Warning: This piece contains descriptions of sexual violence and pictures featuring BDSM gear.
You’re going to miss Nancy Pelosi, because California is sending much darker figures to Congress. To explain, let’s start with a story.
Tremaine Carroll is awaiting trial on rape charges, but the identity of his alleged victim might be a surprise: She was his cellmate at Central California Women’s Facility, a state prison that isn’t supposed to have men in it, and Carroll is a three-strikes prisoner serving a long sentence for repeated felonies, including violent crimes. A woman was locked in a prison cell at night with a provably dangerous man, and it happened at a women’s prison.
The allegations are years old now, but Carroll’s path to trial has been slowed by a side issue: A Madera County Superior Court judge rebuked prosecutors in 2024 for alleging that “he” raped his cellmate, ordering that documents and testimony in the case respect the defendant’s declaration that he uses female pronouns (while Carroll has been returned to a men’s prison to await that trial). If she wants to testify, the victim must identify Carroll and then tell the jury that she forced her penis into the victim’s vagina inside their shared prison cell.
Women convicted of crimes in California face the threat of sexual assault by male cellmates because of Senate Bill 132, “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” which was introduced by state senator Scott Wiener – remember that name – and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The law requires that transgender, nonbinary, and intersex state prisoners be “housed at a correctional facility designated for men or women based on the individual’s preference.” Announcing that he was a woman, Carroll was imprisoned with women. In California, men convicted of violent felonies can be incarcerated at women’s prisons by declaring themselves women. You can see all of the resulting respect and dignity.
Senate Bill 132 author Scott Wiener will soon be leaving the California State Senate and taking up a new job, replacing Pelosi in the House of Representatives. Get to know the man, because you’ll be seeing his face on the national stage:
Incredibly, SB 132 may not be Wiener’s most damaging legislation. The journalist Abigail Shrier has credibly argued that this uniquely damaging figure played a significant role in turning California into a “predator’s paradise” and a “safe haven for human trafficking.” Wiener was the author of SB 357, which (in Shrier’s accurate description) “decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution.” The problem with that choice is that it sharply limited the ability of police to question women and girls who appear to be engaged in street prostitution, because they aren’t yet committing a crime. That means it’s harder for police to communicate with minors being forced into prostitution by violence and threats.
After the passage of Wiener’s SB 357, Shrier writes, “police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring.” After that development, the prevalence of child prostitution on Los Angeles streets has become so ugly that even the New York Times has noticed it, in a long report on “the trafficked girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street.” The problem has also gone statewide:
Another Wiener bill passed in 2020, SB 145, ended the requirement that adults convicted on sex crime charges involving minors be added to the sex offender registry, unless the offender and his victim had an age difference over 10 years. If you’re an adult in California and you sodomize minors, you know who to thank when you don’t have to register as a sex offender.
You might begin to spot a pattern. It used to be a felony in California to knowingly expose a sexual partner to HIV by having unprotected sex without disclosure of being HIV-positive. Wiener’s SB 239 made it a misdemeanor, sharply reducing the potential penalties.
And the reason minors can flee other states and come to California for sex-rejecting procedures is that Wiener’s SB 107 made California a sanctuary state for trans youth, giving the state’s courts “temporary emergency jurisdiction” to ensure that children receive transgender medical procedures.
There’s more, and Californians debate which of Wiener’s bills is the most appalling.
Wiener’s unrelenting awfulness is only partially captured by his parade of horrible bills, as he frequently uses legislative hearings to berate and degrade opponents who try to do things he regards as backward, like protecting children from sex trafficking and trans groomers. Watch here as Wiener denounces “this right-wing outrage machine” for opposing a bill to allow children to receive supposed mental health services (including transgender counseling) without parental consent:
Despite being popular enough in his San Francisco district to win elections, Wiener has a long list of emphatic critics on the left and the right. The radical feminist and former ACLU lawyer Kara Dansky writes on X that Wiener “has done some truly vile things,” for example, while describing him as “utterly abhorrent.” That sentiment is widely shared among radical feminists.
See also the description from self-declared San Francisco liberal (and former Wiener political opponent) Cynthia Cravens, who has described Wiener as “quite possibly the #1 legislator in the U.S. promoting a quasi-religious movement that decentered girls and women from their own words, spaces, services, and sports,” while he also “encouraged minors to believe that they are born in the wrong bodies.”
Observers on the other side of California politics are not more polite. Lance Christensen, a vice president at the conservative California Policy Center whose X post is embedded above, told The Federalist that Wiener is “methodically diabolical in his approach” and dangerous because he’s shrewd.
“He wears his distinct minority identities as a protective shield to cover his yearning to assert power and control over others who do not see or agree with his world view,” Christensen told The Federalist. “Scott is going to be an effective member of the House of Representatives because his instincts are naturally rapacious and he’ll be able to lean into his sociopathy and narcissism.”
Wiener will have an odd little wingman, the Sacramento politician and former state senator Richard Pan, who defeated erstwhile Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley for a seat in the House. Pan is a bizarre political figure, relentlessly awkward and inarticulate.
But he’s also a true believer, consistently determined to limit parental involvement in the lives of their own children. If you doubt that, you can watch Pan – a pediatrician outside of his political career – explaining what he would do if a 12-year-old patient came to his medical office needing treatment for STDs or a pregnancy:
Of course mommy and daddy don’t need to know that their 12-year-old daughter is pregnant and has syphilis. Why on Earth would you ever tell them?
Christensen describes Pan as “a legislative cry-bully of the highest order” and dangerous despite his awkwardness: “Richard Pan’s deadpan personality is not an act; it’s a reflection of his vacuity and the resentment he has towards any sentient constituent or California resident and taxpayers.”
Serving as a Republican chief of staff in the state capitol while Pan held a seat in the legislature, Christensen came away with a poor impression. “I never saw Richard as an intellectually honest broker of public policy,” Christensen told The Federalist. “He is going to be a pox upon Congress, and the country will be worse off.”
Watch these men closely, because Christensen is an informed observer of California’s bizarre politicians. The country absolutely is going to be worse off when they get to Congress, and their profoundly dark social agenda demands sustained opposition.
