A Year Ago, Gavin Newsom Changed the USA, and Here is Why He Now Rightly Faces a Recall Election

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A year ago this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom made, what I called at the time, the most impactful state-based decision in modern American history when he shut down California. By locking down our nation’s largest and most influential state in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and continuing to do so under dictatorial “emergency powers” which he is still yet to consider relinquishing (even despite having a state court rule against his power grab), he may have fundamentally altered this country forever.

He did so based on a blatant, massive, and obvious lie. One which the news media has never come close to exposing, or, remarkably, even really examining.

When Newsom became the first governor to go in this unprecedented direction, his radical action was founded on a terrifying projection, one which, if it was even close to being accurate, would have justified such an extreme measure (though obviously not for the next year with no obvious end in sight). He wrote to then President Donald Trump that in the next EIGHT weeks, more than 25 million Californians — which he weirdly claimed was just 56 percent of the states almost 40 million residents — would contract the virus, and he requested a military ship be sent to Los Angeles to serve as an auxiliary hospital.

Except, as I said a year ago, even based on the limited knowledge and data we had at the time, this prediction was always absurd and grossly trumped in order to justify his ending of our constitutional freedoms and to scare his subjects into immediate and total submission. Eight weeks later, California had not even hit 100,000 positive tests, and that hospital ship was never used. FIFTY-TWO weeks later, my state has had 3.6 million confirmed cases, which is still by far the most in the entire USA, though our hospital system has not been truly overwhelmed.

If Newsom was ever seriously asked about this lie (our extremely liberal and pro-lockdown news media here would likely never do so), he would surely, with a straight face, claim that it was his dramatic restrictions which saved us from catastrophe. But since nowhere in the entire world, even in places with very limited governmental interventions, has there been anything remotely close to the doomsday scenario Newsom manipulated to make himself a king, this explanation is simply ludicrous.

It was at this point where media narratives became instrumental in the domino effect of lockdown insanity which continues in much of the country to this day, and which is outrageously still keeping my eight-year-old daughter out of real school here in Southern California.

Because California is so large and liberal, every blue state governor was immediately obligated to follow Newsom’s lockdown lead (it surely didn’t hurt that their efforts also ended any chance Trump had of winning reelection based on a great economy). Many weak Republican governors, lacking any political cover amid a full-blown panic, also quickly fell in this fascist line. This caused all of them — Newsom more so than any other — to become deeply invested in the now highly contested theory that government lockdowns greatly slow the long-term spread of a virus.

For ardent anti-lockdown activists like me, the failure of Newsom’s original horror-show-prediction to manifest itself was, counter-intuitively, actually the worst scenario from a purely political perspective. Not only did it provide the pro-lockdown narrative with a supposedly huge victory (though they never were forced to come close to explaining why the heck New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and other hard lockdown states faired so poorly in the early going), but, because it was SO “successful,” it appeared that, at least out west, maybe the whole thing was monumentally overblown. Like a boy convinced his lucky charm is why his favorite team is on a winning streak, this actually caused Newsom to triple-down on the lockdown theory.

In other words, had the basis for Newsom’s state shutdown come even close to actually happening and California had been hit like New York was last April, it would have removed any pressure to prove that his extreme measures were justified by a real “emergency”. Consequently, contrary to what had been promised with the “Just 15 Days to Flatten the Curve” lie, the restrictions continued.

In a very pivotal moment which the news media conveniently ignored, Newsom led the drive to stop focusing on the stated goal of not devastating our hospitals, and somehow successfully moved the goalposts to reduce the total number of “cases” to essentially zero (even though the test was notoriously unreliable, and a big portion of the cases were asymptomatic).

It was during this summer of 2020 period when the fledgling movement to force an election to recall Newsom began. At first, it was slow to gain traction, partly because it was understandably perceived as a purely pro-Trump crusade (having spoken at a couple of their early events as an anti-Trump libertarian, it was very clear that I was not a good fit). But since then at least three factors have now almost assured that later this year Californians will have the opportunity to remove “King Gavin” from his throne.

First was his total capitulation to the teacher’s unions which has caused schools, against all the known science, to remain largely closed for an entire year — and running. Second was when he broke his own indoor dining ban at a fancy French restaurant. Third, was the dramatic rise and fall of cases during the winter, which has destroyed his argument that his life-destroying measures worked (especially when wide-open Florida has done much better during this period), that even his friends in the news media may not be able to hold his charade together much longer.

In my view, Newsom’s total abuse of his “emergency” powers, which has radically altered California’s form of governance, should be the only reason needed for him to be recalled on a completely non-partisan basis. However, the past year has proven that most of us in this formerly-freedom-loving country, which originated in revolution from a monarchy, bizarrely seem to yearn for such tyranny.

As we hit the one-year anniversary of Newsom changing America, perhaps the news media could finally take an honest look at how things would have gone differently if we had known then what we know now. An objective look at the evidence shows he never could have even dreamed of possibly getting away with what he somehow has for the last 12 months, especially if the news media had not been cheering him every step of the way.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.