The New Yorker:
How the movement might cohere—if it does at all—remains an open question.
By Jon Allsop
Earlier this year, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, launched a podcast that promised direct conversations with people he disagrees with. In reality, it featured him sucking up to figures from the maga Extended Universe. In the début episode,the guest was Charlie Kirk, an influential young right-wing activist and commentator; Newsom suggested that his thirteen-year-old son was so excited to meet Kirk that he wanted to skip school to attend the taping. (Newsom didn’t let him. “C’mon,” Kirk objected. “You cancelled school for like two years!” Newsom seemed to find this funny.) The following week, Steve Bannon came on the show and said that the 2020 election was stolen; Newsom let this slide. Recently, in the wake of the protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles, Kirk and Bannon have returned Newsom’s hospitality by, respectively, calling him “the fakest person I’ve ever met” and comparing him to John C. Calhoun. Newsom, for his part, has pushed back strongly against the Trump Administration’s militarized response to the protests, challenging Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, to arrest him (“Come and get me, tough guy”) and tweaking Trump himself in TikTok memes inspired by “Hamilton” and Taylor Swift. With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Jay Caspian Kang pointed out in this column, in March, that Newsom’s podcast always seemed doomed to fail—not to mention “embarrassing”—because his conciliatory approach was out of step with polling that indicated liberals want to see Democrats fight Trump’s Republican Party, not get along with it. In a different column, Kang similarly took issue with a school of thought, advanced most explicitly by the veteran strategist James Carville, holding that Democrats should “roll over and play dead,” allowing Trump to burn himself out. As Kang put it, this strategy never seemed viable, either, and several recent developments signal that playing dead is, well, dead. Newsom’s newfound combativeness is one example. Another came last week, also in relation to the L.A. protests, when Alex Padilla, the normally mild-mannered California senator, confronted Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, at a press conference, and was forced to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents. This week, there were similar scenes in New York City, where agents arrested Brad Lander, the comptroller and a candidate for mayor, while he was accompanying a migrant in immigration court. In between, millions of anti-Trump demonstrators protested across the country under the banner “No Kings.”
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