“Ted Cruz calling a dyslexic person illiterate is a new low, even for him,” reads the Feb. 16 X post from California’s Governor Gavin Newsom. Senator Cruz, in fact, made no mention of the governor’s reading abilities but had called the California Democrat “historically illiterate” because Newsom had “no idea that Eisenhower federalized the national guard to stop Dem governors from defying federal law.” 

As Cruz recalled, on Sept. 23, 1957, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730,

federalizing the Arkansas National Guard & ordering U.S. Army troops (101st Airborne Div) to Little Rock, Arkansas. This action broke the blockade by Dem Gov Orval Faubus, allowing the Little Rock Nine to desegregate Central High School.

It is true that Gov. Newsom hasn’t issued any statement that appears to recognize that historical event, but those who know him can make a strong case that he’s also a functional illiterate. 

“For years, Newsom has been very open about the fact that he suffers from dyslexia,” Edsource reported in 2018. Newsom concedes that in the fifth or sixth grade, he “couldn’t read,” and his “reading difficulties” continue to this day. Newsom now claims to have amazing ability to memorize texts, but people may wonder. 

The California governor shows no familiarity with any of the great works of our time, nor does he seem to have read any books about his favorite policy areas. So age and appearance aside, Newsom has a lot in common with Joe Biden, whose disastrous presidency he called a “masterclass” of “effective policy-making.” As Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, noted in 2010, Joe Biden “makes few references to books and learned influences.” This is also true of Newsom. But Newsom had plenty of learned influences close at hand in California.

Long before “affirmative action,” Harlem-raised Thomas Sowell graduated from Harvard and earned advanced degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago. A fixture at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since the late 1970s, Sowell authored Basic Economics, A Conflict of Visions, The Economics and Politics of Race, and other acclaimed books, all available in audio format. By all indications, Gavin Newsom has never cited Thomas Sowell a single time, on any subject. To be fair, neither has former governor Jerry Brown, a failure in three runs for the presidency (1976, 1980, 1992), but whom Newsom hails as the greatest political mind “in our lifetime.”

Sowell was a colleague of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, a fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977-2006, who authored such acclaimed books as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, which were adapted for a television series on PBS. Despite the easy accessibility, it’s hard to find any citation of Milton Friedman from Jerry Brown or Gavin Newsom.

 Mark Twain observed that the man who does not read has no practical advantage over the man who cannot read, and in Newsom’s case, the ignorance shows. “America in 2019 is California in the 1990s,” Newsom told Politico. “The xenophobia, the nativism, the fear of ‘the other,’” and so on. As deployed by Newsom, the “phobias” are fact-less incantations to ward off debate. During the 1990s, California achieved historic civil rights reforms. 

On Nov. 5, 1996, Californians passed the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209, by a margin of 54 to 46 percent. The measure ended racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. As Sowell noted in his 2013 book, Intellectuals and Race, after its passage, African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher.

The disaster opponents predicted never occurred, but Newsom supported 2020’s Proposition 16, which would have repealed CCRI. He wanted education bureaucrats to reject qualified students on the basis of race, just as UC Davis did when it rejected Allan Bakke in 1978. The people, still opposed to racial and ethnic preferences, voted Prop 16 down 57.23 to 42.77, a wider margin than the 1996 vote on Prop 209. 

Gavin Newsom has ties to the Brown, Pelosi, and Getty families, and in the 1990s was profiled with the “children of the rich.” His father was an appeals court judge, appointed by Jerry Brown, but Newsom fils has been posing as a latchkey kid, claiming “I raised myself” on Wonder Bread and mac ‘n cheese. That’s almost as funny as Newsom’s claim that he attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship,” and as he told Liz Mullen of Sports Business Journal, “the only reason I am governor of California, the only reason you are talking to me right now, is because of baseball.” For baseball’s actual influence on Gavin Newsom’s political career, a ballpark figure would be zero.

Newsom now seems to blame his struggles on dyslexia, as Daniel Greenfield observes, “now part of the lexicon of disabilities that merited leeway.” Newsom these days deploys this ruse to “explain his poor grades, lack of focus and anything stupid that leaves his mouth” and “make anyone who notices that he spouts lies and nonsense seem like a bigot, instead of a political critic.”

As Edward Gibbon observed, hereditary rule is the most risible kind of rule. Jerry Brown, son of Gov. Edmund G. Brown, opposed CCRI and the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation  (Proposition 13) in 1978. A similar measure, the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, qualified for the ballot in 2024, but Brown and Newsom leveraged the state’s partisan supreme court to remove it from the ballot, effectively disenfranchising voters.

After revelations that the new span of the Bay Bridge—10 years late and $5 billion over budget—was riddled with safety issues, Jerry Brown said, “I mean, look, sh*t happens.” That quip aside, Brown never said anything that would make a sub-moron’s mouth twitch. Neither has Gavin Newsom, whose only concern is power.

Last Sunday in Georgia, Gov. Newsom told a black audience, including Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens, “I’m no better than you, you know. I’m a 960 SAT guy. Heh. And you know, I’m not trying to offend anyone, you know, I’m not trying to act ‘all there’ if you got 940. Heh. But literally a 960 SAT guy. You’ve never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech.”

Like Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) in Being There, Newsom reveals himself to himself. Like the scene at the upscale French Laundry in 2020, the mask is off. And now abide arrogance, mendacity, and ignorance, but the greatest of these is ignorance.