NEWSOM’S DEADLY FOLLY: A Covid Postmortem for California. Though well positioned to weather the pandemic, California instead pursued disastrous restrictions and cracked down on dissent. It had one of the slowest economic recoveries of any state, and ranked dead last in providing in-classroom teaching to students. Now Governor Gavin Newsom, having squandered $40 billion to mitigate his calamitous lockdowns,  is falsely claiming that the state suffered lower mortality than Florida. The reality: If California’s excess-mortality rate equaled Florida’s, 10,000 fewer Californians would have died.