What Gavin Newsom Wants to Do to Spread Lefty Activism Is Insane. Even Nate Silver Agrees.
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Gavin Newsom apparently wants to figure out how to manufacture more activists, as if California didn't already have enough people who think a hashtag is a personality. The details are almost beside the point. What matters is the impulse behind it: the idea that ordinary people just need to be nudged, funded, or algorithmically encouraged into caring about the right things, in the right way, on the right schedule.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
You have to be kidding me: this cannot be real. If Gavin Newsom is trying to decide whether to run in 2028 — I assume he is — then this isn’t a good sign. He wants to be the herpes outbreak of politics: the itch that never goes away, embodying why the Democrat Party’s brand is so toxic.
It’s simple: they’re condescending busybodies. It reminds me of an old saying Erick Erickson used to say about the Left, their war cry — they will make you care. I used to say there’s no such thing as being Switzerland, but mostly there’s no safe space, which is the height of irony.
Original source:
Read at TownhallHow We See It
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Gavin Newsom apparently wants to figure out how to manufacture more activists, as if California didn't already have enough people who think a hashtag is a personality. The details are almost beside the point. What matters is the impulse behind it: the idea that ordinary people just need to be nudged, funded, or algorithmically encouraged into caring about the right things, in the right way, on the right schedule. That's not organizing. That's stage management dressed up as grassroots politics.
Even Nate Silver, who is about as establishment-liberal as it gets, looked at this and said no thanks. When your own side's numbers guy thinks the plan is a bad idea, that should tell you something. It's not a persuasive argument, it's a confession that the message doesn't sell itself anymore, so someone has to engineer the appearance that it does.
This is the same instinct that shows up everywhere on the left lately: if people aren't naturally showing up to the cause, build a machine that makes them show up. Behind every version of it is the same condescension, the assumption that regular Americans are raw material to be shaped rather than people with their own minds who might just disagree.
Newsom clearly wants 2028. Fine, run. But schemes like this are exactly why voters already have him pegged. Nobody wants to be somebody's activism project. They want to be left alone to live their lives, and every time Democrats forget that, they remind everyone why the brand keeps losing.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.