West
California Dem compares 'Save Girls Sports' law to Nazi Germany, as two trans athlete ban bills fail to pass
The California state legislature failed to pass two separate bills aimed at protecting girls sports from trans inclusion on Tuesday. During debate for one of the bills, a Democratic state lawmaker compared the proposals to practices employed by Nazi Germany in the holocaust.
California assembly member Rick Chavez Zbur made the comparison while arguing against the first bill, AB 89.
“This is really reminiscent to me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We are moving towards autocracy in this country. In Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted, barred from public life,” Zbur said.
Zbur was then interrupted by mediators who protested his comparison and argued it was out of order. But Zbur continued his analogy.
“This is about this, this is about this bill,” Zbur argued. “They were barred from public life. They were detransitioned. They were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps. And the way it started was the same kind of things that are happening in this country by the Trump administration.”
California assembly member Rick Chavez Zbur made the comparison while arguing against the first bill, AB 89. (Getty Images)
California Republican assembly member Kate Sanchez, who proposed AB 89, said she heard audible gasps in the assembly chamber during Zbur’s argument, and that one attendee had to excuse herself from the room.
“There was a lot of gasps and shock,” Sanchez told Fox News Digital.
“It was very tone-deaf. We had a mother who had been in the holocaust itself, so she had to leave the committee hearing because it was so offensive to hear… she stood up and left because she was just so uncomfortable with the situation.”
Multiple Democrat residents, including a member of the LGBTQ community, appeared on the assembly floor Tuesday to advocate in support of the bill.
But AB 89 was ultimately struck down by the Democratic majority. However, it will be allowed for reconsideration at a later date.
“I am just so disgusted that my Democrat colleagues were unable to stand for the protection of women and girls,” Sanchez said. “Not only are they ignoring the will of the people… they’re ignoring the everyday mom, dad, girl in sports. They are ignoring their wants.
Democrat assembly member Avalino Valencia was absent from Tuesday’s vote. Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas inserted himself in the committee to vote in Valencia’s absence. Valencia’s office has not responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Just moments after Democrats struck down Sanchez’s bill, the committee voted on AB 844, which would also ban trans athletes from girls sports and was proposed by California Republican assembly member Bill Essayli. Debate for Essayli’s bill featured testimony from conservative activist and filmmaker Matt Walsh.
NEWSOM’S ‘UNFAIR’ REMARK ON GIRLS’ SPORTS BELIES RECORD AS GOVERNOR: ‘ABSOLUTE BULLS—‘
And like Sanchez’s bill, Essayli’s was also struck down by the Democrat majority. Essayli told Fox News Digital that he believes the Democrat’s resistance to the two bills was intended to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom prompted backlash from those in his own party with comments on his podcast last month, expressing his belief that trans athletes in girls sports was “deeply unfair,” but defended allowing it anyway.
“I think there really is a civil war here brewing within the Democrat Party on how to address these issues. You have the governor going in one direction, and I think what you saw today with the leadership in the legislature, which tends to be even more radical and progressive than the governor, taking a completely different approach. And I think they wanted to send a message to the governor that they’re not budging on this issue,” Essayli said.
“Today they wanted to send a message to their progressive, extremist base that they’re not abandoning them.”
The Democratic majority prevented both bills from passing just days after President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a formal warning to Newsom and the rest of the state, suggesting federal funding may be cut to the state if it continues to enable trans inclusion in girls sports.
MAINE UNIVERSITIES AGREE TO KEEP TRANSGENDER ATHLETES OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS AFTER TRUMP ADMIN PAUSES FUNDING
“Allowing participation in sex-separated activities based on ‘gender identity’ places schools at risk of Title IX violations and loss of federal funding. As Governor, you have a duty to inform California school districts of this risk,” McMahon wrote in the letter.
“As Secretary of Education, I am officially asking you to inform this Department whether you will remind schools in California to comply with federal law by protecting sex-separated spaces and activities. I am also officially asking you to publicly assure parents that California teachers will not facilitate the fantasy of ‘gender transitions’ for their children.”
The Democratic majority prevented both bills from passing just days after President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a formal warning to Newsom and the rest of the state, suggesting federal funding may be cut to the state if it continues to enable trans inclusion in girls sports. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The state’s high school sports association, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), is currently under federal investigation for potential Title IX violations after several controversial incidents involving trans athletes occurred over the last year.
The CIF was one of the first state athletic associations to announce it would continue allowing trans athletes to compete with girls after Trump signed the “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order on Feb. 5. The CIF stated an 11-year-old state law, AB 1266, which has been in effect since 2014 and gives trans athletes the right to participate in the gender category based on gender identity and not birth sex, for its non-compliance.
Both Sanchez and Essayli told Fox News Digital they expect the Trump administration to amplify its pressure on the state and potentially cut funding in order to enforce the executive order after their bills failed to pass Tuesday.
“I think a lot will come down the pipe over the next week or so,” Sanchez said. “There will be a lot of development from what I’ve been told.”
Essayli envisions a situation playing out in California similar to the one that has been playing out in Maine over the last month, as a public feud between Trump and Gov. Janet Mills has resulted in a hostile back-and-forth between the state and federal agencies over the issue of trans inclusion.
“None of us really went in thinking the Democrats in the legislature were going to change their position on this today, but what we wanted to do is make a clear record, make our arguments and show the world where they stand, where the Democrats stand on this, expose their position on this,” Essayli said. “And I think we accomplished that.”
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Hawaii
University of Hawaii study finds San Andreas Fault stress at 1,000-year high | Honolulu Star-Advertiser
LOS ANGELES >> Stress on the San Andreas Fault system has reached a 1,000-year high, according to new research from the University of Hawaii.
Higher stress on a fault means the pressure that causes earthquakes is building.
“Our results show that stress levels on multiple fault segments are now at or above the highest values seen in the past millennium and that the region may be capable of a large through-going rupture involving both fault systems,” said lead author Liliane Burkhard, research affiliate in the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the UH-Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and a scientist at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“We also found that Cajon Pass may act as an ‘earthquake gate:’ sometimes blocking large ruptures from crossing between the faults, and sometimes allowing them to pass through and involve both systems in a single event,” Burkhard said in a UH news release.
Multi-fault ruptures, where earthquakes continue from one fault to another, have occurred in multiple recent earthquakes, including the 2011 Tohoku, Japan, earthquake and became a part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake forecasting model in 2015.
This type of quake would be possible if the Cajon Pass, which is between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, allows an earthquake to pass through it, meaning rather than affecting the area along one fault line, a quake could continue along a second fault and affect a larger area.
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But Kate Scharer, a co-author of the study and a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, said there’s no reason for California residents to be significantly more concerned than they were before hearing about the study.
While the stress has reached a milestone, the pressure was already high and the fault has been overdue for a large earthquake for some time, according to the study.
It has been over 100 years since a major tectonic rupture has affected the greater Los Angeles area, which means stress on the tectonic plates has been building, according to the study.
The 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake was the most recent “big one” to affect Southern California, while the San Jacinto Fault saw moderate earthquakes in 1918, 1968 and 1987, according to the study. A long period without seismic activity “raised concern that the next slip event in this region could be both large and complex,” the study says.
As more time passes, an earthquake becomes more likely because built-up energy needs to be released.
“We know for the southern San Andreas and the San Jacinto fault that they were just a little bit over the average (time between earthquakes) from looking at the geologic record,” Scharer said.
Those two faults are at highest risk for an earthquake because they are the fastest moving, she said.
The study looked at a geologic record of earthquake activity across the past 1,000 years, giving a new perspective on the total stress the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are under. Tectonic plates are always moving and accumulating stress, save for those few seconds where an earthquake is happening.
When an earthquake releases built-up stress from hundreds to thousands of years of an interseismic period, energy is felt in the form of an earthquake, Scharer said.
Earthquake forecast models from the U.S. Geological Survey are “a reminder that damaging earthquakes are inevitable for California,” and the new study highlights just how much stress the fault systems are under as Californians prepare for the “big one,” according to the USGS.
The study’s importance is with the calculations of stress the researchers did. After a geologic record, which looks at prehistoric earthquakes and is assembled by digging trenches across faults and looking at layers that have been offset in the past, is created, the researchers were able to determine that the stress on the San Andreas fault is at a 1,000-year high.
The stress level could influence if the Cajon Pass facilitates an earthquake spreading from one fault to another, or if it stops an earthquake from doing so. When the stress levels on both faults are similar, both faults appear to rupture jointly, according to the study.
Using a physics-based computer model, the researchers found that that the stress that would normally be released in large earthquakes has continued to accumulate and is at unprecedented levels.
The Cajon Pass, the study suggests, could facilitate a joint rupture of both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults simultaneously, which could be “significantly more damaging than a single-fault event,” affecting densely populated areas including Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley, according to the UH news release.
“This is not a prediction of when an earthquake will happen,” Burkhard said. “However, studies like this are important contributions to national and global earthquake hazard research in that we are using rigorous, quantitative science to better understand the risk facing millions of people. What we can say is that the system is critically stressed, and that physics-based models like this one give us a clearer picture of the range of scenarios we should be prepared for. That information matters for hazard assessments, infrastructure planning, and emergency preparedness.”
Honolulu Star-Advertiser staff contributed to this report.
What began as a handful of calls from Treasure Valley residents has grown into a rat problem that is exposing gaps in Idaho law and leaving homeowners to handle infestations largely on their own for at least another year.
Rats have been reported in the Treasure Valley since 2022, when Eagle residents started spotting Norway rats and roof rats in yards, under decks and near canals. Residents have also shared videos showing the rodents in their neighborhoods.
As the reports mounted, it became clear that no agency in Idaho is legally responsible for dealing with rats. The issue traces back to an 1868 legal doctrine known as Dillon’s Rule, which limits Idaho cities and counties to powers specifically granted by the state. Because rats are not mentioned in state law, local governments have no authority to act and no funding to do so.
During this legislative session, state lawmakers tried to change that. Senate Bill 1271 would have directed the Idaho Department of Agriculture to map infestations and coordinate a response across the Treasure Valley. The bill passed the Senate but later died in the House, with opponents arguing it was a local problem, not a state one.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare says rats can spread diseases such as Plague and Salmonella through droppings, urine and bites.
With the Legislature out of session until next year, Sen. Nichols and Rep. John Gannon are pushing for action without waiting for a change in state law. This week, they sent a letter to local officials across the Treasure Valley urging cities, counties, irrigation districts and parks agencies to each designate a point person to help coordinate a response now.
The letter describes the situation as a public health, safety and property concern and warns that a coordinated effort now would be far less costly than a crisis later.
In the meantime, residents are being urged to seal vents, secure trash and call an exterminator if they see signs of rats. Nichols has said she fears that when lawmakers return next January, the problem will be harder and more expensive to solve.
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