The New Yorker:

There’s a new strategy of disavowal emerging among some progressive politicians—and it is destined to fail.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Everyone, including me, has a podcast now—so it’s hard to begrudge Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, for indulging his God-given right to produce audio content. “This Is Gavin Newsom” is five episodes into its run and, outside of a four-minute emergency update on the Menendez brothers’ trial and a lengthy conversation with Governor Tim Walz, each episode has featured Newsom interviewing right-wing figures, namely Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon. The point of all this, Newsom explains in an introductory segment, is “tackling tough questions, engaging with people who don’t always agree with me, debating without demeaning.” Newsom seems to believe that regular Americans have grown tired of polarization and want to see ideological enemies find common ground.

I’ll be blunt: Up until the Walz episode (more about that in a moment), “This Is Gavin Newsom” was the strangest political podcast I had ever heard. And not in a good way. In the first four episodes, Newsom seems incapable of interrogating any right-wing position—whether on tariffs, book bans, trans women in sports, wokeness, or the mess at the border. It feels like a stretch to even describe these episodes as interviews, because Newsom sounds fairly uninterested in what his guests are saying. Bannon, for example, says more than once to Newsom that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And, though Bannon acknowledges in passing that Newsom disagrees with him about the election-fraud claim, Newsom offers zero pushback to the idea and acts almost as if he didn’t hear it.

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