Green Party member Dr. Butch Ware hosted a “Revolutionary Rally” fundraiser in San Leandro to promote his candidacy for California governor on Feb. 7. The event featured speeches from Ware, political activist and Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, transgender rights advocate Angelica Ross, comedian Sammy Obeid, and others, as well as musical performances. The speakers discussed many hot-button political issues, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), taxing large corporations, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ware also sat down for a brief interview before the event to speak about key issues affecting California voters and respond to potential criticism.
As the Nov. 3 election for governor of California approaches, the pool of candidates has steadily grown to 24. California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, is ineligible for re-election now that he has served two terms and is speculated to launch a presidential campaign.
Of the 12 Democratic candidates, the party currently lacks a main contender in the gubernatorial race, which could help the two leading Republicans, Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, garner majority votes. However, Green Party candidate Butch Ware claims he has a chance to win the election and break California’s duopoly.
“In this particular election, we have a great opportunity. It’s a jungle primary, only the top two candidates advance, and the second-place finisher usually only needs about 17-18% of the vote. We’re polling at 5% right now,” Ware said.
The Butch Ware Interview
Ware poses for the camera.
Ware is currently an associate professor of history at UC Santa Barbara. In the 2024 presidential election, he was the Green Party’s nominee for vice president running alongside Jill Stein. His platform encompasses a wide range of ambitious goals, from funding universal healthcare and social housing to creating alternative emergency responder workforces.
Social Housing
Social housing is publicly subsidized and exists to be permanently affordable for lower-income and underprivileged people. Ware plans to freeze rent within his first 100 days as governor in addition to funding social housing. “I’m gonna tax the sh*t out of Blackrock and Blackstone. I’m gonna tax them so hard that they cannot wait to sell all of the vacant properties that they are holding for market manipulation purposes back to the state at pennies on the dollar, and that is going to be the foundation of our social housing,” he said.
Ware explained that his guiding principle of “‘housing first’ just means that before anybody gets seconds, everybody eats.” “You can’t have multiple vacant properties, and some people don’t have no place to live,” he said. “We have 14 vacant properties for every homeless person in the city of San Francisco right now,” he added. A 2022 report states that San Francisco had 61,500 vacant housing units in 2021 compared to just 7,754 homeless people, accounting for just under eight units for each person who can’t afford housing.
Ware says his upbringing has influenced his political philosophy. “I don’t believe that homelessness is a public nuisance. I believe that homelessness is a public policy failure. I faced homelessness as a child, was on and off the streets, in and out of shelters, staying with relatives,” he said. “I do not see homeless people as things to be brushed away. Those are human beings. And for every $100 increase in the average median rent, there’s a 9% increase in the homelessness rate.” This most likely refers to a nationwide study done in 2020, which is not specific to California.
“If you hear Democrats talking about their plan, they’re saying, ‘Well, we’re going to solve the housing crisis by build, build, build, develop.’ I’m like, that is just handouts to Gavin Newsom’s developer buddies,” Ware said. “I cannot accept that we live in a California that has 186 billionaires in it and 187,000 people sleeping on the streets every night.”
Universal Healthcare
Ware plans to implement CalCare, a single-payer healthcare system that eliminates insurance premiums, copays, deductibles, and coinsurance. The system was reintroduced by California Assemblymember Ash Kalra on Feb. 12, 2026, and would offer universal care free at the point of service, regardless of immigration status. “Right now, California taxpayers pay 70¢ on every dollar that is spent on healthcare, and right now, more than 30¢ on every dollar is spent on the healthcare companies and insurance companies, the middlemen,” Ware said. It’s unclear which source he was referring to, but according to a 2025 report, only 7¢ of each dollar goes to non-medical costs like insurance management and taxes, while average net profit is just 3.6¢. “If you take the middlemen out, with what we are currently paying, we are actually capable of covering universal healthcare,” he said. “The people that we should be worried about as drains on our healthcare system are not immigrants. They’re billionaires.”
Ware specified that his plan for universal healthcare doesn’t depend on increasing taxes for most citizens. “[A] 2% income tax increase on those 186 billionaires would have a bunch of cascading effects throughout the state. One of them would be that nobody who makes $100,000 or less would have to pay a penny in state taxes,” he said.
California is currently considering a one-time, 5% emergency billionaire tax to “stop the healthcare collapse.” The tax would require a payment of 5% of each billionaire’s net worth and is estimated to raise about $100 billion, 90% of which would fund healthcare. It needs signatures from 4% of California voters to qualify for the November ballot, where it would need a majority to pass.
“When you start to get creative about the solutions and you’re not beholden to the insurance companies and the health care companies, [then] yeah, you can absolutely provide for universal health care without any real significant increase in what we’re currently spending,” Ware said.
Ware is not the first politician to propose universal healthcare. It’s a common talking point for many progressive politicians, notably Senator Bernie Sanders. “Gavin Newsom ran on universal single payer health care in 2022, had the votes, and $2.7 million was laid down on the Democrat party from the healthcare industry, and then they did not bring it to vote in the legislature. So we never had a vote on universal single payer health care,” Ware pointed out. “The only reason why we don’t have it, because we can afford it, we can operate it, CalCare can absolutely meet this need, is because our politicians are owned.”
“A lot [of] people will think, ‘Oh, these are crazy socialist ideas,'” Ware said. “Listen, General Motors pays more for its healthcare than it pays for the steel in its vehicles. If we have universal health care in the state of California, commerce is going to run to the state,” he said. “Right now, small businesses can’t compete with the big ones, because we can’t compete on insurance and benefits,” he explained. “I am an anti-capitalist. I’m not anti-commerce. I believe thriving business is absolutely crucial to the success of California. But capital has to be directed by public good. We have to have somebody looking out for public benefit, because all we’ve had is people looking out for private profit.”
ICE
Ware plans to close all ICE facilities in California, block police cooperation with ICE, and ban ICE from state property. “As governor of the state of California, I’m not going to comply with unconstitutional orders,” he said. “Every lawyer and law enforcement officer in the state needs to be making sure that the feds don’t touch a single hair on the head of any California resident without due process being followed.”
Gavin Newsom has pushed back against ICE activity through new legislation, such as Assembly Bill 49, which prevents ICE agents from entering government-funded school campuses without a warrant. He’s also signed Senate Bill 67, which prohibits ICE agents from wearing masks to hide their identities, though enforcement has been blocked by a judge under reason of discrimination for not including state police. However, The California Values Act has been effective since 2018 and prevents state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement.
Ware plans to take resistance a step further and face ICE head-on with police forces. “If it comes to the point where we need to have a showdown, then we have to have a showdown, because courts are going to have to have to make decisions as to whether or not the federal government can openly violate everything that the Constitution says, and the states just have to lay there and take it,” Ware said.
Ware also expressed criticism of both Democratic and Republican administrations in their handling of immigration. “Trump is still chasing Obama’s deportation records. The theatrics of power are more brutal because it’s exemplary violence that is designed to make people self-deport. The deportation tactics of the Democrats are meant to be subterranean, not visible to the eye. But both have been equally brutal, and I have been outspoken against ICE for two decades,” he said.
Dismantling the Carceral State
Ware—a self-proclaimed “abolitionist”—plans to demilitarize police forces, eliminate private prisons, and create alternative emergency responder workforces. “My vision is for a society that assures public safety without militarized police force, but I also understand that until we achieve the goals of education, healthcare, housing, and a just society, we need to be very, very careful on how we construct public safety,” he said.
Ware discussed his own experiences with the country’s current policing system. “[I was] stopped for driving while black by police officers 17 times before I got to my 18th birthday, never ticketed. One time, I had a service weapon drawn on me and pointed in my face when asked to produce identification. We are going to end racial profiling. We are going to end the stalking of black and brown communities, and we’re going to replace that with public safety,” he said. According to Ware’s website, he plans to strengthen Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), which investigates police misconduct. However, he didn’t provide the specifics of demilitarizing police forces and creating alternative emergency responder workforces.
“There are very few situations where introducing a person with a high school diploma and a loaded weapon into the situation makes the situation less volatile,” Ware said. “We are going to be looking to scale back in the short term, all of the ways in which people use police as a crutch for all of the things that the society isn’t doing.”
Divestment from Israel
Ware intends to prevent the enforcement of anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) laws and freeze non-divested state spending by executive order. Anti-BDS laws generally require state contractors to pledge to not boycott Israel. In California, Assembly Bill 2844 requires entities with state contracts worth $100,000 or more to, first, certify compliance with California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act (Unruh) and Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), essentially forbidding discrimination, and second, certify that any guidelines against sovereign, government-recognized entities do not infract Unruh or FEHA.
“The popular support for divestment is massive. So what it takes is moral leadership, public leadership. We could divest from genocidal endeavors today if Gavin Newsom took a position of political leadership to do so, but he’s not going to do that because his soul is folded on a piece of paper and buried deep in the pockets of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) someplace,” he said.
“All it actually takes is political will, and one of the easiest places to exercise that political will, especially for me as a university professor and faculty member, is with the UC system. We’re going to push directly for full divestment of the University of California system, not just from genocide in Palestine, but from the war machine more broadly. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman should not have these direct relationships with our publicly funded education,” Ware said. From 2005 to 2022, the UC system received $5.6 billion from sections under the Department of Defense and private companies like Lockheed Martin, primarily for scientific research. They also received 1,428 military-funded research grants, 174 of which went to UC Santa Barbara, where Ware teaches.
“Both parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of AIPAC and the overall Zionist lobby, and I have never taken a penny from any of those sources and never will,” Ware added. Gavin Newsom has stated that he’s “never received a dollar from [AIPAC] in [his] entire political career,” and there is no record of him doing so. Because AIPAC is registered under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, it’s not allowed to make financial contributions to gubernatorial candidates. Of the 24 current candidates, only six have addressed their stance on Israel clearly, with Butch Ware and Kyle Langford as the only two who are anti-Israel. More information is expected to come out in the coming months as candidates promote their campaigns.
Addressing Government Surveillance
Ware discussed his concerns and plans to fight back against an increasing amount of government surveillance technologies. “When I read George Orwell’s ‘1984’ in high school […] I could not imagine the panopticon that Orwell was describing for us. The screens that he described, we carry them in our pockets now, and they have them at every stoplight, and they are searching through all of our data, and they have commoditized our data, and they are selling it to military and even paramilitary organizations,” he said.
“One of the principal sets of instructions that I would push to the Attorney General of the State of California is to leverage maximal legal resources to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the residents of California, and actually they have a massive amount of power to do that right now. It’s just that, unfortunately, the Democrat administrations can’t do that because they don’t bite the hand that feeds them,” Ware explained. So far, he hasn’t specified what this would look like in practice.
Environmental Protection
The California Green Party emphasizes ecological wisdom and sustainability. Ware says he plans on investing in public transportation as an alternative to personal vehicles. “We’re going to need high-speed rail. We’re going to need free public transportation. We’re not going to personal vehicle ourselves out of the ecological crisis. And we damn sure ain’t going to drill our way out of it,” he said. California is currently constructing a high-speed rail, though the project has faced setbacks.
“There’s not enough lithium on the planet to replace what’s needed from the gas vehicle, so we’re going to have to be creative. California is destined to lead the way in ecological sanity, and I’m going to fight the feds tooth and nail on anything that they would do to try to corrupt what is objectively one of the most beautiful natural environments on the face of the earth,” Ware said.
Ware’s policy to decommission nuclear facilities aligns with the Green Party’s opposition to nuclear energy, which could face major criticism, as nuclear energy has caused the second-least number of deaths overall behind solar energy, and provides consistent energy with relatively little land use.
“Nuclear energy is not as clean as people like to pretend that it is, and I think that we have more sustainable futures through wind and through solar and through other means,” Ware responded.
Ware’s nuclear energy policy is based on a global perspective. “France is often propped up as the model of society that leans heavily on nuclear, but there are not only major ecological effects, but look at the political destabilization that is actually driven by nuclear energy consumption. I have seen the cost of nuclear energy in West Africa. I’ve seen its cost in Niger. Sustainability is not just about sustainability for folks in Western societies, it’s about sustainability for the planet as a whole,” Ware said.
Ware consistently emphasized his belief that he has a realistic chance at winning the election as a third-party candidate. “We are not outnumbered, we are out-organized,” he’s often stated, quoting the African American civil rights leader Malcolm X.
“These goals are massively popular,” he said. “I’m going to have to figure out how to get deals done with Democrats and Republicans that are already [in the governor’s mansion], but their constituents are begging for these policies.”
“One of the things that people don’t understand about the executive branch in the state of California specifically is that it’s one of the states in the union that has the most massive power of appointment,” Ware said. “When I want to put a fine point on it, I say you can literally clean out the deep state, the Democrat deep state, and replace people in positions that owe favors to corporate overlords with people that have no corporate commitments of any kind. The other place where the governor’s office has an incredible amount of powers in the state is with respect to the budget. And the way that I’ll put it is like this: we are going to starve the wolves and feed the shepherds.”
“When [I advance], the lesser of the two evils argument is off the table. If it’s just blue versus green, then there is no red boogeyman that you can use to scare people,” Ware said. “Even if you don’t think that I can win, we are going to get better political outcomes by having them pushed in the direction of a populist politics that serves the people rather than the corporation.”
The interview concluded with a note about Ware’s collaboration with political activist and Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, whose presence likely drew the most attention to the event. “Roger actually proposed this idea,” Ware said. “We dropped what we were doing to try to put this together for a simple reason: these policies that we’re discussing are so wildly popular with the people of California that the mainstream media and the corporate parties are doing everything that they can to make sure that don’t nobody ever hears about Butch Ware or what we’re running on. So we have to find ways to make our own noise and to make our own news. And if getting Roger Waters, Pink Floyd himself to come out and sing, doesn’t get people’s attention, I don’t know what will.”
Waters’ history of political activism began in 2006 and has largely been characterized by his advocacy for Palestinian liberation, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and criticizing the foreign policy decisions of the United States and NATO. “Ten toes down for Palestinian liberation, that’s number one,” Ware said.
The Event
Ware’s team started the main event with music from a local band known as Sip Club, who performed while guests filed into the venue. Following the performance was a recitation of verses of the Qur’an in both Arabic and English, reflecting Ware’s Muslim identity, as well as a singing performance from Indigenous artist Shylah Ray.
The event’s conductor, Jose Luis Correa, then led the audience in affirmations, from “I am loved” to “I deserve freedom.” The stage was yielded to speaker Fernando Deveras, who dove into a series of chants advocating for education, healthcare, and the abolishment of ICE. He also drew shouts of “Snakes!” and hisses from the crowd as he described how the Democratic party “extinguished” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s runs in 2016 and 2020.
Deveras gives a speech.
“Frederick Douglass said, ‘find out just what a people will submit to, and you will have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed’ […] We’ve been taught to accept that. So this campaign is about saying ‘no more.’ We want the whole thing. We don’t want your crumbs anymore,” Deveras said.
Succeeding Deveras was transgender rights activist Angelica Ross, an actress and businesswoman who taught herself computer programming and became the founder and CEO of TransTech Social Enterprises, a non-profit that helps transgender people find employment in tech. Her speech centered around themes of inclusivity and social progressivism.
Ross gives a speech.
Like Deveras, Ross encouraged action among the audience. “Sometimes people are like, ‘I don’t know when to say something.’ Is this the right time to come out? Is this the right time to do all these things?’ Listen. Now is always the right time,” she said.
As Ross wrapped up her message, the crew prepared for a Q&A section with Ware, Waters, Ross, and Deveras on the panel.
Butch Ware (left) and Roger Waters (right) on the panel.
The first question for the panel was asked by Ware’s press secretary, Valielza Huynh-O’Keefe, who was also seated on-stage. “How do we combat despair, defeatism and the narrative that I’m just one person in the face of [political upheaval]?,” she asked.
“Build a community with other people, talk to other people, recognize that you are not alone. As we can see in this room here, there are plenty of other people who see things that we see, who feel what we feel, and it’s our job to get out of our comfort zone, knock on someone’s door, call somebody, send a text and start those conversations,” Deveras responded.
“We need to cultivate in our inner beings a distinction between rage—blind anger that often causes us to lose judgment—and outrage. Outrage propels us forward. Rage blinds us. And disciplining our emotions that we feel in these deep ways so that we can stand up for our fellow human beings, that is crucial,” Ware said. “It’s collective liberation or it’s no liberation at all. The corporate duopoly has staged a phony culture war in order to keep us divided against one another, because they know that if united, we get free, and divided, we don’t.”
After a brief comedy set by Sammy Obeid, Roger Waters took the stage. Preceding Waters’ musical performance was a short speech that drew enthusiasm from the crowd.
Waters began by quoting the lyrics of “The Gunner’s Dream,” an anti-war song he wrote about a dying WWII bomber who envisions a safer world. “A place to stay, is that too much to ask?,” Waters asked, to which the crowd shouted, “Hell no!” “No one ever disappears, you never hear their standard issue kicking in your door?,” he continued, drawing more shouts. “And everyone has recourse to the law, and no one kills the children anymore!”
Waters then performed “Under the Rubble,” a song he wrote in protest of Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, and “The Bravery of Being out of Range,” a song that sarcastically describes politicians who create violence from a safe distance away. He concluded with the song “Wish You Were Here,” whose lyrics he wrote about his former band member Syd Barrett, who suffered from a severe mental breakdown, likely related to his use of psychedelic drugs, and was driven into seclusion.
Waters sings a song.
The event concluded with a 20-minute speech from Ware discussing the inspiration he received from civil rights leader Malcolm X and the importance of taking action. “I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X cover to cover in one night. Couldn’t put the book down. I couldn’t put it down because Malcolm spoke with such incredible candor and clarity about what white supremacy had done to him and his family,” Ware explained.
“My mother was pregnant with me at the age of 15, and told by her high school guidance counselor to abort the child because she was pregnant by a Black man,” Ware said. “So I had seen a lot of the dark places that Malcolm had described. And I saw this man, Malcolm X, who had achieved freedom from his inner demons and his external oppressors, and I wanted what he had. So I went right out to my school library, and I checked out the English translation of the Quran, and I read that book, cover to cover,” Ware continued. “I converted to Islam before the week was out.”
Ware gives a speech.
“[Roger Waters] said, ‘where is our Mao Zedong? Where is our Vladimir Lenin? Maybe it’s Butch Ware.’ He said, ‘maybe we’re not going to have our 1917 moment in the streets. Maybe we’re going to find a different way to take power from these people,'” Ware said. “You have already taken the most important step, which is to turn your heart against oppression,” Ware explained. “I am the son of a locksmith with a sixth grade education and a teenage mom, but Butch Ware in the equation means nothing. I’m here to serve y’all.”
