California Governor Gavin Newsom decided to virtue signal on Twitter by taking a stand against censorship and showing himself reading “banned books.” So what were the dangerous and controversial titles Newsom decided to pose with? “Mein Kampf?” “120 Days of Sodom?” A high school biology textbook from 15 years ago? Of course not. Newsom posed with “Beloved” by Toni Morrison and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Newsom “reads” “banned” books
In addition to the extremely vanilla stack of books and the banality of the performance, Newsom was mocked for being on the first page of the first book in his pile.
The governor couldn’t even bother to do the bare minimum to make it look like he was actually reading any of the titles he’d assembled for his virtue signal.
Newsom hadn’t made it to “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “1984” yet at the time of his post, but those two titles are arguably the most ludicrous part of the embarrassing picture as Newsom declared that certain state governments are “afraid” of them.
These are two of the most well known books in the country; most high schools in the United States feature at least one of the two as required reading.
In fact, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is only banned in a few districts in Newsom’s own state. That ban has come from the governor’s own side, as leftists feel that students may be traumatized by encountering racial slurs.
The other states Newsom was attacking have not banned the books in his stack; those bans are efforts to keep sexually explicit content out of school libraries and classrooms.
Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of. pic.twitter.com/z6eJ01NZJe
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 31, 2022
Who’s against banning books?
Liberals like Newsom embrace the “banned books” virtue signal every year but their anti-censorship performances invariably end up looking just as ridiculous.
None of these celebrations of “banned” literature ever show off books that are actually challenging, shocking, or subversive. Like the California governor, they exclusively show off the safest books imaginable and assert that a handful of obscure libraries may have taken them off the shelves.
This is because they actually support banning books. Everyone does, in fact. Almost no one is demanding that schoolchildren be given access to terroristic or pornographic literature.
Newsom, like most Democrats, would be wholly in favor of adding books that are accused of racism or homophobia to the list of real banned books.
If the governor had really wanted to make a statement he would have shown himself reading the works of Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong; he did not do this because, for obvious reasons, most Americans have no desire to see these books in public school curricula.
Gavin Newsom is being mocked for his virtue signal, but the mockery should extend to anyone who claims to be enthusiastic about reading “banned books” without showing a willingness to touch anything genuinely controversial.
