Gov. Newsom’s Underhanded Reparations Bill
Governor Gavin Newsom found a way to demand reparations from companies with his new bill, California AB 2599. The bill requires businesses operating in California with over 100 million in annual worldwide gross receipts to submit sworn affidavits disclosing any historical involvement in slavery. Businesses must post the filings on a public digital platform by 2028.
Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, a Black Caucus member, authored this bill on September 30, 2026, and it requires companies to investigate and report whether their past included slavery-related transactions.
It’s one giant step closer to direct payments.
The Demands
The disclosures include verifying involvement in buying or selling enslaved persons, using enslaved persons as collateral, providing loans to purchase enslaved persons, ensuring slavery related transactions or individuals, and finally facilitating or supporting such transactions in any related way. It requires them to consider any predecessor entities and their potential ties.
The Reasons Why Not
They have deadlines, and they must launch a public, searchable digital platform by January 3, 2028, to display affidavits and related data. The highly-biased civil rights department will build and maintain this platform. They will enforce it under penalty of perjury, but the attorney general can seek injunctive relief for violations
Clearly, this isn’t just to publicly embarrass the company. They’ll use it to demand money for something that happened more than 150 years ago. Lawsuits and boycotts could follow. They are being set up.
This is extremely divisive and is aimed at attacking wealth using the Marxist income inequality mantra. It demands that everyone have the same outcomes, regardless of talent, education, intelligence, or the commitment of those who earned it over those who did not.
This idea of reparations comes from the Pan-African movement; it is a communist supremacist movement. It has no business being brought to America.
As Black economist Thomas Sowell said many times, you can never make it up to the people who were enslaved, and you could never punish those who enslaved them.
The Law Doesn’t Allow It
Reparations violate the US Constitution and California’s 1996 Prop 209, which prohibits discrimination or preferential treatment by the state, public universities, public employment, or any public entities. It bans affirmative action policies.
California was not a slave state, yet they insist on pushing reparations. They likely realize their leadership is weak and stupid.
The California Black Caucus has repeatedly introduced bills demanding reparations. Some minor bills pass, and they’re slowly but surely eroding the Constitution.
The Black Caucus says it’s to push for justice and equality when the people who were treated unjustly are dead, and so are the people who did it. Almost every reparations bill will violate Proposition 209.
Slowly but surely, they will succeed. In 2020, Gavin Newsom apologized for slavery even though California was not a slave state. In 2025, he signed AB518, which created the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery within the state civil rights department to administer potential programs and handle genealogy, verification, education, and related functions. He signed SB437, which provides up to $6 million for California State University research to verify descendants’ status.
