Understanding Gavin Newsom’s Lore And Why He’s The Internet’s Latest Hyperfixation

If you saw a picture of a chiseled white man with grey hair reading Beloved on your timeline, you’ve been introduced to Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. And if you’ve been seeing him a lot more often on your social media, it isn’t necessarily because of any specific campaigning and legislation, but mostly because people are learning just how polarizing and chaotic Gavin really is. In fact, people have even gone as far as to call him a psycho and TBH, I get it.

He’s been called an “evil liberal,” and it’s mostly because he has pretty moderate views for someone in the Democratic party, and yet really has a strong disdain for Republicans (including Ron DeSantis, which he demonstrated when he encouraged Floridians to join him in California). And the really confusing part is that you never really know which side he’s going to lean with every new bill that comes across his desk. He’s done a lot of damage to the unhoused population of California, and most people in California are really not a fan of him.

And yet, purely off of the strength of his hate for Republicans, people have been sharing videos of him and championing him as the Left’s evil figure. Against my will, I’ve recently learned that he’s dyslexic so he has to memorize all of his speeches, there’s a rumor that he was the inspiration behind Fitzgerald Grant III in Scandal, was one of the only Dems in the early 2000s marrying gay couples, and cofounded the winery PlumpJack in 1992. A lot to unpack there, I know.

But to really understand his lore, it’s best you do it through the eyes of his constituents, AKA people on Twitter. Here’s what the internet has had to say about Gavin: