Gavin Newsom can’t seem to let it go.
The California Governor took another shot at Joe Rogan in a recent interview, and this time he didn’t bother with diplomatic language.
And what Newsom said about the world’s most popular podcaster will tell you everything you need to know about why Democrats keep losing working-class men.
Newsom Goes Foul-Mouthed on Rogan
Newsom called Rogan “an a**hole” during an appearance on the Fairewinds Words for the Future podcast, hosted by nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen.
That’s a pretty remarkable thing for a sitting governor to say about a private citizen whose main offense appears to be hosting a wildly popular podcast and asking questions that make the political establishment uncomfortable.
But Newsom wasn’t finished. He went further, claiming Rogan “traffics in misinformation” — which is the standard political language Democrats deploy whenever someone with a large audience refuses to echo the approved narrative.
Rogan endorsed Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election and sat down with him for a three-hour conversation that drew tens of millions of listeners. That interview is widely credited with helping Trump make inroads with younger male voters — a demographic that has been walking away from the Democrat Party for years.
And that, more than anything else, appears to be what’s eating at Newsom.
The Feud Has Been Running for Months
This isn’t the first time these two have gone at it. Newsom reached out to Rogan after the election, apparently hoping to get some face time on the podcast. Rogan made that outreach public, which clearly did not sit well with the Governor.
Newsom accused Rogan of embarrassing him by revealing the private communication. Rogan, for his part, has been characteristically unbothered. He moved his operation from California to Texas a few years back, citing the state’s business climate and quality of life — a decision that speaks for itself given how many other high-profile names have made the same move out of Newsom’s California.
There’s something almost tragicomic about a California governor burning bridges with one of the most influential media figures in the country and then wondering why his party keeps struggling to connect with regular people.
Newsom has been making the rounds on podcasts and media appearances that suggest he’s positioning himself for a future presidential run. But calling a podcast host an “a**hole” in public doesn’t exactly scream “I’m ready to unite the country.”
What This Actually Reveals About Democrat Strategy
Rogan’s audience is enormous — consistently pulling in tens of millions of listeners per episode across every political stripe. He talks to scientists, comedians, fighters, politicians, and everyone in between. He doesn’t follow a script. He asks follow-up questions. He lets conversations go where they go.
That’s apparently a threat to someone like Newsom, who operates in a world of tightly controlled messaging and carefully staged appearances.
Democrats who once championed the idea of speaking truth to power now seem deeply rattled by a guy in Austin with a microphone who won’t play by their rules. The party that claims to champion free expression has spent years trying to pressure platforms into silencing voices they don’t like — and when that doesn’t work, they resort to calling those voices “misinformation” spreaders.
But Rogan isn’t going anywhere. His audience keeps growing. His influence on the 2024 election was real and measurable. And every time a Democrat politician takes a public swing at him, it probably adds another few hundred thousand listeners who want to see what all the fuss is about.
Newsom seems to understand, on some level, that the media landscape has shifted in ways that are genuinely bad for the old political establishment. The problem is his response to that shift is to get angry and name-call rather than actually engage.
That’s not a communications strategy. That’s a tantrum.
And it raises a fair question about whether Newsom — who presided over California’s spiraling homelessness crisis, its mass exodus of residents and businesses, and some of the most aggressive COVID lockdown and mandate policies in the country — is really in a position to be lecturing anyone about credibility.
He championed lockdowns. He pushed vaccine mandates. He enforced mask rules that he personally ignored at a fancy dinner while his constituents were barred from seeing dying relatives in hospitals. The voters who gravitated toward Rogan’s conversations with guests who questioned those policies weren’t being misled. They were asking reasonable questions that the political class refused to answer honestly.
Calling Joe Rogan an “a**hole” doesn’t answer those questions. It just confirms why so many people stopped listening to politicians like Gavin Newsom in the first place.
If Newsom wants to win back the voters his party has been hemorrhaging, picking public fights with the most popular podcast host in America probably isn’t the path forward. But maybe that’s not really the point. Maybe the point is to keep his name in the news cycle and signal to the Democrat base that he’s willing to throw punches.
The problem with that approach is the base already loves him. It’s everyone else he needs to worry about.
Source: Mediaite