De Santis’s  Reality Defeats Newsom’s Fantasy World Ron De Santis and Gavin Newsom performed as any who have watched them would have predicted. At first, the glib and smarmy Newsom followed his usual script of strutting, posing— teeth sparkling, hair shimmering—interrupting, cajoling, avoiding the questions asked and the statistics presented, going through his menu of canned ad hominem zingers to fixate on abortion, LGBTQ2+ advocacies, and the usual leftwing cultural revolution boilerplate. But De Santis in workmanlike fashion kept pressing him on the facts, even if at times in the first half hour he seemed overwhelmed by the usual slick antics and alternate-realty facts of Newsom who appeared as if he stepped right out of some metrosexual TV ad. In Newsom’s alternate world, California has almost solved the homeless problem. Oil companies, uniquely in America, single out and undermine the state and so alone cause its sky-high gas and power prices. Illegal immigration is mostly a matter of empathy for the oppressed. California’s Covid shutdown merely ‘followed the science’. Taxes are not that bad. Crime is no problem, and the California mass exodus in just normal state out/in migration. All these mythologies were delivered by a confident, snarky, and cocky in-your-face Newsom, who in that regard offered a stark contrast with the shaky Joe Biden. But after 30 minutes or so, the Newsom firecracker sort off sizzled out, still loud but increasingly predictably empty of content. De Santis’s adherence to facts finally wore down and overwhelmed Newsom’s ability—or anyone’s ability—to turn the highest taxed, home to the most homeless, rising crime, poor education, and most expensive gas and power continental state into some sort of beneficiary of Joe Biden’s brilliant economic agenda at work. In Newsom’s defense who would be so audacious—or shameless?—to sell the country on the California catastrophe as a national blueprint for us all? Newsom loyally wore the indefensible record of the Biden-Harris albatross around his neck to the surreal extent of vouching for Biden’s impressive cognitive clarity and mental robustness at 80. At that moment, some of us probably gave Newsom a few points for his sheer roguery since he seemed to mouth assertions about Biden’s haleness that were not only not true but quite impossible to be taken as true by any sane person— a fact known to him no doubt as well.