California's plan to phase out gas-powered cars will apply to Virginia, AG says

The mandate will not take effect in Virginia until 2024

California recently announced a rule requiring the gradual phasing out of gas-powered cars by the year 2035 and Virginia's attorney general says a 2021 state law will force Richmond to also abide by it.

When Democrats controlled both houses of the Virginia legislature, they passed a law binding the state to the automobile standards dictated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), according to The Hill. Republicans have thus far failed to repeal the law.

Virginia Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares's office confirmed to the outlet that the 2021 law was still in effect and that CARB's rule requiring the end of fossil-fueled car sales by 2035 is therefore binding to the state. The California rule will not take effect in Virginia until 2024.

Republicans control the state House and governorship but Democrats hold the Senate by a single vote. The state was traditionally a Republican bastion, but flipped blue in the 2008 presidential election and has not backed a Republican in a national election since 2004. Democrats gradually took over the state's governing apparatus and held it until now-Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won the office in 2021.

Though the GOP maintains tenuous control of the government, both Youngkin and Miyares expressed hope that the law would not take effect.

“The Attorney General is hopeful that the General Assembly repeals this law and discontinues any trend that makes Virginia more like California,” Miyares spokesperson Victoria La Civita told The Hill.

“I am already at work to prevent this ridiculous edict from being forced on Virginians,” said Youngkin, per the outlet.

The state will hold elections again in 2023, giving the GOP a chance to secure both chambers and repeal the law before the CARB mandate takes effect, the outlet reported.

https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/californias-plan-phase-out-gas-powered-cars-will-apply-virginia-ag-says

J.D. Vance: Facebook-FBI Censorship Collusion Undermines ‘Free Enterprise’ Defense of Big Tech

J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, said on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission of his company’s digital censorship of news and information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election contradicts the framing of Big Tech companies as operating within a free market.

Last Thursday, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on the latter’s eponymous podcast that the FBI advised his company of digitally circulated “Russian disinformation” in relation to news and information regarding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

When asked about Big Tech censorship of reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg said, “The FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

The FBI’s role in Facebook’s digital censorship should have led to “wall-to-wall coverage for a couple of weeks,” Vance said, highlighting much of the news media’s refusal to report on the government’s coordination with technology companies’ political restrictions on access to information.

Vance alluded to governmental circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing its political censorship to ideologically aligned Big Tech firms.

He remarked, “I argue that Big Tech is too powerful and that conservatives need to wake up and realize what moment we’re in and actually go after these guys. The counterargument I always get is, ‘Well, they’re a private company, and of course we believe in free enterprise and we [believe] in capitalism.'”

“This a perfect illustration of why that argument is so inadequate,” he continued, “because these guys are not only censoring because the dictates of the market require them to. They’re sometimes censoring because the government shows up at their doorstep that says, ‘Do this, or else,’ and then they do it in a way that affects the presidential election.”

Marlow described the coordinated censorship between Big Tech and the FBI as “tantamount to election interference” given the potential impact that news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could have had on voters’ decisions ahead of November 2020.

Vance remarked, “According to independent studies — some done by pro-Biden groups — millions of votes were changed because of the lack of coverage of the Hunter Biden story, because it implicates the entire Biden family in corruption, and it wasn’t covered. It wasn’t shared on social media nearly the way it should have been, because our government told Mark Zuckerberg what to do with this digital media company.”

“It is an earth-shattering story,” he emphasized. “Unless we rein in the technology companies and unless we rein in the amount of power and influence they have over American elections, we’re never going to win the long-term battle.”

Free speech and expression are essential to a properly functioning American public capable of creating “better public policy” and making “better decisions,” Vance argued. Technology companies “backed up by the government agencies,” he concluded, “are denying us” these essential freedoms.

Hunter Biden is the subject of a brand new narrative film My Son Hunter, marking Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution. It’s the story the establishment media don’t want you to see. It’s available for PRE-ORDER NOW at MySonHunter.com. The film becomes available for Streaming and Downloading September 7. The trailer has already been viewed over 3.5 million times across social media.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2022/08/29/j-d-vance-facebook-fbi-censorship-collusion-undermines-free-enterprise-defense-of-big-tech/