by Frank Holmes, reporter
Gov. Gavin Newsom has an explanation for why more than two million Californians want him thrown out of office.
It’s not his lockdown orders, which he’s quietly repealing.
It’s not his decision to lock Californians inside their own homes while he lived it up with lobbyists at a gourmet French restaurant.
It’s not the homelessness, crime, or stagnant economy that sees more people leaving California than moving there.
According to him, it’s all a vast, right-wing conspiracy.
He’s mounted a desperate, last-ditch effort to save his political career by convincing voters that the wildly popular recall petition was a conspiracy ginned up by the same people who vandalized the U.S. Capitol.
“The top 10% proponents, the people who are behind this, are members of the 3-percenters, the right wing militia groups, the Proud Boys, who supported the insurrection, and folks who quite literally and enthusiastically support QAnon conspiracies,” Newsom told ABC’s The View on Tuesday. “That’s the origin here.”
Newsom has hit the same talking points this week in every medium available—and the list of conspirators keeps growing.
In an email to supporters on Monday, Newsom called the movement “a partisan, Republican recall—backed by the (Republican National Committee), anti-mask and anti-vax extremists, and pro-Trump forces who want to overturn the last election and have opposed much of what we have done to fight the pandemic.”
The California Democratic Party paid for an ad, in English and Spanish, that threw even more national figures into the tall tale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcgxN6Mk76o
Despite millions of California’s grassroots voters—including some of his own former supporters—signing a petition to replace Newsom as the governor of the nation’s most populous state, he insists he’s a victim of a small cabal.
He doubled down on Wednesday, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that it’s “just … factual” to call “the lead proponents” potentially violent extremists.
“That’s the origins of this,” Newsom said. “You combine that with Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee and Devin Nunes, and now the RNC nationalizing this recall, time and money, you’re going to get something on the ballot.”
But Tapper pointed out that only about 50,000 people had signed the recall petition before photos surfaced of Newsom eating at the French Laundry—with no mask and no social distancing.
The conspiracy theories aren’t even new. The chairman of the California state Democratic Party, Rusty Hicks, called the Recall Newsom petition a “California coup’” being “led by right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and groups that encourage violence on our democratic institutions.”
But there aren’t enough Proud Boys, anti-vaxxers, and “white nationalists” in the state of California, which has been minority-majority for more than 20 years, to succeed as well as the petition already has.
The recall movement needs 1.4 million verified signatures from registered California voters to let voters decide whether to remove Newsom from office—and organizers say they’ve busted through that requirement.
More than 2,060,000 people had signed the petition as of last Wednesday, according to petition drive leaders—and 1,871,573 signatures have been “pre-verified internally through an outside third party vendor.”
“This campaign is not about political powerbrokers,” said Randy Economy, the spokesman for RecallGavin2020. “It is about the people.”
Gov. Newsom admitted Tuesday that the recall effort “appears to have the requisite signatures”…but he proved he still doesn’t get why Californians want him booted out of office two years early.
The only problem he saw with dining out while he forced Mom-and-Pop diners to go bankrupt was “there were too many people at the table.”
“I’ve held myself to a higher level of accountability of even my worst critics,” he told Tapper.
It’s no wonder the wealthy liberal is lashing out. If the recall is successful, Gavin Newsom will be only the second California governor ever to have voters recall him from office—and only the fourth attempt in U.S. history. Nobody wants to go down in history like that.
The last governor to be recalled was Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who was replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger—and a new poll shows there’s a good chance Newsom will follow his steps.
Already, 58% said they believed the state needs to elect a new governor in two years. About a third of voters said they’re ready to repeal Newsom’s term now—and there are enough undecided to tip the election against him.
“I’m worried,” he admitted.
So, he’s painting everybody who comes against him and his incompetent job in office as a domestic terrorist, a racist, or somebody dedicated to giving everyone in the Golden State COVID-19. Newsom claims all these forces and the deep-pocketed Republican Party are in cahoots against him—coordinating and colluding.
You might even call it a conspiracy theory.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”