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But in recent months with his “This Is Gavin Newsom” podcast and its long list of Democratic bête noire guests, the governor has worked to publicly differentiate his own brand from that of his bedraggled party, one controversial interview at a time.

Those remaining numbly reiterate the greats from "Black Mirror"’s yesteryear: “Common People” and “Bête Noire” echo themes from “Fifteen Million Merits,” “Hated in the Nation,” and “Nosedive"; “Hotel Reverie” attempts to riff on the “ghost in the machine” romance of “San Junipero"; and “Plaything” makes a muddle of “Smithereens,” “White Christmas,” and, frankly, “USS Callister” — which arguably makes it this season’s Polaris.

When Dowd interviewed Jane Fonda in 2020, she asked the movie star/workout queen/bête noire of the right wing if she wanted to have sex with Che Guevara.

“To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a spectacularly uninformed column in 2015 that libeled the fish as “the cause célèbre of environmentalists and bête noire of parched farmers.”

A frequent Fox News bête noire, he routinely carries legislation that makes headlines and pushes Democrats from the left.