Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so.
Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist.
How can Gavin Newsom sleep knowing he’s encouraged children to think of their parents as the enemy?
‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told the Pennsylvania crowd. ‘It’s America in reverse. They want to bring us back to a pre-1960s world and you are the front line of that opposition. Voting rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights…’
We can look forward to months of this, and from Harris too: Trump as a slump backwards into the toxic past, Democrats as the party of progress. And it’s amazing how many people, even those here who’d call themselves Conservatives, agree. They simply take it for granted that no one sensible, no one educated could vote for Trump.
But what I’d like to ask them is this: if Trump is backwards, what is forwards? Where is the party of sanity leading you? It’s my feeling that if people really understood the direction of travel,Trump might not look like such an obviously ludicrous choice.
Newsom is mesmerisingly, nakedly consumed by vanity. Like Harris, he seems to go with any political flow, which is why the bills he’s signed as governor act so well as signposts, pointing to a destination.
Last year Newsom signed Assembly Bill 665, which had the noble-sounding aim of ‘increasing mental healthcare access for low-income youth’. What this meant in reality was that children of just 12 who have been persuaded by their peers or by TikTok that they’re trapped in the wrong body can take ‘refuge’ in government-affiliated residential shelters. If a parent doesn’t instantly affirm their chosen identity, a child can just up and leave to be with a new ‘glitter’ family of adult activists courtesy of the state.
AB655 works nicely in concert with Newsom’s Assembly Bill 5, which requires teachers to be educated in transgender ideology and then seek out pupils to recruit. ‘Recruit’ is not too strong a word. In 2021, the journalist Abigail Shrier was given an audio recording from the California Teachers Association in which teachers can be heard encouraging each other to look through pupils’ search histories to find girls and boys who might be LGBT-inclined. There was an urgent need, agreed the teachers, to get new LGBTQ ‘bodies in the door’.
Shrier explained: ‘They said, effectively, if you want to bring a new society into existence, the way to start that is with children… and so activist teachers are looking to recruit other people’s children in the revolution.’
I’ve written recently about another of Newsom’s astonishingly anti-family bills, AB957. This requires any parent contesting custody to affirm a child’s chosen gender identity or else run the risk of losing them. But this month Newsom really excelled himself. He signed through AB1955, which instructs school districts to lie to and keep secrets from parents about their children.
This is a revenge move, pushed through sneakily outside the normal legislative calendar. Parents and school governors in several of California’s less demented districts had decided on parental notification policies so as to ensure that their own children couldn’t change gender in secret. AB1955, astonishingly, makes these parental notification policies illegal. It also violates federal law that guarantees parents’ right to access their children’s school records, so the battle goes on.
AB1955 was the final straw for Elon Musk. ‘Because of this law and the many others that have preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas,’ he wrote. If I was a California resident, I’d be hot on Elon’s heels.
I actually don’t for a minute think that either Newsom or his wife Jennifer themselves buy into trans ideology. Jennifer was a registered Republican until 2008. Gavin was once married to the former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who raised funds for Trump 2020. Both of them must know perfectly well that children can easily be persuaded that they’re ‘trans’, especially if they’re gay. They also know that sexuality has very little to do with gender identity and that the language of ‘outing’ is here being hideously misapplied. A child’s ‘gender identity’ is clearly a parent’s business in a way that their sexuality isn’t. Being gay doesn’t set you on a path that can end in surgery and infertility.
The worst of it is how often and how easily Newsom presents himself as a family man. ‘Husband to Jennifer Siebel Newsom and father,’ reads his social media profile, and only after that comes ‘40th governor of California’. How can he sleep knowing he’s helped encourage mentally unwell children to think of their anxious, caring parents as the enemy? The secret, I suppose, is that he doesn’t care. It’s not expedient to care. That’s the forward-facing way.
My favourite recent video of the Newsom-Siebels is on Jennifer’s Instagram feed, and shows them engaged in a little photo-op good-deeding, doling out lunch at a local school. They’re both wearing plastic gloves and they look as if they wished they had masks on too. In the accompanying voice-over, Jennifer explains that she’s been hard at work ensuring that Californian schools source their canteen food from ‘small and medium-sized BIPOC farmers’.
What a wonderful set of ideas and priorities. How grateful the pupils will be. Say goodbye to your parents, children, but rest assured that your salad has been grown by a local farmer of colour.
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