Making politicians face voters is “cancel culture,” according to California Gov. Gavin Newsom in his latest round of complaints about the recall effort against him. He is wrong.
Newsom jumped on the comparison in a Yahoo! News interview with reporter Andrew Romano, who may as well be a Democratic flack. In a softball interview from start to finish, Romano set Newsom up by asking if California is going overboard with recall elections, citing efforts to recall Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
“It’s cancel culture gone amok,” Newsom said. “The ultimate manifestation of cancel culture is a recall, it seems to me.”
He later added that “my only comment on cancel culture is just that I find it ironic that some of the biggest critics of cancel culture are out there promoting recalls. It’s a rather confusing construct.”
Except it isn’t confusing for people who know what they are talking about, which neither Newsom nor Romano do. Recall elections aren’t “cancel culture,” nor are they a new phenomenon in California.
Take 2009, for instance, when 14 recall efforts were filed against state legislators, Attorney General Edmund Brown, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. All 14 failed to qualify for the ballot. The most recent successful recall effort was filed in 2017 when constituents recalled Democratic state Sen. Josh Newman for supporting an increase in the state’s gas tax. He was defeated in the 2018 recall election.
There have been 47 recall efforts since 2000, not counting local offices such as district attorneys. Only four have made it to the ballot, and only Newman and former Gov. Gray Davis have actually lost their recall elections, with Newsom’s now pending.
Cancel culture is when private citizens are targeted by the full force of media outlets such as the Washington Post or CNN for offending some progressive orthodoxy or when people are fired from their jobs for trivial issues that run afoul of a social media mob, such as what happened to former Star Wars actress Gina Carano. When a Jeopardy! contestant is smeared as a white supremacist for using his hands to indicate the number three, that is an example of cancel culture — not when voters use the legally outlined process to recall a governor.
Newsom being recalled is not the result of cancel culture. It is the result of his own ineptitude and hypocrisy, as he demanded California residents abide by rules he imposed but refused to abide by himself. This is what most people would call “accountability,” and the most powerful man in the state of California being inconvenienced by having to face voters to whom he lied does not mean he is canceled.
It’s clear Newsom has learned nothing since his visit to the French Laundry restaurant breathed life into the recall effort. He certainly will have learned nothing if he survives the recall set to take place sometime later this year. Trying to throw partisan potshots at Californians whose businesses he closed permanently over the past year doesn’t change the fact the recall against him is based on legitimate grievances.
