The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think

Yves here. To balance our entirely warranted “hating on Kristi Noem” piece yesterday, a harsh look at a Gavin Newsom seemed in order. Oddly, Norman Solomon does not mention that Newsom is a creature of the Gettys with not just personal but family ties. That alone does much to explain why his progressive stance is mere posturing. From Stanford Magazine in 2019:

Bill Newsom once told an interviewer that as a young man he wanted to be a high school English teacher. Instead, he would rise to prominence as a champion of the environment, an appeals court judge for California’s First District—and the person charged with delivering the ransom money when billionaire J. Paul Getty’s grandson was kidnapped.

On December 12, 2018, William Alfred Newsom III, JD ’60, MA ’61, a native San Franciscan and the father of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, died at his Pacific Heights home. He was 84.

Newsom’s life was forever changed by the friendships he formed with three fellow students at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco: Jerry Brown and Gordon and Paul Getty Jr., sons of J. Paul Getty. As California’s governor, Brown appointed Newsom to the bench twice, first to the Placer County Superior Court in 1975 and then to the Court of Appeal in 1978. Newsom also served as a trustee for the Getty family, a position he devoted himself to after retiring from the judiciary in 1995, and he was godfather to Paul Getty III, whose kidnapping was dramatized in All the Money in the World, the 2017 film directed by Ridley Scott.

And from the Los Angeles Times in 2018, in How eight elite San Francisco families funded Gavin Newsom’s political ascent:

Gavin Newsom wasn’t born rich, but he was born connected — and those alliances have paid handsome dividends throughout his career.A coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families has backed him at every step of his political rise, which in November could lead next to his election as governor of California.

San Francisco society’s “first families” — whose names grace museum galleries, charity ball invitations and hospital wards — settled on Newsom, 50, as their favored candidate two decades ago, said Willie Brown, former state Assembly speaker and former mayor of the city.

“He came from their world, and that’s why they embraced him without hesitancy and over and above everybody else,” said Brown, who is a mentor to Newsom. “They didn’t need to interview him. They knew what he stood for.”

A Times review of campaign finance records identified eight of San Francisco’s best-known families as being among Newsom’s most loyal and long-term contributors. Among those patrons are the Gettys, the Pritzkers and the Fishers, whose families made their respective fortunes in oil, hotels and fashion. They first backed him when he was a restaurateur and winery owner running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1998, and have continued their support through the governor’s race.

They are not Newsom’s largest donors: The families in total have given about $2 million of the $61 million that donors have contributed to his campaigns and independent committees backing those bids. But they gave while he was a relative unknown, providing crucial support to a political newcomer in the years before his camp

aign accounts piled high with cash from labor unions, Hollywood honchos, tech billionaires and donors up and down the state.

By Norman Solomon,the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Originally published at Common Dreams

California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”

Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.

A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food—in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.

The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”

So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It’s a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”

Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He’s also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oilindustry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”

Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”

Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss, and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it—the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”

As with the environment, so with workers’ rights. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill to provide unemploymentcompensation to workers on strike. In 2024, he vetoed a bill to help protect farmworkers from violations of heat safety regulations, while temperatures in California’s agricultural fields spike above 110 degrees.

The latest Gallup polling of the party’s rank-and-file indicates a wide ideological gap between Newsom and the party’s base. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 32 percent said “moderate,” and 8 percent “conservative” or “very conservative.” And the trendline is striking: Democrats’ self-identification as liberal or very liberal has doubled in the last two decades.

It might be tempting to believe that Newsom’s services to corporatism and the rich are less important than the possibility that he would be an adept Democratic nominee to defeat the GOP ticket in 2028. But pursuit of such “moderate” politics was harmful to Democratic turnout in 2016 and 2024. Newsom’s current political attitude is similar to the timeworn approach that undermined the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

Newsom says he’s eager to pitch a big tent for the Democratic Party, declaring that he welcomes the likes of former US senator Joe Manchin as well as New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in the fold. “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party,” Newsom said in November. “I want it to be inclusive.” He did not mention that during the Biden presidency, while in the Senate, Manchin wrecked prospects for transformational Build Back Better legislation and other measures that would have benefited tens of millions of Americans.

It’s telling that Newsom and former president Bill Clinton, a longtime backer, have voiced profuse mutual admiration. Interviewed after he came off the stage with the former president in a joint appearance at a Clinton Global Initiative event a few months ago, Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground, only to toss the working class overboard from the Oval Office. The disastrous results—made possible by Clinton’s reaching “across the aisle”—included passage of the NAFTA trade pact, the “welfare reform” law that harshly undermined poor women with children, the mass-incarceration-boosting crime bill and the media monopoly-enabling Telecommunications Act.

Launching his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom” a year ago, the host began warmly showcasing extremist bigots by featuring Charlie Kirk as his first guest. When Kirk was assassinated in September, Newsom lavished praise on him, tweeting: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” From the governor’s office, Newsom issued a statement that explained: “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate.”

The praise raises the question: how far right would someone need to be before no longer meriting Newsom’s admiration for “passion”? Clearly, Kirk wasn’t far right enough to be disqualified. He only said things like asserting that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” proclaiming “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s” and castigating Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and others as affirmative-action hires: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Newsom’s show has continued to give a friendly platform to such extreme right-wingers as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro. In effect, Newsom is engaged in a podcast form of triangulation—by turns validating and disputing his guests’ attacks on progressivism.

On no issue is Newsom more out of step with the Democratic electorate than US support for Israel. Last summer, a Quinnipiac survey found that 77 percent of Democrats believed Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza—but last month Newsom said the opposite, declaring “I don’t agree with that notion.” Like most Democratic officeholders who combine their denial of genocide with support for the nonstop weapons flow to Israel, Newsom lays blame narrowly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he is “crystal clear about my love for Israel and condemnation of Bibi.” The same Quinnipiac poll found that fully three-quarters of Democrats were opposed to sending further military aid to Israel, a position that Newsom refuses to take at the same time that he dodges questions about the right-leaning Israel lobby group AIPAC.

Newsom can expect a direct challenge from another California Democrat likely to be on debate stages when the party’s presidential campaigns get underway next year. Congressman Ro Khanna said of Newsom in January: “He doesn’t want to offend the AIPAC donors. He doesn’t want to offend the donor class. And that explains his position on going to give Netanyahu a blank check right after October 7, on not being willing to ever call out the funding we were giving, and not willing to call out that clearly it was a genocide, and then not willing to challenge the billionaire class on tax policy.”

For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news.