Newsom: ‘We Were Insane’ but Elect Us to Be Insane Again

Everybody gets things wrong, and, statistically speaking, the more things you do or opine on, the more often you will get things wrong. 

I opine on political events, and the more granular my opinions and predictions, the more likely I will be to get some wrong. Correspondingly, the more often you intervene in events, the more often you will wind up making things worse. That alone is a reason to be skeptical about the impulse to “just do something.” I like to joke, “don’t just do something, sit there!”

Not everybody gets things wrong with the same frequency or on the same scale as others. When we talk about “wisdom,” we are talking about something quite real and something some have in greater abundance than others. There are people who get things mostly right, and when they are wrong the damage is more limited, and there are people who seem to get all the big things wrong and do tremendous damage along the way. 

We call the latter “liberals.” They want to screw with everything, and when they do screw with things, they screw them up. 

Translated: “I, Gavin Newsom,” was insane to close the beaches & schools.” We should all wear t-shirts stating this. Does he think we buy some fantasy that this was imposed on him?

— Lezlee (@BellBird68) September 18, 2026

Gavin Newsom is, of course, running for president. 

Not officially, mind you, but then again, when he was the San Francisco mayor, he wasn’t “running for governor,” although for all intents and purposes he was and had been since he became aware such a position existed. Ditto the presidency. 

Newsom has a record, and it is a horrendous one. So bad, in fact, that even a few Democrats might notice, although the greater danger for him is that even worse candidates, such as AOC, exist and might ace him out of the nomination. So Newsom is on a Mission Impossible, which is to bury his record while simultaneously trying to convince the radical left that, however awful a governor he was, he assures them he will be even worse as president. 

Good luck with that. 

His “admissions” about COVID-era failures are part of his project to wipe away his record as governor, and they are quite revealing. If you asked a sane person about his mistakes during COVID, he would list what worked and what didn’t, explain why the results were as they were, and tell you what lessons were learned. 

Gavin? “Hey, those were crazy times, man. The peyote was great though!”

Newsom is technically correct that his policies — not that he took RESPONSIBILITY for them — were insane. But the admission is not that he was wrong and learned a lesson. It was, quite literally, that they were disconnected from reality itself. 

Not one of the mistakes listed was obvious at the time if you sat down and considered the costs and benefits rationally, as a few governors actually did. Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp did so and followed wise policies. They acted like responsible adults and took the slings and arrows aimed at them by the left, including Newsom, in stride. 

Newsom acted impulsively — insanely—and now wants credit for admitting that he is incapable of reason. 

Wise men don’t act on mere hope, fear, panic, or impulse. They don’t blow with the wind or make consequential decisions that will obviously harm people based on feelz. 

And wise voters don’t let them get away with it or rush to praise them for admitting they were insane. We don’t want insane people running things. 

Because we are all human and making decisions in conditions of uncertainty and enormous stress is immensely difficult, we should all give grace to people who did their best and got it wrong sometimes. 

Because policymakers can make or break lives and leave immense carnage in the wake of their poor decisions, we shouldn’t forgive, forget, or laugh it off when they cause havoc by acting insanely. Every bad decision was foreseeable and foreseen by many who were viciously slandered and canceled for telling the truth, and it was people like Newsom who did it. 

So many people joined the mania that there is an all-of-society effort to memory-hole the insanity, and Newsom is counting on that effort to work in his favor. And it may, but only because the people who control the culture are just as culpable as he. 

The people who retained their sanity and still got it wrong deserve grace when they ask for it and acknowledge their failures. 

But not those who laugh it off, as Newsom does here, or justify their insanity and cruelty as mere peccadillos. 

It reminds me of the AOC line, “Woke One was crazy.” Uh, yeah. And you did everything you could to destroy the sane people who opposed it, and are doing the same in service of something even crazier. 

Among the many lessons we should learn from the COVID years is that crazy people should be allowed nowhere near power. Newsom hopes most people don’t see it that way, because he is betting they all want forgiveness for their own insane cruelty. 

Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It’s common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure. 

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