The whole world is laughing, or rolling its eyes, at California SSR Commissar Gavin Newsom after he told a black audience that he was just like them because he is supposedly dyslexic and got a 960 on the SATs. Newsom himself, however, fails to see what’s so funny.
As PJ’s own Stephen Green noted, “The choice Newsom made was to approximate a white guy suffering from lifelong dyslexia that’s so bad he ‘can't read a speech’ to a roomful of black people who were, I dunno, just born that way, I guess.” And now our wannabe next president is responding with incandescent rage to any suggestion that that he said anything that was odd or eyebrow-raising at all.
Early on Monday morning, Sean Hannity posted on X the video of Newsom’s uber-pandering with the comment: .@GavinNewsom Thinks a 960 SAT Makes Him 'Like' Black Americans. Let That Sink In.” Newsom responded in a frothing fury three hours later: “You didn’t give a s**t about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations s**tholes — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia? Spare me your fake f**king outrage, Sean.”
You didn’t give a shit about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations shitholes — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia?
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) February 23, 2026
Spare me your fake fucking outrage,… https://t.co/ABNZJQJLcj
This was Newsom at his most disingenuous, and that’s quite an accomplishment. As everyone except, apparently, Gavin Newsom knows by now, the video in question was not “an ape video of President Obama” at all, but a video about voter fraud that ended with an automated YouTube recommendation of other videos that contained the offensive material. That offensive material, meanwhile, also depicted Old Joe Biden as a monkey, so the idea that it was some shockingly racist presentation is a stretch at best.
On top of all that, Trump said in early February that he "didn't make a mistake" regarding the video; he said he hadn’t viewed the whole thing, and hadn’t seen the depiction of Obama at the end of the video. The video was taken down.
Newsom, however, acknowledged none of that, and instead labored to reinforce the leftist canard that Trump is a racist. Newsom did the same thing regarding the “s**thole countries” business; Trump wrote in Jan. 2018: “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!”
Newsom may think Trump was lying in both cases, but even if that were true, it wouldn’t establish that Trump was a racist. If everyone portrayed as a monkey in the Obama video were black, Newsom might have a case, but if they weren’t. And if the African countries that may or may not have been dubbed s**tholes were models of good government, public order and prosperity, once again Newsom might have a convincing case that Trump registered distaste for them only because they’re full of black people, but they aren’t.
Newsom was just as disingenuous about his own remarks. He wasn’t just noting that he has struggled with dyslexia. He was saying that this struggle made him just like the black people who were present. Newsom apparently assumes that they are on a lower intellectual level, and that he was showing that he was on their level by noting his own cognitive disability.
Related: Mamdani Says You Don’t Need ID to Vote, but You Need FIVE Forms of ID to Do THIS
Thus there isn’t really any escaping it: Gavin Newsom thinks black people are stupid. This should be the end of his political career, except that the Democrats have been increasingly open about their racist elitism in recent years. After all, their standing objection to Voter ID laws is essentially that black Americans are so intellectually challenged that they aren’t even able to master the basic requirements for obtaining an identification that Republicans want to make a requirement for voting.
And so, as distasteful and outlandish as Newsom’s remarks are, they’re unlikely to hurt his chances of getting the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination. The paternalistic elitism of the left is just part of its larger authoritarian agenda: the Democrats want to make all of us into wards of the state who can do nothing on our own, and so their condescension toward black Americans is not unique. The Democrat top dogs think they’re superior to everyone, and want to control everyone’s lives. And Gavin Newsom may be just the man for that job.
Editor’s Note: With President Trump back in the White House, the state of our Union is strong once again.
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