Well he said he acknowledges the need for downvotes on posts for plagiarism and spam but haven't seen him use his stake to support/downvote blatant posts that do fall under those categories.

Of course, many downvotes are justified in my eyes and probably in most other people's too - but many are not.

Sounds like acknowledging some cases downvotes are warranted but not necessarily contributing to the solution of normalizing downvotes.