What does Gavin Newsom actually believe in? The question is legitimate, given his practice of trying to take multiple opposing views on various issues.

When it comes to the issue of boys in girls’ spaces, Newsom is against it until he is for it. And when it comes to a wealth tax, he opposes it in California but supports it nationwide.

When California’s Democrat-controlled legislature put a 5% wealth tax on billionaires on the ballot, Newsom came out opposed to the tax. Newsom says that he’s a “no” and claims his reason for rejecting it is “because this measure dedicates almost all of the revenue it raises to a single category of state spending.”

That’s politician talk. Newsom actually disapproves of the tax because it is chasing the biggest wealth creators out of the once-Golden State. It’s simple logic: If you penalize those who create the most wealth by disingenuously portraying them as the cause of economic inequity, as if making money were a crime, then those entrepreneurs will move to places where they are not penalized for making money. They flee as refugees to wealth-welcoming places like Texas or Florida — or any red state for that matter.

It became painfully obvious that Newsom’s claimed objection is disingenuous when he called for a nationwide wealth tax. Noting that 10% of the country owns two-thirds of the nation’s overall wealth — as if this were a self-evident problem, which it’s not — Newsom proposes a solution: “A national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern Buffett Rule — that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay.”

He, like so many Democrat politicians, ignores the fact that wealthy Americans already pay the lion’s share of the taxes. Only viewed through the lens of socialism does the dynamic of the wealthy being the problem simply because they are wealthy make any sense.

Apparently, for socialists, wealth itself is a crime worthy of being punished. It’s necessary, they say, to have one’s property confiscated by a “benevolent” government to redistribute — conveniently according to their own political agenda.

Newsom attempts to tie his anti-wealth argument to the Founding Fathers, stating, “The system America’s founders built was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades.” Wrong. The system our Founders built was designed to limit government power; thus, the three coequal branches were created to prevent the accumulation of too much power in any one branch.

America’s Founders were not socialists, as Newsom implies. They were utterly unlike the surge of radical leftist Democratic Socialists taking over the Democrat Party. No, America’s Founders were staunchly capitalistic. They did not eschew legitimate wealth creation, nor did they see it as a fundamental flaw in America’s economic system, as so many Democrats assert that it is.

Newsom’s eyes are clearly on the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination, and being the political animal that he is, he’s sidling up to the radical leftist socialists seemingly taking over the party, while at the same time holding them at arm’s length in the state he currently governs.

The glaring problem for Newsom is that while he has occupied the governor’s mansion, the Golden State has gone from having a budget surplus to a growing deficit. California’s problem has been that it has leaned into radical leftist ecofascist policies and expanded the welfare state at the expense of the business sector, which is responsible for producing the wealth in the first place. In effect, Newsom has overseen a state government effort to systematically kill its economic engine. And now he wants to blame the wealth generators for economic disparity, even though his own party is responsible.

That’s not leadership; it’s deflection.