Gavin Newsom’s White Privilege

By: William McGurn
On: Wall Street Journal

If the polls going into Tuesday’s recall election in California hold up, Gavin Newsom will keep his job as governor. But if he does, no one should ever again take seriously progressive complaints about white privilege.

Because if white privilege is a thing, Mr. Newsom is drenched in it. Mr. Newsom’s father was a well-connected state judge who once managed one of the trusts for the family of oil magnate J. Paul Getty.

As for his son, the Los Angeles Times says that “a coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families has backed him at every step of his rise.” This privilege is reflected in the $70 million Mr. Newsom raised to fight the recall—more than five times the $13 million raised by his leading challenger, Republican Larry Elder.

“California has become the epicenter of neo-feudalism, and Newsom symbolizes this new autocracy,” says Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in Orange County. “The irony is that Elder is attacked as the candidate of the rich and greedy by this new elite—high tech, teachers unions, the media and some of the state’s wealthiest citizens.”

Covid has put this privilege in stark relief. While many of California’s public schools remained closed, for example, Mr. Newsom’s own children were at a private school that offered in-person learning. Perhaps the governor’s most Marie Antoinette moment came when he was caught flouting his own guidelines by dining out with a group of lobbyists at the French Laundry, where, the New York Times reports, “dinner for two costs more than many people earn in a week.”