Gavin Newsom is discussed across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the governor of California, a figure whose policies on high-speed rail, health care, pandemic emergency powers and housing draw sustained criticism from the program’s guests. The excerpts treat him less as a biographical subject than as an illustration of the show’s recurring themes: federalism, the limits of central planning, and the gap between political rhetoric and fiscal reality.
High-speed rail and the State of the State
In a discussion of the Green New Deal, Charlie Dice noted that he had watched Gavin Newsom’s State of the State address, describing Newsom as the recently elected governor of California who said he was not positioning himself for a run in 2020 Not Enough Bricks (2019). Mark Joffe characterized Newsom as having been stuck with an unsustainable and irrational high-speed rail plan inherited from two predecessors, and as wanting to be in office for four to eight years, which required cleaning house. According to Joffe, Newsom indefinitely postponed two of the most costly aspects of the train: a connection from Bakersfield underneath a mountain range to the Los Angeles Basin, and a connection from San Jose to the Central Valley, again tunneling under a mountain range. Joffe noted that many people, including President Trump, marked this as a cancellation, but that it was not one; a rump segment of 165 miles connecting Bakersfield to Merced in the Central Valley would still be built. Joffe said the indefinite postponement stood to save Californians something in the range of $50 to $100 billion.
The same episode returned to Newsom’s speech later, with Dice recalling a line that was quoted a lot, in which Newsom talked about California values up against the President’s vision of America Not Enough Bricks (2019). Dice called California values an ambiguous statement but suggested there was something in California, a vision of how the future can be better than the present, that could be thought of as a federalist experiment in which California tries out some of the objectives of the Green New Deal on a smaller scale.
Health care and single-payer
Sally Pipes, discussing the cost of single-payer proposals, said that Gavin Newsom ran on single-payer and had the support of the very militant nurses’ union Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019). Pipes described Newsom as pursuing stepping-stone approaches after his election. She said California would begin an individual mandate in January, that subsidies for people buying coverage on Covered California would rise from 400% of the federal poverty level to 600%, allowing a family of four to earn up to $150,000 and be eligible for subsidies, and that Newsom increased the age at which illegal immigrants could get Medi-Cal coverage from 19 up to 26. Pipes said Newsom claimed this would cost $98 million and cover 90,000 undocumented immigrants, and that she believed it would cost a lot more. She said she believed Newsom still supports single-payer but realizes he has to do it slowly because the taxpayers of California cannot afford a $400 billion healthcare bill.
Pipes placed this in the context of earlier state failures: Vermont passed a single-payer system in 2011 and its Democratic governor reversed the bill in December 2014 because the people of Vermont could not afford it; Colorado’s Amendment 69 went down 79% to 21% in 2016. She noted that California’s Senate passed a single-payer bill, which she called SB 561, that was costed out by the California Senate Appropriations Committee at $400 billion a year, more than double the state budget of about $190 billion at the time, and that Speaker Anthony Rendon said the state could not afford it and did not bring it to a vote.
The “nation-state” framing
In an episode on American secession, Bob Zadek said California Governor Gavin Newsom had a bit of a hissy fit publicly and complained about how President Trump and the federal government were handling coronavirus control and shelter-in-place Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020). Zadek said Newsom complained he was not getting his share of supplies and announced California would exercise its power as a nation-state, acquiring its own ventilators and testing kits and using its bargaining power to somewhat economically separate itself from Washington. Zadek described Newsom’s speech as perhaps a mini Fort Sumter attack.
Frank Buckley said that coupling nation with state suggests a degree of independence, and that Newsom was talking about something like that when he talked about California going its own way in its response to the coronavirus epidemic Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020). Buckley called that benign and part of the Trump administration’s approach of letting different states compete and find their best way, which he described as what federalism was all about. Buckley said that what Newsom was trying to do was recover the original understanding of American federalism in which states would be sovereign within their scope of competence, and that this was a good thing because not all wisdom emanates from Washington, D.C.
Recall and pandemic-era business policy
A March 2021 episode featured Bob Zadek interviewing California State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley about the movement to recall Governor Gavin Newsom, covering Newsom’s use of emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of school and business closures, the controversial AB 5 legislation, and allegations of corruption in state contracting The Case for Recalling Gavin Newsom (2021).
Carol Roth, discussing the war on small business, described Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, a local business shut down by mandate that spent around $80,000 to comply with outdoor dining standards, only for the city it was in, which fell under the purview of Los Angeles, to shut down outdoor dining Carol Roth on the War on Small Business (2021). Roth said a movie production nearby got the green light to shoot and set up a catering tent in the same parking lot, and that it was then found out that Gavin Newsom had had dinner, breaking his own mandates, at the French Laundry, with a lobbyist for the movie industry in attendance. Roth said this showed there was no science behind the rules and called it complete political tyranny. She also said a Twitter bracket tournament to find the worst governor in America for small business ended with Gavin Newsom taking the title, which she offered as another reason to recall him.
Across episodes: federalism and the California experiment
The excerpts show a consistent treatment rather than a developing argument. In the 2019 high-speed rail episode, Newsom is presented as a governor forced by fiscal reality to postpone parts of an inherited project, and Dice frames California’s policy experimentation as a federalist laboratory Not Enough Bricks (2019). In the 2020 secession episode, Buckley frames Newsom’s nation-state language as a recovery of original federalism rather than a radical departure Did California Just Declare Itself a Nation-State? (2020). The 2019 single-payer episode and the 2021 recall episode supply the critical counterweight, with Pipes describing Newsom’s incremental health policies as unaffordable and Roth and Kiley treating his pandemic governance as overreach Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019)The Case for Recalling Gavin Newsom (2021). What changes between the earlier and later treatment is tone rather than doctrine: the 2019 episodes allow that Newsom may be constrained by inherited commitments, while the 2021 episodes treat his emergency powers and business mandates as the problem itself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Newsom’s early life, education, business career, or his time as mayor or lieutenant governor. They do not state the name or outcome of the recall election, nor do they report any Newsom response to the criticisms leveled by the show’s guests. Several excerpts break off mid-sentence or at section headings, so the surrounding argument is unavailable.