California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is salivating at the thought of being the next president of the United States. Nothing proves this more than his new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” which he’s using to rebrand himself as more of a moderate after years of taking the most radically left positions on every single issue.

Liz Wheeler, however, isn’t falling for his ruse. That’s why she created a new segment on “The Liz Wheeler Show” called Newsom vs. Newsom, in which she exposes his political chess game.

“Gavin Newsom wants to be president so bad that he needs to radically remake who he is in order to appeal to the American people because right now, he’s one of the most unappealing politicians out there,” says Liz.

His podcast, she argues, is just example after example of him “[being] chummy with a person from the right” in an effort to “portray himself as relatable” and willing “to see the other side’s point of view.”

The reason he chose a podcast to make this pseudo-transition to the center is “to collect the sound bites of him saying these ostensibly centrist things” so that when “he actually launches his bid for president … he is going to have an absolute library of sound bites that he can trot out any time one of us says, ‘Actually, Gavin Newsom is one of the most radical governors and politicians in the entire country,”’ Liz explains.

For example, on his debut episode of “This Is Gavin Newsom,” he interviewed none other than Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. During the conversation, Newsom agreed that biological males competing in women’s sports is unfair.

“It’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk, before adding, “There’s also a humility and a grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with.”

This is exactly the kind of “sound bite” Liz is talking about. Newsom will use this clip in the future to appear moderate when the issue of biological men competing in female athletics comes up.

But here’s the truth we all need to be armed with when that day comes: Gavin Newsom has been the governor of California since 2019, which means he’s had years to enact policies that would protect women from men competing in women’s sports. And he’s never done it.

“Every time Gavin Newsom had an opportunity to do this, he chose the transgender ideology,” says Liz.

For example, in 2024, California “prohibited schools from creating policies that would require teachers or school administrators to notify parents if their son or daughter requests to identify with neo-pronouns or change their names or use the bathroom of the opposite sex or play on a girls’ sports team.”

“Gavin Newsom presides as governor of California over the California Department of Education,” and “the education code allows men to play on girls’ sports teams. Gavin Newsom has the authority and the power to stop that, and yet he didn’t,” says Liz.

Further, back in 2022, Newsom “signed a bill into law making California what he calls a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender-identifying children.”

“The reality of his actions demonstrate without a shred of doubt that Gavin Newsom has not changed his mind on any of these issues,” says Liz. “He has had six years to protect women in sports, and he has not done it; he has done the opposite and made girls less safe playing sports.”

To hear more of Liz’s commentary, watch the episode above.

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s undermined every pillar of American identity, and public religion was no exception. Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963 struck down state-led prayer and mandatory scripture reading in public schools. While these decisions didn’t explicitly ban biblical education as literature or cultural instruction, they effectively removed it from the classroom. Over time, institutional pressure and administrative caution eliminated nearly all engagement with the Bible in the public square.

As large-scale immigration introduced greater religious diversity, demands for a more “neutral” education further pushed cultural Christianity into the realm of the taboo. Christmas and Easter became “winter” and “spring” break. Schools reduced biblical references to passing mentions — if they acknowledged them at all. The result: a rootless, amnesiac society cut off from the spiritual and cultural traditions that once inspired greatness.

By removing the religion that shaped our national character, we’ve lost the ability to understand or transmit our own culture. This is no accident.

Humans remain narrative creatures. Even in an age obsessed with data and reason, we understand ourselves through stories. Every civilization has a set of core narratives that define its identity. These stories echo through its literature, art, science, and daily language. People imitate the archetypes they inherit — knowingly or not—so the stories a culture preserves shape its citizens’ behavior, values, and imagination.

For ancient Greece and Rome, Homer’s “Iliad” served as a civilizational anchor. For Western Christendom, that role belonged to the Bible.

As with all enduring societies, the Western canon both reflected and created its civilization. The canon includes the foundational works every educated citizen was once expected to know, at least in outline: “The Divine Comedy,” “Paradise Lost,” the plays of Shakespeare. But none of these are truly intelligible without biblical knowledge. These literary masterpieces do more than quote scripture — they shape theology itself, popularizing specific interpretations of Christian doctrine.

Art doesn’t just reflect a culture; it defines it.

The stories are everywhere: David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Judas the betrayer, the unwelcome prophet, the good Samaritan, the sacrificial Christ. These archetypes saturate Western literature. Even works not explicitly Christian — like Shakespeare’s plays — reference scripture on nearly every page. And for directly inspired texts like Dante’s “Inferno,” biblical illiteracy makes the work incomprehensible.

Yet American legal doctrine now treats biblical ignorance as a virtue. Misreadings of the First Amendment have transformed cultural illiteracy into a legal mandate. Forget the Bible’s spiritual value — removing it from schools broke the chain of cultural transmission.

As a former public school history teacher, I saw this biblical and cultural illiteracy firsthand. I routinely had to explain the story of David and Goliath or the birth of Christ to 16-year-olds — just so they could understand the references in a historical speech or literary text. Students weren’t rejecting scripture. They had simply never heard it before.

Shakespeare and Dante still haunt English literature curricula, but only as lifeless relics. These works already challenge students. Strip out the biblical framework, and they become unreadable. That’s one reason woke activists now demand their removal altogether. Too white. Too Christian. Too patriarchal. But the push to obliterate the canon also masks a deeper failure: Today’s teachers often find these works unteachable — because students lack the cultural foundation to make sense of them.

Mass immigration has intensified the demand for multiculturalism and secularization. As the public square fills with Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists, American institutions have stripped out the Christianity that once defined them. But by removing the religion that shaped our national character, we’ve lost the ability to understand or transmit our own culture.

This is no accident. It’s the only outcome multiculturalism has ever produced.

America now suffers from a full-blown identity crisis. If we hope to recover a coherent national identity, we must start with the Bible. Conservatives and Christians who want to revive the American tradition must demand — unapologetically — the return of scripture and prayer to public life.

These practices weren’t controversial for most of our history. The Constitution didn’t suddenly change because the left launched a cultural revolution. Students — even those who are secular or from foreign faiths — still need biblical literacy to understand the civilization they live in and the culture they’re supposedly assimilating into.

A general knowledge of the Bible is indispensable. Without it, American education remains incomplete — and a unified national culture remains impossible.