California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday debuted his new podcast with a 90-minute chat with Charlie Kirk, the anti-woke culture warrior and Turning Points USA co-founder. Newsom, who is positioning himself as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, used the conversation to throw trans people under the bus.

Newsom told Kirk that he finds the participation of trans women in sports to be “deeply unfair.” “I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk, a man who called trans people a “throbbing middle finger to god” and “an abomination.”

Little matter that “fairness” in sports when it comes to the participation of trans athletes is, as the Human Rights Campaign reported, “a non-issue.” The LGBTQ advocacy group noted that “many states, athletic organizations, and governing bodies successfully balanced fairness, inclusion, and access to play without any problem.”

But Newsom was not interested in taking seriously the responsibility of his position and huge platform to demystify and rebut far-right fearmongering by elected officials, conservative think tanks, and well-funded trans exclusionary campaigns. Instead, he used the podcast to give this far-right Trumpian agenda more oxygen still.

Newsom showered Kirk with affirmation and only the most meagre of pushbacks; one listener counted that the governor used some variation of the word “appreciate” 52 times in reference to Kirk’s views. Newsom denigrated the use of gender pronouns in introductions, mocked the term “Latinx,” and decried calls to defund the police as “lunacy.” In a particularly disturbing segment, the governor effectively disavowed Democratic support for trans people accessing gender-affirming health care in prisons — a constitutionally protected right under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Newsom described as “brilliant” the popular Trump campaign ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One of the ads featured a clip of former Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was California attorney general, voicing support for adhering to a law ensuring medically necessary gender-affirming care be provided for trans people in........

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