The Incident and What It Reveals
A reporter asked a straightforward question about Gavin Newsom's dyslexia diagnosis. The governor's aide responded with two words that we can't print in full. The Hill ran the story. The aide has not, as of this writing, faced any public consequence from the Newsom operation.
This is not, at its core, a story about profanity. Reporters hear worse. Political staffers are stressed people in adversarial environments, and occasionally someone says something they shouldn't. What makes this incident worth examining isn't the word — it's the question that prompted it.
Newsom has leaned heavily on his dyslexia diagnosis in recent months, citing it to explain certain public communication patterns and to burnish a narrative of personal resilience. A reporter who asks whether the diagnosis is accurate or clinically documented is doing exactly what reporters are supposed to do. That's the job. Verify the claims of powerful people. When a governor's communications apparatus responds to that verification attempt with profanity rather than documentation, the appropriate conclusion is that the documentation doesn't exist or doesn't say what the narrative requires.
The Standard That Applies to Everyone Else
Gavin Newsom spent a significant portion of 2024 positioning himself as the national face of resistance to what his party calls disinformation. He launched initiatives, gave speeches, and appeared on network television to decry the spread of false narratives. His administration funded programs aimed at fact-checking and media literacy in California schools.
Apply that standard to himself. A claim made repeatedly in public by a public official, about his own medical history, used to explain his behavior and humanize him to voters — that claim is subject to the same scrutiny Newsom wants applied to everyone else's assertions. The fact that his staff responds to scrutiny with profanity suggests the scrutiny is landing somewhere sensitive.
This is the accountability gap in progressive governance. It's fine to demand transparency from corporations, from political opponents, from media organizations that don't share your worldview. It becomes different when the transparency is demanded of you. The aide who told the reporter to get lost wasn't an outlier. He was revealing an institutional culture in which accountability is for other people.
What Competent Communications Looks Like
I've worked around government communications professionals for fifteen years. The good ones know that the job, when a hard question comes in, is to either provide the documentation that answers it or explain clearly why the documentation is private and unavailable. What they don't do is tell reporters to go away, because telling reporters to go away is how small questions become major stories.
The Newsom operation is not staffed by amateurs. They know this. Which means the response wasn't a mistake — it was a choice. Someone calculated that stonewalling with profanity was preferable to transparency. That calculation tells you something about what transparency would reveal.
California's governor is running a state with a $73 billion deficit, a housing crisis that has driven hundreds of thousands of residents out of the state, a homeless population that rivals some small nations, and wildfire management failures that resulted in catastrophic destruction in Los Angeles in January 2025. He is also spending significant time positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run. In that context, a question about the accuracy of his medical narrative is a minor inconvenience. The explosive response to it suggests otherwise.
Journalists should keep asking. That's the job. And editors should keep running the answers — including the ones that consist of two words and a slammed door. Accountability doesn't require the cooperation of the powerful. It requires the persistence of the press.
