Gavin Newsom's Wife Rakes in Cash Charging California Public Schools To Screen Her Woke Movies
Jennifer Siebel Newsom's nonprofit shares a number of donors with her husband
California Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D.) wife has charged the state's public schools as much as $1.5 million to screen her documentaries on "gender justice" and "corporate exploitation."
"First Partner" Jennifer Siebel Newsom has raised nearly $1.5 million from film licenses and nearly $1.7 million from sales since 2012, according to the watchdog group Open the Books. Her nonprofit, the Representation Project, charges schools an average $270 to license documentaries like The Great American Lie, which says sexism causes economic inequality, and Fair Play, about women who want to do less housework. While the group does not specify how much it earned from schools, Open the Books says it could easily account for all or nearly all her $1.5 million in streaming revenue.
Siebel Newsom's nonprofit could pose an ethical problem for her husband as he considers a presidential run. The Representation Project drew criticism in 2019 for accepting $358,000 in donations from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), the utility company responsible for some of the state's worst wildfires. PG&E is listed as an associate producer on two of Siebel Newsom's films and hosted a screening of her first movie, Miss Representation, in 2011, when Newsom was mayor of San Francisco.
PG&E isn't the only Newsom donor with ties to the Representation Project. The governor and his wife for years have raised money from the same donors and corporations—he for his political campaigns and she for her nonprofit.
Shared donors include AT&T, Comcast, Planned Parenthood, and Kaiser Permanente. AT&T, a powerful lobbying force in Sacramento and a Newsom campaign contributor, sponsored a glitzy Siebel Newsom screening at San Francisco's Castro Theater in 2015, when Gavin Newsom was lieutenant governor. Oil heiress Aileen Getty, who bankrolls "climate actions" such as throwing soup at priceless van Gogh paintings, is also a major donor to both Newsoms.
According to government watchdog Jeff Hauser, the Newsoms' overlapping donor lists pose an ethical quandary.
"We're going to need a rethink of ethics laws that allow people to work without making political officeholders easy to bribe via their partners," said Hauser, the founder of the Revolving Door Project.
Siebel Newsom does not disclose which corporations buy and license her movies, another red flag for ethics experts. Her funder list, however, shows that companies and individuals sometimes donate to the Representation Project when they are also trying to block or lobby for California policies in which they have big financial stakes.
These include the nonprofit's 2022 gala fundraiser sponsors, AT&T and Comcast. The internet giants are both seeking to shape California's $6 billion effort to expand broadband access across the state, which could bring them lucrative state contracts.
Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe, donated thousands of dollars to the Representation Project annually from 2019 to 2021, as the state legislature debated and passed a privacy bill that cracked down on DNA-sampling firms like hers. Newsom vetoed the first of these bills in 2020.
Published under: California , Democratic Donors , Ethics , Feature , Gavin Newsom , Movies , Public School , woke
'Clean and sober is the biggest damn mistake this country ever made,' California's Newsom said...
Ever wondered why California has become the homeless capital of the U.S.?
Sure, there are lots of technical explanations about housing availability and bureaucratic waste, but let's look to the fine-dining California governor, Gavin Newsom, who let out this whopper three years ago in a virtually uncovered news story.
According to YourCentralValley.com's Alexan Balekian:
Newsom: "Clean and sober is the biggest damn mistake this country ever made." Should clean and sober rules be thrown out for homeless?
Governor Gavin Newsom admits he likes to self-medicate with a glass of wine while watching the nightly news. He believes the homeless should not have to be subject to rules and regulations when going to shelters for a bed or a hot meal.
The "biggest damn mistake this country ever made"?
Bigger than slavery? Bigger than Vietnam? Bigger than the poverty-and-fatherlessness-propagation programs of the Great Society?
Well, you heard it first from Newsom, Democrat frontrunner for the president in the post-Biden era, whenever that may be.
It tells us a lot about why California now houses 30% of the nation's homeless and has now become the nation's "homeless capital." The tent cities and bums living under highway overpasses, booze bottles in hand, grow bigger and bigger in the state every year, even as Newsom shells out at least $12 billion for "homeless programs," supposedly to "help" them.
According to local 790KABC:
Newsom's policies are working! Latest Census Shows California Is America's Most Homeless State
(Sacramento, CA) — Between 2020 and 2022 California's homeless population expanded more than any other state. That's according to the latest census data, which shows that the homeless population in the state grew by nearly ten-thousand in that span, raising the total to over 170-thousand. At least 30-percent of the nation's homeless population is in California according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. California also accounted for nearly the entire national increase between 2020 and 2022.
Needless to say, this is complete lunacy. The best thing a bum can ever hear is that someone cares enough about him to encourage him, or order him, to get clean and sober. Does Newsom like to dine out at French Laundry with people who are not "clean and sober"? Does he take his nightly wine in the company of booze-addled street bums? Should public schools or homeless shelters themselves and police drunk tanks be run by untreated alcoholics? Should highways be freely available for drunk drivers now? The whole thing speaks to an amazing breakdown of standards, whether it's convicts in government jobs, a lowering of academic standards, the declaration that obese people are healthy, or the claim that men can be women. It's all about the "inclusion" now, and in Newsom's mind, alcoholism is no longer a "disease," let alone a bad condition whose most humane solution is going clean and sober.
Newsom is all about undemonizing the rum, and the results speak for themselves.
According to a story that ran on NBC News last year:
LOS ANGELES — California pours billions of taxpayer dollars into fighting homelessness each year but has little to show for it, as experts warn thousands could die before enough housing is secured for them.
In San Francisco, hundreds of housing vacancies remain unfilled as the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed efforts to pair homeless residents with hotel rooms and other forms of temporary housing.
In Los Angeles, a $1.2 billion bond measure is falling short of its promise to create up to 10,000 housing units for homeless people over a decade as construction costs skyrocket and projects drag on, according to a city audit released Feb. 23.
"It's like the walking dead out here," said LaJuana Johnson, who lives in a tent on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. "They're just waiting for judgment."
If you build it, they will come.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Gavin Newsom Encounters an Obstacle on His Way to the Socialist Paradise
Turns out his critics have to be allowed their say, at least for now.
California Politburo chief Gavin Newsom is a rising star on the Left and is even being touted as a possible 2024 Democrat presidential candidate. This is anomalous in the extreme in light of the fact that Newsom is energetically destroying California with ever more intrusive and expensive nanny state socialist measures, and Californians are fleeing in droves: the state is experiencing a population decline for the first time in recorded history. But Newsom remains popular among Leftists because he is not just a socialist, but an authoritarian who eagerly tramples upon the First Amendment in his lust to crack down on dissent. As the Left grows ever more open about its opposition to our Constitutional rights, Newsom’s disdain for the freedom of speech makes him look increasingly like the Democrat of the future, if the future belongs to Mao. But now he has hit a small bump in the road.
“Misinformation” and “disinformation” are two labels that today’s enemies of freedom use in order to suppress speech that gets in the way of their agenda while fooling Leftist rubes into thinking they’re performing a valuable public service. Newsom, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic proponent of such deceptions; in September 2022, he signed Assembly 2098, prohibiting the dissemination of “misinformation” on the COVID hysteria. Specifically, according to a Thursday report in the San Francisco Gate, it established penalties for physicians who departed from “the contemporary scientific consensus” regarding COVID. Now that this “consensus” is being shown to have been based more on groupthink and political objectives rather than dispassionate and objective scientific analysis, Newsom’s bill appears to be particularly insidious. And it is.
Newsom himself, of course, claimed that his fascist little bill was perfect, as it “narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.” However, the Gate notes that “in an SFGATE op-ed last year, California physician Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg argued that AB 2098’s definition of ‘misinformation’ was too broad and that ‘the contemporary scientific consensus’ is always changing.” Indeed. If anything is obvious about COVID at this point, it’s that. And so “Høeg and other doctors sued the state, alleging that the law violates the First Amendment’s free speech protections and 14th Amendment’s due process protections.”
Obviously it does. And so on Wednesday, Judge William B. Shubb shot down Newsom’s gag rule, and had some strong words for it in his opinion: “Defendants argue that while the scientific consensus may sometimes be difficult to define, there is a clear scientific consensus on certain issues — for example, that apples contain sugar, that measles is caused by a virus, or that Down’s syndrome is caused by a chromosomal abnormality. However, AB 2098 does not apply the term ‘scientific consensus’ to such basic facts, but rather to COVID-19 — a disease that scientists have only been studying for a few years, and about which scientific conclusions have been hotly contested. COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus.”
All this gives the impression that Gavin Newsom would have been one of those insisting that Galileo obey the clear scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth, and would happily have burned him at the stake if he continued to insist otherwise. The contents of the orthodoxy and the heresy have changed, but otherwise the situation is the same: Gavin Newsom would have been a zealous Inquisitor.
Shubb wasn’t finished; he further embarrassed California’s Grand Inquisitor by pointing out that the definition of “misinformation” included in AB 2098 was “grammatically incoherent” and consequently thus “unconstitutionally vague.” The Gate adds that Shubb “had signaled he would grant the doctors’ request at a Monday hearing, in which he told California’s lawyers that their definition of ‘misinformation’ was ‘nonsense.’”
Newsom, like all totalitarians, is not going to give up. The Gate notes that Shubb’s ruling was “not a final judgment on the constitutionality of the law but rather a temporary halt against enforcement while litigation continues. California can appeal to have the injunction lifted,” and you can be sure that it will. Although little noted among patriots, the war against the freedom of speech is the Left’s primary focus at this point. If Leftists can destroy it, under the guise of protecting the public against such trumped-up bogeymen as “hate speech” and “misinformation,” they will have a free hand to implement the rest of their sinister agenda. That’s why this small victory against AB 2098 should be celebrated, and its positive example studied and emulated.
Robert Spencer
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur’an and The Sumter Gambit. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
No comments:
Post a Comment