Make no mistake, the mounting evidence of bribery surrounding President Joe Biden and his family can only be buried one way: an admission of his major cognitive decline, necessitating his dropping out of the 2024 race.
The only factors keeping him in the White House are the need to keep up the charade (else Biden prematurely become a lame duck), the fear of Vice President Kamala Harris’ utter lack of qualification or disposition for the job of president, and the desire of Biden’s staff to extract every last drop of grift — like ticks burrowed into presidential power.
When Biden’s handlers drop the pretense, the race for the Democratic nomination will be a short, intense sprint, favoring those with existing name ID, money, connections, and ideologies acceptable to the ascendant left-wing of the Democratic Party. The winner will be California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Created for the Swamp
If you need further evidence of this likelihood, then look at the increasing volume of fire by Newsom aimed at his potential big state rival, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. After Newsom said he’d debate DeSantis, DeSantis shot back, challenging Newsom by asking him if he was “…going to throw [his] hat in the ring and challenge Joe? Are you going to do it? Or are you going to sit on the sidelines and chirp? … Stop pussyfooting around.” DeSantis went on to note that Newsom’s “…got huge problems in his state,” with the Golden State’s population decline pointing to “a massive exodus out of California.”
So, who is Newsom? If globalists, with their leftist hivemind worldview, were to spawn the perfect politician in a vat, Newsom would emerge from the goo, slick his hair back, and proceed to win one office after another, a bioplastic terminator of liberty.
Newsom, his friends, and his backers, are creatures of San Francisco, a city that draws its old money elite from the Boston clipper ship clans who made their fortunes off the 1849 gold rush.
Silver Spoons
Newsom was born in the epicenter of the Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco. His father, William A. Newsom, 32, married Tessa, age 19, in September 1966. Tessa’s mother acted under the stage name Trigger Addis in the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. Tessa’s father was the assistant curator at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. Gavin was born a year after the marriage, and his sister, a year after that. William Newsom would divorce Tessa in the early 1970s.
William “Bill” Newsom had interesting connections — connections that would launch his son into the rarefied world of money, power, and privilege.
Bill’s father — Newsom’s grandfather — was a native San Franciscan who was campaign manager for former Democratic Gov. Pat Brown’s campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Brown would be elected California’s attorney general in 1950 and reelected in 1954, then serve as governor from 1959 to 1967. His son, Jerry, would serve four nonconsecutive terms as California’s governor.
Bill Newsom’s sister — Gavin’s aunt — was once married to Ron Pelosi, brother-in-law of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Importantly for Gavin, his father lived with Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, when he attended prep school in San Francisco. Getty was the richest man in the world.
Bill Newsom would later work for Getty Oil in Italy. When J. Paul Getty’s grandson was kidnapped in Rome by the Mafia, it was Bill Newsom who delivered the ransom payment of $2.2 million — after John Paul Getty III’s ear was sent to a newspaper. This would lead to Bill becoming the Getty family’s tax attorney.
One of Bill’s side jobs would become relevant for Gavin. He was an attorney and board member for defense contractor Trans-International Computer Investment Corporation (TCI), a firm in which Getty had substantial ownership. During most of 1969 and 1970, when Gavin was 1 to 2 years old, Bill traveled Europe with TCI Vice President Otto von Bolschwing.
During World War II, von Bolschwing was part of the Nazi SS Gestapo where he reported to Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. Eichmann — along with the infamous “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele, and other top Nazis — fled to Argentina after the war. Von Bolschwing, presumably with the help of his wartime Nazi contacts, helped Bill get his start importing wine from Argentina — an occupation Gavin would later pick up with financial backing from the Getty family and others.
Jerry Brown would later appoint Bill Newsom as a state judge. The elder Newsom was also on the boards of the Sierra Club Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund, during a time when the former was explicitly anti-immigration and in favor of population control — a position later abandoned for tactical political purposes to align with the larger left-wing movement that saw increased immigration as a key to power. The elder Newsom’s link to an explicitly Malthusian organization fits with Gavin Newsom’s own view of an Earth that is better off with far fewer people on it.
After Newsom’s father divorced his mother, the Getty family effectively adopted Gavin into their world, bringing Gavin on trips to Europe and opening the door to the rarefied world of the super wealthy.
For five years, Gavin Newsom attended a private French American bilingual school in San Francisco, though he went to a public high school where he excelled in sports. He graduated from Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit college, in 1989.
At 23, Newsom founded PlumpJack Associates L.P. with financial backing from the Getty family. A year later, Newsom started his wine business. PlumpJack’s various operations would eventually employ 700 people.
Power Trip
By 1995, Newsom volunteered for longtime California State Assemblyman Willie Brown’s campaign for mayor of San Francisco. Within a year, Brown launched Newsom’s political career with an appointment to the Parking and Traffic Commission and then, a year after that, to a vacant seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Newsom, 29, was the youngest member of the board at the time.
Of note, in 1994, Speaker Willie Brown gave future Vice President Kamala Harris her political start. They were dating at the time. She was 29 and he was 60.
Newsom quickly climbed the political ladder, winning a full four-year term to the board of supervisors in 1999 and getting reelected in 2002 in an uncontested race. In San Francisco, the County Board of Supervisors is essentially the city council and governs both the city and the county.
In 2001, Newsom married Kimberly Guilfoyle, now Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancé. But four years later, Newsom had an affair with the wife of his friend and campaign manager. Newsom and Guilfoyle divorced shortly after.
In 2003, Newsom won his race for mayor of San Francisco and replaced Willie Brown, with backing from Brown, President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and even Jesse Jackson.
Newsom pushed the envelope on same-sex marriage in 2004 when he directed the San Francisco city-county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in violation of state law. This move gained him notoriety nationwide, though the state Supreme Court soon annulled the unions.
Newsom remarried in 2008 to Jennifer Siebel, who attended exclusive private schools in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and became a successful actor. Before meeting Newsom, she dated George Clooney.
Newsom announced his campaign for governor in 2009, receiving Bill Clinton’s endorsement. But prior two-term California governor and current California Attorney General Jerry Brown was the prohibitive favorite, and Newsom dropped out 13 months before the election and filed instead for lieutenant governor. Of note, Brown came in second to Clinton in the 1992 Democratic nomination contest — something that likely motivated Clinton to endorse against his old rival.
Newsom was elected lieutenant governor in 2010 and reelected in 2014, marking time while Jerry Brown was in office in a position as powerless as the vice president. But, with Newsom widely expected to take the reins from an elderly and soon-to-be-termed-out Jerry Brown, the perch of lieutenant governor was quite valuable in a more traditional, if corrupt, fashion.
Grifty Gavin
Corruption in California appears to be on the upswing, especially when elected officials can push or block projects worth millions or even billions of dollars. This generally applies to lawmakers exercising land-use authority or sway over contracts in locally elected offices that do not attract much media scrutiny, or with chief executives, such as a governor or mayor. (Of the roughly 160 assembly members I served with over six years, three have been convicted of bribery and one was just indicted. Three of the four were charged for crimes they committed at the local level.)
Newsom’s corruption, in contrast to my former convicted colleagues, is right out in the open in the form of “behested payments.” Behested payments have an unseemly connection to powerfully placed politicians.
The grift works like this: Monied interests with business before the state, or with exposure to regulatory fiat, are approached by Newsom. (It’d be a shame if the California Public Utilities Commission were to rule against you…) Before you know it, Pacific Gas and Electric, AT&T, Comcast, and scores and scores of other businesses write thousands of checks totaling almost a quarter of a billion dollars in 2020 alone to the “California Partners Project” and other nonprofits favored by Newsom.
Even the bankrupt Silicon Valley Bank chipped in $100,000 — with all its wealthy and connected depositors subsequently bailed out by American taxpayers in the form of higher bank fees. Newsom lobbied for the bailout but did not disclose that he would financially benefit from the federal help.
Of course, the governor’s wife just so happens to run the “California Partners Project” and was paid at least $2.3 million from 2011 to 2018 — $287,500 annually, more than the governor’s own salary of $224,000. In an odd bit of timing, The Sacramento Bee reported that behested payments to Siebel’s project ballooned 30 percent to $16 million after Newsom announced his candidacy for governor.
From the start, old-money billionaire supporters have pushed along Newsom’s campaigns for office. Of the $61.5 million Newsom raised from 1998 to his first gubernatorial election in 2018, $2.2 million of it came from eight families: Getty, Pritzker (the governor of Illinois’ family), Fisher, Wilsey and Traina, Marcus, Swig, Buell, and Guggenhime.
Many of these families invested in Newsom’s business empire, with 23 businesses operating under the PlumpJack umbrella (named for an opera Gordon Getty wrote). Newsom’s most recent financial disclosure form, filed on March 1, 2023, shows at least $10 million in assets, and possibly millions more, with at least $2.5 million in annual income.
In addition to selling wine and owning restaurants and hotels, the Newsoms made $499,452 in 2011 by selling silver in the Golden State while he was lieutenant governor.
Based on the income received, it is likely that Newsom’s assets are around $25 million. Newsom placed these assets into a blind trust in 2019 three days before he was sworn into office as governor — likely in preparation for a run for the White House. On Feb. 17, Mrs. Newsom placed at least $1 million of her assets into a blind trust as well.
In 1996, when Newsom was just getting started in politics, his financial disclosure forms showed assets of $950,000 or more. This means Newsom has seen at least a 25-fold increase in his wealth — all while serving in public office, continuing a long American tradition of politicians becoming very wealthy during their time in office.
Insulated from His Own Destruction
With Newsom’s background speaking to a heavily gilded environment of private schools, European trips, and billionaire benefactors, it is no wonder his worldview is squarely in the globalist-progressive camp. While the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called to reduce the number of cars by 75 percent in only 27 years, that body is merely a PR gathering of rich and connected virtue signalers. Newsom’s California has real power, with the governor announcing in 2020 that the state would ban gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Of course, neither Newsom nor the poseurs at the WEF have promised to give up their private jets.
Regardless of the pain the elites plan to inflict on the rest of us in the name of the planet or some other cause-du-jour, their wealth and status insulate them from their policy preferences. They have armed guards while proposing to curtail your ability to defend yourself with a crafty end-run around the Second Amendment; they unleash inflation to monetize America’s trillions in debt while owning hard, inflation-resistant assets; they layer heavy taxes and crushing regulations on average people, putting prosperity beyond reach for hundreds of millions while they already have their money.
Nowhere was this more in evidence than in Nov. 2021 when, as Newsom was ordering Californians to stay at home during Covid-19’s winter resurgence, he attended a dinner party with well-heeled lobbyists at the ritzy French Laundry restaurant. Newsom later acknowledged this as an error — presumably the “I was caught” variety of error rather than the “It was wrong” variety. But Newsom’s “rules for thee but not for me” had real consequences far beyond the PR hit.
California’s losing population for three years in a row was abetted by Newsom’s wanton destruction of people’s livelihoods and crushing of their freedom of movement. The same happened in New York state and New York City, which from April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2022, lost an estimated 524,079 and 468,297 residents, respectively, the plurality of whom moved to DeSantis’ Florida.
And given that California and Florida had similar age-adjusted Covid-19 mortality rates while taking wildly divergent public health responses, one can understand Newsom’s prickly defensiveness toward a DeSantis strong point.
America’s two major political parties have been undergoing a realignment since the 1990s, concurrent with the increased pace of globalization and the information economy. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, while retaining considerable allegiance among minorities and the government-dependent poor. Republicans have seen a surge in support among the working class.
Depending on the major party nominees and the themes dominating the 2024 campaign, the national political realignment may be cemented for a generation. Should Newsom win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2024, the stakes will be higher and the contrast clearer than at any time in the last 100 years.
