The Fake Proletarianism of Gavin Newsom

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 

I’m not technically on vacation, I’m actually on vacation.

 

But given the life I have chosen, I find it very difficult to relax if I have a deadline I am supposed to hit and am able to hit (take note, Dispatch young’uns).

 

I do not, however, find it difficult to skip the State of the Union address. On the long list of ways Woodrow Wilson made our country worse, reviving the tradition of the president physically addressing Congress is not in the top five, but it might be in the top 10 or 15 (Keith Whittington penned a worthy contribution to the extensive literature of why the SOTU is not worth keeping).

 

But here’s a thought: if we can’t get rid of it, how about just not televising it? The Constitution requires the president to check in with Congress from time to time about the state of the union, sort of like when a mechanic calls you and says he discovered that your brake pads are a little worn out and might be worth replacing while they still have your car up on the lift. I’m not going to revisit my whole spiel against cameras in Congress, but it’s just obvious the founders never intended this requirement to be a taxpayer-funded political ad and pep rally for the president.

 

It’s funny: A lot of people, for understandable reasons, believe the “mainstream media” suffer from groupthink. The main reason for this view is that it is objectively true. But it’s not always true in the ways people think. During commercial breaks on CNN or, even back when I was a regular on Fox News, there would often be a lot of political or ideological disagreement. But when I’ve been a guest during “special coverage” of the State of the Union, I’ve often said something like, “I think this whole ritual is stupid.”  People looked at me like I just threw my hot coffee in the Dalai Lama’s face.

 

What I’m getting at is a lot of people—regardless of ideology—who make a living from being on TV tend to think TV is just really, really important. And while ego definitely plays a big part for some people, the story most of them seem to tell themselves isn’t obviously narcissistic but charmingly patriotic. Media types have told themselves that this is a vital and important ritual for the country, and they’re jazzed to play a part in it. I think they’re mostly wrong on the substance, but it’s a form of bias that most people don’t think of when they decry media bias.

 

A similar dynamic applies to a lot of political traditions. For instance, when I tell people that I think the primaries should be rotated out of Iowa and New Hampshire, some of the biggest resistance I get is from reporters and pundits (including—cough, cough—Steve Hayes) who’ve invested a lot of sweat equity in reporting from Iowa and New Hampshire. Knowing the names of local diners and having sources in various precincts is not just a valuable journalistic resource, it’s a credential and bragging right.

 

Something similar happens when I argue that political conventions are Potemkin versions of the real thing and don’t deserve the coverage they get. That’s in part because party conventions are actually media conventions, too. Indeed, it’s often the case that there are two to three times as many people from the media than there are actual delegates at conventions. Attending conventions is also a credential and bragging right that has intangible but real value to journalists.

 

I could go on about international climate conferences, Davos, etc. The point isn’t that these things are all unimportant, just that there’s an incentive for the people who cover them to exaggerate their importance. Inflating the importance of these events and pseudo-events is a subtle way of inflating the importance of the people who cover them.

 

Again, this is a kind of media bias that cuts across ideological and partisan lines.

 

The same bias, of course, applies to all sorts of other disciplines and professions, too. Academics have a similar incentive to make their research subjects as “relevant” as possible. The normal and obvious reasons have to do with the desire for grants, tenure, etc. But there’s also just a human component as well. Who wants to spend years studying and writing about stuff that isn’t important?

 

Newsom’s Romney problem.

 

Let me start off by saying I think Mitt Romney is a good and honorable man who will be better remembered by history than many of his detractors.

 

But you might recall that one of Romney’s biggest political liabilities was that he had no rough edges, no narrative of struggle. This was not a new problem for Republicans. George H.W. Bush had a similar problem, despite his heroic service in World War II. I remember that someone asked Bush’s baseball coach at Yale what kind of player he was. The coach said something like, “He was the kind of player who, if you told him to bunt, he bunted.”

 

Romney had a similar vibe. He was born to privilege, worked hard nonetheless, and was very successful, with a beautiful wife and five handsome sons. I used to joke that he looked like the picture that comes with the frame. I also talked about his “authentic inauthenticity problem.” To a distrustful and ornery public his scar- and scandal-free life, his compulsive decency and good manners, his almost Ned Flanders-like cheeriness made him seem fake. But that was really him.

 

Enter Gavin Newsom. Newsom’s an adroit politician but, from what I can tell, an extremely mediocre governor. We will undoubtedly have time to look at his record again.

 

But I want to take a moment to discuss his battle with dyslexia, or rather the way he’s using it.

 

A couple of weeks ago, Sen. Ted Cruz gave an interview in which he claimed that Newsom was “historically illiterate” for claiming that we had never federalized the National Guard in the states (whether Newsom actually said that, I don’t know).

 

On social media, Newsom replied not by saying Cruz misquoted him or missed some relevant facts. He instead played the victim: "Ted Cruz calling a dyslexic person illiterate is a new low, even for him."

 

At the time I thought it was just … weird.

 

But it turns out this was the beginning of Newsom’s presidential messaging—timed to coincide with the publication of his book, Young Man in a Hurry.

 

This week, at a book event in Atlanta, Newsom said, “I’m not trying to impress you, I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy,” Newsom told Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. “And I’m not trying to offend anyone,” he went on. “You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.”

 

Now, this took on more of a racial vibe than the facts warranted. So I’ll ignore that ginned-up part of the controversy. Let’s concede he wasn’t saying black people can’t read or break a thousand on the SAT, he was saying all of you normal Americans can’t read and are grateful for the 250 points you get for filling out your name on the SAT.

 

That’s … better, but not a lot better. But saying that he can relate to all of the unwashed because he can’t read or that being a rich and powerful man with dyslexia makes him no different than un-rich, un-powerful people struggling to make ends meet, is not great.

 

Also, I don’t mean to make light of dyslexia (which I have a minor case of myself), but boasting about how you can’t read on your book tour is a weird flex. It reminds me of all my sophomoric jokes when Stevie Wonder came out with a music video.

 

Given what Newsom thinks about normal Americans, I guess he’s hoping for big audiobook sales?

 

Privileged politicians have learned that the old line about the elder Bush—“a man who was born on third base and thinks that he hit a triple”—can sting. And Newsom is nothing if not privileged. He grew up not quite rich, but rich-adjacent (his father managed the Getty family trust), attractive, and extremely well-connected. I also have no problem being honest about his disability. It’s the way he’s using it that bugs me. The interesting thing about Newsom is that he overcame his disability, not that he has one. But he’s touting it as if it defines him, so that he can claim to be like the little people who can’t read or score poorly on tests. I understand that the trial-lawyer-inflected political culture of California—which gives us hazardous chemical signs posted in businesses and those warnings about flashing lights at the beginning of TV shows—has turned every affliction into a monetizable form of identity politics. But the simple fact is that his dyslexia isn’t a ticket to membership in the proletariat.

 

He didn’t get where he is by attending the “Derek Zoolander Center for Children Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too.” He got there because he worked really hard and is a talented politician, but also because he pushed on a lot of doors that were opened by rich and powerful people.