Newsom: Conservatives are just like Hitler

Everyone knows the ancient joke about the two exhausted kids walking through a sun-blasted and waterless land. Sunburned and still miles from their destination, they come upon an immense pile of animal manure blocking their path. The boys stop for a moment to consider the obstacle mounded before them – feculent, still miraculously (in my telling) steaming – before the younger boy jumps quickly into the pile and begins digging furiously. His wee hands are a blur. Appalled, the older boy shrieks, “What are you doing?!” The younger boy famously replies with what’s become an aphorism on its own: “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!” It’s supposed to be a story of plucky, silver-lined, glass-half-full optimism, a pre-industrial “when life gives you lemons” buoyancy in the face of what’s obviously really bad news. But sometimes excrement is just excrement. So it was with Governor Gavin Newsom’s bizarre and pony-less State of the State, delivered 99 days late and by a video, no less, distributed on social media rather than, as per usual, in a speech delivered directly to that live studio audience we call the legislature. In fewer than 28 minutes, the governor stated with precision the opposite of what’s true; at best, he took an artless brush to Republicans and conservatives on issues that even Newsom must know are shot through with inconvenient subtleties. He compared conservatives to fascists. You might say that’s what politicians do – in which case, Newsom’s speech on Tuesday was just harmless lying. But to paraphrase the late, great Martin Luther King, Jr., lying anywhere is a threat to truth everywhere. Many others have already carried out the foul labor of sifting through the governor’s Misstatement of the State. But none so far have considered the governor’s framing device – that Newsom began his memorable, dark speech with what he called “a warning from the past”: It was January 2, 1939, that anxious moment in history. The world was on edge as fascism spread its hate and destruction through Europe. On that day, Governor Culbert Olson delivered an inaugural address to raise the alarm with lawmakers and the people of this great state. He spoke of California’s most determined task in the face of “the destruction of democracy.” At that moment, the state’s highest calling was “the preservation of our American civil liberties and democratic institutions. Framing his speech with a quote from the inaugural address of California Governor Culbert Olson (1939-1942) is classic Newsom. It’s supposed to ground in history the rest of his ungrounded – unhinged – attacks on conservatives. It’s supposed to show that our shallow governor is a man of real wisdom. But if he had bothered to dig into the manure of Olson’s actual politics, he’d have found what you may already know: California Gov. Culbert Olson was a bad governor and a worse man. In the inaugural address that Newsom cites, Olson declared he would stand with actual socialists and progressives rather than with the U.S. Constitution. He shared with them “our desire for unity of action” – that’s the progressive’s lofty ideal of an executive strongman unencumbered by other branches of American government. In a phrase, it eliminates the checks and balances that protect against authoritarianism. In this alone, you’ll no doubt see the remarkable similarities between Olson and Newsom. He called for minimum farm prices, the very Rooseveltian policy that had further immiserated farmers and disrupted the American food supply. Thanks to government-created prices and other bizarre regulations (such as paying farmers not to farm), farms continued to wither and everyday hunger was real. With the Great Depression still raging after nearly a decade of such misfeasance, Olson nevertheless declared that “a heavy tax burden cannot be avoided.” On business, unitary action would allow government to take over key businesses. “I have long been committed to the proposition that where a service is or becomes necessary to the daily life or existence of all the people and is in effect a monopoly it should be owned and operated by the people through their own government,” Olson proclaimed. Who would decide which services would be – or already were – necessary to existence? Gov. Olson, of course. On water, oil, and the land itself, “It shall be the policy of this administration . . . to control their exploitation in the common interest.” In perhaps the most Marxian passage of all, Olson declared, “America has built enormously productive facilities for manufacturing. Our scientists, engineers and technicians have literally recreated the world in which we live. It is now well known that we have both the capacity and the ability to produce abundantly for all. But these advances, wonderful as they are, have brought along their own new and extremely difficult problems. We are a long, long way from the goal of social justice. We have