Gavin Newsom would like you to forget how spectacularly he bungled California’s Covid-19 response.
Fortunately, Chuck Todd is one of the many who still recall it vividly.
In an interview on “Meet The Press” this past weekend, the host pressed hard on the governor about his abysmal pandemic record.
Todd rightly called Newsom out for his preferential treatment of Hollywood, which was largely allowed to resume business while churches stayed shuttered and beaches were closed to the public.
“This is this anger between the populace and the elites,” Todd said. “Here you prioritize this industry, but you were tougher on those that just wanted to go worship.”
Newsom had no choice but to admit that criticisms of him are “legitimate, in terms of reflection.”
“We would have done everything differently,” he conceded. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
It’s true we know more now than we did in the past — but there are many, many missteps Newsom made that were obvious to his critics in real time.
One thing that was never acceptable: dining at French Laundry, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Napa Valley, with health industry lobbyists while state guidelines heavy-handedly discouraged indoor gatherings for everyone else.
The governor was spotted stuffing his maskless face with a $350 tasting menu one week after recommending Californians cancel their 2020 Thanksgiving festivities.
Or how about when Newsom — the last governor in the entire country to reopen schools — sent his own children back to in-person classes at their ritzy private academy while public school kids in the very same county were stuck at home on Zoom.
If it was safe for his kids, why wasn’t it safe for everyone else’s?
Newsom’s pandemic leadership was the epitome of “rules for thee but not for me.” And that has nothing to do with hindsight.
I was in Newsom’s California for the pandemic lockdown, and I will never forget the deprivation of liberty that entailed — from governor-mandated curfews to chained up playgrounds and even watching cops write $1,000 fines for surfers hitting the waves alone.
All the while, red states, like DeSantis’s Florida, were cautiously and successfully experimenting with getting things back to normal.
Newsom’s critics — and his constituents — were calling out his failures all along, so much so that he was taken to task with a recall attempt in 2021. Although he survived a special election, almost 5 million Californians voted for his ousting.
Bet he hasn’t forgotten that.
But Newsom isn’t the only one hoping to memory-hole their pandemic blunders.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has also dabbled in revisionist history. This spring, the labor leader boldly claimed she was working to reopen schools as early as May of 2020.
I guess she was hoping that we all forgot her hyperbolic rhetoric and her characterization of the Trump Administration’s attempts to get kids back to school as “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel” in July of that year.
We may not know the extent of the damage done to children by the edicts of Newsom, Weingarten and other fear-mongers. The consequences of school closures are still being realized, but the learning losses will follow a generation of Americans for the rest of their lives.
We can’t just let the leaders who failed us declare that bygones are bygones. Refusing to forget isn’t being stubborn — it’s a civic duty.
Remember this: Americans’ rights were trampled — in the name of “safety” — by a spectacular display of often unscientific government overreach.
History will repeat itself if we forget it.
