Gun-toting Newsom’s alpha male rebrand

In a 2023 interview, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked how he ended up in a leadership position. After struggling with his response, he eventually paraphrased a line from George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant: “I put a mask on and my face grew into it.” It was a remarkable admission that inadvertently validated his most common critique – that he is fundamentally inauthentic.

Newsom has always seemed as though he were grown in a lab to be a politician. In a way, he was. The son of a well-connected judge and insider of the Getty family dynasty, he has glided through public life with the polished ease of someone born to power. He looks like a central casting governor, speaks in political platitudes and has successfully learned to suppress any sign of human spontaneity.

But lately, he’s trying on a new mask. He wants to trade in the image of the slick progressive from San Francisco for something grittier: a man’s man. A political moderate. A Democrat who can appeal to the same demographic drawn to Donald Trump.

His four-hour appearance on The Shawn Ryan Show, a podcast hosted by a retired Navy SEAL, popular among younger, right-leaning men, was clearly meant to showcase this evolution. The episode began with Ryan gifting Newsom with a handgun – an incongruous moment for a governor known for imposing some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Newsom accepted it enthusiastically, boasting about his marksmanship and professing a love for shooting sports.

Throughout the show, Newsom laced his speech with curse words – roughly one per minute – and called Ryan “man” or “brother” with cringe-inducing frequency. He gratuitously name-dropped former NFL star Marshawn Lynch not once, but twice. He claimed a baseball scholarship was his ticket to college, contradicting an admission made years ago that family connections, not athletic prowess, were what got him in. And, for the record, there’s no evidence he ever played baseball at the college level.

To most of the podcast’s audience, which skews conservative, male, and skeptical of liberal politicians like Newsom, this performance almost certainly rang false. It came across not as a genuine expression of shared interests or personal evolution, but as the product of a consulting firm’s focus group. What do young men like? Guns, sports, cursing, podcasts. Great – let’s make that the new Newsom.

The motivation is no mystery. Democratic strategists have been panicking over the party’s growing unpopularity among men, particularly young men. One poll showed a 30-point shift to the right among men aged 18–29 since 2020. Newsom clearly wants to be the Democrat who reverses that trend, and he’s transparently laying the groundwork for a 2028 presidential run in the process.

Newsom understands that style matters in the Trump era. But he seems less clear on substance. “It’s style now. It’s narrative. It’s not facts,” he told Ryan. “It’s who can dominate the conversation, man. Flood the zone.” The phrase “flood the zone,” popularized by Steve Bannon, describes a media strategy of saturating the information space with so much noise that clarity becomes impossible. But Bannon used this tactic in the service of a political strategy. Newsom’s zone-flooding, by contrast, lacks an organizing principle beyond a hope that vague centrism and relentless self-promotion will win elections.

He also seems to misunderstand what actually makes figures like Trump and podcast stars like Joe Rogan popular among young men. It isn’t just the format or aesthetics – it’s the perception of authenticity. Newsom complained on the show that Rogan “won’t have [him] on,” a telling sign that he’s tried to secure a spot. Since that didn’t work, he’s opted to mimic the ecosystem instead. He launched his own podcast this year and brought on conservative campus activist Charlie Kirk as his first guest. His official press office account on X, formerly Twitter, has taken to posting memes, edgy jokes and schoolyard insults.

As one commentator on X observed, the effort has the feel of a cargo cult. In isolated societies, so-called cargo cults emerged when indigenous groups constructed imitation airstrips and towers, believing this would cause Western goods to descend from the skies as they once had, without understanding the actual forces that made the planes appear. Likewise, Newsom mimics the trappings of the manosphere – long-form interviews, gun talk, locker-room banter – but has no grasp of what actually animates it.

Donald Trump, for all his flaws, speaks in a way that appeals to many voters for its brutal honesty. The remarks that cause the most outrage are often those that strike people as too real, not too rehearsed. Newsom, by contrast, comes across like a man wearing a costume.

Which brings us back to Orwell. When Newsom said, “I put a mask on and my face grew into it,” he likely thought he was being introspective. But in Orwell’s essay, the line isn’t about growth – it’s about the loss of self. It’s about playing a role for so long that you forget who you are.

Newsom’s latest role is the tough-talking centrist who can win back disaffected men. But sincerity is one thing he can’t fake. And without it, all the memes, guns and bro-speak in the world won’t make the cargo appear.