SF Bay View backs Dr. Butch Ware for governor of California

by Tabari Morris

A historian of Black Freedom steps into California’s 2026 governor’s race 

California’s long crisis of homelessness, mass incarceration, corporate capture and economic inequality has a new challenger in the 2026 governor’s race: historian, activist and educator Dr. Butch Ware, now running on the Green Party ticket with an unapologetically Black radical, liberation-centered platform. After a wide-ranging interview touching on housing, prisons, surveillance, education and political power, the San Francisco Bay View is proud to officially endorse Dr. Ware’s candidacy for governor of California. “This Green Party run is an opportunity to bring our radical politics outside of that duopoly system and really put that to the center of state politics and national politics,” Ware said.​ 

In my interview with him, Ware framed his campaign as a direct challenge to what he calls the “two-party duopoly” that has overseen California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty, deeply racialized policing and an historic homelessness crisis despite the state’s position as the world’s third-largest economy. He is running as a self-described “Black Muslim revolutionary,” promising to wield the ballot as “a weapon” in the tradition of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and the broader Black radical tradition.​ 

From Black radical history to the governor’s race 

Ware comes to the race as an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaching African history, African American history and Islamic intellectual history, with a body of work focused on Black radical traditions, colonialism, genocide, revolution and social transformation. He credits his decision to jump into electoral politics to his 2024 vice-presidential run alongside Dr. Jill Stein, which forced him to revisit how earlier generations of revolutionaries treated the vote.​ 

“I went back to Malcolm, 1964, ‘The Ballot or the Bullet,’” Ware recalled. Malcolm’s insistence that “the ballot is a weapon as effective or more effective than the bullet,” and the Panthers’ choice to run for office convinced Ware that electoral work could be a tool of organizing, not a substitute for it. “I’m running to try to build an independent liberation-centered politics that comes out of the Black radical tradition, but channels that Black radical tradition towards the aims of collective liberation in the same ways that the Panthers did,” he said.​ 

Breaking the Democratic-Republican ‘duopoly’ 

Throughout the conversation, Ware returned to a central premise: Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same corporate machine. Citing Malcolm X’s metaphor of the liberal “fox” and conservative “wolf,” he argues that the differences between the parties are “a difference of style, not substance,” particularly on policing, prisons and economic inequality. “The Democrat establishment in the state turns California citizens and residents upside down and shakes us until all of the money comes out of our pockets,” he said, describing the state’s additions of tolls, fees and regressive revenue schemes.​ 

Ware says the current system is a bipartisan failure, a state that is simultaneously a global economic powerhouse and a national leader in poverty, wealth inequality and carceral expansion. For Ware, the Green Party’s refusal to take corporate funding was not a branding decision, but a requirement for democracy: “Who funds you runs you,” he said, contrasting his campaign with Democrats and Republicans funded by defense contractors, private prison interests and Wall Street asset managers. 

“Our job is to restore power to the people,” he said, advocating for proportional representation, ranked-choice voting and mixed-member districts as a way to break the corporate stranglehold on state power. 

‘Poverty industrial complex’ and a housing-first vision 

If there was one issue that drew special urgency from Ware, it was homelessness – and the multi-billion-dollar ecosystem that has failed to end it. He referred to the web of agencies, consultants and developers as the “poverty industrial complex,” saying that too much of the state’s homelessness funding functions as “poverty alleviation for them, but not for the people.” Under Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ware pointed out, California has spent roughly $25 billion on homelessness programs, while the average number of people sleeping on the street each night has risen from about 120,000 to 187,000.​ 

Ware’s criticism is personal as well as it is political. He tells of a childhood spent riding a bike through shelters, relatives’ homes, public housing and other unstable living situations. He also tells of his father who was struggling with mental health and addiction issues who lived on the streets at times. “I don’t see homeless people as a public nuisance. I see homeless people as human beings who need care,” he emphasized. His plan focuses on a housing-first approach combined with universal single-payer healthcare including mental health and addiction services, as well as social housing funded through aggressive taxation of vacant properties, especially those of companies such as Blackstone and BlackRock. 

Care, not cages: healthcare, addiction and drug policy 

Ware links California’s housing crisis and homelessness problem directly to healthcare and criminalization. He supports universal single-payer healthcare, currently blocked by Democrats who advocate for it but take millions from the health care lobby. Ware argues that universal healthcare is the only way to treat addiction and mental health issues as a healthcare problem, not a crime. When Ware ran for national office on the Green Party ticket with Jill Stein, he supported the Green Party’s platform of legalizing and regulating controlled substances, decriminalizing users and treating substance abuse as a health crisis, not a pipeline to prison. 

“At the intersection of the two problems that you just stated is the fact that many of those folks who have some kind of record inside the carceral system are people who were serving time for drug offenses,” he said in our interview, arguing that both public and private prison interests profit from criminalization. “If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail,” he said. “And if all you have is corporate donors, then you’re always going to craft solutions that serve your corporate donor class rather than just fixing the damn problem.”​ 

Abolition, political prisoners, and ending prison slavery

Ware describes himself as an abolitionist who “envision[s] a day when we close down Pelican Bay,” and he says his team is already vetting lists of political prisoners for gubernatorial clemency. He situates California’s carceral system within a long genealogy of racial violence and intellectual resistance, pointing to figures like George and Jonathan Jackson and Huey P. Newton and the intellectual work produced behind bars that has shaped Black liberation movements worldwide.​

On the continued use of prison labor under the 13th Amendment’s “punishment for crime” clause, Ware is equally blunt: “Slavery still exists inside the state of California,” he said, drawing a straight line from chattel slavery to post-emancipation vagrancy laws in South Africa to today’s forced labor regimes. He criticized the state’s recent ratification of carceral slavery at the ballot box as a failure of moral and political leadership, promising to side with incarcerated workers who refuse to participate in coerced labor. “One of those human rights is to be exempt from slavery at the hands of the state,” he insists.​

Standing with inside-outside organizing and street organizations

In one of our interview’s most powerful exchanges, a question from formerly incarcerated organizers asked how they could form a political action committee to back Ware’s platform as “new stakeholders.” Ware responded with clear enthusiasm: “First of all, I love this,” he said, revealing that his campaign is already working with formerly incarcerated street-organization leaders in San Diego on community-based violence prevention and political organizing.​

He cited as a point of pride the 2024 endorsement of the Stein-Ware ticket by the Almighty Vice Lord Nation, arguing that street organizations are uniquely positioned to build the political formations necessary to “wrest power out of the hands of the corporations.” “The only murderous gangs that I know that wear blue and red are Democrats and Republicans,” he quipped in an interview on the Breakfast Club, clarifying that his campaign sees street organizations, incarcerated people and their families as central partners, not scapegoats.​

Ending hostilities, building safe and liberated zones

Asked whether he would meet with “principal thinkers” behind the historic Pelican Bay Agreement to End Hostilities and support using that framework as both inside-outside peace work and a curriculum for schools, Ware did not hesitate. “Without any question. So mark that down, put it on the record,” he said, noting that such work has already begun through his campaign’s collaboration with street leadership. His view of violence prevention is rooted in structural analysis: He recalls growing up in Washington, D.C., when it was the murder capital of the United States and argues that current conditions reflect “the indelible marks of white supremacist, capitalist and imperialist violence on our communities.”​

For Ware, the real public safety work is twofold: meeting people’s basic needs – “housing, healthcare and education because those are the things that lead to opportunity” – and supporting robust, community-rooted violence prevention programs both inside the prison system and in neighborhoods under constant surveillance and policing. He sees little meaningful boundary between “inside” and “outside” for Black, Latino and poor communities living under militarized policing, recalling being stopped “for driving while Black 17 times before I got to my 18th birthday.”​

Fighting surveillance and the expanding police state

Ware and I also tackled the explosion of surveillance technology in cities like San Francisco, where flock cameras, license-plate readers and private systems like Ring create what Ware calls a 21st-century police state. Quoting Dead Prez’s song “Police State,” he noted how streetlights now function as watchtowers as corporations and law enforcement track movement and activity with “no respect for people’s rights to privacy.”​

Ware argues that this surveillance boom is inseparable from the influence of Silicon Valley over state politics. “When the executive authority and the Democrat Party is in the employ of Silicon Valley tech bros …  of course they’re going to look the other way as our privacy and civil liberties are violated,” he said. As governor, he says he would press the attorney general to aggressively litigate in defense of civil liberties, leveraging the office’s power against tech overreach instead of shielding corporate donors.​

Schools, students and ending the school-to-prison pipeline

In my interview with Dr. Ware, the conversation frequently returned to young people and education, including my observation – grounded in the actual Chicago experience – that closing dozens of schools and forcing students to cross neighborhood lines escalated violence and instability. Ware connected those experiences to his own, recounting his transformation at 15 after reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and the Qur’an in two nights, and to the long history of Black students being told that their ambitions are unrealistic, from Malcolm being told to become a carpenter rather than the lawyer young Malcolm wanted be to Ware himself being told in third grade that there had never been a Black president and likely never would be.​

Dr. Ware argues that schools in Black and Brown communities often function as extensions of the carceral state – complete with metal detectors, prison-like architecture and a culture of surveillance – that make students feel unsafe and unwelcome. To change that, Ware calls for equalizing per-pupil funding across districts so that students in places like Compton and Stockton are funded at the same level as those in Beverly Hills, as well as universal pre-K and a return to free tuition at public colleges and universities, paired with relief from crushing student loan debt. “The student is the bag,” he said, describing how student debt has turned higher education from a path to social mobility into a revenue stream for corporations.​

Taxing billionaires, cutting tolls and ending ‘extortionary’ fees

On economic policy, Ware is sharply critical of what he calls California’s “never ending constant shakedown” of working people through tolls, fees and layered taxes while billionaires and major corporations pay little. He points to proposals such as per-mile “road-use” charges and escalating tolls as examples of a state that “turns California citizens and residents upside down and shakes us until all of the money comes out of our pockets.” Meanwhile, he notes, nine households in Silicon Valley control about $683 billion in personal wealth, 186 billionaires reside in the state, and companies like Tesla and Palantir pay effective tax rates that are negligible or reportedly zero.​

Ware’s alternative is straightforward: Cut “extortionary” tolls and fees by rooting out entrenched corruption and pork in Sacramento and raise modest taxes on the ultra-rich and large corporations. He argues that a 2% increase in income tax on the state’s 186 billionaires alone could fund the elimination of state income taxes for Californians making $100,000 or less while cancelling many regressive charges on everyday life. “The only freeloaders who are getting over on our dime are the billionaires, not the immigrants,” he said.​

100-day agenda: emergency single-payer and structural change

When pressed to elaborate on what he would do in his first 100 days as governor, Ware said they are working on releasing a comprehensive plan but pointed to one major action he said he would take right away: declaring a public health emergency and immediately establishing a single-payer health care plan for Californians. “People need relief now,” he emphasized, noting that Democrats have shown they could pass a single-payer plan by doing it twice, in 2006 and 2008, knowing Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger would veto it.

Ware accuses Democrats of betraying voters by campaigning on single-payer – Newsom did so in 2022 – then abandoning it after accepting $2.7 million from the healthcare lobby and refusing to even bring a single-payer bill to a vote. Ware quotes James Baldwin: “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do,” promising that a Ware administration would act immediately on what he calls an “80/20 issue” that enjoys overwhelming popular support.​

Building a statewide movement: from 2% to the governor’s mansion

Despite being a non-corporate candidate running as an independent in a so-called “jungle primary,” Ware insists that this campaign is meant to win rather than merely being symbolic. He argues that his recent poll figures have placed him between 2% and 5%, a feat that is impressive for a third-party candidate in California. He further notes that with so many candidates in the race, the current leaders are polling at around 13 to 14 percent, meaning that he is merely “single digit off the lead.” No third-party candidate has polled at 5 percent in California since a third-party candidate actually won in 1917, Ware observed.

The campaign’s growth, he says, is fueled by real-world organizing rather than “Instagram AstroTurf.” Ware describes “boots on the ground in every community,” from San Diego to Humboldt, including a 500-person rally in San Leandro headlined by Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters where the campaign raised roughly $40,000 in a single day – more than some left formations have raised in entire cycles. He reports having “a few thousand” volunteers already engaged in field work and expects that number to rise sharply as vote-by-mail ballots go out on May 4, 2026.​

A Muslim, pro-Palestine multi-racial coalition

Ware’s candidacy is also changing political assumptions about who makes up the backbone of state insurgent campaigns. A practicing Muslim who was fasting during Ramadan while giving an interview with me, Ware pointed to 2024 exit polls in California that found 53% of Muslim voters supported Stein and Ware, while only 20% of those voters chose Democrats, whom he called “team blue genocide,” and Republicans, whom he called “team red fascism.”

As there are a million Muslims in California, Ware sees a scenario where Muslim, youth, Black, Latino, Asian-American and working-class voters can easily provide the 1.75 to 2 million votes needed to win the June primary election.

He points to especially high levels of enthusiasm among young voters, who are “deeply anti-Zionist, very pro-Palestinian, very pro-ICE abolition,” and also have Green Party chapters at about 20 colleges across the state. “We’re trying to win,” he says straightforwardly, emphasizing that his platform of housing, healthcare, human rights and stopping carceral and imperial violence is popular beyond traditional “left” communities.

‘A new day is dawning’: Why SF Bay View endorses Dr. Butch Ware

In closing, Ware turned again to Malcolm X, reminding Black Californians that being taken for granted by Democrats makes them, in Malcolm’s words, “political chumps.” “Aren’t we tired of Black Californians being chumped by a party that plays in our face and locks us up, that plays in our face and keeps us impoverished?” he asked. For him, a Ware victory would signal that “the third largest economy on the planet has gone out of the fold of imperialism and capitalism and white supremacy and that a new day is dawning in the political history of humanity.”​

The SF Bay View agrees that California is past the point of tinkering at the margins and that the crises facing Black, Brown, working-class and poor communities demand a fundamentally different governing vision. With his lifelong commitment to Black liberation, his lived experience of housing precarity and family incarceration, his refusal of corporate money, and his concrete plans for housing, healthcare, education and decarceration, Dr. Butch Ware has earned our full and official endorsement for governor of California in 2026.​

How to get involved – and a thank you

Readers and viewers who want to learn more or plug into the campaign can visit ButchWareForGov.com, where they can sign up to volunteer, donate or connect with field teams across the state. The campaign can also be reached directly at contact@butchwareforgov.com and volunteer@butchwareforgov.com for those organizing PACs, inside-outside efforts or local community initiatives.​

On behalf of the SF Bay View community, we extend a heartfelt thank you to Dr. Butch Ware for sharing his time, clarity and courage with our readers and viewers and for placing the needs of our people at the center of his bid for California’s highest office. We look forward to covering this campaign as it grows – and to seeing power return to the hands of those who have carried the heaviest burdens for far too long.​

Tabari Morris, a journalism student at City College of San Francisco and news editor of The Guardsman, City College’s student newspaper, is managing editor of the Bay View and can be reached at tabari@sfbayview.com.  

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Source: https://sfbayview.com/2026/03/sf-bay-view-backs-dr-butch-ware-for-governor-of-california/