“Alcibiades possessed, they say, one special gift which surpassed all the rest and served to attach men to him, namely, that he could assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of others and submit himself to more startling transformations than a chameleon…Alcibiades was able to associate with good and bad alike, and never found a characteristic he could not imitate or practice…It was not so much that he could pass with ease from one type of behaviour to another, nor that his own character was transformed in every case; but when he saw that by following his own inclinations he would give offence to his associates, he promptly assumed and had recourse to whatever manner or exterior was appropriate to them.” - Plutarch [The Life of Alcibiades, 23]
We’re over three years out from the next Presidential election, but California’s slick Patrick Bateman-esque Governor Gavin Newsom is already doing what he can to raise his profile in advance of a widely anticipated Presidential run. Currently, one form this has taken is a podcast where he engages with people ranging from Charlie Kirk to Tim Walz about a variety of topics, most notably trying to strike a conciliatory note with the young male voters the Democrats have been bleeding. He also has his aids running a “Press Release” account where they try to emulate Trump’s language and behavior, a gimmick which has gotten mixed reviews. Most significantly, Newsom is backing an ambitious initiative to temporarily suspend California’s non-partisan Congressional districting commission in favor of partisan redistricting through 2030 which he claims would offset Texas’s mid-session redistricting scheme- this is seen as an enormous political gamble but that assumes someone who feels shame and is unable to win by losing. All of this is on top of frequent media appearances, less hesitancy to be seen interacting with “unacceptable” accounts on social media than other Democrats, proudly showing off his family which looks something like a younger version of the Romneys, and more. As Governor of America’s most populous and wealthiest state, he would be a major political figure regardless, but is tirelessly keeping himself in the discourse at a time when most Democrats remain disorganized and in retreat. This all seems to be working towards the goal of making himself the most prominent national Democrat figure and therefore the 2028 Presidential nomination front-runner.
Skeptics abound about if any of this work. They note the disastrous response to the LA wildfires at the beginning of this year. They say that no one wants to “Make America California” given its extreme cost of living, extraordinary rate of homelessness, unbelievable red tape, constant dysfunction, and that as such California liberals are toxic to national politics. It is argued that Democrats are a diversity cult past the point of accepting a good looking slicked back wealthy white man [not a sensible criticism of a man who got elected Governor of California, the belly of the diversity beast.] They say that the gimmicks will have run their course and far too soon. Some point to other big name front runners who went nowhere, like Rudy Giuliani or Jeb Bush, or Hillary Clinton who did get the nomination the second time and still lost. It is said that the Democrats hate Trump and do not, in fact, want their own. Others say that voters simply won’t go for a man who is so obviously sociopathic and clearly lacks core beliefs. These criticisms misunderstand both Gavin Newsom and electoral democracy itself. Most successful politicians may have some form of personality disorder, as half of their job is blowing smoke up your ass, but Newsom’s obvious sociopathy and genuine shamelessness are enormous political assets that cannot be taught. Newsom seems to live by the immortal words of George Costanza, “And remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
There isn’t a coherent narrative about why anyone should elect the failed governor of America’s most dysfunctional state but Gavin Newsom doesn’t need one because it isn’t how he thinks. Newsom has no baggage because he simply doesn’t care, he will just tell you that you are wrong with some rapidly produced semi-relevant key words or statistics. Whereas your Rudy Giulianis and Jeb Bushes [and currently Andrew Cuomo in New York] fizzled as major candidates because they had the burden of unmerited presumed “frontrunner” status and felt entitled and didn’t want to energetically campaign and fight for every vote, Newsom thrives at a task which is arduous to any semi-normal person because he feeds off of selling people on himself all day while simultaneously having no emotional response to negative feedback. Here is a rare politician who enjoys the journey instead of just dreaming about the destination. I won’t belabor the comparison, but he really is an American Alcibiades1- talented, good looking, self-aggrandizing, incapable of shame, and in it only for himself and the love of the game. Democrats will feel he can save them and love him for it, no matter how much they may rationally hate his other traits. I make no specific predictions about what happens in the coming election, but it is an enormous mistake to write Newsom off, because he will adapt to any circumstance while portraying every prior iteration of himself as positive and authentic. Nothing critics have said will by itself stop Newsom from becoming President, which is a big concern for America because Gavin Newsom is a horrible and irresponsible leader who stands for nothing but the sheer joy of being recognized as the first among his people.
Who, then, is Gavin Newsom? According to his forthcoming memoir, which we can assume will be an instant classic on “Sigma Male” psychology, he was a “Young Man in a Hurry.”
The basic facts of Gavin Newsom’s earliest years are that he was born in 1967 to William Newsom, a California Superior Court Judge, and Tessa Newsom [née Menzies.] A sixth generation Californian of Irish descent on his father’s side, his father had risen to prominence befriending Gordon Getty of the Getty oil family [also of Getty Images] and later managing his father’s estate. Newsom’s parents divorced when he was very young and he lived in a small apartment with a struggling single mother. According to an extensive New Yorker profile from 2018, his father was something of a “Disneyland Dad,”
“Bill Newsom…occasionally swooped in to take Gavin on vacation with the Getty family: polar-bear watching in Hudson Bay, safaris in Africa. When he returned from these jaunts, his mother would say, “Hope you had fun! ” and storm off to bed. “The guilt,” he told me. “She made me feel horrible.”
One night, Newsom recalled hearing “my mother yelling and screaming at my dad because he wasn’t able to help us financially, because he was very close to bankruptcy.”
It’s hard to know what to believe about this guy or his background- he has relied on his friendship with the Gettys his entire career while running away from the claim that he is privileged- but it seems to be the case that his father got used to a certain lifestyle while privately managing the Getty trust and then he couldn’t maintain it when he got the prestige of the Superior Court position, and helping his ex-wife support the children was never a priority. Regardless, we’re told that Newsom is simultaneously like an extra son to the heir to one of the wealthiest old money families in California while also the product of an impoverished single mother and this seems to be broadly true.
Perhaps, though, the LA Times gives us the clearest picture of the man with this incredible quote from a 2021 profile, “California’s most powerful politician often begins his day around 6 a.m. alone in his office, struggling to read.” Yes, Gavin Newsom is dyslexic. I’m going to allow myself a digression here because, though it is hard to know to what extent this is a narrative his aides came up with so that the slicked back wonderboy with rich friends can claim to be disadvantaged, it seems as if, perhaps more than anything, not being able to read or understand long-form prose is what made Gavin Newsom who he is today. It’s also notable he has been so willing to talk about this, when an unusually high amount of the articles I read for this piece, even from major papers such as LA Times or Business Insider, could not get a response for their stories, making it evident that this is a political machine comfortable ignoring the media but which wants to talk about dyslexia.
“California’s most powerful politician often begins his day around 6 a.m. alone in his office, struggling to read.”
Newsom says, “I can read two chapters and literally be daydreaming, and I’ll have read every word and not remember one damn thing unless I’m underlining it.” What this means is that, with difficulty, he can gather what he needs to pass a test, but can’t actually understand written stories in the normal sense. Instead of reading as you or I might, Newsom undergoes an intensive process of distilling information down to a few bullet points which don’t require a central narrative,
“I have files and files,” Newsom said. “Everything is underlined, circled, and I put it on 8-by-10 white papers, and then there’s like thousands of these stacks ... every topic, subject matter. And then I take from that subject matter and break it down to two or three pages, and then I try to eventually get it on these yellow cards.”
This all seems to be key to his success as a politician, both his acceptance of having to work harder than everyone else due to his learning disability as well as his entire political thought process being centered on memorizing bullet points. I think this helps in his shamelessness because he isn’t necessarily even aware of the narrative a normal person might put together based on the facts he presents, he simply answers objections with other facts he has memorized. Here is just one representative example:
This is in response to Ron DeSantis pointing out that, among other things, California is #1 in homelessness and poverty. This is somewhat normal politician speak, but none of his positive things have anything to do with Gavin Newsom and are primarily simply that California has about 1/3rd more population to the next closest state and is also the major gateway to the Pacific. To Newsom, no narrative continuity is required and while these are major facts and he is on Twitter and thus could have looked them up, the entirety of his political rhetoric is having memorized endless little facts because as per his own description it is impossible for him to memorize or read a prepared speech. I don’t mean to downplay the achievement of overcoming his dyslexia, but the point is it is hard to know how to respond to someone incapable of feeling shame or processing narrative in a normal fashion because it is outside of the experience of almost everyone.
Regardless, this dyslexia, according to Newsom, had a serious impact on him, making him initially a shy and often bullied child, which I do believe, if he was unable to read out loud. In middle school, Newsom decided to be the person everyone wanted him to be, apparently successfully. As per the New Yorker profile,
“In middle school, Newsom, drawing inspiration from “Rocky,” took up boxing and drank raw eggs to toughen himself. Then he began applying hair gel and wearing blazers and business suits, a costume inspired by “Remington Steele,” the TV show that starred Pierce Brosnan as a con man who assumes the identity of a glamorous private detective. “The suit was literally a mask,” he said. “I am still that anxious kid with the bowl-cut hair, the dyslexic kid—the rest is a façade. The only thing that saved me was sports.””
Note that Newsom is comfortable saying he is a fake person based on a TV con artist—he just comes out and tells the public this! At this same time, he started excelling in baseball and basketball, developing his underdog-becomes-overdog persona and his self-image as the powerful defender of the little guy. In many ways this makes him a perfect leader for the modern Marvel-brained American: he can’t understand complex concepts but instead has based his life off of a series of aesthetics and distilled story-line tropes from popular visual media. This all worked fabulously. Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Espirit and North Face clothing lines, and a Democrat megadonor, said the following of Newsom as a young man in a 2018 LA Times story about his support from San Francisco’s most important moneyed families,
“He was the boy about town. Everybody wanted to date him,” she said, recalling that one of her daughters was in a relationship with Newsom in the 1990s. “He was the smartest, the best-looking. He went through a cocky stage, and then an arrogant stage. Now he’s in a total serving stage. He paid his dues, I’ll tell you.”
That last part is obvious nonsense, but is also crucial to understanding the mindset of his long-time supporters, and I suppose it is easy enough to believe that a 17 year old Newsom was a much more extreme version of what he is now.
Much has been made of Newsom’s baseball background, and by all accounts he likes the game and was a good player in highschool. However, the enormous fabrications about this part of his life seem representative and are worth going into. It has been widely reported across major publications that he played baseball at Santa Clara University and was “recruited” by the Texas Rangers. A 2024 investigation from CalMatters found that Newsom practiced with the team but never played in a varsity game, and that since he became famous it’s actually been a joke among the teammates of those years that he was on their team. It seems that he was unable to balance college sports with schoolwork, which makes sense for a guy who describes himself as needing to spend “like six hours to give a five- or six-minute presentation.” Further, regarding the Rangers, he is one of hundreds of players they have on file from that year but did watch him play at least one time, according to their recruiter, presumably to see multiple players on the team, as Major League Baseball teams thoroughly scout California. Still, it’s true that one or more MLB recruiters spoke to him and gave him a business card as a highschool student. What is the most interesting about this, is that while Newsom’s press team accurately clarified the situation with the San Francisco Chronicle, regarding his record at Santa Clara University, a spokesman said of Newsom, “it was not his job to fix whatever mistaken assumptions the public may have developed.” It is not, perhaps, his job to correct every rumor that makes him sound cool, but when the New York Times prints incorrect biographical information about the mayor of a major city [which is what he was at the time] it is in fact the job of his media people to correct it.
It has also been widely reported that Newsom went to school on a baseball scholarship, with Newsom himself telling Pod Save America in January of 2024 that he had started at community colleges due to poor grades and a 960 SAT score2, which, by the way, implies he also isn’t good at math. Then, he got a call from coaches at Santa Clara University, “It was literally the ticket to a four-year university. It changed my life, my trajectory.” According to the same CalMatters investigation, though there is evidence that Newsom received one $500 scholarship to play on the JV team his first quarter of college, how this came about was that Bill Connoly, a long time San Francisco investment banker, associate of Bill Newsom, and Santa Clara baseball alumni and donor to the program, put the younger Newsom “on their radar.” However, the former assistant coach interviewed says “the baseball program was not a backdoor into the university.”
For that, it seems his family relied on letters of recommendation they solicited from former California Governor Jerry Brown as well as from an attorney named John Mallen who was on the University’s Board of Regents at the time, and who later described Bill Newsom as his “best friend of 75 years” and said this may have been the only such letter he ever wrote in that position, “In fact, I may not have helped anybody else get in…I mean, I’d known him since birth…He was a good athlete. That I remember…I think it was a big help.” It is with these apparent facts that Newsom made such a big deal of his background as a scrappy baseball player that he “wrote” a baseball-theme children’s book about overcoming dyslexia.
One way or another, he managed to graduate in 1989 with a degree in Political Science, and then went into business, starting the PlumpJack Wine & Spirits shop with the funding of Billy Getty. He then expanded to the Balboa Café which became the haunt of all the scions of the local oligarchs, who would later be Newsom’s earliest political donors. It should be added here that much has been said about Newsom being “bought off” by this group of oligarchs, but it needs to be understood that he doesn’t believe in anything in the first place and is actually part of their social circle, so there is no reason he would want to do anything they don’t want; it is less a matter of being “bought off” and more a matter of them supporting someone who was already on their team. It also seems to be the case that Newsom kept getting money from the Gettys to expand his businesses because they were successful under his leadership, as opposed to the Gettys just pouring money into some tangential dependent. It is not at all hard to see how this particular guy with his taste for fine living and self-described “facade” based on a con artist played by Pierce Brosnan would be successful in luxury hospitality businesses. There have been several newspaper investigations into Newsom’s business empire- 18 businesses and 1.5 million annual income for Newsom as of 2018- and I don’t find them that interesting, though I am amused and impressed that Newsom and his wife made perhaps around $500,000 per year trading silver bars during his time as Lieutenant Governor [assuming this wasn’t just a scheme to launder bribes, a big assumption, this would be about the most honest way a major politician could make money while in office.]
As a businessman, Newsom became a big supporter of Willy Brown’s campaign for Mayor- this of course being the same Willy Brown currently most nationally famous for having been some sort of lover of Kamala Harris back in the day when she was fairly hot. This got him put on some boring traffic committee which our “Young Man in a Hurry” managed to leverage into getting onto the Board of Supervisors and then into running for, and winning, the Mayoralty at age 36, the youngest Mayor of San Francisco in a century. After becoming Mayor, Newsom, following such a law passing in Massachusetts, ordered the city to begin marrying gay couples, against both state and federal law. I remember this, and it was years after he became Governor of California that I discovered it was the same person; even as a lib teenager who hated traditional values, at the time I thought he was a maniac for doing this unilaterally. It is unclear why Newsom took such a step, though I imagine he felt he would get enormous praise from San Franciscans [which he did] and be seen as a bold leader by his party nationally [which he was not.] The party bigwigs were uniformly furious, with Nancy Pelosi saying the issue was “moving too fast,” while Dianne Feinstein blamed him for John Kerry’s 2004 loss after Republicans seized on the issue; it’s said that Kerry still blames him. After California passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in 2008, Newsom seemed defeated on this issue. But when the US Supreme Court overturned Proposition 8 and restored California’s prior short-lived gay marriage law in 2013, finally settling all the lawsuits started after Newsom issued licenses in 2004, it seemed he was a man ahead of his time.
This is an enormous political asset for Newsom now, having been ahead of all of the old class of politicians on the defining cultural issue of our era for the Democrats, who instantly adopted gay marriage as a key dogma after the Obergefell regardless of any prior views they held on the matter and demanded everyone else did the same. Newsom told the New Yorker that while he remains proud of the act of civil disobedience,
“So many of my political heroes read me the riot act. And, look, for a lot of years there was a lot of evidence that they were right…I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do it again. Because back then I didn’t know what I didn’t know—I had a beginner’s mind.”
As usual, he gets to be on every side of every issue, having taken the “right” stance at the time, but also saying he thinks he would be more “responsible” now.
During the time that Newsom was a reviled figure amongst his party as Mayor of San Francisco he went through a wayward period of drinking and slacking off that sounds really fun though speaks poorly of his character. Among other things, in 2005, while going through a divorce, Newsom began sleeping with his appointments chief, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his Chief of Staff. He acknowledged the affair two years later, and said he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse. Rippey-Tourk herself went on sick leave for alcohol abuse and managed to get paid $10,000 by the city, against procedure, under a catastrophic illness program. During this time he also brought a 19 year old girlfriend to a public event, where she was photographed drinking wine. This quote from the New Yorker is particularly informative,
“But, even as he cast his tribulations as a part of the hero’s arc, he avoided detailing why they had happened. When I pushed, he obscured himself in a cloud of bullet points: “Personal journey, renewal, turning the page.””
Once again, he understands the “bullet point” aspects of narrative but is not capable of explaining them. It’s fascinating, really.
Anyway, he went to a counselor for alcohol abuse, providing another incredible passage from the same article,
“The first thing Silbert did was to tell him to stop drinking. (Two years later, having decided he wasn’t an alcoholic, she gave him permission to drink socially.) “I have two speeds, on and off,” Newsom told me he’d explained. “I said to Mimi, ‘When I have a drink, that’s my moment when I turn off. It’s my time.’ And she said, ‘You’re still the fucking mayor!’ I had never thought of that.”
Silbert told me, “I would be trying to get at the feelings, but emotions were not Gavin’s strong suit. He gets excited by ideas, by having achieved thirty-seven per cent of his goals. And in that period there was no policy pathway out. He was just sad and lonely and he drank too much.””
At the time, it was widely reported that Newsom had gone to rehab, something he left “uncorrected” for ten years, though he later acknowledged this counseling did not constitute an alcohol rehabilitation program. Here, again, Newsom gets all worlds: he has struggled with and overcame alcohol abuse but also can still drink and was never an alcoholic.
Newsom remarried in 2008 and had the first of four children in 2009. As his time as San Francisco Mayor was drawing to a close- he had been re-elected with 71% during his wild years- Newsom briefly ran for Governor of California, but saw the campaign was going nowhere and dropped out to run for Lieutenant Governor, which he won, serving under Jerry Brown who was making a return after almost 30 years away from the Governor’s Mansion.3 He then, of course, ran to replace Brown and became the Governor of California in 2019.
I think, at this point, anyone sufficiently interested in American politics to have read this far knows enough about Gavin Newsom that I don’t need to extensively describe his tenure as Governor. We all know it has been a disaster. The brutal covid lockdowns and his own dinner at the French Laundry, California losing population for the first time while Texas and Florida made enormous gains, the 2021 failed recall, crime and shit in the streets, budget surplus turned into insane budget deficit, and the ridiculously incompetent response to devastating wildfires. All of these are things which have made people write Newsom off for dead, but, as is the theme here, his inability to feel shame or process narratives have made him immune to devastating coverage from national media and widespread fury from his constituents.
This brings us to Newsom’s current moves as he prepares to run for President in 2028, though he wants us to believe there won’t be an election in 2028 [more accurately, he doesn’t care if we believe him when he says that]:
This is from just a few days ago, by the way.
Anyway, we will start here with Gavin Newsom’s burgeoning podcast career, something increasingly popular among politicians as we rapidly move towards the goal of America having one podcast per capita [by having a podcast between us, Alexis and I are only half pulling our weight.] It should be added that this is not Newsom’s first foray into an interview program: he had a radio show as San Francisco Mayor and hosted a TV show while he had the do-nothing job of Lieutenant Governor, which included an episode where he interviewed Elon Musk in 2012. The New York Times published an article about this in April of this year titled “Newsom Tries to Understand ‘Bro Culture.’ Will It Change Him in the Process?” There are several amusing things about this, but I suppose most of all the implication that there is a risk of this guy being “turned into” a bro:
Anyway, they start with the Charlie Kirk conversation where he tells Kirk that his 13 year old son is a huge fan. Kirk takes this positively of course and says he would love to meet this kid. I would say, first off, it comes off well in a society where the left is widely seen as stifling all intellectual diversity that Gavin Newsom thinks its fine that his son likes Charlie Kirk and is hearing different views; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a New York Times advice column about what to do if your kid likes right-wing media.4 Newsom probably grew up watching Family Ties and finds having his own Alex Keaton amusing. Further, they say that Newsom has always been fascinated by right-wing media, and used to watch Tucker Carlson regularly back when he was on Fox, according to Newsom, “to see how far he’s going on the racism spectrum.” The NYT, while discussing this interaction, characteristically skips over the most informative part of the conversation: it mentions that the son had wanted to meet Kirk but his father wouldn’t let him because he had school, but it doesn’t say that Kirk’s response was, “You kept the schools closed for two years!” to which Newsom didn’t have a meaningful response but also didn’t seem to view it as a “gotcha” or even necessarily see how the things were related.
Another interview with Tim Walz demonstrates just how terrible the Democrats have been, and included this exchange as described by the Times,
Mr. Walz was reluctant: “I can’t message to misogynists…How do we push some of those guys back under a rock?” Mr. Walz said, calling them “bad guys.”
Mr. Newsom said that referring to men as “misogynists,” as Mr. Walz did, was a political misstep.
“There’s a crisis of men and masculinity in this country,” Mr. Newsom said. “And that’s a hard thing for Democrats because we want to lift up women. We want to lift up the oppressed.”
You can see here, again, how Newsom had three bullet points put together and was able to make a response because of it, but also since he portrays his podcast as a “selfish endeavor” to “understand the country” he doesn’t need to have any in-depth understanding and he is probably at best cribbing other people’s “bullet points” for later- his prior shows were also described as being “deferential” to guests. The thing, though, that is so wrong about the approach of the inept and dreadful Tim Walz is that he seems to think his only option to appeal to “misogynists” is yelling “those bitches need to get back into the kitchen!” instead of saying something like, “we spent a lot of time working towards gender equality, which was important, but amidst all the programs for girls, boys got left behind, etc.”
As a bit of an aside, the Times informs us that Newsom, perhaps sincerely, has gotten somewhat into Rome, having recently been gifted a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and saying, “the teachings hit me like a lightning bolt…Where the hell has this book been all my life?” This is itself interesting as Meditations is a very famous but fairly simple and short book that even a man with severe dyslexia can read multiple times and gain a lot from, so perhaps Marcus Aurelius is also one path towards helping boys that doesn’t require “messaging to misogynists.” Newsom also says he has become a fan of the morning ice plunge, another Rome-related trend.
There has been an amount of kvetching about Newsom’s moves to understand “bros” making him popular among some far right anons. There is some truth to this, but there is no reason it is Newsom’s problem if this bothers people or that it presents an actual political liability. The most prominent example was his quote retweet of this objectively great picture of him as a young man:
This YungPut1n is unsurprisingly some sort of no-no account, but it is in fact, exactly what people hate about the identity libs that you’re supposed to launch a full-scale investigation before you interact with any random account on Twitter despite that the disclaimer “Quotes/RTs ≠ endorsements” is so widespread among anyone with a job to lose that it is implied.
There has also been some amount of focus on Newsom’s beautiful white family, particularly in contrast to JD Vance being married to a woman of Indian descent. I thought this was interesting enough commentary to work as the representative example:
It is somewhat unique to Democrats to imagine it is a great problem to Newsom if he should happen to appeal to unsavory people, who don’t generally vote for their party, because they like his private life. To the extent he needs to respond to this at all, he can easily enough say, “They like me because they think I’m a cool guy, which I am, and they like me because they think my family is beautiful, which it is- none of my political program will be targeted at this niche group of internet users who for all I know or care are not serious anyway.” Further, all three significant Democrats who have been elected on their own campaigning skills in the post-War era [as opposed to because they were originally VP for a man who died] were guys who men thought were cool and women thought were handsome and charming, and there no other known formula for a Democrat winning the Presidency in a “normal” year. Also, they’ve been trying to recapture “Camelot” for over 60 years now, and I can assure you this is as close as they are coming.
I don’t think that willingness to go into “bro culture” or having a podcast is what will set Gavin Newsom apart, but I think in general not being a horrible scold who has an ideological litmus test for ever being seen speaking to anyone keeps him away from one of the things the public really hates about Democrats.
If you’ve read this far, please consider a paid subscription! A man’s gotta eat, and we can’t all have the Getty family backing our ventures.
Onto the next thing, this internet trolling of Trump. It does kind of make a point about the fact that Trump’s comportment is not considered appropriate from anyone else, but it is pretty shallow besides that and you can’t imitate Trump effectively. This shtick would absolutely wear itself out by the election but by 2028 it will be long done and he will tell anyone who asks about it that it is old news and Democrats are trying to look towards the future. If you really want more discourse on this already over-discussed subject, here are some Democrats who think it is great and a Republican who thinks it is terrible. As far as Newsom being in on the “merch game” and copying Trump’s styles, this probably serves to keep people engaged for now, but again, for 2028 he will have the sense to not be running against Trump or his behavior and won’t be copying his merchandise. All three Republican presumptive front runners [Vance, Rubio, DeSantis] behave relatively more serious than Trump, though, in the end, are still American politicians.
Of Newsom’s current moves, the part that is the most impactful and long-lasting is this redistricting fight. This is the one that could potentially sink him if it goes tits up. California struggled for decades to agree on a districting system and ended up with one that is ostensibly non-partisan while ensuring required “minority representation.”5 The root of this story is that the Democrats are throwing a fit because Texas will be redistricting. Newsom promised retaliatory redistricting if Texas moved forward and Texas is moving forward. It needs to be noted here that while I assume the Texas Republicans are acting for partisan gain, and while mid-decade redistricting is unusual [it is generally done after a census, every 10 years], Texas has grown a lot in the last five years, due to egregious covid lockdowns in other states, 2020’s “Mostly Peaceful Riots,” and pre-existing trends. According to Wikipedia [if you’ll forgive me using the easiest source,] Texas gained just over 2 million people from April 2020-July 2024 , or a 7.36% increase to the state’s population. This is a little bit over the average 10 year population change for states according to the same table, and thus does represent an amount of population change that could reasonably be said to justify redistricting simply for fairness to the voting public.
Meanwhile, under Newsom, California lost a little over 100,000 people in that period, the first population loss in the state’s history, or a 0.27% decrease. Newsom wants to portray Texas’s move as some horrible attack on Democracy™ that only the dastardly Republicans would initiate, while he is just fighting fire with fire. Meanwhile, this is what the Illinois map looks like, which is not even the worst it has ever been:
Newsom’s scheme to fight this and hopefully give Democrats a chance at legislative control in 2026 is to pass an initiative, Prop. 50, this November which suspends the commission and puts in districts that will give Democrats 5 more seats. If this passes he may be a hero to national Democrats, but its passage is far from sure, and there will be endless lawsuits. The bigger problem is that in a national redistricting fight Democrats are at an enormous disadvantage. For a state to be able to do that and gain from it, the legislature has to be allowed to draw the map [as opposed to a non-political commission], the same party has to control both chambers and the Governor’s Mansion [or have a veto-proof majority or be in a state that doesn’t require the governor’s signature], as well as being in a state with seats to take. The New York Times provides this map of states where those conditions are met:
Of the Democrat states, Illinois and Maryland are already so heavily gerrymandered you would be squeezing blood from a stone, while Oregon’s one competitive district is already Democrat and its Republican district is over 2/3rds of the state’s landmass and thus very hard to carve up, and further doing so would have an enormous internal political costs for little gain. Overall, these states have 5 Republican districts between them. I am not going to take the time to add up the Democrat seats of the Republican states besides Texas that meet the necessary conditions but suffice to say it’s a lot more than 5.
The nightmare scenario for Newsom is that he generates a backlash and the initiative doesn’t pass. The backlash is already here, with Missouri’s Governor calling a special redistricting session. The upside, for Newsom, is that since Trump has been encouraging this, and more states than just Texas are doing it, the odds of Californians supporting him are pretty high. A lot of Democrats like to believe they follow Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” dictum to their own detriment- even though they never did that and their nasty tricks are endless- so will find appeal in Newsom meeting “Republicans at their level.” Even in a worst case scenario failure, I don’t think Newsom is done for 2028 because he can simply say they had to try because the alternative was accepting failure and letting their higher moral standards give Republicans all the power. Further, due to the flight from the years-long covid lockdowns and more, the 2030 re-apportionment is pretty bleak for Democrats, so he could say they had to act now or never. If all else fails, Newsom can bring up the gay marriage thing in 2004 and say one way or another history will prove him right again. It doesn’t matter or even have to make sense, he will just steam on ahead not worried about it.
Newsom’s real strength, however, is going to come from his skill at and love for campaigning. There is nothing better to Newsom than going from person to person selling them on himself. Basically his whole life has been spent trying to convince people he is two things he is not: intelligent and competent. It could be said this is his true passion, at least as near as I can tell. According to the New Yorker profile, Newsom’s favorite way to campaign is town halls, an unpopular and grueling campaign technique which politicians commonly avoid and then are constantly criticized for avoiding. Many feel they are not that productive, bring out crackpots with an ax to grind, and then create opportunities for bad interactions. Newsom, with his boxes of notecards, loves them. The New Yorker describes one instance in Fresno where it took him 40 minutes to win over the crowd until an 8 year old girl asked him about gun violence and his answer got loud applause. He can do this all day.
Newsom can give a respectable speech based on his bullet points, but it still isn’t his strong suit. There’s a curious thing that people don’t think much about: what does the mega-rally and the stump speech do in the modern era? There was a time when the best way for the public to see you was to gather them under a big tent. Later, maybe the radio would broadcast your speech to that city. Now, in the era of Youtube, why are politicians still going around giving basically the same speech day after day that anyone could choose to watch online? People might bring some friends or family, but it largely serves to rile up volunteers or encourage people to remember to vote, which is important, but the amount of new voters this wins over must be marginal. We don’t think about this much because the last three great campaigners in American life- Obama, Sanders, and Trump- thrived in the “large rally and stump speech” format and it got 2 out of 3 of them across the finish line, while the other massively outperformed any reasonable expectations.
Newsom, however, does not look to any of those three men for inspiration, even if he has been playacting as Trump. Instead, Newsom has been watching Bill Clinton videos for decades, so extensively that aides say this sixth generation Californian sometimes develops an Arkansas twang when he over-studies. One official who knows both men said the difference is this: “Bill Clinton peers deeply into your soul. Gavin peers deeply into the mirror at himself.” That notwithstanding, technology is waiting for the Clintonian master of the town hall. Instead of the same rallies, it puts Newsom up there day after day talking to people with different problems, put in a line at the microphone, or a group sitting in chairs, or a conversation with a host as the public asks questions. It is constant new content that cannot be replicated by watching a video of a rally. If something goes wrong one day, he can fix it the next day’s cycle. If people come to yell at him, that is just the game, and he seems impervious to negative feedback and shows a willingness to talk to detractors and thus “be a President for all Americans.” If he forgets an answer, he can go back to his boxes of notecards he travels with and find the right one and tweet out his correction, saying, “hey man, we all make mistakes, it’s hard answering 100 unscripted questions a day.” People will surely point out contradictions but they will be lost among the multitude of interactions. This is the campaign format made for modern technology. Most importantly, whereas a stump speech will leave positively inclined people thinking, “He understands what I’m going through,” this format accomplishes something even better, “if I spoke to him, he would understand what I am going through.” He neither knows nor cares what you are going through, but is great at creating the impression that he does.
I considered concluding here by restating my initial list of objections in the bullet point format which Governor Newsom prefers and going over why they aren’t a problem for him, but this article is long enough, and I don’t think any merit further explanation. The point is this: Gavin Newsom cannot be caught with the self-doubt of a normal man or the real problems with his record because he doesn’t care and has a list of semi-relevant facts that will move the conversation forward. He will not come in as the cursed early front-runner because he has a perpetual underdog complex due to his struggles with literacy and believes his way in life is working harder than everyone else. His campaign style is that when something doesn’t work he just talks to the next person and the next person until something does work. All of this combined with his undeniable vibes and aura- serial killer vibes and aura, but vibes and aura nonetheless- make him an extraordinarily powerful politician. His authentic shamelessness is perhaps his greatest attribute, because it does not even occur to him that he is humiliating himself by changing positions or being exactly who the audience wants him to be.
There is a scene from The Wire which is informative in this situation. A Youtube user has titled it, “The Parable of the Bowls of Shit.”
If you don’t remember or aren’t inclined to watch this, the newly elected Mayor of Baltimore, Carcetti, is sitting down to speak to a former Mayor, and asks him why he didn’t run again. He then explains that as soon as he was Mayor the unions sent him a bowl of shit to eat, followed by the blacks, followed by the Polacks, and that being mayor is just a eating a succession of bowls of shit.
This parable is accurate. Some people rapidly burn out on executive political positions because of this. Others tolerate it because of the power and ill-gotten gains it brings. Still others, a minority, are so ideological that they do it for their perception of the common good, while still others refuse to eat shit and see how long they last.
Gavin Newsom is none of the above kinds of politicians. Gavin Newsom likes eating the bowl of shit. He believes in nothing, but his favorite thing to do is ingratiate himself with different groups of people by being who they want him to be. He eats the shit enthusiastically and sells it so hard they don’t even feel like they’ve made him perform a humiliation ritual but that he has simply honored them.
Gavin Newsom is not a smart man, nor a wise man, nor a competent man, and he is certainly not a moral nor a compassionate man. He is a demonstrably terrible political leader. He is basically just an ambitious sociopath with a learning disability who managed to become immensely powerful due to his coping mechanisms combining with a variety of circumstances beyond his control.
I make no predictions about what will happen in 2028, but can tell you that he is an extremely potent political force that anyone who wishes to counter underestimates or fails to understand at his own, and America’s, peril.
And yet, for all of that, I somehow like the guy more than I did when I started my research for this article- and enough American voters could learn to love him to put him in the White House.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
Alcibiades is one of the most famous and well-documented figures from antiquity and has been used as a literal textbook example of a historical figure with traits of psychopathy. If you don’t know who he was you can easily find a brief description by any method you prefer.
Given this SAT score, one wonders if Buell calling him the “smartest” meant “smartest dressed” or instead paints an extremely bleak picture of the intelligence of the children of the Bay Area oligarchs.
Amusingly, Brown was Mayor of Oakland during about half of Newsom’s tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, their fates were long intertwined.
Facebook is always showing me NYT advice columns and it’s stunning the extent to which the writers are generally completely oblivious over-privileged people who would easily figure out their “problem” if they had a single reasonable person to talk to and didn’t live in a stiflingly judgment environment.
It is obviously absolute bullshit that there is a requirement to district states to create majority-minority districts as opposed to making them neutral in that regard. Fucking “Civil Rights Era” laws, but this is neither the time nor the place.
My favorite incident of Newsom’s turning bowls of shit into fresh cream was the re-opening of the biggest LA freeway, burned and melted in a dramatic fire after neglecting years of warnings about the heaps of flammable junk swept under the overpass. All the striving Dems, Newsom, Karen Bass, Padilla and Kamala celebrated their competence and smooth executive ability after propping it back up a few days ahead of schedule with never a peep about the cause.
[by having a podcast between us, Alexis and I are only half pulling our weight.]
Slackers!! 😄
Great article, and the comparison to Alcibiades is great, if only because I would actually have loved to meet him in person, and might have considered voting for him if I was sufficiently pissed about something or other.