Gavin Newsom’s racial pandering knows no bounds



Leaders should seek to unify people. Instead, California governor and likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom (D) embraces politics, dividing his constituents into those entitled to privileges and subventions by reason of their melanin, sex, or sexual orientation — and those who are required to fund the largesse.

He opposed race-neutral admissions to the California state university system (overruled by the people of California — twice), imposed gender and racial requirements on corporate boards (held unconstitutional — twice), required ethnic studies and ethnically dumbed-down math in K-12 curricula, and is carefully advancing a potentially multitrillion-dollar reparations plan for California’s black residents.

Whether born of intense self-loathing or kowtowing to the radical left, Newsom’s support for reparations is racist political pandering at its worst.

Newsom’s unconstitutional quest to curry favor with, undermine the confidence of, and potentially spend trillions of dollars on California’s 2.5 million black residents began in 2020 when he signed AB3121 into law, which required the state to study and develop reparation proposals for black Californians, with “special consideration” for descendants of slaves.

Then, in 2022, Newsom established a commission to develop policies that impact racial equity and disparities. The following year, it recommended payments exceeding $1 million for each descendant of slaves, as well as housing assistance, guaranteed wages, racially segregated education, and overturning California’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions, among hundreds of other racially abhorrent policies.

Now, Newsom has established a new bureau nominally to develop programs to implement the commission’s report, but with legislative authority to “expand” its mission to address remedies for the “lasting harms” of disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, neglect, and violence impacting black Californians. The bureau is also authorized to collect nonpublic personal and genetic information to identify those who should obtain preferential treatment.

Newsom vetoed legislation to give admissions preferences to descendants of slaves, which he said colleges can already do; investigate racist property taxes, which is already within the new bureau’s mandate; and allocate 10% of state loans to slave descendants, which is clearly unconstitutional. An appearance of balance is important for a nascent presidential campaign.

Nonetheless, whether born of intense self-loathing or kowtowing to the radical left, Newsom’s support for reparations is racist political pandering at its worst.

Reparations are particularly inappropriate in California. The state was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state, in which slavery was prohibited. Its population today is about 37% non-Hispanic white, 39% Hispanic, 16% Asian, and 6% black. Over a quarter are foreign-born.

There is no doctrine in the United States that holds children liable for the crimes of their parents, much less their distant ancestors; nor do children inherit their ancestors’ debts. In 1860, there were 395,216 slave owners in the 15 states that permitted slavery and none in the other 18 states. In total, about 5%-6% of all U.S. households owned slaves.

Today, most blacks are at least middle class, live in diverse suburbs, and pursue the same careers as whites. They are doctors, lawyers, and chief executives. With about 12.5% of the population, blacks account for a somewhat larger share of U.S. House members and about one-third of the mayors in America’s 100 largest cities. Blacks have held the highest offices in government, from president and vice president to numerous Cabinet positions and 22% of current Supreme Court justices.

RELATED: Gavin Newsom lashes out at Joe Rogan for accusing him of ruining California: ‘He did horrible s**t!’

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In a 2002 Gallup poll, 14% of Americans favored the payment of cash reparations to descendants of black slaves. A 2019 Associated Press-NORC poll found 29% approval. In 2024, a Princeton University-Liberations poll found that 36% of Americans supported at least some form of reparations, with 15% strongly supporting cash payments. A 2022 Rasmussen poll and a 2025 YouGov poll had similar results. About a quarter of blacks oppose reparations.

At least 23 cities and states are considering paying reparations, including New York City, San Francisco, and Boston. Under most reparation proposals, the national cost would range from about $12 trillion to $20 trillion.

While polls usually ask about reparations for descendants of slaves, most commissions also consider payments to other black Americans. A Brookings Institution report justifies giving reparations to wealthy blacks and recent immigrants due to the wealth gap between black and white families.

Polls and partisan commissions aside, the 14th Amendment prohibits governments from allocating benefits based on race. The Supreme Court has been clear that our detour into justifying affirmative action and other race-based programs was a “pernicious aberration.” There have been trillions of dollars of transfer payments to black Americans through welfare, food stamps, loan payments, enterprise zones, minority contracting, and affirmative action. These giveaways deprive blacks of agency and create dependency, not a path toward self-actualization.

Chief Justice John Roberts said it well in the Supreme Court’s decision ending racial preferences in college admissions: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. … [T]he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”

Gavin Newsom knows all this. He just doesn’t care.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Joy Reid said the quiet part out loud — and it’s ugly



Joy Reid has done the parents of America an unexpected kindness.

If you’ve ever wondered what really lies behind the diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy and the “decolonizing” curriculum so prominent in our universities, Reid has made it plain by saying the quiet part out loud.

Appearing with Wajahat Ali on “The Left Hook,” she claimed that “mediocre white men” are simply coasting along on stolen achievements from others. As amusing as it can be to watch Reid melt down and flail in any medium, there is, alas, a serious side to her remarks.

In the space of a few breaths, Reid not only insulted the intelligence of all white people, but also cast herself, unwittingly, as the schoolyard bully.

As one of the few — and I mean very few — conservative professors at Arizona State University, I can testify firsthand that faculty meetings and mandatory “trainings” often turn into open-mic nights for contemptuous remarks about white men. And if you raise the issue, cue the gaslighting chorus: “We can’t be racist. Only white men can be racist.”

So yes, laugh at the absurdity if you like. But parents should know that Joy Reid’s public bile is not an isolated eccentricity. It’s the distilled essence of a worldview taught in classrooms across the country.

Riding on privilege

Consider her credentials: a degree in film studies from Harvard and a lucrative perch in television. Yes, you read that right — film studies. Yet her rant against “whiteness” was no theatrical performance. It was a window into the sort of ignorance and hatred our universities have been happily exporting into the culture for decades.

Her interlocutor, Ali, was even more candid.

These people [white men] cannot create culture on their own. Without black people, brown people, the DEIs, there’s no culture in America. We make the food better. We make the economy better. We make the music better. Right? MAGA can’t create culture. They got Cracker Barrel and Kid Rock.

If you are still operating under the “classical liberalism and respectful pluralism” lens, you need to wake up. The left abandoned that approach decades ago. That might not be what leftists say at “meet the professor night” to get your money, but it’s what you find in their curriculum — and then said out loud by people like Joy Reid.

For those who are still under the illusion that we are committed to pluralism, you might have expected Reid to have exhibited a modicum of moderation: “Hold on, we can’t make sweeping denunciations of an entire people group. Everyone has contributed.” But no. For the academic left, classical liberalism and its old-fashioned respect for difference and fair treatment went out of fashion around the same time as dial-up internet.

Instead, Reid didn’t hide her disdain for those with lighter skin tones. “They don’t have the intellectual rigor to actually argue or debate with us,” she told Ali. “What they do is tattle and tell. They run and tell teacher that ‘the black lady or the brown man was mean to me.’”

Hiding in plain sight

The spectacle is almost too delicious. In the space of a few breaths, she not only insulted the intelligence of all white people, but also cast herself, unwittingly, as the schoolyard bully whose chief grievance is that the other children tell the teacher when she breaks the rules.

The irony, as Kid Rock might have noted with a raised brow, is as dense as a Cracker Barrel biscuit.

When Reid and Ali deign to speak of “culture,” they only mean food and pop music. They spent time sneering at Elvis, as if dismissing him were the final act of liberation. Meanwhile, Reid — a multimillionaire alumna of one of the finest (supposedly) universities in the world — complains of American awfulness and insists that our entire history must be reduced to the story of slavery, with no mention of those white men who fought and died to abolish it.

RELATED: Students are trapped in mandatory DEI disguised as coursework

Photo by Deagreez via iStock/Getty Images

As a professor, I can assure you that this is standard-issue humanities pedagogy in many American universities. Students are not trained to grapple with Mozart, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, or William Lloyd Garrison. They are taught a cartoon version of history in which every problem is “the fault of whiteness” and every solution is a demand for reparations. If those great names of history do appear, they are merely depicted as foils in a morality play about systemic oppression.

Remain vigilant

Parents, take note: Feel free to chuckle at Reid’s self-own, but then remember that people with her views stand in the front of your child’s classroom, smiling benignly during the parent campus tour while privately stewing in the same resentment. Moreover, they expect you to pay them tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being indoctrinated into their hatred.

It’s time to call this nonsense what it is — racism dressed up in academic jargon — and consign it to the ash heap of falsehood. They are free to hold their opinions, and we are free to ignore them and move on.

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