control of the illegal immigration debate. Some clever lawyer came up with “We simply will not make any distinction between legal and illegal…..just say “immigrants” (now “migrants”). That makes a productive debate impossible by refusing to stick to the topic of controversy. It’s verbal jui-jitsu. It’s cognitive militancy.
Call it out for what it is.
“plain legal words”
Unfortunately, in many legal venues, that term has been an oxymoron for a very long time. The majority of lawyers seem to like that.
“Undocumented” is also in most case inaccurate. The left doesn’t like the term illegal alien, so alien becomes immigrant and illegal becomes undocumented. Euphemisms for the purpose of making their presence more acceptable or less inappropriate. Of course, most illegals are not undocumented since they have foreign passports and driver licenses. Moreover, a US citizen who has lost his passport is undocumented, but obviously not entering the country illegally when he crosses the border.
The law on refugee status is widely abused. Every person who seeks to enter the US without a valid visa is advised to claim refugee status (thanks to the deplorable lawyer class – deplorable because advising to lie is not a virtue). Once released into the country, it takes years before their case is decided if they even show up in court. There is a rule under international law that a refugee must apply in the first country they enter after leaving their country of origin. We should be able to refuse entry to those who come via third country. If you fly from Africa to Mexico and walk to there US border, refuge should be sought in Mexico.
Our humanitarian laws are being abused and the West is being overrun by the Third World. We are importing poverty. I also get sick of the libertarian argument (prof. Ilya Somin e.g.) that the newcomers contribute so much to society. Really? 75% of the Somalis is on welfare after 20 years in the country; 85% is on medicaid. The Afghans don’t do better. Even if they find a job, they do not make enough to provide for their families as they produce 6-8 children. The US is, indeed, a country of immigrants but the idea was that the immigrants do not become a financial burden to society and that they can sustain themselves. That was the case still with immigrants that arrives in the 1950ies, but with the emergence of the welfare state that has been lost, because the children born here are automatically US citizens and entitled to benefits which of course are shared by the whole family (which is also true for children of illegal immigrants).
We are stupid by allowing immigrants taking advantage of our immigration and welfare system.
Billionaire Steyer requires his limousine drivers and private jet pilots to be extremely proficient in English. Each and every one of them speaks English at a high level. Steyer ought to put his big money where his fat mouth is and hire non-English speaking pilots for his fleet of private jets. He won’t. He is a shameless hypocrite. One who speaks only English himself.
Being a good leftist does not actually require getting one’s hands dirty, it only requires saying the right things or having the right sign in the yard.
antonio
Can we then say people who only speak German, French, Polish, Hungarian, etc. are being profiled for being white?
Democrats are the folks released onto the streets when we abolished mental institutions.
How is it racial profiling when the main ways to check for English proficiency is during roadside stops where you can either understand English and be understood speaking it or not, or at roadside stops such as weigh stations where each individual trucker is greeted and asked one or more questions? There’s no evidence of any way that only people of certain races or skin colors are being stopped and questioned
Umpires? In the interest of comedic levity, you might want to re-think that one. Imagine an argument between a Spanish speaking umpire and an English speaking manager.
In the Mexican league??? In MLB umpires speak English.