The Secret But Real Story of California. Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Yet, he is not broadcasting his qualifications by citing his history of eight years as Governor of California, eight years as Lieutenant Governor, his eight years as Mayor of San Francisco, and not his eight years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Why?

During these thirty-two years—Newsom has had no other job since age 30 but government—California went from a vibrant and well-run state to a catastrophe, one of turning a natural paradise into a manmade purgatory.

In times past, the state was the gem of the 50-state union—due mostly to twenty-four years of Republican governance in Sacramento by Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson.

But after sixteen years of Jerry Brown and soon eight years of Newsom, the thirty-two years were cancelled out by the twenty-four years of Democrat governance. (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s were a wash: four years conservative, four years liberal.)

The Left gave us the highest income taxes in the nation, the highest gas taxes, the highest gas and electricity prices in the continental U.S., amid chronic and huge multi-billion-dollar budget deficits, nearly half the nation’s homeless, and by 2020 half of the country’s illegal aliens.

Currently, the result is that a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line. One quarter of all power company monthly bills go unpaid. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients reside in California. San Franscico achieved the dubious honor of having the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation. The public schools’ test scores were in the bottom 10 percent of the nation. And its infrastructure, especially decrepit roads, were among the nation’s worst.

So, Newsom is by needs logically running against Trump who will not be running.

He will not mention the catastrophic LA fires, the multi-billion-dollar fiascos like the high-speed rail debacle, the Moss Landing solar battery disasters, or the failed Ivanpah Solar Power Facility. He will not run on the implosion of the California timber industry, or the flight of oil refineries out of state, or the insurance disaster that makes it almost impossible to afford or even find home insurance above 1,500-feet given the state’s disastrous record of fire management and prevention. No one talks about the number of residents that have neither car nor home insurance.

Newsom for a while thought the pathway to the presidency was through posing as a “moderate.” But he gave up his brief flirtation with centrism, birthed after the 2024 Democratic collapse, when his advisors shook him by the shoulders and reminded him that he must first win the primaries of a lunatic party. And that trajectory is not through hosting podcasts with Steve Bannon or the late Charlie Kirk.

So, Newsom dropped his brief “moderate” image—at least if and until he wins the primary and then in 2028 will pivot back to the center left.

But for now, he is firmly within the fringe base of the party, hiring kids to do his social media imitations of Trump’s tweets, and threatening to punch various people in the mouth, from Trump to his assorted Republican enemies.

No other single California politician of the last three decades has held so many elected offices, as the state’s legislative and executive power shifted from Los Angeles to the Silicon-Valley-fed megarich Bay Area. And no other official is more responsible for the state’s general decline than Newsom.