(LifeSiteNews) — Target, fearing a consumer boycott last May like the one that cratered Bud Light’s sales after it embraced a transgender pitchwoman who is really a man, pulled from store shelves its Pride collection items like female swimsuits with “tuck-friendly construction” and “extra crotch coverage” designed for male genitalia.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pounced quickly, ridiculing what appeared to be a prudent move to protect company stockholders.
The Target CEO’s “selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage,” Newsom tweeted sarcastically on May 23. “Wake up America. This doesn’t stop here. You’re black? You’re Asian? You’re Jewish? You’re a woman? You’re next.”
Newsom returned to the platform now known as X on May 31, taking aim more squarely at opponents of the woke blitzkrieg of the past few years.
He warned of a “full-throated purge effort” by far-right forces “on a boycott binge and cancel crusade, trying to eliminate the existence of minority communities. Burning Flags. Banning Books. … We must continue to call out hate when we see it, as they keep trying to normalize it.”
The rhetorical inversion of reality was classic Gavin Newsom, a White House aspirant always eager to raise his national profile.
The social media posts implied that “minority communities” should monolithically support his hardcore progressive agenda and ignored the fact that “cancel culture” emanates overwhelmingly from the left. LGBT proponents, meanwhile, are the ones pushing to normalize at warp speed radical views of gender and sexuality considered by a global majority to be deviant and well outside the mainstream.
One reason why Newsom has long embraced “LGBTQ+” (previously with fewer letters and no plus sign) as his signature political cause is his deep ties to the family of the late American oil billionaire, J. Paul Getty. The Gettys have bankrolled Newsom’s business ventures as well as his rapid rise in public office that has brought him to the cusp of a U.S. presidential run.
The Ariadne Getty branch of the family vigorously promotes LGBT issues from Los Angeles and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Their activities help to explain why the transgender craze in particular has overrun American society and co-opted the business strategies of corporate elites.
Growing Up Getty, James Reginato’s 2022 book on the clan’s often tragic history, describes an “intimate family friendship, spanning generations, between the Gettys and the Newsoms.” The word “Newsom” appears 71 times in the 336-page book.
Gavin’s father, William Newsom III, was the “lifelong best friend” of J. Paul Getty’s sons John Paul Jr. and Gordon, with whom he attended St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco in the early 1950s. William Newsom’s own father was a “surrogate dad” to the brothers, as the Getty Oil founder lived mostly in Europe.
William Newsom was godfather to John Paul Getty III. When the 16-year-old was kidnapped in Rome in 1973, it was Gavin’s father who flew the ransom money from California to Italy. The Stanford Law School graduate later was appointed to the California Court of Appeal by Governor Jerry Brown, another St. Ignatius classmate, and managed the immense Getty family trust.
Now 56, Gavin Newsom’s privileged upbringing included Getty-funded international adventures such as African safaris and an expedition to Canada’s Hudson Bay to watch polar bears. In 1992 Newsom and Billy Getty, Gordon Getty’s son, launched PlumpJack, a wine store named after an opera written by Gordon, that grew to include upscale restaurants, luxury hotels, clothing boutiques, and Napa Valley wineries.
Gordon Getty was called Newsom’s “pseudo-father” by The American Spectator in its Golden Boy Gavin series of articles. During Newsom’s successful campaign for San Francisco mayor in 2003, investigative reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle found that Gordon owned 49 percent of Newsom’s 11 businesses and was the lead investor in 10 of them.
RELATED: Americans beware: Gavin Newsom as president would be more disastrous than Biden
Soon after becoming mayor in 2004, Newsom grabbed the national spotlight by illegally issuing “marriage” licenses to same-sex couples. His commitment to LGBT issues has been further cemented by his connection to Ariadne Getty, a granddaughter of the petroleum tycoon.
“How A Branch of the Getty Family Became LGBTQ Icons” was the title of an excerpt from Reginato’s hagiography published in Los Angeles Magazine last year. It recounted how the LGBT movement became Ariadne’s primary philanthropic focus after her daughter Natalia and son August each came out as gay while in their teens around 2010. Both have high-profile careers as fashion designers today.
Newsom is godfather to “Nats” Getty, who is best known for her unusual “non-same-sex marriage” to transgender YouTube star Gigi Gorgeous.
Born female but calling herself transgender and non-binary, Nats’s “top surgery” to remove her breasts was featured by People in an article some readers may find disturbing. Gigi was born male but has breast implants and claims to be female, meaning the pair has managed to confect a heterosexual union the hard way.
Ariadne Getty attended the WEF in Davos for the first time in 2018 and cosponsored, with the LA-based GLAAD advocacy group, a panel called “How Business, Philanthropy, and Media Can Lead to Achieving 100 Percent Acceptance for LGBTQ People.” She also announced a $15 million donation to establish the GLAAD Media Institute to train thousands of LGBT activists to bolster public messaging efforts.
The Ariadne Getty Foundation (AGF) had already been a major benefactor of GLAAD, founded in 1985 as the now insufficiently inclusive Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Variety has honored Ariadne as its Philanthropist of the Year for her work on behalf of the LGBT community.
Ariadne returned to Davos and the WEF in 2019 with Nats, Gigi, and August Getty in tow. “Making Equality Equal: The Next Move Forward for LGBT Rights” was the name of the panel she again cosponsored with GLAAD. “So, basically, we’re here to strong-arm the corporate world, to make sure they do the right thing. Shame them, if necessary,” she said, foreshadowing Newsom’s criticism of Target last spring.
Mark Getty, Ariadne’s brother and founder of Getty Images, joined the family for the WEF meeting in 2020. While Nats Getty and Gigi Gorgeous gravitated toward reporters, Mark announced a new partnership with GLAAD to “prioritize intersectionality” so that LGBT-related photos can be more easily located and used publicly. The AGF website later noted the family had “moved the needle in Davos.”
America’s most LGBT-friendly governor, Gavin Newsom might well have pushed his leftist politics involving sexual morality even without his tight ties to the Gettys.
But California’s anti-family policies on transgender minors, woke educational mandates, rising crime, and rampant homelessness will limit Newsom’s national appeal whenever he runs for president. His quest to add gun control measures to the U.S. Constitution won’t help, nor will the numerous other examples of the state’s decline on his watch.
The Gettys are hardly the only family that has enabled Newsom’s political ascent. CalMatters mapped out three generations of pivotal connections between four San Francisco family dynasties: the Browns, the Newsoms, the Pelosis, and the Gettys.
The Los Angeles Times examined the money trail in 2018, identifying the “faithful eight” San Francisco families that financially backed Newsom since his earliest campaigns. The billionaire Pritzkers of San Francisco and Chicago topped the donor list. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is now a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT stalwart with presidential ambitions of his own.
RELATED: Biden’s praise of Newsom rekindles speculation about California governor’s presidential ambitions
The Times piece also quoted Willie Brown, a key Newsom mentor who was California’s longest-serving Assembly speaker and then a two-term mayor of San Francisco.
Mayor Brown appointed Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission and then to the Board of Supervisors, before arranging for Newsom to succeed him as mayor. Newsom next served two terms as lieutenant governor and is now in his second and final term as governor.
Brown told the newspaper the liberal city’s wealthy elite foresaw and supported Newsom’s climb up the ladder years in advance. “He came from their world, and that’s why they embraced him without hesitancy and over and above everybody else,” Brown said. “They didn’t need to interview him. They knew what he stood for.”
William Underwood, Ph.D., is a writer living in California.