In November 2023, downtown San Francisco underwent a sudden transformation. Its streets were power washed, graffiti was erased, trash was cleared, and the city’s sizable homeless population was relocated. For a city grappling with a mass exodus fueled by these very problems, the cleanup revealed that it was never a matter of feasibility but rather a lack of political will that was to blame for the city’s condition. Public officials who insisted such efforts were impossible, in an instant, demonstrated that a cleaner, safer city was always within reach.
However, the reason for the cleanup was not the concerns of upset San Franciscans but rather a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who attended the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, which was held at the city’s St. Regis hotel. In the days after the summit, the downtown reverted back to a filthy equilibrium. In the previous five years, the state of California squandered $24 billion on failed attempts to address the homeless crisis. Yet, Xi’s visit laid bare the true nature of California’s political machinery — an insular, dynastic system dominated by ultrawealthy progressives whose priorities shift when the right people are watching.
In Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All, investigative journalists Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter deliver a gripping expose of California’s entrenched political machine and uncover many of its secrets for the first time. They argue that California, and especially San Francisco, has become the Democratic Party’s center of gravity, aggressively exporting its brand of progressive politics to the rest of the country. “It’s time to stop the contagion from spreading,” they warn.
California, despite its vast resources, is in steep decline after decades of progressive rule. The state faces a $68 billion budget deficit. It has the nation’s highest poverty rate at 18.9% and 28% of America’s homeless population. A potent symbol of its decay is the Bay Area’s thriving drug market, aided by sanctuary laws, which has triggered a real estate boom in Honduras where successful fentanyl dealers have returned to build gaudy mansions emblazoned with the logos of the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers.
Fool’s Gold is a sharp, meticulously researched, and timely analysis of California’s decline and the political forces sustaining its one-party rule. California, once the state of Reagan and Nixon, began swinging left in the 1980’s. The Democratic takeover was accelerated by “military base closings after the end of the Cold War, the flight of tech, aviation, and other businesses to states with lower taxes; amnesty and sanctuary policies that opened the floodgates to illegal immigration; and San Francisco’s liberal contagion spreading south.”
This was, in many ways, the triumph of a tight-knit social network that began to form in the first half of the 20th century. In 1942, current Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) grandfather, William Newsom, steered Pat Brown’s campaign for district attorney. When Brown later ran for governor, he again tapped William Newsom to run his campaign. It was a relationship mirrored many decades later when Brown’s son Jerry Brown served as governor, with Gavin Newsom as his lieutenant. Woven into this fascinating saga are the Pelosis and the billionaire Getty clan, whose money has sustained the power of the Bay Area aristocracy in city and state politics for decades.
In Fool’s Gold, Crabtree and McFatter ruthlessly shed light on California’s “failed progressive vision.” Across nine gripping chapters, the book dissects California’s murky entanglements with the Chinese Communist Party, its scourge of devastating wildfires caused by a combination of natural dryness and manmade forestry mismanagement, and the looting of the state treasury by an impossible array of progressive causes, while offering incisive portraits of the powerful figures — Gavin Newsom, Adam Schiff, Kamala Harris, and Willie Brown — who have shaped and benefited from the state’s trajectory.
The book is, in many respects, a takedown of Gavin Newsom, a formidable and clever politician who, the authors say, in a lurch into psychiatric diagnostics that may extend beyond their own expertise, “exhibits the ‘dark triad’ personality traits that ought to disqualify a person from achieving power of any kind.” But the question remains: does he carry enough personal baggage to doom his future presidential ambitions?
The authors allege that he secretly paid for the $91,000 bronze statue of himself that sits in San Francisco’s monumental Beaux-Arts City Hall and that it was his mentor Jerry Brown, not the baseball scholarship which he often alleges, that gained him admission into Santa Clara University back in 1985. They also say that in the wake of the 2018 Camp Fire, he bailed out utility giant PG&E and diverted blame to oil and gas companies after the provider made significant donations benefiting him and his wife. Gavin Newsom has proven resilient to personal scandals in the past, even his infamous lockdown-breaching dinner at the French Laundry in 2020. In 2021, he easily survived the statewide recall effort driven by his own highly unpopular pandemic response. But confronting some of the questions raised in Fool’s Gold will be a challenge for the governor.
Perhaps the most damning claims concern Gavin Newsom’s ties to China, which began during his mayoral tenure. Using a nonprofit organization called ChinaSF, launched by the city in 2008, the then-mayor sought to attract Chinese businesses to San Francisco and beyond through a variety of clever incentives that promised to remove bureaucratic obstacles. Among the businesses that came in through this scheme were solar companies that flooded the U.S. market with cheaper alternatives and were a factor in the 2011 collapse of Solyndra. Unbothered by the optics, he later appointed Yu Ben Meng as chief investment officer of the California state pension system, whose funds were then invested into various Chinese defense companies. (Meng, who resigned in the wake of scandal in 2020, now serves as deputy CIO at China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange in Beijing.)
WHY THE RED TIDE IS RISING IN CALIFORNIA
For now, California progressivism seems to be on its heels. The 2024 election dealt a devastating blow to California progressives from Harris to Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. California voters further reversed progressive policies by passing Proposition 36, which enhances penalties for theft and drug offenses. Yet don’t count out Gavin Newsom. Crabtree and McFatter’s critique of the “California way” and its charismatic governor is well-timed. This month, Gavin Newsom launched a podcast, which some have viewed as a launchpad for his 2028 presidential ambitions. It features the governor sparring with right-wingers such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and conceding ground on tactical matters such as transgender athletes. Gavin Newsom seems to be attempting to rebrand as a moderate.
“More than any current politician, Newsom has executed the progressive vision across his city and state with swiftness and precision,” Fool’s Gold demonstrates. But this is a portrait of a highly effective politician who will survive and triangulate however he must, not of an ideologue who will die for the cause. For anybody seeking to understand the past, present, and future of the Democratic Party and the inner workings of its California stronghold, Fool’s Gold is an essential and exhilarating read.
Carson Becker is an American writer.
