Gavin Newsom Tears Into GOP Governors for Pretending to Be Pro-Life

California Governor Gavin Newsom ripped into his Republican counterparts on their apparent disregard for human life during a weekend interview.

Newsom has previously made clear he isn’t afraid to call out Republicans for their hypocritical policies on issues including gun control, health care, and child welfare. His interview, which aired on MSNBC Sunday, included some of his most forceful comments yet about the policies they push “in the name of freedom.”

He first took aim at Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “One of the worst crime and murder rates in America and one of the worst mental health records of any governor in America?” Newsom said. “I’m not so convinced about the merits of his leadership.”

But Newsom pointed out that the problems go beyond Texas. “Eight of the top 10 murder states are Republican states,” he said. “Seven of the top 10 dependent states …  are red states.”

“The life expectancy in the South, and they’re not expanding Medicaid and prenatal care and providing child care? It’s jaw-dropping,” Newsom continued.

“Infant mortality? You care about life, and you look at life expectancy? You care about life, and you’re getting kids that are gunned down by weapons of war? Spare me. All in the name of freedom, as you’re banning books?”

“With all due respect, we should not be on the defensive as the Democratic Party. The Republican Party should be on their heels, not us,” Newsom added.

Newsom is no stranger to taking Republicans to task. In January, while visiting victims of the tragic Monterey Park shooting, he told he told CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell that the Second Amendment, which many Americans believe guarantees them unfettered access to guns, is “becoming a suicide pact.”

“Nothing about this is surprising. Everything about this is infuriating,” he said of the Monterey Park attack. Hours later, while still visiting, he then received reports that there had been another shooting, this time in Half Moon Bay, which killed seven people and injured one more.

More recently, during a June interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Newsom again highlighted the major discrepancies between Democratic- and Republican-led states. Newsom pointed out that blue states make up a much stronger portion of the U.S. economy, meaning they essentially subsidize red ones.

As Ron DeSantis’s campaign continues to plummet, it seems the junior varsity fascist has gotten all the more desperate to keep those fundraising dollars coming in and maintain the illusion that he stands a chance. He’s now even begging for donations in the wee small hours of the morning.

According to several users on Twitter, his campaign sent out a fundraising text around 2:30 a.m. ET on Monday.

Of course, there’s nothing with perhaps trying to connect with those who may be awake at nonconventional hours—workers with different or later schedules, individuals with different sleeping patterns, and those who maybe just have trouble falling asleep. But given DeSantis’s war on practically every subgroup of people under the sun, one may not be off-the-mark to imagine this fundraising text as unintentional.

This instance alone doesn’t indict the DeSantis campaign as incompetent. But taken in tandem with his disastrous Twitter campaign launch alongside Elon Musk, his immediately subsequent signing of a bill that would protect Musk if his rockets explode and kill workers, his sharing of a viciously homophobic and downright odd campaign video, and numerous reminders of his generally nonrelatable demeanor, the sum of it all perhaps explains why DeSantis is not built to win a presidential primary, let alone a general election.

And these campaign bugs don’t even get into DeSantis’s actual policies, like his infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country, or the rollback of gun safety laws while the country is awash in practically daily mass shootings that have radicalized people from Tennessee to Texas.

Elon Musk has decided that the only way to determine which billionaire tech bro can reign supreme is to have a literal dick measuring contest.

You read that right.

Musk is fuming over Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s newest platform, Threads. The Twitter competitor came out of the blue and has been a runaway hit, amassing more than 100 million downloads in its first week of existence. People are leaving Twitter in droves for Threads.

And Musk, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion and promptly ran it straight into the ground, will not stand for it. “Zuck is a cuck,” he tweeted Sunday night. “I propose a literal dick measuring contest.”

Musk also sued Meta last week for allegedly poaching former Twitter staff to create the “copycat” site. Those former staffers would be among the nearly three-quarters of all Twitter employees that Musk fired when he took over.

Meta’s response was short and to the point: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee—that’s just not a thing.”

Zuckerberg had not responded to Musk’s call for a dick measuring contest as of press time.

Musk seems determined to duke it out with Zuckerberg, one way or another. He has also challenged the Facebook founder to a cage match. And if that wasn’t enough toxic masculinity on display for you, misogynist influencer Andrew Tate—who has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized crime group to sexually exploit women—has offered to train Musk for the fight.

George Santos has taken many identities, finding his inspiration, personality, and even personal background from the lives of others. His latest model? Rosa Parks.

Santos compared himself to the civil rights leader during a bamboozling interview on conservative talk show host Mike Crispi’s Unafraid podcast last week, during which he appeared live from the back seat of a vehicle and went on a rant about how his party is apparently not intersectional enough for far-right Latino gay men.

“Come for me, I go right back for them because they think for far too long they’ve gotten away with getting along to get along. So no, it’s not going to stay that way anymore. I’m going to call them out. You want to call me a liar, I’ll call you a sellout,” Santos spitted.

“I mean, Mitt Romney: The man goes to the State of the Union of the United States wearing the Ukraine lapel pin, tells me a Latino gay man, that I shouldn’t sit in the front, that I should be in the back,” the fake volleyball all-star and vet charity scammer continued.

“Well guess what, Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the back and neither am I gonna sit in the back. That’s just the reality of how it works. Mitt Romney lives in a very different world. And he needs to buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride for him,” finished the congressman under investigation for potential criminal activity both here and abroad.

It’s unclear why Santos brought up Romney’s wearing of a Ukraine pin as an apparent pejorative or contrast to his identity as a Latino gay man. But Santos’s typically odd sentences pale against him—a member of Congress and possibly serial financial criminal—likening himself to a Black woman risking her life to make a stance against systemic racism and discrimination.

From Martin Luther King Jr. to now Rosa Parks, one wonders which other civil rights leaders Republicans may try to co-opt next!

Fabian Basabe used to be known as the “male Paris Hilton” in tabloid circles, a cosmopolitan socialite famous for being famous (being the son of a wealthy Ecuadorian businessman probably helped, too). Now, as a Florida state representative known for pushing anti-LGBTQ policies, he is being accused of sexual harassment by two male former staffers.

On Thursday, the Miami Herald reported on the lawsuit, which said Basabe made repeated sexual comments and advances towards a legislative aide and an intern. The suit detailed accusations including Basabe nonconsensually slapping the aide’s butt while at an elementary school career day, and groping and trying to kiss a Florida State University graduate student before then going on to hire him as an intern.

The lawsuit, filed by former intern Jacob Cutbirth, former aide Nicolas Frevola, and his mother Janette Frevola, goes into great detail of what allegedly transpired. According to the accusations, Cutbirth first met Basabe and Frevola at a Tallahassee bar in December. Later, Cutbirth was asked to drive the drunk Florida representative back to his hotel.

While Cutbirth was driving, Basabe allegedly “began to physically touch and grope him and to grab at him to try to kiss him.” Cutbirth says he “repeatedly told Basabe to stop touching him” and refused a request to come back to Basabe’s hotel room. Cutbirth accepted a part-time unpaid internship in Basabe’s office just weeks later; he saw the opportunity as an “apology.”

But things did not end there. Cutbirth alleges that Basabe repeatedly requested that he “flirt with him” while in the office, and that Basabe described him as “eye candy” in front of other people. Basabe allegedly even suggested that Cutbirth should break off his engagement with his girlfriend and instead “explore his sexuality by having sex with men.”

In a different incident, Basabe allegedly told his aide, Frevola, that he wanted “all of that butt” before slapping Frevola’s buttocks in the back of a fifth grade classroom, while another aide spoke to students during career day.

On another occasion, Basabe allegedly showed Cutbirth and Frevola a photograph of a naked man on his phone, and told the two that he was a “bottom,” while they should be “tops.”

Cutbirth says he quit in March due to “pervasive sexual harassment.”

The lawsuit also carries a previous claim made by Frevola that Basabe slapped him across the face at an event hosted by one of the largest Tallahassee lobbying firms, following Ron DeSantis’s inauguration. Allegedly, while Frevola was talking to a lobbyist, Basabe—who had apparently been drinking all day—approached and asked Frevola if the lobbyist was the woman he had “slept with” a few weeks ago. The pair were both shocked by the question and denied the inquiry. Basabe apparently grew angry, saying “Oh, so you are cheating,” before slapping Frevola and telling him to stand in the corner.

Basabe has been criticized for running as a supposed social moderate, while supporting Florida’s slate of anti-LGBTQ bills. That includes the infamous Don’t Say Gay bill, a measure that prevents teachers from asking students their preferred pronouns, and another that makes it a crime to host drag shows with anyone under the age of 18 present.

Cutbirth and Frevola said they didn’t know what they could’ve done in response to all the alleged incidents, as Basabe apparently made them both sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Asked earlier as to whether he had indeed required them to do so, Basabe simply said, “There’s an application package, whatever is in there is in there. I don’t deal with the hiring process.”

The Florida legislature doesn’t require or provide NDAs for staff. Basabe has since accepted forcing staff to sign NDAs, and defended doing so. Still, he has denied the broader allegations, even calling the accusations from Frevola a “false” one made by “lazy, entitled, unscrupulous, self-involved, ungrateful, lying scum.”

Basabe once appeared on the reality TV show Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive, which depicted privileged children of celebrities experiencing the rugged life of working on a Colorado cattle ranch. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that comes out of [Fabian’s] mouth,” one viewer remarked in an IMDB review of Filthy Rich. “He is the most disrespectful, lazy, arrogant person I have [ever] come across.”

“Every week I am amazed at what a spoiled, immature, brat Fabian is,” another said.

In 2006, he was arrested in New York for drunk driving and running a red light in his Hummer. He sued a New York nightclub $2 million after the doorman, who he called a “sand negro,” didn’t allow he and his friends to enter.

In December 2019, Basabe reportedly called a Black Miami publicist the n-word at a party at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach.

“When he’s leaving, he starts screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘peasant,’ ‘whore,’ ‘bitch’ at me … When he’s 50 yards away, he screams, ‘F–k you [n-word] bitch,’” publicist Tayo Otiti said.

Basabe has since viewed himself as a reformed man. “[Raising my son] has made me realize and focus and make up for any wrongs in my past,” he said in 2021.