California Governor Gavin Newsom has been gaining a reputation for spicy comebacks amid President Donald Trump's second term — and this latest may be his zestiest yet.
A conservative influencer named Benny Johnson, who was fired from Buzzfeed after an internal investigation found that he plagiarized at least 40 stories, taunted the governor Tuesday on X, saying that he would be traveling to California to "investigate fraud."
"The fraud uncovered in Minnesota was very bad and led to the destruction of Tim Walz’s career. But Gavin Newsom’s California is far worse," Johnson's post on X reads.
An account for the governor's press office responded to the post, saying, "We’ll make sure Grindr servers are ready…"
This joke may refer to alleged outages of the gay hookup app at Charlie Kirk's funeral that cited the website Downdetector, which provides real-time reports of online outages. The fact-checking website Snopes later noted that Downdetector is "crowdsourced and any user can report an outage," and a representative for Grindr told Out at the time that no outages were reported on Grindr's status page.
It may also refer to December remarks from far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who claimed to know on Tim Pool's podcast that Johnson, despite his conservative family-man image, had a reputation for sleeping with "younger men." Following Yiannopoulos's claims, Johnson said on X that he is "duty bound" to sue those who "maliciously defame" him.
The replies to the governor's post were mostly positive, with people leaving comments like "Okay, that's funny." Newsom has largely vocalized support for the LGBTQ+ community — though in 2025, he complicated this support by calling trans women competing in women's sports "deeply unfair." Some commenters felt the new joke to be off-color and called it "homophobic."
This isn't the first instance of liberals employing gay jokes to undermine conservatives. Notably, Jennifer Welch of the I've Had It podcast cracked a joke about Vice President JD Vance being a "failed drag queen" and said he couldn't do it because he "wasn't fabulous enough." This comment was mostly well-received by listeners, but it also found dissenters, as many people felt that queer people were being made out to be the butt of the joke.
Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris's running mate in the 2024 presidential election, dropped his bid for gubernatorial reelection Monday following intensified scrutiny over fraud in his state's safety-net programs. Following the news over Walz, President Trump announced on Truth Social that "Fraud Investigation of California has begun," providing no details.
