Sam Harris

I consider myself left of center on virtually every topic, and yet I don't recognize most of what the Democratic Party has been doing for at least a decade.

I don't recognize it as

politically pragmatic or morally sane.

It would be such a relief to have a governor who has his head screwed on straight and who's obviously compassionate, but not a masochist.

And so I guess I would just invite you to reflect on the politics of California and what sort of reset is possible here for Democrats.

So on a different approach, how would you judge Newsom's tenure as governor?

what should he have done or not done?

Because obviously we're not talking about a resounding success at this moment in his tenure, right?

We're talking about all, we've spent an hour talking about all the things that ail us as a state.

What could he have done differently?

Remind people what Prop 36 was.

So what's Newsom's reason for not supporting it?

The point you made around the dysfunction in California being a gift to the far right and, you know, right-leaning authoritarianism and Trumpism.

I mean, this is really my criticism of, or my skepticism, not even so much criticism, my skepticism about Newsom's run for president.

president is not so much his failings as governor or his failings as a politician or anything about him personally, it's that he's got the albatross of California's reputation hung around his neck.

Now, some of that reputation is, I think, a hallucination on the part of the other 49 states, but some of it's real.

And you can just see the bad campaign ads taken out to his disadvantage of just scenes in San Francisco that look like they're out of a zombie movie.

of, you know, homelessness and open-air drug use and, you know, looting and, you know, the looting of CVSs.

And, I mean, just you can walk into a CVS and steal $999 worth of stuff.

Right.