The man under federal criminal investigation, hiding his tax returns behind a no-cameras viewing room, presiding over a state with ghost daycares bilking billions in fraud from taxpayers, has found his next project: infiltrating your Thanksgiving dinner.
Newsom’s political PAC sent an email this week announcing a new “digital” operation. The plan is to hold training sessions every Tuesday for the next eight weeks teaching supporters how to absorb his talking points and then quietly insert them into family text chains, alumni Facebook groups, neighborhood apps, and other online spaces where politics normally doesn’t come up.
“A lot of those spaces aren’t political at all,” the email explains. “That’s the point.”
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Not forwarding propaganda, the email insists. Just taking what Newsom sends you and “translating it for people you understand better than we do.” The person “already in that room is the only one who can get a message in, and the only one who knows how to say it so it doesn’t feel out of place.”
In other words: learn to gaslight your relatives on Gavin Newsom’s behalf. Make it sound organic. Make it sound like your own opinion. The governor of California — who has enough actual governing problems to fill several scandals — is now in the business of teaching people to be covert political operatives inside their own social circles.
Nate Silver, a political pollster and forecaster who is not a conservative and has no particular reason to protect Republicans, summed it up in one sentence: “FYI the only humane policy is a lifetime ban from the groupchat to anyone who does this.”
FYI the only humane policy is a lifetime ban from the groupchat to anyone who does this. https://t.co/p4XOW7QDzn
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 6, 2026
When Nate Silver is more concerned about this than Newsom’s own PAC is, you have a project that is going to produce exactly the blowback it deserves.
This is, in miniature, everything that makes the Democratic Party’s brand so toxic right now. They are condescending busybodies who believe their job is to manage what other people think — not by making better arguments in public forums, but by seeping into private spaces and nudging people toward predetermined conclusions without being noticed. It is the political equivalent of hiding medication in your pet’s food. It assumes the people around you are incapable of reaching correct conclusions if left to their own devices, and that the solution is not better ideas but better infiltration.
There’s also the rich irony of a man under active DOJ investigation raising $250,000 from supporters immediately after announcing that investigation — and then immediately deploying those funds toward an operation designed to make people trust Gavin Newsom through their own family members.
The operation is going to fail for the reason all such operations fail: people can tell when someone has been briefed. Inauthenticity is detectable. And discovering that your cousin spent eight weeks in Newsom training sessions before bringing up California’s housing policy at Christmas dinner is the kind of thing that ends text chains permanently.
Nate Silver’s right. Ban them from the groupchat.
