CHARLIE KIRK: Here's what I learned after talking with Gavin Newsom: GOP beware

I had the opportunity to be the very first guest on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new podcast last week. I’m under no illusions about why I was invited: Gavin Newsom wants to run for president in three years, and he thinks that talking conservative figures like me increase his recognition, help him present as a centrist, and cast him as a champion of the left in a time when the left has no real leaders.

A few people have complained that I shouldn’t have done the show at all. How could I help platform Gavin Newsom, they say. To that, I bluntly say: Are those people nuts? Gavin Newsom isn’t an oddball college professor or an obscure blogger. He is the governor of one of America’s largest states, one of the world’s largest economies and the nerve center of many of America’s most important companies and industries. Of course, I’m going to talk to him if he asks!

So, what did I see, talking with Gavin for an hour and a half, face to face?

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Unsurprisingly, Newsom is charming and friendly in-person. You don’t become governor of 40 million people without having some charisma. But there’s clearly a layer beneath the charm. I saw that Newsom wants to be president more than any living person (and possibly every dead person, too). He is an ambitious man, and his new podcast is clearly a product of that ambition. 

One thing I learned in my podcast experience: The California governor isn’t a joke. He has a shark’s instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish’s memory. 

That ambition came through when I brought up Gavin Newsom’s support of Prop 16, a measure to legalize racial discrimination in California that lost by more than 16 points in 2020. Back then, at the height of the George Floyd moment, it looked like wokeness, BLM, and CRT were going to dominate America for ages and so he was right there to support their worst excesses. But now, wokeness is in rapid retreat. 

So how did Newsom defend his support? He evaded, and acted like he had to check his notes to remember what I was talking about! 

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Gavin didn’t need any notes: What he was doing was a stall tactic. Before he ties himself down on that issue, he wants to see where the winds blow the next few years.

They say that Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player ever because, rather than going where the puck was, he could anticipate where the puck would be in the future and went there. 

Newsom is similarly savvy with politics. In 2004, when he was mayor of San Francisco, he became nationally famous by ordering city clerks to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At the time, he was violating California state law and going against a large majority of Americans. But Newsom anticipated what was coming. Within just a few years, Democrats would overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage and now Newsom had credibility for being ahead of the curve. 

Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk is the guest on California Gov. Gavin Newsom's inaugural edition of his "This is Gavin Newsom" podcast. (Gavin Newsom on X)

Do I think the man who was so far out front on gay marriage is suddenly really a moderate on women’s sports? Not even close. But he can see the polls. He’s moving to where the puck will be in four years.

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But we shouldn’t fall for this pivot, and fortunately, swerving to the center won’t be that simple for Gavin. In the end, he still has an eight-year record as governor of California. He signed a bill making it illegal to require that teachers tell parents when a student has changed their name and gender while at school. He signed AB 101, which mandates ethnic studies classes in California public schools. Under his watch shoplifting became so rampant that pharmacies had to lock up their toothpaste. Newsom’s California loses over 200,000 people a year in out-migration to other states.

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Newsom got a bit irritated when I suggested he was "slick," precisely because it’s so accurate. His show is a charm offensive, a calculated play, a rebrand for a man who knows the Democratic Party took a beating in 2024 and needs a new face. He hopes that by looking moderate on the perfect cocktail of issues, he can both get liberals to back him in a primary and then moderates and Republicans to back him in a general election.

It might work. One thing I learned in my podcast experience: The governor isn’t a joke. He has a shark’s instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish’s memory. 

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He knows his current record can’t win him the White House, and so he’s trying to rewrite what that record is. 

The conservatives he speaks with in the weeks to come shouldn’t let him.

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