What Charlie Kirk said about his conversation with Gavin Newsom
'The governor isn't a joke. He has a shark's instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish's memory,' Kirk said in a first-person opinion piece for Foxnews.com.
As co-founder of Turning Point USA, Kirk is widely credited with helping to increase President Donald Trump's support among young Americans. (Newsom said during the 'This is Gavin Newsom' podcast that his 13-year-old had been excited to learn that he would be speaking to Kirk and had wanted to come along.) Kirk, who has become something of a rock star among young conservatives and is currently headlining a Turning Point USA tour called 'The American Comeback,' has taken heat from some conservatives about appearing on the show.
'To that, I bluntly say: Are those people nuts?' Kirk wrote. 'Gavin Newsom isn't an oddball college professor or an obscure blogger. He is the governor of one of America's largest states, one of the world's largest economies and the nerve center of many of America's most important companies and industries. Of course, I'm going to talk to him if he asks!'
Kirk went on to describe Newsom as charming, friendly and ambitious and said the governor 'wants to be president more than any living person.' And he likened Newsom's political instincts to that of celebrated hockey player Wayne Gretzky who, 'rather than going where the puck was ... could anticipate where the puck would be in the future and went there.'
On the show, Newsom broke with many in the Democratic Party by saying that the issue of transgender athletes in women's sports is one of 'fairness.' This is an example, Kirk wrote, of Newsom 'moving to where the puck will be in four years.'
By that statement, and talking to conservatives like Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon on the podcast, many observers speculate that Newsom is positioning himself as more of a centrist than a progressive in anticipation of running for president when his term as governor ends in two years. 'It might work,' Kirk wrote.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Newsom was able to connect with Kirk and Bannon with the help of his former wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was nominated by Trump to be the next ambassador to Greece.
While some critics have accused Kirk of 'platforming' Newsom, technically it was Newsom who platformed him, and the pairing was good for both men in terms of publicity. Kirk, for example, was invited to go on Sean Hannity's Fox News show to talk about the appearance.
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