Opinion: Gavin Debases Himself | Blog#42

Debasement is throwing the vulnerable under the MAGA bus

Mar 07, 2025

Gavin Newsom debased himself today, first, by choosing to make Charlie Kirk his first guest on his brand new podcast, then ditching the very principled stance on LGBTQ rights that propelled him to stardom in the political arena, not to mention pulling a Trump by going after the most vulnerable among us at a time when they are literally being persecuted by the new regime. Newsom got his start in politics thanks to San Francisco’s LGBT community.

What is worrisome here, aside from his obvious crass move, is that he is hardly the only solid Democrat to move way off to the right. There has been a pattern of some Democrats who’ve traditionally been aligned with center-left Democratic politics making overt moves rightward.

Take Hakeem Jeffries, for example. He’s not supporting Al Green. In fact, his edict for the Democratic Caucus was to maintain decorum and do nothing to protest Trump’s speech to both Houses of Congress. There was to be no clapping back, no audible protests, nothing. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of the extraordinary situation the nation is currently in with literally every institution being decimated by Musk and Trump.

This seems to be the direction most - not all - Democrats are taking, including the DNC, when it comes to a strategy of dealing with Trump and the GOP.

Is the takeaway from Democrats’ loss that the party needs to veer hard to the right? Is Gavin Newsom’s calculus, looking to the presidential election in four years, that he needs to ditch everything that was good and appealing in California in order to garner the support on the national level? Whatever happened to making California a sanctuary for Trans Americans whose states are banning them from obtaining medical care?

If the answer is yes, it would seem to me that it is a huge miscalculation on his part. The same LGBT community that gave him his start may well turn out to be the community that inspires the rest of us to bring an end to Newsom’s national aspirations.

Of all people, Newsom knows more than most politicians what happens to the bodies of transgender people after they’ve transitioned. There is plenty of anecdotal and medical literature and testimony to dispute the disgusting claims Trump and the religious right have made against people who are transgender.

Is it possible that this is a tactic to endear himself to Trump because of the dire funding needs the state has to deal with the costs of rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires? As important as rebuilding is, the principled thing to do surely cannot be throwing a minority group under the proverbial bus.

After all, if Newsom can ditch this constituency now, who else will he ditch next?

Which brings me to Pete Buttigieg. He, too, has been moving to the right. Here is a headline from Mediaite:

Pete Buttigieg Hammers Democrats’ Approach to Promoting Diversity: ‘It Is How Trump Republicans Are Made’

“Yeah, I mean, I saw a little bit of that event you described, and it was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us,” Buttigieg replied, adding:

And we cannot go on like that. We cannot. I also think that we believe in the values that we care about for a reason. And this is not about abandoning those values. It’s about making sure we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them.
What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia, which I have also experienced.
And it is how it is how Trump Republicans are made. If that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions but doesn’t actually get at what we’re what what actually matters here, what’s actually at stake, I think and this might sound counterintuitive if we were more serious about the actual values and not caught up in vocabularies and trying to cater to everybody only in terms of their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared project.

What I don’t see here is any kind of acknowledgement of the context in which transgender people were being defended. They were and are now actively under attack from the Trump administration acting on behalf of the religious right. If not Democrats, who will come to the aid of this group of American citizens whose right to pursue the Jeffersonian ethos is clearly outlined:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”

It has been quite disgusting to see Democrats abandon a principled approach to life in politics as their main lesson from the last election. David Axelrod has been a main perpetrator of that approach in his commentary on CNN. Did he have anything nice to say about Rep. Al Green? Nope!

Establishment Democrats are doing the exact opposite of what the public wants. No one wanted Trump on the left. Trump didn’t win by a huge margin. He doesn’t have a “mandate” to persecute. Going after transgender Americans is low hanging fruit. He’s going after the rest of us through Elon Musk.

Democrats banding together to push back and defend us all is the correct approach. Ditching those who are weakest is not. It can never be.

I fear that what should be an easy midterm cycle for Democrats may turn into yet another bloodbath, not because voters are happy with Trump and his MAGATs, but because there is no other way to force change within a headless, rudderless party.

We used to be the party of live and let live. We need to get back to that and not turn into “them.”

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller

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