Self-own: California Gov. Gavin Newsom Poses with 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' Banned by District in Own State

Joel B. PollakMarch 31, 2022

California Gov. Gavin Newsom tried and failed Wednesday to mock states that have removed sexual books from curricula by posing with a stack of books that included To Kill a Mockingbird, which has been banned by a district in his own state.

Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of. pic.twitter.com/z6eJ01NZJe

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 31, 2022

Newsom makes a habit of attacking Republican-run states over social issues. Recently, he asked Disney to move jobs back to California over Florida’s bill restricting instruction on sexuality in early grades, falsely calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

In the staged photo, he appeared reading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, and with other books in a stack: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, George Orwell’s 1984, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic tale about the struggle for racial equality.

Aside from mockery online by those who were incredulous that he had not read most of the books already, since several are common in school curricula, some pointed out that Newsom was mocking other states despite California’s own examples of censorship.

To Kill a Mockingbird was recently banned, at least temporarily, by schools in Burbank, California, among other classic books, over concerns about “racism” and the use of racial slurs in the text. As Newsweek reported at the time:

Middle and high school English teachers in the Burbank Unified School District received the news during a virtual meeting on September 9.

Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Four parents, three of whom are Black, challenged the classic novels for alleged potential harm to the district’s roughly 400 Black students.

Moreover, a professor at the University of California Berkeley recently attacked Abigail Shrier’s exposé of transgenderism in schools and its effect on teenage girls, Irreversible Damage, saying that it should not only be banned, but actually burned.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.