There are slips of the tongue. And then there are moments when a politician says something so revealing that the spin room practically bursts into flames trying to contain it.
.
Recently, during a Q&A before a predominantly black audience, the Getty-adjacent governor of California, Gavin Newsom—a man marinated in elite privilege—groped for common ground. It did not go as planned. Of all the qualities he could have invoked, he chose this:
.
“I’m not trying to impress you… I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy… you’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.”
.
Let’s set aside Newsom’s pathological mendacity, as just a few years before he posted on social media an image of him immersed in reading one of several so-called “banned books”. (Was he lying in the photo then, claiming to read while he could not…or was he lying now, claiming he cannot read while he could? This is the essence of California’s chameleon governor who cannot get his own personal narrative straight.) With that said, let’s not dwell on the governor’s contradictions. His flagrant insult to the intelligence of the predominately black audience hosted by the black mayor of Atlanta was not a slip or gaffe. It was instinct. Nor was it relatability. It was condescension dressed up as humility.
Was Gavin lying then or lying now? Does he even know himself?
.
The sequencing is the tell. “I’m like you”… followed immediately by a below-average SAT score. That was the bridge he chose. That’s what he believed would resonate. Not achievement in the face of adversity. Not perseverance. Not excellence. Academic underperformance.
.
Despite the scramble to fill the Chicxulub-sized crater left by his Freudian slip—retrofitting it into a dyslexia anecdote—the governor never once uttered that word. Nor was he addressing a room of dyslexics, of any color, with whom he might plausibly claim kinship. It was simply a room of ordinary Black Americans. And that is what surfaced.
.
Had this been a one-off, perhaps we could chalk it up to clumsiness. But it isn’t. As far as Democrats go, it is part of a pattern within the highest echelons of the party as to how they view their most reliable voting bloc…without whom they cannot hold on to any power, now that the Trump administration is deporting their Plan B. This is the way modern progressive white elites view the Schwartze Untermensch.
.
Consider: In 2007 the still-lucid Joe Biden hailed Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is “articulate, bright, and clean.” In 2019, he also assured us that, “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Many a truth is spoken in gaffe.
.
Then there was New York Governor Kathy Hochul, eager to display her compassion for minorities, who lamented, “young Black kids in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word ‘computer’ is.” Not that they lack access. She believes in 2026 many minorities still don’t even know what a computer is.
.
Notice the theme.
.
The self-appointed champions of the marginalized keep reaching—instinctively—for diminished expectations as their rhetorical device of choice.
.
Martha’s Vineyard police keep careful watch on Venezuelan migrants awaiting evacuation back to the mainland. For white wealthy coastal progressives, compassion ends where their property values begin.
.
Then there were the compassionate progressives holed up in their wealthy homogenous enclave of Martha’s Vineyard. For years, affluent progressives assured the country that borders are abstractions and “no human being is illegal.” But when some fifty mostly Venezuelan migrants—fifty—were transported to their manicured island sanctuary, the humanitarian embrace lasted roughly forty-eight hours before the National Guard was called and the newcomers were shipped elsewhere. Yes, the same National Guard whose presence on the streets of Washington, D.C. to combat rampant crime and make life bearable—a city about forty-three percent Black—was condemned by these progressives as a descent into “authoritarianism”. So, if you are white and rich and don’t want to, well, bring the “wrong types” into your upscale homogeneous island bastion, the National Guard is your personal ICE. If you are black and stuck in a dystopian hellscape inner city ( courtesy of Democrat one-party rule) you do not deserve the same protections because, well…why exactly?
.
Fifty migrants was all it took for the “All Are Welcome” crowd to shriek a collective “there goes the neighborhood!” It is the same instinct that underlies Democrats’ political theater: moral exhibitionism at a distance, discomfort up close. Virtue for me, illegals for thee.
Happy, self-righteous progressives of Martha’s vineyard eager to take photos with their new “asylum seeker” arrivals…before kicking them off their island.
.
And now Newsom.
.
The outrage isn’t “manufactured.” The outrage stems from recognition. Recognition that beneath the “Hate Has No Home Here” lawn signs and the DEI panels and the solemn speeches lies a quieter assumption: that when it comes to people of color, expectations must be adjusted downward, that standards must be softened, that condescension counts as empathy.
.
This is what makes the moment damning. Not because Newsom misspoke—but because he didn’t. This was the polished version. The vetted version. The microphone-on version. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
.
A serious leader elevates the people he addresses. A charlatan studies the room and calibrates downward. Newsom calibrated. And that calibration—echoed in Biden’s phrasing, Hochul’s remarks, and Martha’s Vineyard’s sudden logistical crisis over fifty migrants—reveals not compassion, but a pattern of elite paternalism masquerading as virtue.
.
That’s not solidarity. That’s soft bigotry with a wine list.
.
Since the days of FDR when black voters left the party of Lincoln, they have been the most loyal voting bloc for the Democrat Party. And what have they been given in return by this party that claims to care for them so much? Dystopian crime and drug-ridden inner cities; public schools that literally pump out functional illiterates; an enervating welfare state that laid waste to the black nuclear family; and the highest rates of abortion of any ethnic group, the soft bigotry of low expectations, all concealed under a carapace of faux compassion and colorblindness.
.
As Clarence Thomas, a black man whom one suspects scored a tad better than 960 on his SATs wrote in his autobiography:
.
“In my life, I had seen more prejudice from those who wore three-piece suits and practiced discrimination with a handshake and a smile than from those who wore white sheets. The worst I had ever been treated was by white liberals who held themselves up as moral paragons and flowed with sanctimony
.
With friends like the Democrat Party and progressive elites—including the oily governor of California more focused on his own political ambitions than rebuilding the Palisades or balancing his budgets—blacks need no enemies.
Brad is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.