The Brief

When U.S. National Park Service staff found out this spring that they were being instructed to scrub entire parks of any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” reactions among workers ranged from disbelief to anger.

“Sometimes I’m raging. Sometimes I’m in denial,” said one park superintendent, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and losing their job.

It had already been a chaotic year for national parks under President Donald Trump’s second administration. First came the attempt to fire thousands of employees of the National Park Service and impose a hiring freeze — followed by threats to cut billions in funding and sell off federal lands, including some less popular national parks.

Then, in March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It ordered staff working at all National Park Service locations to remove any content that casts Americans in a negative light from parks, monuments and memorials.

It’s thrown staff into further chaos.

A view of a welcome sign as hundreds of tourists and photographers flock in Yosemite National Park.

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“Things that would normally take us years to do, like exhibit development, we’re trying to figure out how to wholesale make changes that many of us are morally opposed to in weeks,” the anonymous superintendent said. “It’s kind of wild.”

Many parks staffers are wary of speaking up on the record. “There’s worry and fear that telling the truth can get them in trouble,” said Neal Desai, Pacific regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Across the nation, from Yosemite National Park in California to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., staff are now grappling with what the anonymous superintendent called a “Herculean” task: Inspect, document and potentially change or cover up thousands of signs ahead of a looming September deadline from the federal government.

Staff and advocates at California’s iconic national parks say they’re especially worried about the potential threat to the state’s cultural memory — and that the very nature of historical truth is now at stake.

Chaos and confusion

Trump’s order addressed what it called a “distorted narrative” about American history — one the White House claimed was permeating the country’s national parks, monuments and other federal institutions.

In demanding the signage review, Trump instructed parks staff to “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” and “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

“Interpretive materials that disproportionately emphasize negative aspects of U.S. history or historical figures, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, can unintentionally distort understanding rather than enrich it,” the National Park Service told KQED in an emailed statement.

The dismay and disbelief among park staff were instantaneous. “This is the fascist playbook,” said one park ranger, who also wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “You silence the voices that are inconvenient to you, and you control history, you control the narratives.”

U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubled down on Trump’s order in May, further instructing parks to report on any statues or monuments that had been removed since 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, including Confederate monuments.

Waysigns, interpretive signs, exhibits, brochures, films screened within park buildings, even merchandise sold in park kiosks and bookstores — according to the orders, all of it had to be entered into a federal database for the government’s review. Staff were also ordered to post new signs around parks land urging the public to submit feedback online about parks and their signage.

“Frankly, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country,” California Rep. Jared Huffman, who serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told KQED. In August, Huffman co-authored a letter in response to the White House’s orders, requesting the rationale for “ongoing efforts to rewrite history,” and asking for more information about who within the federal government would ultimately decide what can or can’t go in national parks.

And in a state with as many parks resources and visitorship as California, the orders required a particularly enormous undertaking. The state has nine major national parks — the most of any state across the country — including Yosemite and Joshua Tree, each of which regularly receives 3 to 4 million visitors annually.

That’s not to mention the dozens of smaller national historic landmarks, smaller parks, monuments and historic trails on a scale matched only by Washington, D.C., including Alcatraz, the Presidio and Fort Point just in the Bay Area.

Unknown judges, unclear timeline

Who exactly within the federal government would make the final decisions on thousands of signs — covering hundreds of years of history — remains unclear.

Huffman said he has yet to receive any response to the Committee on Natural Resources’ queries. And the NPS did not respond to KQED’s query on who is evaluating submissions, saying only that they are done “manually.”

As first reported by the New York Times, the federal government originally told parks they’d know which exhibits were slated for removal by Wednesday. The anonymous superintendent said staff were initially told that a panel of subject matter experts would issue a memo on what should ultimately be removed.

But in mid-August, they were told they’d instead only “receive an email that identified which submissions were in conflict, but not tell us what exactly was considered problematic or why,” the superintendent said. And when the emails came, they didn’t make clear exactly when staff should pull down any material that had been, in the government’s words, “found to be out of conformance.” (The NPS did not respond to KQED’s questions about the timeline for removals.)

Ultimately, the confusing rollout has put the onus on parks staff to “determine what someone thought was in conflict” with the order, the superintendent said, and then decide themselves how to move forward in a way they think the federal government wants.

“Which is really frustrating,” they said. “Do we change a word in a sentence, or do we take down a whole exhibit? Or somewhere in between?”

But one of the first high-profile examples of such removal has already happened here in California — offering insight into the kind of history that’s being targeted.

Change already comes for California

With its towering redwoods, Muir Woods National Monument is one of California’s most popular parks, with annual visitorship of more than a million people.

In 2021, Muir Woods park rangers developed an exhibit called “History Under Construction,” which took the form of sticky notes placed on a permanent sign. The sticky notes represented an effort to add context to the park’s history, highlighting the foundational roles of women and Indigenous people in its creation and the oftentimes racist and violent past of its more notable founders.

Christine Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, stands in Muir Woods National Monument.

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“Part of our duty in the National Park Service is to tell the full story” of Muir Woods’ stewardship, the exhibit read.

But in mid-July, Muir Woods staff removed the sticky note exhibit altogether, with a spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area confirming its removal was prompted by Trump’s executive order.

The swiftness of the Muir Woods removal was jarring to some observers. “We were surprised that changes happened at Muir Woods so quickly,” said Chris Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the nonprofit partner of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which manages Muir Woods.

The Muir Woods removal was ordered by a higher-up outside of the park, according to Lehnertz and an anonymous source with knowledge of the exhibit’s development. The National Park Service did not reply to KQED’s request for confirmation of the directive’s source.

The federal government has yet to make widespread directives to parks staff to enact removals. Yet preemptive changes within other national parks have already been witnessed — with apparent anxiety over landing in the White House’s crosshairs even pre-dating the “Restoring Truth and Sanity” executive order.

As documented by the Resistance Rangers advocacy group, the website for New York’s Stonewall National Monument was altered in February to remove references to transgender people. Language on other national park websites was removed in February and then restored, including information about abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman on an NPS webpage about the Underground Railroad.

In the Bay Area, as reported by Richmondside, a handful of staff members at Rosie the Riveter World War II Homefront National Historic Park briefly removed an exhibit focused on the LGBTQ+ history of the region right after Trump’s inauguration in January, before putting it back up a few days later.

“It’s an anxious time to be a superintendent,” Lehnertz said.

Donna Graves, an independent historian who helped develop the Rosie the Riveter Park back in 2000, said Rosie is the kind of national park site where “inclusive storytelling permeates every aspect of the exhibits in the visitor center, the handouts, the films that are shown.”

Parks staff found themselves in a quandary, said Graves, who organized a rally against the order in August. Should employees submit every piece of content in the park for federal review, “seeing it as sort of flooding the zone”?

“Others took the stance of, ‘Well, we’re not ‘inappropriately’ disparaging anybody. We think what we’re doing is appropriate,’” Graves said. “So they did not report any content.”

‘Hard history’

The idea of taking a second look at history isn’t actually new for the National Park Service.

Lehnertz said when Jonathan Jarvis was parks director from 2009 to 2017, he made a sweeping effort to broaden the narratives on display, shifting from a previous focus on military and political history to including individuals’ stories, expanding the timeline to before the country’s founding and “opening up the story” of American history, she said.

Jarvis, she said, “helped us understand that the preamble to the Constitution — ‘We, the people’ — means ‘We, all the people; we, all the stories.’ And that means hard history sometimes,” she said.

By contrast, the Trump administration’s approach to revisiting history “isn’t an honest exercise,” argued National Parks Conservation Association’s Desai.

“It’s premeditated — there’s a goal in mind at the end,” Desai said. “They’re not really looking at all these things in a critical way or in a scholarly way. It’s about: ‘We want to erase certain parts of history, and clamp down on the Park Service from providing Americans with a full picture.’”

Jonathan Jarvis sits outside of his home in Pinole.

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Jarvis — who lives in Contra Costa County after retiring from NPS — agreed. Had he still been at the helm of national parks, Jarvis said, he’d have “gone upstairs and told them this was a really stupid idea.”

“Just the task of it in of itself is completely daunting,” he said. “To think that there’s going to be somebody back there with either the intelligence — or the capacity — to somehow give a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a sign that is in some visitor center in Dinosaur National Monument that talks about evolution.”

“It’s absurd,” he said.

‘Going backwards’

The federal government’s orders are forcing national parks around the country to review hundreds of years of history — events that often sharply illustrate the human cost of that state’s development.

In states including Pennsylvania, Florida, Tennessee and Louisiana, staff have been asked to flag mentions of slavery for possible removal.

In California, where the arrival of white settlers in the 1840s and the subsequent Gold Rush sparked a decades-long genocide of Native Americans that killed tens of thousands of people, parks staffers must decide how to deal with this state’s painful history around its Indigenous communities.

When Sharaya Souza, co-founder of the American Indian Cultural District in San Francisco, first heard about the changes made to the Muir Woods sticky notes exhibit, she was “sad but not surprised,” she said.

“They’re removing Post-it notes from a piece of history,” said Souza, who is Taos Pueblo, Ute and Kiowa — in addition to being of both Spanish and Brazilian heritage — and spoke to KQED on her own behalf and not for the organizations she works with. “That’s all we got: Post-it notes.”

In her role at AICD and her previous work with the California Native American Heritage Commission, Souza has long strived to protect Native cultural sites and heritage via an effort called “placekeeping:” “Letting people know the full history of what happened here. And yes, some of it was a hard history,” Souza said.

The state’s history of violence toward its Native communities has long gone ignored in California, but in recent years, many national parks across California have begun to acknowledge that brutal history in their programming or signage — even though Souza said there’s still a long way to go.

And tribes’ relationships with the parks haven’t always been smooth either, advocate Morning Star Gali said. A member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe and the founder of Indigenous Justice, Gali is also the California Tribal and Community Liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, coordinating the annual Sunrise Gathering for Alcatraz Island. She has been driving work to remove racist place names and add signage, particularly to NPS sites like Alcatraz, that acknowledge its Indigenous history.

Gali said that while staff and leadership at some parks have supported their efforts, many are limited in the changes they can make — and others have dragged their feet in allowing tribes to access and use their sacred land or have scrutinized their practices and religious expression.

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“Where do we go when we’re shut out of our sacred places?” she said. “Where do we go when we’re no longer allowed into both state and federal sites?”

Souza agreed: “We’ve kind of become the Indian in the Cupboard,” she said. “You take them out when you want to play with them.”

“But you put them back in the cupboard when it comes to actually elevating that truth-telling, and it’s out of some sort of fear that it’s going to increase ‘a sense of national shame,’” she said, referencing the language used in Trump’s executive order.

“I’m a little afraid of the direction that we are going,” Souza said. “That we’re going backwards from all the progress that we’ve made over the years.”

‘A white nationalist effort’

Another aspect of California history that many worry could be erased: the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

These events are commemorated at the National Park Service’s Manzanar National Historic Site in the Eastern Sierra, where around 11,000 people were incarcerated. Around the country, well over 100,000 people were imprisoned this way.

Survivors of Japanese American incarceration have been among the most vocal against the Trump administration’s detainment and deportation of immigrants, after the president used the same law deployed against them in the 1940s — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — to attempt to deport Venezuelans being held at a Texas detention center.

Now, advocates are worried the history they’ve fought so hard to tell will be at risk once again. The story told at Manzanar is “a cautionary tale,” said Bruce Embrey, who co-chairs the Manzanar Committee that his mother, who was incarcerated at Manzanar, co-founded in 1970.

For Embrey, the signage review at parks like Manzanar is “a white nationalist effort to erase our history,” he said — and he believes that “if they cannot rewrite the narrative of the Smithsonian or Manzanar or the various sites around this country, they will close them.”

Lehnertz said it’s stories like those on display at Manzanar that are most needed in parks.

Replica camp barracks stand at Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California.

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“The United States does not put its history into secret boxes,” she said. “It shares its history openly, and that’s what makes America great, is our willingness to sometimes disagree.”

“And our willingness to commit resources to a rigorous understanding of history, even when it disagrees with our family’s experience of history,” she said.

An uncertain future

Regardless of the federal government’s final decisions, many staffers are worried about the degrading effect that any hasty revision of information will have on the parks — and on visitors.

Normally, the anonymous superintendent said, they would work with historians, biologists and other subject matter experts to help develop park signage.

Signs also have to be accessible — often featuring braille or sitting at wheelchair height — and parks staff will often consult with tribal communities or descendants of the historical figure they’re writing about. Parks advocates have even argued the changes demanded by the executive order violate their legal obligation to consult with tribes before making significant changes to parks.

“We’re talking millions of dollars here in terms of process and years of work to do a full exhibit, and the signage, and all the interpretive materials that go with,” former NPS leader Jarvis said.

In the absence of those funds, covered-up signs will likely become a familiar sight to visitors, said Jesse Chakrin, the executive director of Fund for People in Parks. Chakrin’s group works with small or lesser-known parks in the West on elements like signage that aren’t typically funded by federal dollars — “a long and slow process,” which can cost up to $5,000 for a single sign.

In an era of reduced staffing, Chakrin said, these signs “may be the only way that a visitor actually better understands the park location that they’re in.”

But Chakrin’s biggest concern is that even if no more sign removal orders ever materialize, the order is so broad — and the penalties so nebulous — that parks staff will simply self-censor out of fear of retribution.

“People will stop telling full and complete stories,” he said. “People will start to think about the ways that they can be careful so as to not offend.”

This puts parks staff in a moral quandary, Jarvis said, with many feeling the order runs counter to the park service’s mission “to tell these stories authentically and based on the best scholarship in science.”

“It’s essentially a violation of that responsibility,” he said.

Visitors speak up

Amid all this turmoil, staff and advocates say that visitors have yet to see the biggest effects of the orders. Nonprofit partners like “friends” groups have been backfilling a lot of public-facing roles, as have seasonal staff.

“Visitors aren’t really seeing the full impact because of this veneer, this facade, of keeping parks ‘open and accessible’,” the superintendent said — referring to another secretarial order that mandates parks keep functioning even amid severe staffing shortages.

“Meanwhile, everything on the back end is falling apart.”

One thing that might give parks staff solace: Across California, the federally mandated signs urging the public to join the review of parks signage have so far not borne much fruit for the Trump administration.

According to a copy of the public submissions received by California parks and provided to KQED by the National Parks Conservation Association, out of around 300 entries across the state’s national parks sites from June and July of this year, just four were elevated for review — all of which critiqued the Muir Woods “History Under Construction” exhibit.

A handful of others alerted parks staff to infrastructure issues with bathrooms or fading signs that need replacing. But nearly all of the rest of the submissions were either in praise of rangers and parks staff or offering complimentary views of existing signage.

And hundreds of public comments were submitted specifically in protest of the signage order — commending displays at parks that highlighted Indigenous history and climate change. Manzanar, especially, wrote one visitor, “is an example that the beauty and grandeur of our constitution can never be taken for granted,” making reference to the language of Trump’s executive order. Another comment about Yosemite urged parks staff to “continue to educate people about the Native Americans who were displaced in this area.”

Supporters line the walkway with signs spelling “Protect Our Park” during the National Parks Conservation Association’s Day of Action at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California.

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Parks advocates said the results of the public submissions give them hope that, amid everything, park visitors see the value in telling the whole story of American history.

“History aims to improve the nation by learning the lessons of the past,” Lehnertz said. “And the openness of any individual American to learning that, in my experience, has been 99% to 1%.”

Or as Graves put it: “They’ve said over and over — ‘We want to know the whole truth. Don’t dumb down our history.’”

California Republicans have an unusual shot of claiming an upset victory in the governor’s race this year — but to win, neither of their candidates can get too far ahead of the other just yet.

With eight major Democratic candidates splitting the liberal vote, both Republican candidates, former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, could come in first and second in the June 2 primary and move on to the November ballot.

That would shut out Democratic general election candidates, an extraordinary event that pollsters and strategists of both parties agree is the only viable chance for a Republican to become governor. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one in California and the GOP hasn’t won a statewide race in two decades.

Both Republicans can only advance to November if they split the Republican vote essentially evenly, giving each enough to surpass their Democratic opponents. That’s thanks to California’s top-two primary system, in which the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election regardless of their party.

Democrats insist it won’t happen, though they face mounting pressure over the risk in a year when the party is hoping to turn out liberal voters for U.S. House races in November.

And neither Republican is strategizing to shut the Democrats out. Instead of trying to keep the other alive through the primary, Hilton and Bianco are running campaigns like any other candidate: seeking to defeat each other. Hilton has spent the past few months attempting to consolidate Republican support by attacking Bianco, who has been happy to return the ire.

“There’s an amazing irony there, that they need to beat each other but they both need to succeed at the same time,” GOP strategist Rob Stutzman said. “It cuts against human nature and cuts against the way you put together campaigns.”

An intra-Republican primary

Despite very different backgrounds, Hilton and Bianco are running on similar policies.

Hilton is a British political strategist who’s written extensively about populism, reducing bureaucracy and decentralizing power, and Bianco is a bombastic local sheriff who is pushing the boundaries of police authority over elections.

Both are pushing a deregulation agenda, railing against Democratic-backed environmental policies they blame for raising the state’s cost of living. Their targets include the landmark California Environmental Quality Act, which requires environmental reviews for new construction.

Both Republicans also want to reverse prison closures, boost oil production to lower gas prices and reduce or eliminate the 61-cents-a-gallon gas tax.

Hilton wants to shield the first $100,000 of earnings from the state income tax (a goal Democrat Katie Porter shares) and significantly lower taxes on higher earners by cutting 18% of the state budget, including areas he claims are fraudulent or wasteful such as using cannabis tax revenue to support substance abuse programs. Bianco also wants to cut, and bring in oil revenues to eliminate the income tax entirely.

Hilton, one of the race’s top fundraisers, has raised more than $6.6 million so far, exceeding Bianco’s haul by more than $2 million. The two are second and third to Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter in the total number of campaign donors — one measure of popular support.

Polls show they remain neck-and-neck at or near the top of the pack, with one survey released last week by the California Democratic Party showing Hilton and Bianco statistically tied with 16% and 14%, respectively. To be competitive, they each need to win over independent and undecided voters, some of whom lean Republican and most of whom are fixated on the state’s cost of living crisis. The California Republican Party is slated to take an endorsement vote at its convention next weekend.

Each has tried to outrank the other on conservative credentials.

Hilton has attacked Bianco for having “too much baggage” related to liberal causes, pointing to a video showing the sheriff kneeling during the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests, as many police officers did then to de-escalate crowds, and later describing his actions as praying. Under Trump, the FBI this year fired several agents who had done the same.

“It’s a question of character and honesty and judgment,” Hilton said in an interview.

Bianco pointed to the two Republicans’ continued tie in the polls as proof Hilton can’t carry the party. He’s called Hilton, who worked for the conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, “a fraud amongst Republicans” in part because a political crowdfunding startup Hilton co-founded in 2013, Crowdpac, later rebranded to exclusively support Democrats.

And each has aimed to align himself with Trump without saying the president’s name directly. While both are vocal fans of the president, nearly three-quarters of California voters disapprove of him, and Democratic voters in particular are motivated this year to vote against the president’s agenda. Hilton and Bianco have both blasted Democrats for linking the gubernatorial race to Trump.

Hilton, who once called for an audit into Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, is promoting “CalDOGE,” a program to look into reports of fraud and waste in California government. It’s a nod to Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that slashed federal spending and employment last year. So far, as part of the project, Hilton has held press conferences criticizing state grants to nonprofits with advocacy wings that support liberal causes, like stricter environmental laws and holding voter registration drives; he’s vowed to cut them as governor.

Bianco, who endorsed Trump’s 2024 re-election by saying America should “put a felon in the White House,” told KTLA last fall if he had the president’s support he’d downplay it on the campaign trail. Asked last week if he’s seeking the president’s approval, he said he instead wants “the endorsement of every single person in this country.”

“You have an entire Democrat field trying to label me as Donald Trump, and the reason why is because they have absolutely nothing to run on,” he said in an interview.

He has embarked on an unprecedented effort in Riverside County to recount ballots from last year’s special election based on what local elections officials say is inaccurate and flawed raw ballot data, a move that mirrors the Trump administration’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia. But Bianco has insisted it’s not political. The investigation, he said this week, is on hold amid legal challenges.

Who is Bianco?

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco speaks with the press after announcing his bid for governor at Avila’s Historic 1929 Event Center in Riverside on Feb. 17, 2025.

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The ballot seizure is one of the many ways Bianco has courted controversy as county sheriff, a seat to which he was first elected in 2018 with hefty campaign contributions from the union that represents sheriff’s deputies.

The three-decade law enforcement officer and one-time member of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers gained attention in 2020 for fighting state orders to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to enforce masking or stay-at-home rules or to mandate vaccination for deputies. He also opposes school vaccination laws.

He’s often criticized the state’s sanctuary law that limits police cooperation with federal immigration agents, simultaneously insisting he’ll do everything he legally can to help immigration agents but clarifying to Riverside County residents that deputies do not enforce immigration laws and take reports of crimes from anyone. He’s presided over a spike in deaths in county jails that he’s attributed to fentanyl and suicides, though the state attorney general’s office has opened an investigation.

He has ties to an evangelical pastor in Temecula who helps elect Christian conservatives and is pushing to increase the influence of Christianity in government.

His pitch to voters is that he’s an outsider — and he’s prone to using hyperbole to prove it, calling environmental activists who sue to stop development “terrorists,” promising to “completely destroy special interests” and saying if elected he’d “take a nuclear bomb” to the decisions made in California government.

He’s running, he said, to offer a change from the “crime and corruption” he says has defined state politics and claims he’s the only candidate with strong executive experience (though several Democratic opponents have led state or federal agencies, or major cities.)

He’s endorsed by several law enforcement groups, some of which have also jointly endorsed a Democrat, and funded by campaign contributions from dozens of officers and police chiefs, various business owners and the powerful Peace Office Research Association of California, a special interest with outsize influence at the Capitol. The law enforcement association extends to his title as Riverside sheriff on the ballot, which will give him an edge over Hilton, GOP strategists say.

“Every other person in this race is nothing but a career politician,” he said. “We're over career politicians, millionaires, billionaires, bright, shiny objects and career politicians and strategists. California is sick of that.”

Who is Hilton?

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton speaks at a press conference outside the California attorney general’s office in Sacramento on Aug. 5, 2025. Hilton announced legal action to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta from pursuing mid-decade redistricting.

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Hilton, meanwhile, is making lofty promises like $3-a-gallon gas and halving electricity bills, and says he has experience from London to achieve such cuts.

The son of Hungarian immigrants to Britain, Hilton got his start in the Conservative Party there before moving to the private sector and returning to politics as Cameron’s director of strategy from 2010 to 2012.

The British press noted Hilton’s penchant for casual dress and credited him as the ideological force pushing the party to loosen workplace regulations, cut welfare, shrink the size of government, lower taxes and withdraw from the European Union. Hilton was disillusioned with Cameron’s progress, the Washington Post reported, when he left his team after two years to join his wife, tech executive Rachel Whetstone, in California and take a sabbatical at Stanford. The couple still maintain several properties in central London.

“The government has lost its ultimate radical,” The Economist declared of his departure from 10 Downing Street in 2012. “In his visceral disdain for the state, reverence for local communities and commitment to enterprise, he might be the most deeply conservative figure at the very top of this government.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton speaks at a press conference outside the California attorney general’s office in Sacramento on Aug. 5, 2025. Hilton announced legal action to stop Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta from pursuing mid-decade redistricting. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters He founded Crowdpac in 2013 with two partners, a Stanford professor and a Google executive, with the stated goal of getting more people engaged in politics by using software to match their views with candidates they could support financially. The platform, he highlighted at the time, was used by a Black Lives Matter leader to crowdfund a run for Baltimore mayor and by anti-Trump Republicans hoping for a Paul Ryan presidential run. In 2015, he wrote a column in the Guardian supporting a higher minimum wage in Britain and walking back his own prior campaigns against one.

Years later, Hilton left the platform when Crowdpac, having mostly been used by Democrats, stopped helping Republican candidates in what executives called “a stand against Trumpism.” It later shut down and relaunched again as a Democrats-only platform. By then, Hilton had already endorsed Trump for president in 2016 and landed a weekly Fox News show, which ran from 2017 to 2023. He’s now returned fully to his conservative roots, pushing to “massively reduce spending” and regulation the same way he did in the U.K.

“I have a very clear message of change that's practical and positive and not ideological,” he told CalMatters.

Hilton has raised the third most in the race, behind Democrats Tom Steyer, a self-funding billionaire, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who has pulled in millions of dollars primarily from Silicon Valley. Hilton has put $200,000 of his own money into his campaign, and counts among his supporters Uber, Fox Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch and tech executives who have also supported Democrats: Google founder Sergey Brin and Ripple executive Chris Larsen.

Will Democrats really be shut out of the race?

Experts say a Democratic shutout is unlikely, unless the field remains entrenched.

“It depends upon those two Republican candidates who are splitting the Republican vote fairly evenly right now, doing that, and then having more than a half a dozen Democrats with no one that is a leading favorite, which is what we've seen so far,” said Mark Baldassare, director of polling at the Public Policy Institute of California. “But one thing I would say is it’s still early.”

Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks has also used that reasoning. He has started an incremental public pressure campaign to prompt lower-polling Democratic candidates to drop out, but the candidates have resisted so far.

Hilton, too, dismissed analyses that both Republicans must advance for either to have a shot of winning the seat, calling it a hypothetical exercise from GOP strategists.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about, I mean these are the kinds of people who have been losing for 20 years,” he said. “The idea that the Democratic Party is just going to concede California is obviously ridiculous. … It’s going to be a Republican against a Democrat.”

Bianco said he’s running against Hilton, whom he called a “career strategist,” as much as any of the Democrats. He said he hasn’t thought too much about who his opponent would be in a general election.

“It really doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I’m not doing this for Republicans. I’m not doing it for Democrats, independents, anything like that.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

FIFA is once again raising prices for a substantial number of games in the upcoming World Cup tournament that will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico in June and July.

The price increases took place in FIFA's latest sales window that kicked off on Wednesday, with 40 out of 104 games now costing more than in the last sales window, according to an NPR examination of prices.

The hikes can be stark. The most expensive "Category 1" tickets for the final will now cost $10,990, a broad area that covers most of the lower two bowls of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where the last game of the tournament will be held in July.

That's significantly more than the nearly $8,700 at which these tickets were priced in FIFA's previous sales window earlier this year — and much higher than the $6,370 at which they were priced when sales kicked off last year.

The increases come even after FIFA has faced heavy criticism about the record prices being charged and its adoption of dynamic pricing for the first time. A group representing European fans and consumers called FIFA's prices "exorbitant" and filed a formal complaint this month with the European Commission in a bid to get the soccer body to lower prices.

Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to FIFA accusing the organization of "price gouging at the expense of the people who make the World Cup the most-watched sporting event in the world."

FIFA has not replied to NPR's queries. But previously FIFA has justified its prices citing strong demand for tickets as well as noting it's adapting its pricing to the North American market. FIFA has also repeatedly said it's a non-profit that steers the vast majority of revenue from the World Cup to grow soccer around the world.

Price increases cover a wide range of games

Most of the price increases in the initial stage of the tournament were for teams that tend to draw more fans such as Brazil, Argentina, England and Germany — as well as co-host Mexico.

Although price hikes tended to be of less than $100, they still mark a substantial escalation from the initial prices at which FIFA started selling those tickets. Some increases were quite big though. Mexico's opening game against Saudi Arabia now costs as much as $2,985, up from $2,355 in FIFA's last sales window and up from its initial price of $1,825.

Most of the knockout games also increased in price, including the one being held in Philadelphia on July 4th — and the hikes tend to get more substantial for match-ups later in the tournament.

For example, the two semi-finals of the tournament also saw hefty price hikes. The game that will be held in Dallas in July will now cost as much as $3,710, up substantially from $3,295 in the last sales window.

The current sales window will last all the way through the tournament. FIFA has not said how many tickets are left to sell, only that it will continue to drop tickets periodically, including potentially for games that appear to be sold out.
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Why now: HMC StratCap notified the city on Tuesday that it was pulling its proposal to build a data center in a local business park after months of pressure from residents and advocates who raised concerns about pollution, energy use and health risks. The parent company of the developer — DigiCo Infrastructure REIT — said that HMC sought to "work with the City to establish productive land uses" for its Saturn Street property "that are supported by the broader community." Representatives for HMC StratCap have not responded to requests for comment.

Why it matters: For people pushing back on data centers in the region, Monterey Park is shaping up as a test case for how local organizing can stop them. The developer’s decision to withdraw its application comes ahead of a June 2 special election on Measure NDC. If approved at the ballot box, Monterey Park would be the first to ban data centers by public vote. The developer, which had threatened legal action against the city for data center restrictions, now says it will not contest the proposition.

The backstory: The data center proposal had been moving through the city's planning pipeline for two years before it started showing up on the City Council's agendas and coming to the attention of residents, who were outraged the plans had not been well-publicized by the city. Hundreds of people flooded City Hall during council meetings over the last several months, demanding the city heed their concerns. In response, the council approved a temporary moratorium on data center development, put the issue on the ballot and will consider a separate ordinance banning data center development altogether.

What’s next: Members of groups like No Data Center MPK and San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action are celebrating the application's withdrawal, but say they will continue to advocate for Measure NDC and the data center ordinance, which the City Council is expected to vote on in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, organizers are joining the effort to stop a proposal to build a battery energy storage system in the City of Industry, which they see as laying the groundwork for a data center.

Go deeper: How Monterey Park residents pushed back on a data center — and changed the course

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that Attorney General Pam Bondi is out from the top job at the Justice Department. Her departure comes amid simmering frustration over her leadership and her handling of the Epstein files.

In social media post, Trump called Bondi "a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year."

"Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900," Trump said. "We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future."

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is Trump's former personal attorney, will step in to serve as acting attorney general, the president said.

Bondi, a longtime Trump loyalist, is the second member of the president's Cabinet to be forced out. Her departure comes almost one month after Trump fired Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security.

Bondi leaves after a tumultuous 14 months in charge that critics say damaged the Justice Department's credibility, hollowed out the career ranks and undermined the rule of law.

Under Bondi, the department jettisoned its decades-old tradition of maintaining independence from the White House, particularly in investigations and prosecutions, to insulate them from partisan politics.

Instead, she used the department's vast powers to go after the president's perceived foes. That includes the high-profile cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, which were brought after Trump publicly called on Bondi to prosecute them.

A federal judge later tossed both cases after finding the acting U.S. attorney who secured the indictments was unlawfully appointed.

Other political opponents of the president or individuals standing in the way of his agenda also have found themselves under DOJ investigation, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, and former Obama-era intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan.

Bondi also oversaw sweeping changes to the career workforce at the department. The agency fired prosecutors and FBI officials who worked on Capitol riot cases or the Trump investigations.

The elite section that prosecutes public corruption was gutted; the Civil Rights Division, which protects the Constitutional rights of all Americans, experienced a mass exodus of career attorneys who say the division is being turned into an enforcement arm of the White House.

Political firestorm over Epstein files

Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, has defended her actions. She has portrayed the firings as a necessary house cleaning of politicized career officials. She's also tried to focus on what she views as major accomplishments during her tenure: targeting drug cartels, cracking down on violent crime, and helping in immigration enforcement.

But ultimately, the department's handling of the files related to the investigations of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein played a large role in her downfall.

Early in her tenure, Bondi told Fox News that she had Epstein's client list "sitting on my desk right now to review." A few months later, the Justice Department and the FBI said there was no client list and that no additional files from the Epstein investigation would be made public.

That touched off a political firestorm and ultimately led Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which forced the Justice Department to make public all of the Epstein files in its possession.

The department failed to meet the Act's 30-day deadline to release the materials, fueling frustrations on Capitol Hill, before eventually releasing millions of pages of files. Democratic and Republican lawmakers also expressed concerns about heavy redactions that were made to many of the documents.

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