The Talented Mr. Newsom
Authored by Alex Berenson,
Gavin Newsom could be our next president. But does anyone – including him – know what he stands for? A detailed look at his life suggests the answer might be no.
California has every natural and economic advantage: a long, beautiful coast, great weather, a generations-long stranglehold on cultural production in Los Angeles and advanced technology in Silicon Valley.
Yet years of Democratic misrule have made the state so unlivable its taxpaying residents are fleeing en masse. Building houses, or high-speed rail, or anything else in California is nearly impossible. Meanwhile, the state has done all it can to make itself a home for unemployable illegal migrants, including offering them free medical care.
One might think this record would make Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, an unattractive presidential candidate.
One would be wrong.
The 2028 election is still almost three years out, but prediction markets have Newsom as the leading candidate to become the Democratic nominee in 2028 and trailing only JD Vance to take the White House in 2029.
Now Newsom, like many a would-be President before, is promoting a new autobiography, Young Man in a Hurry.
His book tour hit an air pocket over the weekend, when he made news for telling an audience in Atlanta about his barely mediocre SAT score — 960 — in a way that made him seem stupid, inauthentic, and possibly racist.
The incident got me thinking about Governor White Teeth, as I called Newsom during Covid. Like other big blue-state governors, Newsom loved lockdowns. He and California clung to them longer than almost anywhere else. Beyond that, though, I didn’t know much about him, aside from the fact he had once been married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.
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Which is why I was so happy to have the chance to read this biography of Newsom from Brad Pearce, an independent journalist in Washington state who writes the Wayward Rabbler Substack. Pearce alerted me to it on X after I made a snarky joke about a wine store Newsom had once opened in San Francisco, writing:
Gavin Newsom’s father was a social climber who lived beyond his means and didn’t properly support his mother, so he did kind of grow up simultaneously rich and poor. I wrote a full profile of him 6 months ago. Horrible but fascinating man.
Naturally I clicked through to the profile, titled “Gavin Newsom Doesn’t Need a Narrative.” What I found was more interesting, and frightening, than I’d expected.
Pearce presents Newsom as not so much a chameleon as a man without any shape at all. Like Bill Clinton, his most obvious comparator as a modern politician, Newsom grew up without a strong father and used his charm and looks to get ahead — with women and politically.
But Newsom and Clinton differ in crucial ways.
Clinton is far smarter than Newsom. But Newsom grew up in an social and class environment more complex than the one Clinton faced. Newsom was close to the scions of San Francisco’s Nob Hill gentry, a group whose wealth long predates Silicon Valley and is possibly the snobbiest local elite anywhere outside Boston. Yet he didn’t actually have their money, giving him acute status anxiety.
At the same time, Pearce makes a persuasive case that Newsom’s learning disability and lack of genuine intelligence mean that he cannot understand the nuances of difficult policy choices — much less figure out which might be best substantively. He navigates on instinct and his desire for personal approval. Even more than most politicians, Newsom wants to be loved at any cost.
Yet Pearce warns against underestimating Newsom, or his ability to win the Democratic nomination or the Presidency. Newsom is a tall, handsome white man who is the governor of the nation’s largest state, and those facts all by themselves make him a serious candidate. And Newsom’s bullet points style of argument may make him the man for an increasingly post-literate age.
Horrible but fascinating indeed.
The piece is too interesting not to share, so I asked Pearce if I could excerpt it for Unreported Truths readers. He graciously agreed. It is long by Unreported Truths standards and has a lot of discussion of California’s House redistricting plans.
I have cut the redistricting discussion and the opening section of the piece to focus on Newsom’s history and made other cuts for length but have not otherwise edited it. (If you want to read the entire piece, you can find it here – it is not paywalled.)
Even if you skim it, I hope you’ll get to the end. Pearce’s conclusion may surprise you. Yet it’s hard to disagree with his final paragraph.
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Without further ado, courtesy of Brad Pearce and The Wayward Rabbler, everything you need to know but were afraid to ask about the leading Democratic candidate to be our next president:
The basic facts of Gavin Newsom’s earliest years are that he was born in 1967 to William Newsom, a California Superior Court Judge, and Tessa Newsom [née Menzies.] A sixth generation Californian of Irish descent on his father’s side, his father had risen to prominence befriending Gordon Getty of the Getty oil family [also of Getty Images] and later managing his father’s estate.
Newsom’s parents divorced when he was very young and he lived in a small apartment with a struggling single mother. According to an extensive New Yorker profile from 2018, his father was something of a “Disneyland Dad,”
“Bill Newsom…occasionally swooped in to take Gavin on vacation with the Getty family: polar-bear watching in Hudson Bay, safaris in Africa. When he returned from these jaunts, his mother would say, “Hope you had fun! ” and storm off to bed. “The guilt,” he told me. “She made me feel horrible.”
One night, Newsom recalled hearing “my mother yelling and screaming at my dad because he wasn’t able to help us financially, because he was very close to bankruptcy.”
…[Newsom] has relied on his friendship with the Gettys his entire career while running away from the claim that he is privileged. But it seems to be the case that his father got used to a certain lifestyle while privately managing the Getty trust and then he couldn’t maintain it when he got the prestige of the Superior Court position, and helping his ex-wife support the children was never a priority.
Regardless, we’re told that Newsom is simultaneously like an extra son to the heir to one of the wealthiest old money families in California while also the product of an impoverished single mother and this seems to be broadly true.
Perhaps, though, the LA Times gives us the clearest picture of the man with this incredible quote from a 2021 profile, “California’s most powerful politician often begins his day around 6 a.m. alone in his office, struggling to read.”
Yes, Gavin Newsom is dyslexic.
I’m going to allow myself a digression here because, though it is hard to know to what extent this is a narrative his aides came up with so that the slicked back wonderboy with rich friends can claim to be disadvantaged, it seems as if, perhaps more than anything, not being able to read or understand long-form prose is what made Gavin Newsom who he is today.
It’s also notable he has been so willing to talk about this, when an unusually high amount of the articles I read for this piece, even from major papers such as LA Times or Business Insider, could not get a response for their stories, making it evident that this is a political machine comfortable ignoring the media but which wants to talk about dyslexia.
Newsom says, “I can read two chapters and literally be daydreaming, and I’ll have read every word and not remember one damn thing unless I’m underlining it.” What this means is that, with difficulty, he can gather what he needs to pass a test, but can’t actually understand written stories in the normal sense.
Instead of reading as you or I might, Newsom undergoes an intensive process of distilling information down to a few bullet points which don’t require a central narrative,
“I have files and files,” Newsom said. “Everything is underlined, circled, and I put it on 8-by-10 white papers, and then there’s like thousands of these stacks … every topic, subject matter. And then I take from that subject matter and break it down to two or three pages, and then I try to eventually get it on these yellow cards.”
This all seems to be key to his success as a politician, both his acceptance of having to work harder than everyone else due to his learning disability as well as his entire political thought process being centered on memorizing bullet points.
I think this helps in his shamelessness because he isn’t necessarily even aware of the narrative a normal person might put together based on the facts he presents, he simply answers objections with other facts he has memorized. Here is just one representative example:
This is in response to Ron DeSantis pointing out that, among other things, California is #1 in homelessness and poverty. This is somewhat normal politician-speak, but none of his positive things have anything to do with Gavin Newsom and are primarily simply that California has about 1/3rd more population to the next closest state and is also the major gateway to the Pacific.
To Newsom, no narrative continuity is required… the entirety of his political rhetoric is having memorized endless little facts because as per his own description it is impossible for him to memorize or read a prepared speech.
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I don’t mean to downplay the achievement of overcoming his dyslexia, but the point is it is hard to know how to respond to someone incapable of feeling shame or processing narrative in a normal fashion because it is outside of the experience of almost everyone.
Regardless, this dyslexia, according to Newsom, had a serious impact on him, making him initially a shy and often bullied child, which I do believe, if he was unable to read out loud. In middle school, Newsom decided to be the person everyone wanted him to be, apparently successfully.
As per the New Yorker profile,
“In middle school, Newsom, drawing inspiration from “Rocky,” took up boxing and drank raw eggs to toughen himself. Then he began applying hair gel and wearing blazers and business suits, a costume inspired by “Remington Steele,” the TV show that starred Pierce Brosnan as a con man who assumes the identity of a glamorous private detective. “The suit was literally a mask,” he said. “I am still that anxious kid with the bowl-cut hair, the dyslexic kid—the rest is a façade. The only thing that saved me was sports.””
Note that Newsom is comfortable saying he is a fake person based on a TV con artist—he just comes out and tells the public this!
At this same time, he started excelling in baseball and basketball, developing his underdog-becomes-overdog persona and his self-image as the powerful defender of the little guy. In many ways this makes him a perfect leader for the modern Marvel-brained American: he can’t understand complex concepts but instead has based his life off of a series of aesthetics and distilled story-line tropes from popular visual media.
This all worked fabulously. Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Espirit and North Face clothing lines, and a Democrat megadonor, said the following of Newsom as a young man in a 2018 LA Times story about his support from San Francisco’s most important moneyed families,
“He was the boy about town. Everybody wanted to date him,” she said, recalling that one of her daughters was in a relationship with Newsom in the 1990s. “He was the smartest, the best-looking. He went through a cocky stage, and then an arrogant stage. Now he’s in a total serving stage. He paid his dues, I’ll tell you.”
That last part is obvious nonsense, but is also crucial to understanding the mindset of his long-time supporters, and I suppose it is easy enough to believe that a 17 year old Newsom was a much more extreme version of what he is now.
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Much has been made of Newsom’s baseball background, and by all accounts he likes the game and was a good player in high school. However, the enormous fabrications about this part of his life seem representative and are worth going into. It has been widely reported across major publications that he played baseball at Santa Clara University and was “recruited” by the Texas Rangers.
A 2024 investigation from CalMatters found that Newsom practiced with the team but never played in a varsity game, and that since he became famous it’s actually been a joke among the teammates of those years that he was on their team. It seems that he was unable to balance college sports with schoolwork, which makes sense for a guy who describes himself as needing to spend “like six hours to give a five- or six-minute presentation…”
…according to the same CalMatters investigation, though there is evidence that Newsom received one $500 scholarship to play on the JV team his first quarter of college, how this came about was that Bill Connoly, a long time San Francisco investment banker, associate of Bill Newsom, and Santa Clara baseball alumni and donor to the program, put the younger Newsom “on their radar.” However, the former assistant coach interviewed says “the baseball program was not a backdoor into the university.”
For that, it seems his family relied on letters of recommendation they solicited from former California Governor Jerry Brown as well as from an attorney named John Mallen who was on the University’s Board of Regents at the time, and who later described Bill Newsom as his “best friend of 75 years” and said this may have been the only such letter he ever wrote in that position, “In fact, I may not have helped anybody else get in…I mean, I’d known him since birth…He was a good athlete. That I remember…I think it was a big help.”
Newsom at the opening of his PlumpJack wine shop in 1992. Fellas, watch your wives and daughters around this guy.
…[Newsom] managed to graduate in 1989 with a degree in Political Science, and then went into business, starting the PlumpJack Wine & Spirits shop with the funding of Billy Getty. He then expanded to the Balboa Café, which became the haunt of all the scions of the local oligarchs, who would later be Newsom’s earliest political donors.
Much has been said about Newsom being “bought off” by this group of oligarchs, but it needs to be understood that he doesn’t believe in anything in the first place and is actually part of their social circle, so there is no reason he would want to do anything they don’t want; it is less a matter of being “bought off” and more a matter of them supporting someone who was already on their team.
It also seems to be the case that Newsom kept getting money from the Gettys to expand his businesses because they were successful under his leadership, as opposed to the Gettys just pouring money into some tangential dependent. It is not at all hard to see how this particular guy with his taste for fine living and self-described “facade” based on a con artist played by Pierce Brosnan w