California Gov. Gavin Newsom Tries Desperately to Ditch Covid Record
Newsom’s track record during the pandemic is rife with failure and hypocrisy.
By now, it is an open secret that California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to run for president in 2028.
Newsom’s challenge is that he is term-limited as governor, and so will no longer hold office when the primary field begins to take shape. This will severely hamper attempts to seem relevant and to rework narratives.
Among the numerous failures Newsom will have to explain are the many poor choices he made in regards to the COVID pandemic and how his administration embraced the complete suite of draconian policies pushed on this nation by “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.
Newsom kicked off his rewrite of the state’s COVID response by appearing on former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan’s podcast. During their conversation, Ryan asked Newsom to reply to a “tough” question from fellow podcaster Joe Rogan. The question was: who should be held responsible for requiring COVID vaccines for children, and for the rise in related health issues?
Additionally, Ryan asked if the California governor felt “any remorse for that draconian decision that was obviously heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical companies’ desire for maximum profit?”.
Newsom’s response was as slick as you would expect, blaming Florida and “experts” and denying ownership in the ponderous set of pandemic policy choices that throttled the state for about three years.
“I mean, Florida shut down their bars and restaurants before California. The question was, when did we start to unwind some of those restrictions? California was more restrictive and we were certainly aggressive at scale,” he said.
The governor claimed his team was compiling an “objective review” of the good and bad outcomes of these policies and comparing them to what other states did.
Regarding vaccines, Newsom declared they “save lives” but that he respected Rogan’s question. He explained that he received “a lot of feedback” from independent advisors regarding their safety.
“I took their advice, not as a doctor, but as a governor. So, with humility — seriously — humility and grace, I’ve asked them to have that report done. It’s going to be done next month. And it’ll be the only state that I know of that is putting out a truly objective review of what went right and what went wrong,” he added.
Don’t worry everybody, the guy that arrested a paddle boarder in the ocean, filled up skate parks with sand, and locked everyone in their homes is going to independently investigate the COVID-19 response in California https://t.co/y2kgi90WEr
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) July 14, 2025
Unfortunately for Newsom, many of us were collecting all the receipts and challenging the narratives being put out by the “experts.” Newsom could have made different choices, but he went with the most heavy-handed option possible.
I would like to take a look at some of the “highlights” of Newsom’s COVID response. California was among the first states to issue statewide stay-at-home orders and one of the last to lift them, keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed for extended periods.
Trump’s own lockdown guidance even predated DeSantis’ first and only stay-at-home order in Florida. On March 16, 2020, then-President Trump and his White House Coronavirus Task Force leader, Dr. Anthony Fauci, unveiled their “15 Days to Slow the Spread” plan, which recommended that governors shut down schools, restaurants, and other public places. Newsom closed down his state three days later, while DeSantis waited more than two weeks to issue his on April 1, 2020, which lasted for 30 days and never returned.
While DeSantis took a more libertarian approach to the pandemic, Newsom repeatedly shut down businesses in his state throughout 2020 and 2021, and he used his authority to make sure all of California’s local governments had restrictions in place – even threatening to cut funding to some cities that refused to enforce them.
It took Newsom 3 years to end California State of Emergency orders for COVID.
While most schools were closed, Newsom’s own children attended in-person classes at a private school. Additionally, there was also the infamous “French Laundry” incident, which fueled a recall effort against Newsom.
A rising chorus of parents and educators have demanded a statewide policy covering when to reopen school campuses; so far, those decisions have been left largely to local school districts, a matter particularly galling to those who note that Newsom’s four children returned this fall for limited in-person teaching at a private school in Sacramento.
The most flammable moment came last month, when Newsom attended a dinner at a pricey Napa Valley restaurant. Photos leaked to a Los Angeles TV station showed the governor and his wife sitting in tight quarters with others, none of whom were wearing masks.
In one way, Newsom is an over-achiever. There have been 7 recall petitions and one recall measure that made the ballot in 2021. The number includes a 2025 effort, targeting his response to the Los Angeles wildfire disaster.
An effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) began on March 28, 2025. Supporters of the recall have 160 days—or no later than September 4, 2025—to collect 1,311,963 signatures to require a recall election.
Proponents of the recall effort criticize Governor Newsom for his handling of the Los Angeles County fires, the rising cost of living—including gas, electricity, and insurance—along with concerns about crime rates, homelessness, the drug epidemic, and border-related issues.
Despite Newsom’s current push to rebrand himself as a “centrist” and moderate administrator of government policies, his political opponents will have plenty of material to work with.
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Comments
Good luck with that… “The Internet is forever.”
Newsom has such a record for abject failure that the only way he could win an election now – any election – is by outright fraud.
Hang that Covid BS around his neck like a dead stinking albatross.
And “outright fraud” is the DNC’s Standard Operating Procedure.
Nah. What he will do is tell everyone that he did all the right things. The gullible will believe him and vote for him. Remember: there are many more voters with IQs less than 105 than with IQs over that. Appeals to voters from people like Newsome are never on reason, they’re on emotions. Only emotions.
The more repulsive these creatures are to intelligent people of goodwill, the more attractive they are to their base.
Well put.
Anytime I see his Orwellian revisionist history of his Covid record on X, I’ll post a link as a comment reminding people just how he acted. Like a totalitarian king. Pretty much everything he says is a denial of history and detached from reality.
The correct method of comparing covid deaths is by age group.
Unfortunately obtaining covid deaths by age group requires a lot of time to find the source data.
CA covid deaths were about 2846 per 1m population
FL covid deaths were about 4433 per 1m population
CA population over 65 is about 15.7% while Florida over 65 population is about 21.5%. Adjusting for age, Florida and CA covid deaths rates were almost the same.
note – there are a lot of ‘age adjusted studies, though it is quite easy to play games with the weighting of deaths by age. Since the over 65+ age group had about 80% of the covid deaths nationwide, that is the demographic that should be most heavily weighted.
What we need is a complete, thorough, and politically independent review of death certificates from March 2020 to March 2023. My guess is that only 10% of the deaths attributed to Covid will have covid as a primary cause. The rest will simply be an other process where covid was coincidental. It was a clear case of one phenomena being overdiagnosed and many others ignored. A major difficulty with this process is determining how artfully the documents were falsified. For starters, consider the miraculous decrease in deaths attributed to heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc. Heck, even influenza disappeared. IIRC, following an egregious example of reporting, Colorado reviewed their 1100 covid deaths to date and 300 were immediately tossed. I suspect many hundreds more could be similarly challenged. Giving money to the families and to the hospitals, IMHO, constituted a bribe for false reporting at the time.
Time will show that the shutdown caused 5-10X the damage a pandemic would have. The scamdemic was fueled entirely by a desire for power and money, real costs be damned.
As stated above, the deaths rates by state properly adjusted for age – results in very little discrepancy in death rates by state (republican state or democrat state – the virus was an equal opportunity killer.
Another area that I have is vax vs unvaxed death rates. CDC data shows your chance of covid death as 7-10x greater for the unvaxed.
However, almost every data point shows that is highly unlikely to be true.
A – The historical average death rates for the 3rd major wave is usually about 50-70% of the 2nd major wave. The US death rates in the nov2021/jan2022 fell right in line with the historical average.
B – since about 85%-90% of the over 65 age population was vaxed, the death rates in the nov 2021/jan 2022 wave should have been about 25%-30% of the Nov 2020/jan 2021 wave, not 60%.
C – About 40-45 of the states had higher death rates after the vax.
D – the only exceptions were states that had high early deaths such as NY and NJ, Those states death rates declined because they already killed off a high percentage of the elderly, thus fewer vulnerable to kill
Also consider that healthy people are people more concerned about their health, and they made up a large proportion of those vaxxed. The converse is that less healthy people often are people who aren’t concerned with their health, and they are less likely to get any vaccine. The healthy vaxxed almost to a certainty would never have died from Covid even if they remained unvaxxed, while the unhealthy unvaxxed would have been more likely to have died from Covid. This skews the figures to make the vaxxes seem more effective than they actually were.
Consider that the infection fatality rate (IFR) for all age groups combined was somewhere around 0.24% (about one-quarter of one percent). This means that even without the vaxxes, nearly everyone who was infected survived. This also means that nearly everyone who was vaxxed would have survived Covid without being vaxxed. The vaxxes had nothing to do with the survival of nearly everyone (more than 99 out of every 100) who was vaxxed. “The vaxxes saved lives” is complete BS.
Also note that even if the vaxxes saved 50% of those vaxxed who otherwise would have died of Covid, that would have only improved the IFR by 0.12%. Although a 100% effective vax would have made the IFR 0%, a reduction of 100%, that only improves the IFR by 0.24%. Let that sink in. At best, the vaxxes could have only improved the IFR by 0.24%. Now, a vaccine against a virus with an IFR of 20% would improve outcomes greatly if it was only 50% effective. Reducing an IFR from 20% to 10% would be a huge improvement. But an improvement of 0.24% would have hardly moved the needle, and that is true whether the IFR is 20% or 0.24%.
Dave – likely a lot of truth to that
My personal observation is that I know several elderly and unhealthy individuals that did not get the vax, though the reason seemed to a case of not wanting to be exposed to other people vs not caring about their health.
Additional reply to Dave –
You mention risk assessment. I personally chose not to get vaxed at age 65/66 with the logic that my personal risk factors were very low ( in comparison to the rest of the population) , endurance athlete, along with other health traits. My risk factor was simply too low.
“It was a clear case of one phenomena being overdiagnosed and many others ignored.”
Let’s never forget there was an actual bounty for reporting each “COVID” death.
And that’s if you actually BELIEVE the ‘covid deaths’ nonsense.
It’s been well known, and they all finally admitted, that the vast majority of those died WITH covid, rather than FROM covid, because hospitals got more money for claiming a covid death, so they tested literally everybody that came in, and if you were positive, you died of covid.
Absurdity like the guy rushed to the hospital with 5 gunshot wounds. Cause of death – covid.
Agreed. This is also why comparing international COVID statistics is a lost battle. It all depends on the incentives. If I recall correctly, George Floyd tested positive for COVID in his autopsy. Now why would they do that? I wonder if his death was used as a COVID statistic for the benefit of some medical establishment?
As able as he is at climbing greasy poles, it won’t do any good.
Unfortunately, fraud is a major obstacle now in many states including California. California appears to be high risk for fraud given the fact that the DOJ has already stomped one large area from registering illegals as citizens so they can vote. How safe is the motor voter law in California? Heaven help us if Newson wins!
Newsom is a sociopath.
The purpose of the covid lockdowns was not protecting public health but a barometer as to what Sheep Factor the people would accept. They got their answer. Soon after, the migrant onslaught began and here we are with the threat to Western culture and One-World government. A lot has changed in the last ten years, no?
Newsom and his travelers will never admit wrongdoing, nor do they have to. You just saw it in your friends and family. How many times were you mocked as having more knowledge than doctors or scientists? That shut up people very quickly — even though they saw with their own two eyes how the rich and powerful were not the one bit concerned about wearing masks or distancing, and lived their lives as if the threat didn’t exist.
Many a times I asked how I was so sure that covid was not the deadly threat the media portrayed it to be and my answer was always I will be concerned about a pandemic when the people who tell me it’s a pandemic start conducting themselves like there is a pandemic — for Newsome and his ilk are the biggest cowards among us.
“…I will be concerned about a pandemic when the people who tell me it’s a pandemic start conducting themselves like there is a pandemic…”
An actually threatening pandemic will be obvious. Nobody will have to tell you to stay home and shelter in place. They tried to make such a threat out of Covid, with the very scary numbers from Italy that were generated in nursing homes. It didn’t work. So they panicked people (intentionally) by conducting the theatrical production of “pandemic response” and all that entailed. Too many people were convinced “If the response is this draconian, Covid must be a serious threat.”
Yes, the lockdowns and other measures were a test to see how large a segment of the population would comply. But the compliance was also a measure of their ability to induce panic.
they wont need to lie
They will blame AI
AI gave the orders
AI put you in the gulag
AI attacked the whts and j ews
and on it goes until it doesnt
Newscum gave himself “emergency powers” and locked everything longer than any other state crushing business. He squandered billions on faulty masks ordered over internet in middle of night from china, without spending approval from state assembly. CA had staggering amount of pandemic relief fraud, more than any other state. The book has yet to be written on this debacle in CA.