Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss when Gavin Newsom apparently decided he didn’t want to be president after all.
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Did you hear that the South has risen again? California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems pretty upset about the Virginia Supreme Court ruling against the unconstitutional gerrymandering state Democrats pushed through in April. The map would have shifted Virginia’s delegation from a 6D-5R split to something like 10D-1R.
Democrats spent the last two weeks patting themselves on the back for erasing Republican representation in a purple state. They claim Republicans started this fight. Republicans blame New York Democrats for firing the first shot. Regardless of what triggered this all-out fight to control House district maps, the Virginia Supreme Court poured water on all of the Democratic Party celebrations Friday, prompting Newsom to post an insane attack on the GOP.
“Confederate states are rushing through rigged maps to erase Black districts off the map. If this doesn’t make you angry, it should,” he posted.
One might assume that his post has nothing to do with Virginia, but the timing is too coincidental for that to be true. He is likely upset that after Republican-held Southern states began erasing racially biased House maps (making it more favorable for the House GOP), Democrats’ best chance at closing the gap was for Virginia Democrats to win their court case.
Still, instead of being honest about it, he is effectively calling Republicans racists for removing so-called black districts. There is no other way to explain why he’d use the term “Confederate states” if not to invoke slavery and the Civil War.
And the low-hanging fruit debate would be to call out the hypocrisy of forcing states to create race-based districts in the first place. But I’ll leave that alone. Because what’s more interesting is that Newsom has been very clearly and publicly running for the Democratic presidential nomination for the better part of the last four years.
Newsom has been nothing if not calculating.