On the menu today: I’ve written a bunch of profile pieces of presidential candidates over the years. I always thought the best part of them was when they told you something you didn’t already know about the candidate; by the time a politician is running, we often already know the basics. Back in the 2020 cycle, I wrote “Things You Probably Didn’t Know” columns about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Sherrod Brown, and Michael Bloomberg.
We’re still in early 2026, but two major national magazines have published profiles about Gavin Newsom that seemed more interested in his appearance, his body language, and his sartorial choices than in what he’s actually done as governor of California for the past seven years. And neither one had much to say about California becoming, far and away, the most unaffordable state in the country on Newsom’s watch. Read on.
The Glowing Profiles That Miss the Real Story
Another week brings another gushing profile of California Governor Gavin Newsom, this time in The New Yorker, which is supposed to be a much more serious and intellectually rigorous magazine than Vogue, the last glossy magazine to swoon over Newsom.
Nathan Heller wrote a long profile, more than 12,000 words, so it’s hard to succinctly summarize, but this paragraph struck me as the core contention of the article:
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Since the pandemic, it has been fashionable for Republicans to stand on San Francisco street corners and point to homeless people, spinning out a story of apocalyptic decay that, they say, results from Democratic leadership. Newsom argues the inverse. Since his first year as governor, he has promoted an idea of California as a terrarium for Democratic principle — enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution, upholding sanctuary-state policies, pushing for police reform — while emphasizing its successes over its failures. California, the closest thing to a test zone for the blue economy, is home to roughly half of all American unicorn startups, which are valued at more than a billion dollars each, and technologists who made a show of fleeing because of taxes and regulations, like Elon Musk, have returned to found A.I. firms. “The Republicans’ governing thesis cannot be true if California succeeds,” Jason Elliott, a former deputy chief of staff in Newsom’s office, told me. “We disprove their ideas that pluralism is a recipe for failure, that completely deregulated capital is the only way to grow.” He added, “It drives them f***ing crazy.”
First, if you think Republicans oppose “pluralism,” you have not spent much time in places like Florida, or Texas, or Nevada, or Arizona. For what it’s worth, the whitest states in the country are GOP-leaning West Virginia, followed by Democratic-leaning Vermont and Maine and purplish New Hampshire. Also, everyone living under the current tariff regime and the expanding federal government ownership role in private businesses would be surprised to learn that Republicans promote “completely deregulated capital.”
Affordability Problem?
Heck no problem here. Slick and his gang just write checks that keep the State in Billions of debt. They have a little item that hands out % of the down payment with little or no interest.
UUUhhhhh guess what this is exactly what the Democrats did and what happened? No big deal it just brought down the entire Western economy. Years of unrecoverable real estate loans. After all “everyone” should have the right to own a home and the worthless paper was the quicksand.
You figure it out.
This is another 3 card monte scheme the Radical Left uses to hid the truth. The truth is if there is more demand for a product and there is less product the value of the product will be large.
Gold is worthless if no one wants it.
Slick drove the minimum wages so high that meat that was $.65 cents a pound to a $1.50 a pound is now $10 a pound or more. That is just one item. The wealthy are fleeing, the working middle class is trying how and where to move so they can afford to live.
Look in the mirror and you will see you voted for them. You are the Problem.
Governor Newsom’s environmental policies that are being imposed on the States’ 40 million citizens represent 0.5% for the world’s 8 billion people. The other 99.5% of the world’s 8 billion live outside of California.
The perspective of the California Energy Infrastructure Future remains very fragile with no one able to clearly verbalize to the voters their plan for what the replacement will be for that black tar commonly referred to as crude oil, to maintain the supply chain of products and various transportation fuels demanded by our materialistic society.
With the continuous closures of nuclear and coal fired generation of electricity, where will the power come from to power datacenters?
With the closure of in-state refineries, where will the transportation fuels for the military, airports, trucking, cars, and merchant ships come from?