Newsom Signs Law Requiring Companies To Disclose Historical
California businesses will soon have to disclose their historical and financial ties to slavery, thanks to a Democrat-backed bill Governor Gavin Newsom…
You have to hand it to Gavin Newsom—he knows how to perform moral seriousness without breaking a sweat. The Truth In Disclosure Act, signed last week, demands California businesses swear under penalty of perjury that they've dug through company archives to see if predecessors ever bought or sold enslaved people. For a state that entered the Union as a free state in 1850, this is less a historical reckoning and more a bureaucratic scavenger hunt dressed up as justice.
Commentary is separate from the original publisher's reporting.
California businesses will soon have to disclose their historical and financial ties to slavery, thanks to a Democrat-backed bill Governor Gavin Newsom signed last week.
The Truth In Disclosure Act forces certain companies to swear “under penalty of perjury” that they have investigated whether they or their predecessors “bought or sold persons subjected to slavery” or engaged in other slavery-related transactions. The disclosures — required of any company that was in business on or before December 31, 1964, and has more than $100 million in annual worldwide gross receipts — will be made available to the public in an online database.
California Democratic Assemblymember Isaac Bryan authored the bill and introduced it at the start of the year. It passed along party lines, with 60 Democrats voting in support.
While the Truth In Disclosure Act also addresses efforts “to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from its direct supply chain for tangible goods offered for sale,” critics of the bill fear this legislation is part of a larger statewide reparations initiative.
Newsom in 2020 created the nation’s first reparations task force, which recommended the state “disrupt the mental health crisis and county jail,” “adopt a K-12 Black Studies Curriculum,” and “provide property tax relief to African Americans, especially descendants, living in formerly redlined neighborhoods, who purchase or construct a new home.”
California lawmakers in the past have proposed giving black Americans upwards of $1.2 million in lifetime restitution. The Pacific Research Institute estimated the cost of reparations to exceed $2.8 trillion, which would cause the economy to decrease in size by 11% and substantially increase state taxes.
In 2024, the California Legislative Black Caucus advocated for a series of bills it deemed important to black Californians, including a formal state apology for slavery, which Newsom signed. The apology, coauthored by Democratic Assemblymember Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, Sr., “affirms California’s recognition of the harms caused by chattel slavery and issues a formal apology, which will be memorialized with a plaque in the State Capitol.”
“As we confront the lasting legacy of slavery, I’m profoundly grateful for the efforts put forward by Chair Wilson and the members of the California Legislative Black Caucus,” Newsom said in a 2024 press release. “The State of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating, and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities.”
California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state. Slavery was prohibited.
Over the years, California issued laws to notify the public of organizations’ ties to slavery. In 2000, then-Governor Gray Davis signed a law that required insurance companies licensed to do business in California to disclose insurance policies issued by them or their predecessor firms to slaveholders. These policies “provided coverage for damage to or death of their slaves.”
Across the country, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he agreed with his prior statement, saying the city must “repair” damage caused by the slave trade. In an interview with journalist Charles M. Blow on “The Root” in July, Mamdani said he would consider whatever the city’s Commission on Racial Equity decides, including cash reparations. The committee is expected to release its findings next summer.
Create a free account to join the conversation!
Original source:
Read at Daily WireHow We See It
New Republican Times Editorial Board
You have to hand it to Gavin Newsom—he knows how to perform moral seriousness without breaking a sweat. The Truth In Disclosure Act, signed last week, demands California businesses swear under penalty of perjury that they've dug through company archives to see if predecessors ever bought or sold enslaved people. For a state that entered the Union as a free state in 1850, this is less a historical reckoning and more a bureaucratic scavenger hunt dressed up as justice.
The premise here is genuinely strange. We're asking modern executives—many running companies founded decades after the Civil War—to investigate corporate ancestors they've never met about a practice that's been illegal for 160 years. What's the endgame? A confession? A public apology from a CEO whose company once had a founder with investments in cotton? The law doesn't say. It just demands the probe, the sworn statement, the public shaming. That's not accountability; that's theater with a notary stamp.
Worse, this creates a perverse incentive structure where the only "winning" move is to find something. Think about it: a company that conducts the investigation and finds nothing gets nothing—no gold star, no press release. But one that finds a historical ledger entry gets headlines, attention, and the moral authority that comes with self-flagellation. We're building a system that rewards digging up the past and punishes moving forward. That's not reconciliation. That's a hostage negotiation with history.
California's real sin was always more bureaucratic than barbaric—Chinese railroad labor, Japanese internment, the systemic abuse of farm workers. But those stories don't fit the tidy narrative of Southern slavery, so they're ignored in favor of a performative gesture aimed at a problem that doesn't exist in the state's corporate DNA. If Newsom genuinely wanted to atone for historical wrongs, he could start with his own state's brutal treatment of indigenous peoples or the forced sterilization of Latinas in the 1970s. Instead, we get a bill that makes lawyers richer and history dumber. It's a shame, because there are real conversations to have about reparations and historical accountability. This law just ensures we won't have them—we'll be too busy reading corporate confessions.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.