Pretty Boy Becomes Ugly
The next plank in Gavin Newsom’s campaign platform — antisemitism.
Ben Steinby Ben Stein
March 6, 2026, 10:07 PM
California Governor Gavin Newsom delivered a speech in London in February 2026 (UK Government/Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security/CC-BY-4.0/Wikimedia Commons)
Your humble servant, Ben Stein, has been a citizen of the Golden State since 1972. It was then that I moved to Santa Cruz and taught for a brief while at the spectacular campus of UC, Santa Cruz. There are not enough words to say how magnificent that campus was in those days. I was introduced to it by my dear friend from Yale Law School, Chris Wilson.
He and his wife and my wife and I drove to an overlook at Cowell College and stared at the Bay of Monterey. I swore I would return. Sure enough, thanks to my film school professor, Stanley Kauffmann, I got a job teaching about the political and economic content of entertainment movies at College V just months later. The scenery was so perfect that my heart stopped the first hundred times I walked across the foot bridges going across the campus.
Sadly, I left the College V world after a student put up a huge Nazi swastika made of tables and chairs in the college dining hall. I complained about it to the College V top dog, James B. Hall. He responded with a nasty, antisemitic letter to the student in question. I asked him to apologize to me and to the students of College V, many of whom were Jewish. He doubled down with an even more bitterly antisemitic letter about me.
I left and went back to my native Washington, D.C. There, I soon went to work for Mr. Nixon as a speechwriter. That’s another story.
Anyway, I have now lived and worked in sunny Cal since June 30, 1976, as a script writer, novelist, economist, lawyer, law teacher, and expert witness. I love California. I love the weather and the climate and pretty much everything else.
But I do not like at all the exploding antisemitism in the air. It has been here for a LONG time. But now, with Israel and the USA trying to stop the Iranian hate/murder regime, and the antisemites all over the left side of the state, I am moved to anger and fear.
https://spectator.org/pretty-boy-becomes-ugly/
