Gavin Newsom is trying to reinvent himself ahead of an expected Presidential run.
That rebrand is off to a rocky start.
And Megyn Kelly caught Gavin Newsom faking the one thing his upcoming Presidential campaign depends on.
The Man Who Wrote a Book Just Admitted He Can't Read One
California Governor Gavin Newsom is crisscrossing the country promoting his new memoir.
He sat down for a book tour event with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and told the audience he's "just like" them – because he got a 960 on the SAT and can't read a speech.
The clip hit 40 million views.
California GOP Chairwoman Corrin Rankin – the first black chair in the party's history – told Fox News Digital what she saw in those comments.
"It's the mindset of thinking that black people are inferior, they're intellectually inferior," she said. "That's the mindset that contributed to Jim Crow."
Republican Senator Tim Scott was more direct: black Americans aren't anyone's "low bar" and have "built empires, created movements, outworked, outhustled and outsmarted" people like Newsom.
Then MK Media's Mark Halperin asked Newsom this week whether he can actually read.
What followed was one of the stranger performances in recent memory. Newsom explained that he underlines everything, transfers the underlined passages to loose paper, then condenses those onto yellow index cards before anything sticks. On a phone or iPad, he said, he starts "daydreaming" and "drifting off."
A man promoting a book he wrote told a national audience he can't read one.
Newsom has blamed his struggles on dyslexia.
Megyn Kelly Says Newsom's 2028 Campaign Has a Lying Problem
On her show, Megyn Kelly didn't spend time on the dyslexia debate. She went straight to the con.
"This is Gavin Newsom lying, again, and trying to make himself sound relatable," she said. While Newsom's office dismissed the controversy as "MAGA-manufactured outrage."
Megyn connected it to the larger fiction Newsom has been selling on his book tour – the one where a man bankrolled by one of the wealthiest dynasties in American history pretends he grew up eating mac and cheese from a box.
The memoir is called Young Man in a Hurry. Premium seats to hear him discuss it run $100.
The Getty Money Behind the Man Calling Himself a Regular Guy
Gordon Getty – billionaire heir to the J. Paul Getty oil fortune – took young Gavin on family vacations to watch whales in Canada and elephants in Kenya. Gordon Getty's own words to The New Yorker: "I think of Gavin as a son."
At 23, Newsom launched his business empire with Getty family money. By the time he ran for governor, more than $2 million of his campaign fundraising traced to a handful of elite donor families – the Gettys among them.
That's the man who stood in Atlanta telling an audience he's just like them because he scored a 960 on his SATs.
Megyn's guest Glenn Greenwald asked the right question: why now? Newsom has been in public life for 20 years. The dyslexia story has been there the whole time. It didn't become urgent until he needed a national identity for 2028.
Every piece of the Newsom makeover – the hardscrabble childhood, the learning disability, the man-of-the-people book tour – exists to put distance between him and his actual record.
His actual record is California. Highest cost of living in the nation. Homeless encampments stretching for miles under overpasses. Blackouts in a state that is banning gas cars before it figured out how to keep the lights on. More than 400,000 residents fled to other states in a single year – the largest domestic exodus of any state in the country.
That's what Gavin Newsom built. Instead of answering for it, he flew to Atlanta on a Getty-funded book tour and told an audience he understands struggle because he got a 960 on his SATs.
Megyn Kelly named it for what it is: a lie dressed up as vulnerability, from a man who has been lying about who he is his entire career. The voters he left behind in California already know how this story ends.
Sources:
- Corrin Rankin, "Newsom Blasted by CA GOP Chair Over Viral Clip," Fox News, February 2026.
- "Newsom's Getty Dynasty Ties Collide With His Claims of a Struggling Childhood," Fox News, February 2026.
- "Gavin Newsom Told a Predominantly Black Crowd He's Just Like Them," Yahoo News, February 2026.
- Tim Scott, post on X, February 2026.
- Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, "California's Population Drain," 2023.