Gavin Newsom Commits a Rather Glorious Self-Own in Tweet Lamenting 'Book Banning'

There’s been a lot of yada-yadaing from the Usual Corners on the left in recent months over efforts in some parts of the country by conservatives to keep books containing sexually explicit material or which promote the dangerous Critical Race Theory ideology out of public school classrooms and libraries as well as the hands of impressionable young children.

Never mentioned in stories and tweets from these so-called progressives decrying the alleged “suppression” of classic literary works is in how often suck campaigns are instigated by woke leftists, which include not just parents but also some politicians and educators who, strangely, feel beloved classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” are too offensive to include in teaching lessons because they contain references to the “n-word” and other derogatory terms related to black people.

Apparently, California ~~dictator~~ Gov. Gavin Newsom is either blissfully unaware of left-wing attempts at banning books or knows and still decided to play the fool in a tweet he posted Wednesday where he tried to “own” conservatives by stating he was reading books that were supposedly banned by red state political leaders so he could see “what these states are so afraid of”:

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

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 31, 2022

But as you can see from the picture, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was on his supposed reading list. As it turns out, some school districts in California have actually banned that book and others like it (including “Huck Finn”) because fauxfended wokesters were concerned the books would be too triggering to black students and lacked context:

A play in three acts pic.twitter.com/Nc6MeQgQoN

— Anthony Abides (@AnthonyAbides) March 31, 2022

Here’s more from that Newsweek story referenced in the tweet:

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.

[…]

Nadra Ostrom, another Black parent who filed a complaint, argued that the portrayal of Black people is mostly from a white perspective.

“There’s no counter-narrative to this Black person dealing with racism and a white person saving them,” she said.

Ostrom added that the current education given to students assumes “that racism is something in the past.”

As we previously reported, faculty members in one Seattle school district objected to some of the same books on the same grounds, as well as over concerns white teachers who had no “lived experiences” concerning racism would not be able to frame the stories in a way woke educators saw fit.

These campaigns by liberal Democrats who sit on school boards, who are teachers, who are parents or who are just “concerned” members of the community are taking place all over the country, but rarely do you see them featuring prominently in national reporting. Which may be why Newsom committed his glorious self-own on the Twitter machine – or maybe not, because as history has shown us, willful ignorance is something Newsom has gotten very, very good at displaying whenever it suits his purposes.