As Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis recovers from the damage and death of Hurricane Ian, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Wednesday, offered his politically calculated support after months of anti-DeSantis bluster – months busied with signing a tsunami of “bold” bills that will trap his state in the eye of a catastrophic dystopian storm.
Political storm trackers have a hunch that Newsom is putting himself on a path to the White House. More and more it’s looking like the man who wrecked San Francisco as mayor and wrecked California as governor, is putting himself in a position to wreck America as president.
“A couple of Fridays ago, you tweeted that you would like to debate Governor Ron DeSantis on CNN,” a reporter asked Newsom on the day that Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida’s Lee County. “Were you serious about that?”
“Of course I am, but tough time to bring that up,” Newsom said. “Let me just express deep empathy and respect for the challenges that the governor’s facing – of course – all Floridians are facing. We’ve offered support and they know that when they need it, we’ll be there for them.”
The debate the reporter referred to was Newsom’s latest punch in a contrived gubernatorial tit-for-tat that he made official in a July 4 political ad warning Floridians that “freedom is under attack in your state.” The ad threw mud on DeSantis, urged “all of you living in Florida to join the fight” against him, and invited California runaways to come back home.
“Your Republican leaders, they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors,” Newsom said in the ad. “… Join us in California, where we still believe in freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, and the freedom to love. Don’t let them take your freedom.”
He left out freedom to flee, which Californians are doing in droves. Some 370,000 more people are leaving the state than coming in, and tens of thousands have fled to Florida annually, according to the Washington Times.
But DeSantis isn’t jumping for joy. Like Californians who moved to Texas and still vote Democrat, many fleeing to Florida bring their ideological baggage with them.
“It’s like the leftism, they will not draw the connection between their leftist ideology and the destruction that’s all around them,” he said in April. “It is a problem because I do think there’s a class of voters who would come to Florida, and they would continue to vote the same way.”
These are the likely voters, like “lone wolves,” who Newsom targeted in his freedom ad, and it’s the same audience he was hoping to attract to a Newsom-DeSantis debate after expressing fury over DeSantis busing 48 “migrants” to Martha’s Vineyard in September.
“Hey @GovRonDeSantis,” an ankle-biting Newsom tweeted, “clearly you’re struggling, distracted, and busy playing politics with people’s lives. Since you have only one overriding need – attention – let’s take this up & debate. I’ll bring my hair gel. You bring your hairspray. Name the time before Election Day.”
That tweet came a day after Newsom tweeted a letter, with official letterhead, accusing DeSantis of “kidnapping” and urging Merrick Garland’s DOJ to investigate.
“What @GovRonDeSantis and @GregAbbott_TX are doing isn’t clever, it’s cruel,” Newsom wrote. “I’m formally requesting the DOJ begin an immediate investigation into these inhumane efforts to use kids as political pawns.”
DeSantis shrugged off the cheap swipes, replying at a Dayton Beach news conference that Newsom’s “hair gel is interfering with his brain function.”
Brain dead may be more accurate. With all that’s gone wrong in California – record homelessness, high crime, unfunded debt, illegal immigration, out-of-reach home prices, high gas prices, a poor education system, drought, an entrenched teachers’ union – Gov. Newsom has spent the last few months angling for higher office and signing virtue-signaling bills that, in the coming decades, will tear through California like a Category 5 hurricane. Here are just a few:
July 12: Signed a bill into law that gives the state’s gun violence victims the right to sue gun makers and distributors for negligence.
Aug. 18: California regulators, acting on Newsom’s executive order in 2020, voted to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, with the ramp-up beginning in 2026.
Sept. 18: Signed AB 351 into law, which lets residents choose human composting after their deaths, for use in natural organic reduction (NOR) to help address climate change.
Sept. 21: Signed 40 new climate and green bills and mandates into law, all at once, that looks to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, and by 2035 expands the state’s energy sources from one third clean energy, to 90 percent, mainly with wind and solar.
Sept. 23: With 22 percent of the nation’s illegal immigrants living in California, Newsom signed a bill that allows non-driving illegals to get a state ID.
Sept. 23: Signed AB 2022 into law, a bill that bans the word “squaw” from all geographic place names – over 100 – in California, stating that the word is a “derogatory term that has historically been used as an offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for indigenous women.”
Sept. 28: Signed Assembly Bill 2799 into law, which restricts the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal cases. Rappers Tyga, Meek Mill, Killer Mike, Too $hort, Ty Dolla $ign, YG, and E-40 were present via Zoom for the signing.
Sept. 29: Signed Senate Bill 107 into law, a bill that offers sanctuary for transgender children and teens who flee from conservative states that restrict access to “gender-affirming” care.
None of these new laws will solve real problems in California, but the way that Newsom’s brain functions, like so many California Democrats, it’s not about solving problems, it’s about keeping power to cement leftist ideology into law, no matter what catastrophes follow.
Joe Mathews, in his Mercury News column, Why Gavin Newsom Will Never be America’s President, sizes Newsom up, from a liberal point of view, as if we’re still living in pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd America.
“Newsom is actually throwing away whatever chances he might have had of being president,” he wrote. “Getting elected president, if you’re a Democrat, is about soft-pedaling divisive issues, and building broad, diverse coalitions.”
I wonder what he might’ve written about defunding the police, CRT, sex and gender dominating K-12 curriculum, AOC’s Green New Deal, Biden as president, or Kamala Harris as president-in-waiting. We laughed at all that stuff in the beginning but now those issues and those people wield enormous power over our lives.
It’s no longer farfetched to believe that people who are willing to openly violate the Constitution and the rule of law, won’t do anything – by any means necessary – to get their people in power, if it suits them, for what they deem is a greater good, regardless of their competence or the people’s consent.
Florida was wrecked by an unavoidable natural disaster. California, like so many Democrat cities, is being wrecked by an avoidable political disaster. Newsom wrecked San Francisco, he’s wrecking California, and signs are that he might be the dupe Democrat puppeteers are looking for to expand the eye of a dystopian storm over the entire country.
You’ve been warned.