Gavin Newsom Is The New Joe Biden (Inarticulate And Lowkey Racist)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom attempted to relate to the black mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, by saying he was “just like” him because he “cannot read a speech” and scored a 960 on the SAT.
Speaking to Dickens during a book tour event on Sunday, Newsom said: “I’m not, you know, 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,” Newsom continued. “You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. And, you know, and I’m not trying to offend anyone, you know, trying to act all there if you got 940. But literally a 960 SAT guy. I cannot — you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.”
The implication — whether intentional or not — was impossible to ignore. Newsom framed poor intellectual performance as a shared trait with a black mayor while in a city with a near 50 percent black population.
His comments drew immediate backlash, with rapper Nicki Minaj posting: “His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read.”
Senator Ted Cruz posted: “The soft bigotry of low expectations.”
When Fox News’ Sean Hannity criticized Newsom’s comments, Newsom lashed out with profanity: “You didn’t give a sh-t about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations sh-tholes — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia? Spare me your fake f-cking outrage, Sean.”
But notably, his excuse collapses under scrutiny. In 2022 Newsom posted a photo of himself “reading some banned books,” undermining his claim that his comments about not being able to read were literal and relevant to dyslexia. In another instance, Newsom apparently claimed he read a book of more than 300 pages in less than two hours.
If a Republican had said what Newsom said, the verdict would already be in. Recall the “very fine people on both sides” hoax. Responding to a 2017 Charlottesville rally in which neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with protesters, President Donald Trump said that people should realize that there were “very fine people, on both sides” before immediately making clear that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Despite the clear comments, the propaganda press twisted the president’s comments and issued a verdict of racism.
In contrast, media are ignoring Newsom’s comments or explaining them away — because he is a Democrat.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ignored Newsom’s comments in a piece entitled “In Georgia, Gavin Newsom urges Democrats to fight ‘fire with fire.’” The Daily Beast chose to focus on Newsom hitting “Trump with brutal new insult over Kennedy Center.”
Others explained Newsom’s comments away. BET News host Marc Lamont Hill posted: “There are so many legitimate reasons to dislike Gavin Newsom. But don’t fall for fake news. Newsom was talking to a room full of white people. He never mentioned Black people. He was talking about his dyslexia. And he made the same exact comment to a white interviewer.”
Lamont seemingly ignores that Newsom was talking to the black mayor and said he was “just like” him before saying he couldn’t read speeches and scored low on the SAT.
CNN’s Bakari Sellers rushed to announce that Newsom is “the furthest thing from a racist.”
“His remarks show a blindness and were inartful. But leave it there. Donald Trump is racist. Gavin is not,” Sellers said.
The reflexive “blame Trump while ignoring Democrats’ derogatory comments and miscues” approach is the same strategy Democrats have relied on for years, most notably with Joe Biden.
Biden perfected the art of saying offensive, racially charged, or incoherent things — only to have them ignored entirely or dismissed as stutters and gaffes. Biden was able to hide behind his stutter to excuse behavior, for example, that would have sparked visceral backlash for any other candidate. Take Clarence Page’s article from Bowling Green Daily News in 2019.
“Now that the 77-year-old former vice president is running for president, many people understandably are asking whether his notorious gaffes, bloopers and stumbles are related to his age,” Page wrote, referring to the obvious cognitive decline Biden was experiencing. “Maybe the voters who worry about his mental fitness would be more understanding … if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter,” Page added, summarizing the argument of The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson.
By 2024, outlets like The Giro reported that black Democrats didn’t care to focus on Biden’s “stutter” or a “gaffe” because saving “democracy” was more important. And it appears the propaganda press had been following that playbook for the better part of four years until Biden’s cognitive decline became so apparent during the disastrous 2024 presidential debate that it was no longer politically expedient to ignore it.
And, just like Newsom, Biden’s problem was never just his “disability acting up.”
It was also the content of what he was saying.
In 1977, Biden opposed forced busing to desegregate schools because he didn’t want his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
Decades later, he heralded then-candidate Barack Obama for being “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Rather than accuse Biden of racism, The Washington Post would later characterize those comments as “Biden fumbl[ing] his way through that backhanded compliment and walk[ing] into a racial quagmire.”
Years after that, Biden eulogized Robert Byrd, a former organizer and member of the KKK. Byrd, according to Reuters, was the “top officer in the local klan.” Byrd later apologized for his involvement in the KKK, but that doesn’t excuse Biden eulogizing him.
Biden claimed in 2019 that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Biden’s team came out and simply attributed the statement to a gaffe.
One year later, Biden said black people who don’t vote for him aren’t really black while appearing on The Breakfast Club. “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden said.
That same year, Biden suggested to a group of black and Hispanic journalists that “unlike the African community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
Despite all these statements, the media and Democrat politicians never decried Biden as an irredeemable racist — the same way they won’t call Newsom a racist.
Whether Newsom’s comments were intentionally racist is almost beside the point. By the standards the media routinely apply to the right, they absolutely qualify.
Yet Newsom, like the rest of his party, is able to say these types of things because he knows the corporate media will accept any excuse from Democrats — while they eagerly denounce Republicans as racist based on the barest pretext.
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