“I don’t think there’s been two years of more effective policymaking of a modern American president. It’s been a masterclass the last two years, not necessarily in effective communication and generating narrative, but in terms of the substance under the circumstance, with all the headwinds, the obfuscation, and opposition. I think it’s been remarkable.”
That may sound like something you’d hear from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, or Don Lemon over at CNN. In fact, that’s the analysis of California Governor Gavin Newsom, four days before the November 8 election, and the subject was White House resident Joe Biden.
Newsom did not explain which Biden policies were “effective,” and the governor failed to detail “the substance under the circumstance.” The statement contains no facts, but there is something remarkable about Gavin Newsom that people might not know.
“For years, Newsom has been very open about the fact that he suffers from dyslexia,” Edsource reported in 2018. Newsom concedes that in the fifth or sixth grade, he “couldn’t read,” and his “reading difficulties” continue to this day. Newsom now claims an amazing ability to memorize texts, but the people have to wonder.
Like many politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, the California governor shows no evidence of familiarity with any of the great books of our time, or books on some of his favorite policy areas. So age and appearance aside, Newsom has much in common with Biden.
The person who does not read has no practical advantage over the person who cannot read. Or, in another saying also attributed to Mark Twain, a person who does not read good books has no advantage over a person who cannot read.
As Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden noted in 2010, Biden “makes few references to books and learned influences.” The Delaware Democrat shows no evidence of reading classics such as The Road To Serfdom, by Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, fully endorsed by John Maynard Keynes. Free to Choose, by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, has also escaped the notice of the most powerful man in the world. Judging by surging gasoline prices, Biden is also ignorant of the basic law of supply and demand.
The governor of a state “poised to become the world’s fourth-biggest economy” might show familiarity with works such as Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, a longtime fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Newsom shows no evidence of reading or memorizing anything from the great scholar, still active at 92.
Consider the governor’s take on government racial preferences. “America in 2019 is California in the 1990s,” Newsom told Politico. “The xenophobia, the nativism, the fear of ‘the other,’” and so on. Readers might wonder what was going on in California during that dark decade and long before.
As the 1978 Bakke case revealed, California’s public colleges discriminated against students based on race. The University of California at Davis rejected the highly qualified Allan Bakke due to a quota for minority applicants. Bakke sued and won, but discrimination remained inherent in the system. The people of California rose up against it.
On November 5, 1996, Californians passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. The measure amended the state’s constitution to end racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in state college admissions, state employment, and state contracting. The disaster opponents predicted never occurred.
As Sowell noted in his 2013 Intellectuals and Race, declines in minority enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley were offset by increases at other University of California campuses. More important, the number of African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher.
The African American Sowell, a graduate of Harvard, earned advanced degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago long before any kind of affirmative action was in place. His books on the subject include Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Discrimination and Disparities, and The Economics and Politics of Race.
Newsom shows no familiarity with these works, all available in audio. Perhaps that’s why it appears the governor had trouble reading the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, which only returned the abortion issue to the states. In a similar style, Newsom has evidently not memorized his own state’s abortion law.
As Mary Theroux noted in “California’s Proposition 1 is Perverse Virtue-Signalling,” abortion is “indisputably legal during the first six months of pregnancy, and illegal after the fetus has become viable (weeks 24 to 26), unless necessary for the mother’s life or health.” Proposition 1 enshrines “a right, funded by taxpayers’ money, to abortion on demand for any reason for the full term of pregnancy.”
As Theroux explains, Newson is one of those “abortion celebrants” who thumb their noses at “old fogies” who adhere to antiquated notions such as “abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.” Newsom ran billboard ads in 18 states to promote California as an abortion sanctuary and launched the website Abortion.ca.gov. So the California governor is “apparently launching his 2024 presidential campaign on this issue.”
Newsom seems unaware of doctors such as Bernard Nathanson (Aborting America), a former abortionist who changed his mind and opposed the practice. The governor also seems unaware of the Atlas of Fetal Surgery and of medical advances in that field, and the realities of human development in the womb.
The late Christopher Hitchens, an atheist, contended that life begins at conception because there is no other place where it can begin. And as fellow atheist Nat Hentoff explained, a change of address does not make you a human being.
Joe Biden claims to be a Catholic, but like chump lawyer Ned Racine in Body Heat, experience shows the Delaware Democrat can be convinced of anything. Biden is panting to make legalized abortion the law of the land, by which he means abortion on demand for any reason for the full term of pregnancy.
By the standards of Biden and Newsom, Catherine Finnegan could have ended the life of her son Joe Biden one day before his birth on November 19, 1942. Tessa Menzies could have terminated Gavin Newsom on October 9, 1967, one day before the birth of the future California governor.
By all indications, neither man has given much thought to what prenatal infanticide could mean for the future of the nation both men want to lead. Biden has been in national politics since 1972. Newsom’s ruling-class roots go back even further.
In 1943, businessman William Newsom, Gavin’s grandfather, helped Edmund G. “Pat” Brown win his race for San Francisco district attorney. In 1960, Governor Pat Brown awarded the concession for the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics to Newsom and John Pelosi, father-in-law of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 1975, new governor Jerry Brown appointed another William Newsom, the son of Pat Brown’s pal, to a judgeship in Placer County, and in 1978, Brown appointed the same Newsom to the state court of appeal.
In 1996, Gavin Newsom served as a volunteer for the mayoral campaign of Willie Brown, the powerful former state assembly speaker. The mayor appointed Newsom to San Francisco’s Parking and Traffic Commission and later to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Newsom was on the elevator, but there was more to it than the Browns.
Newsom’s father also handled the estate of the Getty family. Gordon Getty, heir to the fortune of John Paul Getty, once the richest man in the world, became Gavin’s biggest “investor” in his upscale wineries and such. “Mayor McHottie,” as Newsom was once known, with Ermenegildo Zegna shirts and “hair lacquered with Oribe gel,” also gives off an old-money stank.
Newsom’s aunt, Barbara, was once married to Ron Pelosi, brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi. Barbara and Ron divorced in 1977 when Gavin was 10 years old, but his connection with Nancy remains strong. In March 2020, when he announced the state of emergency, Newsom told Californians they were blessed to have the “leadership” of Nancy Pelosi.
Biden and Newsom are both puppets of their handlers. Should either man win the White House in 2024, the nation would see a masterclass in several policy areas. More people would be killed before birth. Racial preferences, rebranded as “equity,” would again prevail. And the United States of America would soon be poised to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.