Newsom recently launched his own Substack to ‘cut through the right-wing disinformation machine.’

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at California Governor Gavin Newsom’s history of spreading misinformation and cover more media misses.

Gavin Newsom: Expert on Misinformation 
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently launched his own Substack as a way to break through the “noise,” saying Democrats must “flood the zone and continue to cut through the right-wing disinformation machine.”

“There’s so much mis- and disinformation out there, there’s so much noise, I don’t need to tell you that,” Newsom said.

“The question is, how do we break through all of that noise and engage in real conversations? And that’s why I’m launching on Substack. I hope you’ll follow me so we can continue to engage in a two-way conversation at this critical moment in our history.”

That Newsom, who has been the subject of numerous fact-checks himself, is holding himself out as an authority on the veracity of political information is laughable.

The Substack follows up his podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, which he launched in March. That podcast brought us one of Newsom’s most obviously false lies of all: that no one in his office ever used the term “Latinx.”

He made the claim during a conversation with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

In fact, his comment was so far from the truth that CNN compiled several video clips and social media posts where Newsom used the term.

“That is a lot of use of ‘Latinx’ by him for somebody who said that nobody in his office has ever used that phrase,” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski said.

Newsom also said on his podcast that transgender-identifying men competing in women’s sports is an “issue of fairness” calling it “deeply unfair” for the men to compete. This despite Newsom’s leading a state that allows transgender-identifying men to compete in women’s sports.

It’s not the first time Newsom has misrepresented his policies.

In 2021, CapRadio published an investigation finding Newsom had misled with his promises to overhaul the state’s approach to wildfire prevention. On his first full day in office, he said confronting wildfires would have to become a year-round effort.

“An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention,” the outlet explained two-and-a-half years after Newsom first took office.

“The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399,” the article continued.

Meanwhile, Newsom’s propensity for telling tall tales was perhaps most recognizably on display when he debated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2023.

He claimed during the debate that more people are moving from Florida to California than are moving from California to Florida. Yet according to Census data from 2022, 50,701 people moved from California to Florida while just 28,557 people moved from Florida to California.

He also falsely claimed that California mandates parental input into public school curricula. But according to Reform California, Newsom “has smeared parents who raise concerns on curriculum — calling them racists, bigots, extremists, and homophobes. Newsom has also threatened school districts with massive financial penalties for changing curriculum based on parental input.”

Newsom also falsely claimed that California has a lower crime rate than Florida, despite having moments earlier been confronted with a chart that showed California had a crime rate double that of Florida, according to FBI data.

He has even received several mostly false and even one “pants on fire” ratings from Politifact, which is not exactly known for its fact checking of Democrats.

He received his “pants on fire” rating for a 2019 claim that “the vast majority” of San Francisco’s homeless people “also come in from — and we know this — from Texas.”

He received a “mostly false” rating for his claim that Texas Governor Greg Abbott “cut $211 million in mental health funding.”

It is true that Abbott took $210.7 million from the Health and Human Services Commission, which provides mental health services, to help fund a border security initiative. However, state officials were then able to use federal Covid-19 funds to replace that funding.

Headline Fail of the Week

“Supreme Court OKs Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for kids, a setback for transgender rights,” the Associated Press reported. “The decision comes amid other federal and state efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people,” the AP said, “including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.”
It’s just one example of many that Becket Adams listed in his recent column for NR on the media’s “stubbornly skewed coverage of the trans ‘treatment’ debate.”

Media Misses

• After ABC News let reporter Terry Moran go over his commentary on X that President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller is a “world-class hater” who uses his hatreds as “spiritual nourishment,” Moran defended his comments and further claimed that journalists “don’t sacrifice” their “citizenship.” “Your job is not to be objective,” he claimed.

• The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg likened living in the U.S. to living in Iran.

“Where are the ICE raids at the Trump properties?” Acosta asked during an episode of The Contrarian podcast with Jennifer Rubin. “Could somebody call ICE on the Trump golf course in Virginia? You’re telling me there’s nobody in there that is undocumented or has some kind of squirreliness going on with their paperwork? Give me a break.”
“How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one buried at his golf course in New Jersey! Isn’t she buried by the first hole or the second tee or something like that?” he asked. “Immigrants always doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do!” he joked further.