The summer of 2024 was one of those whirlwinds of breaking news and total chaos where everything blends together. Over time, dates from that period get mixed up and transposed, just because so many things were happening all at once. So it can be useful to take a step back and think about the timeline a little bit.
For example, you might not remember that, when Joe Biden officially announced he wasn’t running for president last year, it took just a couple of hours for the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, to make his own announcement. Newsom declared, in no uncertain terms, that he wouldn’t make a bid for the presidency. Instead, he threw his full endorsement behind Kamala Harris, one of the least appealing and most uncharismatic candidates that Democrats have ever nominated for high office.
If you understand Gavin Newsom as the extremely calculating politician that he is, this kind of quick, knee-jerk decision-making raises a few questions. After all, it was an extraordinary move by Newsom, for a couple of reasons. First of all, most of the most important figures in the Democrat Party, like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, didn’t endorse Kamala Harris on the same day that Joe Biden was forced out. It took Obama nearly a week to come around to the idea. And secondly, of course, Gavin Newsom was correctly seen as a far more talented politician than Kamala Harris. He was almost certain to outperform her in every swing state. So why would he take himself out of the running so quickly?
If there was any doubt about Newsom’s intentions, we don’t have to wonder anymore. Gavin Newsom will run for president in 2028. He determined a long time ago that it’s better to run on his own, rather than try to defend a record as unpopular and destructive as Joe Biden’s. And Newsom will challenge the Republican candidate — most likely JD Vance — using a platform of faux moderation, rather than any kind of principle. Newsom’s plan is to stake out an untenable, inauthentic middle ground, on the theory that voters will come to see the Trump administration as too inflexible on social issues.
We don’t have to guess about this. In case you haven’t heard, Gavin Newsom has just launched his own podcast. It’s a show that makes the game plan pretty clear. One of Newsom’s first guests was Charlie Kirk, who proceeded to press Newsom on some of his party’s most unpopular positions.
Here’s one of the most important moments from the show, for example. Watch how Newsom responds when Kirk brings up the fundamental insanity of forcing women to compete against men in sporting competitions:
Will Governor Gavin Newsom EVER say “No Men in Women’s Sports?”
I asked him. pic.twitter.com/xVlJSag0Bq
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 6, 2025
It’s a pretty incredible surrender, even if Newsom doesn’t admit that he’s surrendering. He suggests that it’s profoundly unfair for a man to compete in women’s sports, as any sane person must. But then he still tries to find some kind of middle ground with the bit about how we have to have “grace” for self-identified trans people because “they’re more likely to commit suicide.”
This is classic Newsom doublespeak. He’s not actually committing to any particular position.
He’s not saying anything that suggests he’ll comply with any of Trump’s orders on gender ideology. Nor is Newsom saying anything relevant to men like James Younger, who just lost custody of his child because Newsom declared California a “sanctuary state” for child sex-changes. Instead, Newsom is using language that he thinks will resonate with conservatives — invoking the idea of “grace,” for example — without committing to any actual position.
But it falls flat because it’s a non sequitur. The concept of grace has nothing to do with affirming delusions. And that’s the central question here: Either we’re giving into the false claims of self-identified trans people, or we’re siding with reality and sanity. “Having grace,” to Democrats, has always meant giving into the falsehood. It means forcing women and girls to endure humiliation — and even brain damage, in some cases — for the benefit of narcissistic men.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
In this interview, rather than committing to an answer, Newsom is using a common rhetorical tactic among Democrats. It’s a tactic that Obama — who’s clearly Newsom’s mentor — perfected long ago. Newsom is essentially saying, incorrectly, that conservatives are offering a false choice. He’s saying we don’t really need to choose between affirming reality or affirming falsehood. He’s suggesting that somehow we can do both, without explaining how.
It’s reminiscent of a line from Obama’s inaugural address all the way back in 2009, when Obama said, “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Obama wanted to pretend that defending this country from terrorists didn’t involve making uncomfortable decisions about, say, the rights of Al Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. But during his term, Obama went on to make those decisions. And he did it because, in the real world, you actually have to make choices. On the other hand, in speeches (and in podcasts), you can pretend that there are no hard choices. Although, of course, in the case of the trans issue, this is not a hard choice. Men shouldn’t compete against women or be affirmed as women, period, no matter what. It’s not difficult.
To be clear about this, Newsom is not merely a slick talker. He’s not just someone who will use rhetorical tricks to avoid committing to anything. He will also lie — unapologetically and pathologically.
Later on in this podcast, Charlie brings up Newsom’s record as governor of California. Specifically, Charlie mentions Newsom’s decision to sign a law that enables school teachers to hide students’ so-called “gender identity” from their parents. Watch how Newsom — who now claims he’s concerned about the “unfairness” of men playing in women’s sports — explains the law:
So, Newsom is claiming that the law merely protects the rights of teachers to keep information to themselves. If a teacher notices that a student is using they/them pronouns, or identifying as a non-binary furry, then the law allows the teacher to remain silent, and hide that information from parents. That’s what Newsom’s saying. Of course, even if that were true, it would still be an outrageous piece of legislation. Under no circumstances should teachers be allowed to hide any relevant information from parents — including the fact that their child is demonstrating the symptoms of a serious mental health condition like gender dysphoria.
But just as a factual matter, the law Newsom signed actually goes a lot further than that. You can pull up materials directly from the California legislature and the California attorney general, which explain the law in detail. This is also what the state of California, under Gavin Newsom, is arguing in court. From the California legislature: “Students have a constitutional right to privacy when it comes to sensitive information about them. … Under existing law, school staff are prohibited from outing students unless they have the student’s consent or are required to in a limited set of circumstances under state or federal law. … The SAFETY Act is necessary now because there has been a significant increase in policies and actions targeting LGBTQ+ students and the school personnel who support them. Some of these policies would require school staff to ‘out’ students to their parents/guardians, in violation of existing law.”
In other words, they’re passing this law because they believe that children have an affirmative, constitutional right to keep information hidden from their parents. If Gavin Newsom didn’t believe this, he wouldn’t have signed the law, and he’d instruct his attorney general to stop saying this in court. Instead, he’s trying to have it both ways. He’s telling Charlie that teachers don’t have to hide anything from parents — and at the same time, the state of California says children have a constitutional right to hide their alleged “gender identity” from their parents. And that constitutional right, of course, can be enforced against teachers.
I’ll play some more clips from this interview in a second, but first I need to show you how the Democrats’ leader in the House responded to Newsom’s answer here. This is yet another illustration that Newsom is clearly going to be the party’s nominee in four years. Newsom is the only prominent member of the party who’s capable of articulating a coherent sentence, even if the sentences are pathological lies. Here’s Hakeem Jeffries, for comparison:
It’s not even worth dissecting what the dollar-store Obama was saying there. It just makes no sense. Say what you will about Newsom, but he doesn’t have this problem. When Newsom is confronted with a question he doesn’t want to answer, he has an uncanny ability to worm his way out of it.
Consider this exchange from the podcast, for example. Charlie asks Newsom why he was able to clean up San Francisco for the arrival of China’s president a couple of years ago, but not for American citizens. Here’s Newsom’s response, followed by his comments back in 2023 in response to a similar question:
I challenged Gavin Newsom to explain why California Dems cleaned up San Francisco for Xi Jinping.
Gavin Newsom says I’m weaponizing the issue. I say regular Americans deserve clean streets, not just when Chinese dictators show up.
Crime, chaos, and homelessness is a choice. San… pic.twitter.com/kdmXoFnfJ5
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 6, 2025
And here’s the flashback to Newsom’s statement at the time:
NEW – Newsom on Xi’s visit: “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s true because it’s true.”pic.twitter.com/qxp8UXZUuW
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 13, 2023
When he’s talking to Charlie Kirk in 2025, Newsom says he’s not the mayor of San Francisco. He’s just the governor of the state. So how can you hold him responsible for the level of filth in the city? But, just two years earlier, Newsom came out and admitted that yes, he made sure San Francisco was clean for the Chinese president.
This is utter shamelessness. And it’s why Newsom is the most effective candidate that Democrats can run in four years. He has no reservations, whatsoever, about lying at every available opportunity. It’s difficult to pin him down on anything, because he snakes his way out of it. And at the same time, Newsom understands that, if Democrats are going to win another election, they need to rethink the way they communicate with voters — particularly young voters. He is the only mainstream Democrat who’s come up with a new media strategy. Watch:
Charlie Kirk FORCES Newsom to Admit Democrats are LOSING the Media War, and have a fear of Unscripted, Long-Form Podcasts:
NEWSOM: “We’re losing. You dominate the media. We are toast.”
KIRK: “They can’t survive without scripts. Haven’t built intellectual muscle in 30 years.” pic.twitter.com/5PsJPL4DgU
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 6, 2025
Republicans are flooding the zone with content, policy, and messaging — every. single. day.
We can’t just sit back or “play dead”. Time to flip the script. pic.twitter.com/JFQ2MQcwRV
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 6, 2025
This is the opposite of the Kamala Harris approach, which was to hide from Joe Rogan and do a handful of hits on NBC. And from a strategic perspective, it’s a much better approach than whatever every other Democrat is doing. It’s a lot smarter than holding up a paddle in Congress, or interrupting the president, or vomiting out random words like Hakeem Jeffries.
And Newsom, uniquely, is good at it. The lawyer Laura Powell just unearthed this interview from a few years ago. It shows Newsom explaining his leadership philosophy. And about mid-way through, he references an essay from George Orwell called “Shooting an Elephant.” Watch:
As Newsom understands the metaphor, you put a mask on — a fake persona — and then you warp your actual persona to match it. This is the Gavin Newsom origin story, in a sense. It’s a window into how he sees his political career. It’s not about authenticity. It’s not about good governance — about making sure that Los Angeles doesn’t burn to the ground, or that women aren’t assaulted during sporting competitions, or any of that. Instead, it’s about adopting a fake persona, and then making it work.
That’s a strategy that has clearly served Newsom well, up until this point in his career. But it won’t work anymore. In the context of gender ideology in particular, the approach falls apart completely. That’s because the trans issue is all or nothing. Either trans ideology is true and a person’s gender is fluid and determined by their self-perception, or it’s not true and a person’s gender is a biological reality that cannot be changed. If the former is the case, then there’s nothing unfair about having “trans women” in women’s sports. If the latter is the case, then “trans women” are not women and should not be treated as women or recognized as women in any context at all, ever.
But as this interview with Charlie Kirk makes clear, Newsom is trying to have his cake and eat it too. This is the untenable “middle ground” Democrats will try to stake out over the next few years on this issue, just like they’re going to shoot for a fake “middle ground” on so many other issues. Newsom is going to be leading this effort for the Democrat Party. The good news is that it won’t last. It can’t last. No ideology that depends on fraud and meaningless platitudes can ever serve as a substitute for the truth. People can see through lies far more easily than Gavin Newsom seems to think. He may not realize that now. But relatively soon — say, in about four years — it’ll be extremely obvious, even to him.
