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'Grow a F*cking Spine': Critics Fume as Newsom Backtracks on ICE 'Terrorism' in Ben Shapiro Interview
“If you get cooked by Ben Shapiro, you don't have a chance against Vance.”
Jan 16, 2026
Amid unprecedented backlash against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, California Gov. Gavin Newsom—considered a leading contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—is being accused of giving the increasingly violent agency a pass after an interview with right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro in which he softened his criticism of ICE.
In recent days, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, officers of ICE and other federal agencies have been documented engaging in blatant racial profiling, unconstitutional “citizenship checks,” and extreme uses of physical force, including dragging a disabled US citizen from her car on the way to a doctor's appointment, as the Associated Press reported Friday.
It is part of a pattern of behavior by ICE that Newsom's press office described as "state-sponsored terrorism" as recently as January 7, when he used the term to describe Good's killing by agent Jonathan Ross, who was recorded shooting Good in the head after stepping in front of her vehicle and referring to her as a "fucking bitch." Agents also obstructed emergency medical services from arriving at the scene of the shooting to assist Good, according to video and eyewitness accounts.
But when questioned by the cantankerous debater Shapiro on his podcast, This is Gavin Newsom on Thursday, the governor backed off that forceful description of the agency.
“Your press office tweeted out that it was state-sponsored terrorism, which, I mean, Governor, I just have to ask you about that. That sort of thing makes our politics worse, and it does,” said Shapiro, to which Newsom responded, “Yeah.”
Shapiro continued: “Our ICE officers obviously are not terrorists. A tragic situation is not state-sponsored terrorism.”
“Yeah, I think that’s fair,” agreed Newsom.
A short clip of that exchange, shared in celebration by Shapiro's outlet, the Daily Wire, was met with widespread criticism on social media from those who wanted to see one of the Democratic Party's most prominent leaders take an unapologetic stance against ICE.
Mehdi Hasan, founder of the news outlet Zeteo, questioned why "Newsom is trying to wreck his otherwise very strong chance of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination by doing this self-destructive podcast where he allows right-wing guests to walk all over him and then promote clips online of them walking all over him."
But this clip showed only one of several instances during the nearly two-hour interview in which Newsom rolled over to his guest's pro-ICE framing.
When Shapiro interrogated Newsom about California's supposed "sanctuary state" policy and suggested the state should “cooperate with ICE in the vast majority of cases,” Newsom responded: “That's exactly what they do in California.”
Newsom then boasted that there have been “over 10,000” deportations he’s cooperated with since he became governor of California. Though he emphasized that the sanctuary law only allows for the state’s correctional facilities to cooperate with ICE, advocates have criticized it for allowing the deportation of those who were never convicted and those who’ve had their cases dropped.
“California has cooperated with more ICE transfers, probably, than any other state in the country,” he continued. “I vetoed multiple pieces of legislation that have come from my legislature to stop the ability for the state of California to do that.”
Newsom has indeed vetoed at least two pieces of Democratic legislation that sought to further limit the state’s cooperation with ICE—one in 2023, which would have repealed requirements allowing prisons to transfer noncitizens to ICE custody after they leave prison, and another in 2019, which would have banned private security companies from entering California prisons to transfer people to ICE custody.
Shapiro later questioned Newsom on whether he agreed with calls from some Democrats to “abolish” ICE in the wake of the shooting, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), another potential favorite for the 2028 nomination.
Newsom said, “I disagree,” adding, “I believe a candidate for president by the name of Harris said that in the last campaign. I remember being on [All In with Chris Hayes] hours later saying, ‘I think that’s a mistake.’”
While she has been critical of the agency and suggested changing its enforcement priorities, it is untrue that former Vice President Kamala Harris has ever called to “abolish ICE,” even saying as far back as 2018 that “ICE has a purpose. ICE has a role, ICE should exist.”
She did not call for ICE to be abolished during the 2024 campaign for president as Newsom suggested, and was criticized by immigrants’ rights activists for running further to the right on immigration than in years past.
By rejecting calls to abolish ICE, critics noted that Newsom was expressing a position far out of touch with the Democratic base and with a widening segment of the country, which has grown increasingly hostile toward ICE over the past year, and especially in the wake of its actions in Minnesota, which have led many to see it more as President Donald Trump's personal paramilitary force than a legitimate law enforcement agency.
A poll earlier this week by the Economist/YouGov revealed that for the first time ever, “abolishing ICE” had more support (46%) than opposition (43%) among American adults. Among those who said they leaned Democratic, 80% favored abolishing the agency, compared with just 11% who opposed it.
“This is an unbelievably stupid move from Gavin Newsom,” wrote the host of the left-wing talk show One Hand Politics, who goes by Mason, in response to the governor's rejection of the call to abolish ICE.
He implored Newsom to “grow a fucking spine and stop chasing Republican moderates that don’t exist. They all hate you.”
Brian Tashman, a political researcher and strategist at the ACLU, noted that Newsom is “not willing to push back against Ben Shapiro but will push back against labor organizers trying to enact a billionaire tax that would affect a few hundred people."
Left-wing commentator Joe Mayall saw the interaction as a window into how Newsom might perform in a possible 2028 presidential debate against Vice President JD Vance, widely seen as the Republican who would succeed Trump.
He wrote: “If you get cooked by Ben Shapiro, you don’t have a chance against Vance."
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‘Feckless’ Ken Martin Rebuked Over DNC Decision to Bury Autopsy of 2024 Election Disaster
"You can’t run as the party of democracy and transparency and then stick your own election autopsy in a drawer," said one critic.
Dec 18, 2025
The Democratic National Committee on Thursday drew strong criticism when it was revealed that the party's autopsy of its failures in the 2024 presidential election would not be publicly released.
According to the New York Times, DNC Chairman Ken Martin has decided against releasing the report because he "believes that looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress."
The decision to keep a lid on the report, however, is already sparking a backlash.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent argued in a Thursday piece that the decision by the DNC to bury the report "should unleash harsh criticism and recriminations" because it "could end up protecting key actors inside the party from accountability over the blown but winnable contest."
Sargent then pointed the finger at Future Forward, a super PAC that he said has earned a reputation for blowing large sums of money on ineffective television ads.
"Well before Election Day, the PAC came under harsh criticism from some Democrats who argued that it hadn’t spent sufficient money earlier in the campaign on ads attacking Trump," Sargent wrote. "Other Democrats charged that Future Forward’s ad-testing model and addiction to traditional TV ads led to anodyne communications and that its flawed theory of politics caused it to refrain from sufficiently targeting Trump, letting him avoid blame for his first-term disasters on Covid-19 and the economy."
Jeff Hauser, founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told Common Dreams that Martin's decision to bury the report was part of a broader pattern of a lack of accountability for US elites, an issue that he said is becoming more important" as America gets less and less equal."
"Ken Martin seems determined to become the Merrick Garland of DNC Chairs," added Hauser, "a feckless amiable sort unwilling to take on the powerful people who scream out for stringent accountability. Democrats ought to re-center their entire party around holding elites, be they from Big Tech, the Democratic Party establishment, Big Oil, or Trump's kleptocratic regime, accountable."
Rotimi Adeoye, a columnist for MS Now and former communications strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused party insiders of trying to protect elites at the expense of rebuilding public trust with voters.
"This is also happening as Congressional Dems sit at a -55 net approval," he argued on X. "If your numbers are that bad and your response is to bury the autopsy, you’re basically telling voters the insiders get protection while the base gets lectures."
Adeoye added that "you can’t run as the party of democracy and transparency and then stick your own election autopsy in a drawer," and said that "if the DNC thinks the report would 'hurt the party,' that means the problems are real and political, not analytical—and that’s exactly why people want to read it."
Journalist Yashar Ali, meanwhile, sent out a message on Bluesky encouraging DNC staffers who have access to the report to let him publish it.
"If you have access to this DNC report, please send it to me," he wrote. "I will protect your anonymity."
While the DNC isn't releasing its own report documenting party failures in 2024, the progressive advocacy group RootsAction last week published an autopsy written by journalist Christopher D. Cook, who argued that former Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign made a major mistake by trying to court so-called moderate Republican voters and corporate donors instead of focusing on the struggles of working-class Americans.
"This was a preventable disaster," Cook said, "but Harris and the Democratic Party leadership prioritized the agendas of corporate donors and gambled on a centrist path, while largely abandoning working-class, young, and progressive voters."
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AOC Leads JD Vance For First Time in 2028 Election Matchup: Poll
The poll shows the progressive congresswoman winning back voters who swung toward Trump in a hypothetical 2028 matchup with MAGA's potential heir apparent.
Dec 17, 2025
As MAGA's popularity wanes, a new poll shows that progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is now slightly favored to win a hypothetical presidential election against Vice President JD Vance, a leading contender to be the heir apparent to President Donald Trump.
The survey of over 1,500 registered voters, published Tuesday by The Argument/Verasight, shows the Bronx congresswoman slightly edging out the vice president, 51% to 49%, within the margin of error.
While the 2028 presidential election is still nearly three years away, the poll suggests that Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist who some have dubbed too polarizing to represent the Democratic Party, may have more nationwide appeal than establishment politicians have claimed.
Neither Vance nor Ocasio-Cortez has formally declared their intent to run for the presidency. But as Trump's loyal vice president, Vance is considered by many to be his natural successor. However, the president has continued to vacillate on whether he’ll run for an unconstitutional third-term bid himself, and polls have consistently shown Vance to be even less popular than Trump.
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is one of the relatively few Democrats available to fill a wide-open progressive lane. While her credibility among some on the left was dinged substantially by her defenses of the unpopular former President Joe Biden last year, the core planks of her affordability-focused platform—especially Medicare for All—are more popular than ever in the age of Trumpian austerity. This is especially true among Democratic voters, who polls have shown increasingly view the party establishment as out of step with their priorities.
Following Trump's victory in 2024, which was propelled predominantly by fears about inflation under Biden, one of the most striking numbers was the 11% shift toward Trump in the Bronx from 2020.
But while Trump gained substantially, Ocasio-Cortez also cruised to her fourth term in Congress with about as much support as ever, leading many to marvel at the rise of the idiosyncratic “AOC-Trump” voter, who was evidently disillusioned with the economy under the Democratic incumbent but felt compelled by Ocasio-Cortez’s working-class background and “anti-establishment” status.
Tuesday’s poll shows that these sorts of voters are very capable of being won back by the right Democratic candidate: 8% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 said they’d vote for Ocasio-Cortez in a hypothetical showdown with Vance. And while Trump dominated in 2024 among those who did not vote in the previous election, the poll shows Ocasio-Cortez reversing the trend, with support from 52% of those who stayed home in 2024.
Adding to this, the congresswoman polled well with the voter demographics that Vice President Kamala Harris—another likely 2028 hopeful—struggled to mobilize.
Where Trump dominated with non-college-educated voters, 56% to 42%, Ocasio-Cortez is virtually tied with Vance. Among Hispanic voters, who went against the Democratic VP in historic numbers to give Trump nearly half of their support, Ocasio-Cortez is shown to lead by an overwhelming 64% to 36% margin.
And among voters aged 18-29, who favored Harris by just four points in 2024, Ocasio-Cortez comfortably leads Vance by 16.
Her support among young voters, one of the groups most disillusioned with the Democratic establishment, is especially striking. While Ocasio-Cortez lags somewhat behind Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom in early polls for the 2028 Democratic nomination across all age groups, a Yale youth poll released last week showed that she is by far the preferred candidate among voters ages 18-35.
Meanwhile, the issue that propelled Trump back to the White House—the economy—has become an albatross for the GOP, with a record-low 31% of all voters giving him positive marks, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll last week.
Axios reported in September that Ocasio-Cortez was still weighing her options for what path to pursue in 2028, seeking to heighten her national profile in advance of either a presidential run or a primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who Democratic voters have increasingly scorned for what they perceive as routine capitulations to Trump.
Since Trump’s return to office, she has only continued to lean into her status as a progressive leader, joining Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on a nationwide campaign to “Fight Oligarchy,” which has drawn massive crowds in both red and blue states. Meanwhile, the unexpected rise of fellow democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to become New York’s next mayor has provided proof of concept that a working-class-focused, anti-corporate agenda can win elections.
"She has a very real shot in 2028," said CNN pollster Harry Enten back in September. "There's been a tectonic shift among Democratic voters since Bernie Sanders first ran. AOC's in a far better polling position than Sanders was before his first run, and the Democratic Party is also sick of its leadership."
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