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The nepo baby who failed up to lead the fifth-largest economy in the world may soon find himself overseeing the world’s last superpower
We humans—when we take a little break from destroying the Earth—are quite talented at producing books and movies about impending dystopia. And, occasionally, art becomes life when trickles of a hyperstratified future leak into the present.
The pandemic, in particular, offered a glimpse into the divisions that will emerge more sharply down the road, à la “Oryx and Crake,” Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novel. In the fall of 2020, after placing his state under some of the strictest lockdown orders in the U.S., California Gov. Gavin Newsom attended a private dinner at the French Laundry, a three-Michelin star restaurant in the Napa Valley. The tasting menu typically costs at least $425 per person, before taxes and alcohol.
The news of the little party—a birthday celebration for a powerful lobbyist, which included 12 guests from more than three different households—broke just a few hours after Newsom strongly discouraged Californians from traveling for Thanksgiving or gathering in groups.
This was certainly not the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic that the governor of the most populous state was widely criticized for his comportment. A few days before Thanksgiving 2020, he noted that his children—who attend private school—had returned to the classroom, while the vast majority of public schools in California remained shuttered. While Newsom allowed private schools to seek waivers to reopen in the first year of COVID, he didn’t put the same effort toward ensuring that students in his state’s public school system could have the advantage of in-person learning.
It’s not surprising that the son of judge and attorney William Newsom, who administered the multibillion-dollar Getty family trust, seemed totally unaware of his hypocritical conduct during a health emergency, while presiding over one of the most unequal and segregated states in the U.S. What is surprising, however, is that so many Americans seem perfectly willing to hand the country over to him.
Failing up
In 1985, Newsom entered Santa Clara University to study political science. This process is described by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters as one that “like so many of his formative opportunities, was substantially boosted by friends and acquaintances of his father, William Newsom, a San Francisco judge and financial adviser to the Gettys, the wealthy oil family.” After graduating with a waiver, still in his early 20s, Newsom became an entrepreneur, and in 10 of his 11 businesses, Gordon P. Getty was the lead investor. The 92-year-old, according to Bloomberg, is worth over $7.5 billion.
Somehow, Newsom and his wife have managed to make millions of dollars during the former’s career in public service, most of it from wine sales. Somehow, the public is expected to believe that he managed to be a political appointee (former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Kamala Harris’ ex-boyfriend, appointed a 28-year-old Newsom to the San Francisco Parking and Traffic Commission), a member of the Board of Supervisors (1997-2004), the mayor of San Francisco (2004-2011), the lieutenant governor of California (2011-2019) and, since then, the governor of California … all while being a brilliant wine merchant.
The echoes of George W. Bush ring loudly when you consider how Newsom—a mediocre student and nepo baby who struggled with alcohol use—has ended up leading the fifth-largest economy in the world.
The echoes of George W. Bush ring loudly when you consider how Newsom—a mediocre student and nepo baby who struggled with alcohol use—has ended up leading the fifth-largest economy in the world.
In these respects, Newsom feels a bit like a liberal version of “Dubya,” but in others, there are shades of “The Donald.” Siebel Newsom—the governor’s second wife—once wrote an email to Harvey Weinstein (whom she later accused of rape) asking him for advice on how to handle a sex scandal involving her husband, who carried out an affair with his campaign manager’s wife.
This is the Hollywood milieu of the Newsoms, and it sometimes feels just as surreal and sleazy as the Trump family orbit. In fact, Donald Trump Jr. was previously engaged to Newsom’s ex-wife, Republican campaign adviser and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, now the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
Certainly, high achievers who are largely self-made, such as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama (and, to an extent, even President Donald Trump, who turned his inherited wealth into a global brand and a household name decades before entering politics) have behaved quite cruelly upon overseeing American foreign policy. But in terms of death toll, looking at recent administrations, perhaps the middling performers—Bush and Biden—have actually turned out to be the most destructive, leaving their administrations entirely in the hands of others. I think of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who respectively oversaw the mass murder of Iraqis and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
As he scoops up a multimillion-dollar property in Marin County, California, hosts his own podcast, and teases a presidential run, the man who is supposed to be governing a state that has 40 million people—a population equivalent to Canada’s—seems to be firmly in the category of puppet rulers. Coddled by machine politics and a gerontocratic Democratic Party, Newsom has just as little depth, conviction, and capacity as Harris, a fellow Californian traveler in an undeserved, dishonest rise.
Sometimes, the empty suits who don’t believe in anything (except, perhaps, in the cost and cut of the suit) have the potential to be even more vicious than ideologues and demagogues.
Our man in Silicon Valley, the new Holy Land
When the Israeli regime began its genocidal campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Newsom was one of the first American politicians to visit the occupation state, giving his full-throated support to the operation.
While California’s governor has occasionally paid lip service to the Palestine movement in the U.S., he neither broke with the Biden administration on arming the Israelis, nor has he ever truly opposed the American-backed genocidal society that controls the lives and movements of Palestinians. Any anti-Netanyahu comment that you may hear him make in the coming months and years will be—like his past waffling—measured and eventually walked back. He will never break with the apartheid state, just like he will never break with the place that has helped finance his rise: Silicon Valley.
Over the course of his 30 years in politics, the governor has solicited enormous sums of money from Silicon Valley. Tech billionaires in the state found a true ally in Newsom, and they’re searching for a successor who will be just as friendly. In fact, as far back as 2018—in an ugly foreshadowing of the alliances that are going to fuck us all up—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cut Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign a check for $10,000.
Israel and Silicon Valley are the two principal dystopias where humanity’s rebellion (or what remains of it) is being crushed. These sites conjure up images of robot guns, 24/7 surveillance, data mining, and targets on a screen. In short, a war-torn hellscape from the not-so-far-off future. And the elites of both places will do everything they can to determine who will lead the U.S. in the post-Trump era.
Like Harris boasting about her pro-Israel activities during childhood, Newsom frequently repeats that he grew up attending Jewish Community Center camps that aim to “infuse Israel in everything.” Like the failed presidential candidate, he’s part of the deeply Zionist Californian elite, one which is intertwined with Big Tech. As recently as March, Newsom emphasized that he reveres the state of Israel (a state whose society is committing genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese people), and he has made no secret of the fact that the biggest tech CEOs in the state have a direct line to him.
This perverse coziness is indicative of a pseudo-culture that the Silicon Valley class—the Epstein class— belongs to: a culture of nerd domination, with computers picking targets and field trips to gated settlements in the Occupied West Bank.
Given his dismal record as a mayor and governor—presiding over a rise in homelessness, the codification of anti-Palestinian racism, and the deregulation of data center construction—it seems quite obvious that, in the White House, Newsom wouldn’t lift a finger to halt this slide toward extreme inequality, mass surveillance, and environmental catastrophe. He would likely have no qualms with checkpoints going up around cities while he attends wine tastings, and should he ever govern the U.S., you can bet that the unchecked power of conglomerates—from BlackRock to Palantir, from Elbit Systems to Tesla—will reach unprecedented levels.
As a supreme class of trillionaires is enriched and a whole privileged class of data center workers is created, more and more human beings will be condemned to the status of “cloud serfs,” a term used by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in his 2023 book “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.” Automated out of their professional fields, priced out of their neighborhoods, pushed off their land, and relegated to dreary, low-paid, online tasks, they (or we) will live “increasingly precarious, stressful lives,” Varoufakis laments, “under the invisible thumb of algorithmic bosses.”
Under a Newsom administration, a dystopic reality won’t merely be accelerated within the U.S. at the bidding of his Silicon Valley stronghold. Abroad, he will continue to do the will of the Israeli lobby, funneling weapons and funds to continue Jewish supremacist expansionism in the Levant.
A big smile for a tired country
The president who succeeds Trump will inherit a burned-out population, a society that’s more unequal than ever, an underclass ravaged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a university system crippled by Zionist censorship, and a shocking amount of power (and trillions of dollars) in the hands of firms such as BlackRock. After the Gaza genocide, the bombardment of Iran, and the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the world will be loathing the U.S. more than at any other time since the invasion of Iraq.
It is unlikely that this future American president will be the widely despised JD Vance. The vice president’s Ohio charm, Hindu wife, and general difficulty portraying a human being are going to be substantial obstacles to reach the MAGA base in an image-driven political contest. But the Democratic Party—whose leadership will do everything in its power to block the rise of a progressive candidate such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who wants to (albeit tardily and opportunistically) rein in Big Tech and cut off Israel—has two actors right out of central casting to occupy the White House.
Newsom and his wife are a TV-perfect couple who express all the “correct” opinions that liberal Americans hold. They are affable, very white, and unbearably positive. They are the Democratic answer to the Republican reality show of the past decade. You can picture them getting along fabulously with Oprah (and her corporate sponsorship). Rather than the grim phrase “American carnage,” they could very easily deploy a polar-opposite slogan: “Everything is wonderful.”
For years now, on his podcast, comedian and satirist Tim Dillon has ridiculed the career politician. And, at one point in 2025, he took issue with the governor of California starting his “This is Gavin Newsom” podcast:
Nobody sitting on an ash heap in Altadena wants him on a podcast. They want him to run the state. You have a job as the governor of California. That’s a hard job, right? You keep saying it is. … How in God’s name do you have the time to do a podcast? Can you imagine launching a podcast in the ash heap of your state? Is Gavin Newsom going to read ads while people try to find housing in his state? When you’re in the public eye for many, many years, eventually, people are going to get sick of you, or your policies contribute to their lives becoming a hell. And they’re angry. So, you go, “I’m going to do a relaunch. All that other shit you heard about me? That ain’t me. This is me now.” The guy who’s talking to Charlie Kirk. This is what Gavin Newsom is doing now, instead of being governor of California.
When he’s not estate shopping, hanging out at the vineyard, or doing media events around the country (or at Davos), Newsom has used his podcast to host racist provocateurs—including Kirk and Ben Shapiro—in a Hail Mary attempt to either make the most violence-crazed Americans sympathetic toward him, or to impress liberal Americans with his ability to sit down with segregationists and apply some folksy tolerance. He shamelessly markets himself, even when his state is literally on fire. And when he actually has to address the fires—be it in interviews or via rare encounters with voters—he does so with a big, whitened smile, cringeworthy hand gestures, and upbeat, empty phrases that demonstrate no understanding of what ordinary people go through. The aviators are just an accessory that screams, “I am checked out.”
Gavin Newsom will pose on scorched land for a photo-op and earnestly declare that “we are in the midst of a climate emergency,” while vetoing legislation to help make it easier for his donors to build the data centers that suck up the water.
He is Gavin, fiddling while Los Angeles burns. He will pose on scorched land for a photo-op and earnestly declare that “we are in the midst of a climate emergency,” while vetoing legislation to help make it easier for his donors to build the data centers that suck up the water.
None of this will necessarily hold the governor back. This is because America is a country that doesn’t weaponize envy. On the contrary, the wealthy are revered; the rich and famous are modern gods. Even if polls show that barely a quarter of Americans have a somewhat or very positive impression of the governor, there is such an overwhelming desire to rid the country of Trump (or to prevent a Vance presidency)—and such a behemoth Democratic Party machine operating for Newsom—that it may not even matter how people feel. The narcissism of the incumbent president is so palpable that his potential replacement’s egomania could prove to be socially acceptable by comparison.
Maybe, more darkly, Newsom’s place atop the polls simply shows what Americans have become. Maybe it reveals the ultimate triumph of post-literate, pro-corporate, artificial politics in the society that determines whether much of the world’s population has the opportunity to live peacefully, or be bombed. As sociologist Neil Postman wrote in his 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” “On television, the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.”
After completing his term, should his lead in the Democratic presidential primaries hold, it is likely that Newsom will become president of the addicted, self-destructive society that I have frequently explored. And, if he gets the chance to be a clean-cut spokesperson for its violent, continued decline, this will have only come about because the country didn’t really want to change; it just wanted to coat itself in a veneer of respectability. It wanted to change the language, not the content.
There’s an old saying about how voters have short memories (which will make a lot of sense if, in the end, Newsom’s “relaunch” works out). And there’s a relatively new saying, coined by “Succession” writer and producer Susan Soon He Stanton about how, in a post-literate society, people don’t want anything substantial. Rather, they much prefer “tasty morsels, from groovy hubs.”
As wildfires burn, Tesla battery runoff flows into rivers, and the infinite scroll drags us deeper into a blank state of mind, we’ll soon find out if California’s oligarchs can make a groovy Gen-Xer into a palatable tasting menu for the American public. Now, just like at the French Laundry, the alcohol may not be included … but you’re certainly going to need it.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
A historian by training, Avik Jain Chatlani is the author of This Country is No Longer Yours. He has taught in schools and prisons in Latin America and the United States.
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