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This week’s massive vote against three of San Francisco’s most woke school board members represents a triumphant outbreak of reason in one of the most insanely progressive places on the planet. But it is also, far more consequently, a rejection — in this case by over 70% of voters — of radical Left politics that is building up across the country.

To be fair, the recalled board members were defeated not just for extreme politics, but for their reluctance to open schools during the pandemic. Instead of re-opening schools during the pandemic, they advanced a plan to rename 44 public schools named after figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Dianne Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln, with one board member even claiming that “black lives didn’t matter” to the president who freed America’s slaves.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

A new report by Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University lays out the challenges faced by middle and working-class Californians. The January 21 presentation of the report was followed by an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.  Click here to learn more and download a copy of the report.

Watch the video:

Governor Mike DeWine announced today (January 21, 2022) that Intel will build two semi-conductor plants in suburban Licking County, in the Columbus metropolitan area. The plants will be located in New Albany’s International Business Park, which already has Google, Amazon and Facebook as tenants. The plants are to be opened by 2025.

The Governor said that the plant will be the largest private sector investment in Ohio history. The $20 billion plant is projected to increase Ohio’s Gross Domestic product by $2.8 billion.

The plant is expected to employ 3,000 initially, at an average wage of $135,000, while secondarily generating 20,000 additional jobs statewide.

Representative Troy Balderson, who represents the plant location in the US Congress said “We are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by the imbalance of foreign chip production. It’s past time to bolster this production here at home.”

Already, the Columbus metropolitan area had catapulted to leadership as a domestic migration destination, adding 53,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020, the most of any Midwestern metropolitan area.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin are joined by American entrepreneur, Rony Abovitz, and Charlie Fink, AR/VR consultant and professor of Chapman University.

This show discusses the metaverse and what the future holds in a digital world.

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More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

Watch the Video

Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.
Learn about Joel's book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

About the hosts:

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, and an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His most recent book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism is now available for order.

Marshall Toplansky is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. He co-founded KPMG’s data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.

About the guests:

Rony Abovitz is an American entrepreneur. Abovitz founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, in 2004 and recently acquired by Stryker for $1.65 billion. Abovitz is the founder of the Mixed reality/Augmented Reality (MR/AR) company Magic Leap and served as its CEO from its founding in 2010.

Charlie Fink is a Forbes Columnist, and the Author of Remote Collaboration & Virtual Conferences (2020), Convergence (2019) and Charlie Fink's Metaverse (2017). In the early 90s, Fink ran VR pioneer Virtual World Entertainment. Previously, he was a VP at Disney, SVP at AOL, and President of AG & Blue Mountain. He teaches XR at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Join us for a webinar on January 21st, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky to learn how we can restore the California Dream for middle and working class Californians. Following the presentation of the report, there will be an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.

Panel participants include Raul Anaya, Joe Hensley, and Karla Del Rio.

Register for the free Zoom webinar Restoring the American Dream