Gavin Newsom is an empty suit. He becomes whatever he thinks his voting base wants him to be.
By that, I don’t mean he is stupid. He isn’t, or at the very least, he is very cunning, if not intelligent in a conventional way. (He works hard to assure black people that he is as stupid as he thinks they are, and just as hard to convince others that he buckles down and reads voraciously.)
Couric: Do you have a Zoolander problem? Are you just ridiculously good looking as Vogue said? What do you do about that?
Newsom: You don’t do anything about it…It’s just who I am.
Good. Lord. pic.twitter.com/aFmvpDLlaa
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) March 5, 2026
It is his cunning that we should pay attention to, because when he speaks, you get a great idea of what the Democratic voting base is thinking, or at least wants to hear.
🚨NEW: Gavin Newsom CAN’T articulate *single* specific policy goal to @AdamFriedland🚨
“I, I, you know, I don’t, I don’t have, like, a brand. I don’t have a tag … I’ve struggled with being able to communicate.”@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/uxODdSL8ma
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) March 5, 2026
And what it wants to hear is scary. A big dose of antisemitism, lots of anti-American BS, prescriptions for economic collapse, and a lot of reckless rhetoric.
At the moment, two issues stand out, and one is a potential sleeper. All of which could, under the right circumstances, derail his campaign.
Hasan Piker confirms upcoming stream with California Governor Gavin Newsom pic.twitter.com/t9gG11f4Dv
— Popstonox (@Popstonox) March 6, 2026
The first is Newsom’s sudden flirtation with antisemitism, and closely aligned with that is his bet that the US war with Iran is going to turn out to be an unpopular failure that can be equally blamed on Trump and Israel.
The third is his energy policies, which are threatening to upend the California economy sooner rather than later.
During a March 3 book promotion appearance with “Obama bros” Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau, Newsom denounced Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for dragging America into war.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 5, 2026
Newsom is quite confident that taking potshots at Israel, Jews, and Trump all at one go will sound great to the activist base, and he is betting that the Jewish donors will sit back and forgive him for his betrayals. This tells you quite a bit about where all the energy is in the Democratic Party right now, as if you needed any more evidence.
“I mean, [Thomas] Friedman and others are talking about it, appropriately, as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said.
“You just got to reconsider the whole thing.”
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 5, 2026
It’s not just The Squad: Gavin Newsom is certain that bashing Israel and Jews is the ticket to the Democratic nomination for president.
There’s nothing confusing about pandering to a growing antisemitic base in the Democrat party and echoing a patently false blood libel about Israel killing children. Newsom’s comments were reprehensible- and the ADL failing to call him out was unconscionable.
— Norm coleman (@normcoleman) March 5, 2026
Threatening to defund an ally with whom we are CURRENTLY conducting a war is quite the flex. It is a Keir Starmer-level betrayal of both one’s allies and one’s own country. Unlike during the Israel-Hamas war, when you could assert there was daylight between American interests and Israel’s, Operation Epic Fury is entirely intertwined, to the point of planning and execution, with Operation Roaring Lion.
In 2020, he vetoed a California K-12 ethnic studies mandate amid well-founded concerns from critics, including Jewish groups, that it excluded Jews entirely and included terms like “hxrstory” and “cisheteropatriarchy.” pic.twitter.com/Q2qgEvw9Hk
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 5, 2026
They are the same war. And Newsom isn’t just arguing that it is not in America’s interest. He is talking about cutting a lifeline to a country with which we are conducting military operations. That is a two-fer.
Gavin Newsom’s response to the US and Israel fighting a war together is to defund Israel. Even for Newsom these comments were cringeworthy and preposterously ill-timed, the consequence of brainless pandering in pursuit of powerhttps://t.co/BNfAJEZqaa
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 4, 2026
Newsom is betting that Epic Fury will fail, and betting just as much that the Democratic Party base WANTS it to fail. Whatever this says about Newsom—we already knew he was scum and would sell his little sister to a Pakistani rape gang—it says much more about the Democratic base, from whom he takes all his cues.
He’s quick to blame Israel and Trump at every turn, but spares few harsh words for the mullahs who want Americans dead, writes Peter Savodnik. https://t.co/jKsQ3QuDXB
— The Free Press (@TheFP) March 5, 2026
The biggest sleeper issue is Newsom’s holding on tight to the Net Zero agenda, perhaps because he buys it, but probably more importantly because not doing so would be disqualifying in the presidential primary season.
Chevron warns of economic collapse in California under Gavin Newsom in doomsday letter https://t.co/2oDLLpK06s pic.twitter.com/URpVfJAZkb
— New York Post (@nypost) March 5, 2026
Newsom has every reason to know that the climate house of cards may come tumbling down in the next few years, but for political reasons, he is willing to risk it now to capture the big prize. He’s betting that California’s economic peril won’t be bad enough to harm him before 2028.
Couric: Do you have a Zoolander problem? Are you just ridiculously good looking as Vogue said? What do you do about that?
Newsom: You don’t do anything about it…It’s just who I am.
Good. Lord. pic.twitter.com/aFmvpDLlaa
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) March 5, 2026
Whether his bets on these issues turn out to be smart or stupid really isn’t the point; what those bets reveal about where the Democratic Party base stands matters much more at the moment. This election year, at least, the Democrats are going to veer even deeper into the fever swamp.
They may run “moderate” commercials this fall, after the candidates are chosen and they are trying to win a general election, but for the next few months, expect nothing but raw hatred, antisemitism, and anti-war rhetoric.
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