Gavin Newsom is America’s answer to the question: “What if Keir Starmer, but worse?”
Nobody should be surprised that a politician in the west is proposing that we funnel more money into private companies rather than just fixing the root cause.
LLMs aren’t going to save the world. Stop it.
My trajectory of learning about this Newsom fellow was amazing.
- First heard of him existing when some Very Serious People were floating him as a replacement for Biden like two months ago
- Infer from that that he’s progressive maybe?
- Like right after that a big story how he forcefully cleared homeless encampments like a fucking cartoon villain
- So he’s actually a weird little conservative in disguise?
- Now this fucking nonsense.
How do you keep producing people like this, America?
According to my former left-libertarian roommate: also the scumbag scion of a political dynasty I think? I didn’t look into it because I had no reason to doubt
It may help to know about Californian neoliberalism. Newsom is running on a faulty ontology; the world is built out of different building blocks for him than for us. We often contrast it with the more dominant flavor of neoliberalism on the other coast:
“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” ~ Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen
Yeah… He’s very much a corpo neolib. He’s actively sabotaged attempts to hold PG&E accountable for killing people and render the earned corporate death sentence. He’s also vehemently against any wealth tax and keeps pulling the pied-piper strategy during elections to limit the influence of left-of-center politicians.
Is he better than the guys whose campaigns he aids? Yes. Is he a dumpster fire of a politician who is unable and unwilling to take on major issues and address root causes of problems facing his constituents? Also yes.
So why on earth was anyone calling him a good candidate to replace Biden? Sounds like one of the worst people you’d want in charge of anything, much less a country?
I think it is a combination of:
- Governor of major state.
- Has nice hair. Real generic politician look.
- Polls showing “generic democrat” beating Trump.
- Not super old.
- Have I mentioned the hair?
no, the article isn’t clickbait if it accurately paraphrases a source in a tone you disagree with
no, it’s not ragebait if reading it made you angry and you wish it wasn’t true, but it very obviously is
good talk, thanks