Gavin Newsom: California’s Censor

Any Governor Gavin Newsom appearance ought to come labeled with one of California’s infamous Prop 65 warning labels. Like many politicians, you can count on Newsom to say precisely the opposite of what’s true. In that sense, he’s like a compass that always points to true south. He is invariable in his wrongness.

That’s why it was unsurprising to find the governor sitting on Stephen Colbert’s couch this week, calling Jimmy Kimmel’s return to Stage 16 at the ABC Television Center in Burbank a victory for free speech.

Whatever you think of the unfunny Jimmy Kimmel, you likely find it ironic that Governor Newsom would utter the words “free” and “speech” in such close proximity. Even as he tanned beneath Colbert’s tungsten lights, Newsom was running — is running now — a redistricting campaign that will rob millions of Californians of their right to cast an effective vote. That’s not how he characterizes his Proposition 50 campaign, of course. Newsom says he’s battling Texas’s redistricting effort in a battle to control the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms — “fighting fire with fire.” But in that battle, he’s using Californians — the people he swore to protect and defend — as artillery shells.

(It’s also true that Newsom, who has overseen the state’s worst wildfires, would be smart to avoid the word “fire.” It’s triggering, is all.)

We could go on. California Policy Center is suing the governor right this minute for signing SB 399, the new law that prohibits employers from talking about religion or politics with their employees on their own property. During the pandemic, Newsom did precisely what he says he hates in President Trump — used his “emergency authority” to shut down churches (but not strip clubs) in order to slow the spread of Covid. During the pandemic, you could march in massed ranks of angry progressives and burn down people’s businesses to protest the death of George Floyd, but your children could not go to school. It took the Supreme Court to curb the governor’s authoritarian impulses.

In that same period, the governor signed off on Assembly Bill 2098, a law that punished doctors whose treatments didn’t conform with Newsom’s own advanced epidemiological assessments — assessments that changed from week to week with such speed that they seemed to mirror the governor’s perspective on gender fluidity. That law was so obviously unconstitutional that it required only the whispered threat of a lawsuit for the state legislature to repeal the law less than a year after Newsom signed it.

Even today there’s the discovery that, buried in the legislative effluent on Newsom’s desk, is Senate Bill 771. That bill, which is weirdly titled “Personal rights: liability: social media platforms,” would in fact undermine personal rights — and punish social media companies for publishing “hate speech.” The proposal is so laughably stupid that even Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat from Irvine and Newsom ally, doesn’t take it seriously. She reminded us that a Newsom spokesperson had called Joe Patterson, one of her few Republican colleagues, a “bald little man” on X.

“We all laughed about that,” Petrie-Norris said, “but Assemblymember Patterson could say, ‘That was the governor’s spokesperson — that was intimidating, that was harassing and now I’m going to sue whatever that platform was for $500,000’ and the platform would basically have to settle. How do we ever come up with an objective standard of what is intimidating or harassing?”

You don’t, Ms. Petrie-Norris. You let Gavin Newsom sign the bill into law — and then you join the repeal effort when it becomes clear that SB 771 won’t survive first contact with a federal judge who has any memory of the First Amendment.