Ethical imbroglios abound for California Governor Newsom
Quin Hillyer
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A report this week involving California Gov. and first lady Gavin and Jennifer Seibel Newsom raises the question of how many scandals can be wrapped up in a single story. What will be still more scandalous is if the establishment media doesn’t cover the revelations as a scandal.
The multi-faceted report comes from a non-profit called Open The Books, which publicizes spending by every level of government, exposing profligacy and malfeasance by liberals and conservatives alike. OTB’s new report on the Newsoms details (by my count) at least six things that are so seriously objectionable as to be either arguably or, in one case, indisputably characterizable as scandals.
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Seibel Newsom, a former actress, is a documentary film maker and social-political activist. Her “non-profit,” the Representation Project, and her for-profit Girls Club both do projects pushing decidedly leftist cultural and political narratives and agendas. And both of those entities pay large salaries to her, with the former paying the latter for “production costs,” so she gets two bites at the apple for the same “non-profit” work.
People of reasonable standards and ethics will consider all of the following elements of both Jennifer and Gavin Newsom’s activities to be scandalous. (And no, this has nothing to do with Gavin Newsom’s flamboyant and sometimes adulterous sexcapades or with Jennifer’s role as one of the very believable accusers in the serial-rape case against director Harvey Weinstein.)
I list the scandals below in logical order of how they build upon each other, not in order of the seriousness of the normative and perhaps even legal transgressions.
First, Jennifer’s films and accompanying “curriculum” and “lesson plans,” which are specifically marketed for classroom use for children as young as middle school, contain highly age-inappropriate language and sexual imagery.
Second, these films and “educational” materials openly and repeatedly urge schools and teachers to enlist children in political and social activism, not just in the sense of neutrally urging good citizenship or civic engagement, but quite specifically on behalf of one side of the political spectrum. It should be considered a scandal when schools foist content-specific political and social activity on non-adult students.
Third, the particular political and social agendas, especially of the later films and curricula, are entirely suffused in radical-leftist identity politics of gender and race. They include illustrated instructions using something called the Genderbread Person complete with degrees of “man-ness” and “woman-ness,” along with “privilege walks” that require students to step forward or back, and feel guilty for the degree to which they step forward, according to whether one has been lucky enough to be white, male, heterosexual, and English speaking. The privilege walks especially are emotionally abusive.
Fourth, the films, which are shown widely in California public schools, feature Gavin himself at least eight times in favorable light as a supposedly model public servant. In other words, they provide free political advertising (for the Newsoms, not for the taxpayers) for Newsom’s career.
Item four would be at least slightly less objectionable if all the funding came from third-party sources not otherwise in a position to give or receive favorable treatment from Newsom as governor. But they aren’t, which is why, fifth, it is scandalous that the state government overseen by Gavin (A) signs contracts with the entities his wife oversees and which pay her handsomely on both front end and back, in order to (B) push explicit political action of the sort favored by the Left (and by the Newsoms, as he plans a likely Democratic presidential primary campaign), while (C) portraying Newsom himself as a hero. The use of taxpayer dollars is, in all three ways, a scandalous example of self-dealing from the public treasury.
Yet it gets still worse. Sixth, Jennifer Newsom “solicited state vendors and the governor’s campaign donors for large gifts to her charity, The Representation Project,” even as her outfit failed to comply with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. OTB reported that the Representation Project spent an entire year “engaged in big-money fundraising events with corporate executives and philanthropists” while it was illegal to do so because the “charity’s” filings were delinquent.
For the Newsoms, it’s a nice arrangement: Lobbyists and other favor-seekers who might have maxed out on campaign contributions to the governor can get even more in his good graces by donating to his wife’s “charity,” all while rubbing shoulders with the California first couple at the charity’s fundraising galas. Thus, for just one example, Kaiser Permanente as a company, along with its executives as individuals, all donated big money to Jennifer Newsom’s charities while Kaiser got paid (in various contracts, etc.) more than $172 million in one year from the state of California. Pacific Gas and Electric and its executives gave even more, into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and received state business worth nearly $324 million.
In all, the moral and ethical offenses, combined with the multi-faceted conflicts of interest and extremely dubious use of state taxpayer dollars, are stupendous in scope and seriousness. The establishment media should be in a frenzy looking into all this, and state and federal prosecutors should open investigations to see if the financial aspects of it have crossed the line from being merely unethical (extremely!) into illegal.
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The problem is that the liberal media has tapped Newsom as one of its top golden boys for the presidency. When the media’s golden boys transgress, the media looks the other way — or, worse, attacks the messenger. Who knows: Maybe this time, with its “Russian disinformation” accusation having been used up, the media will blame the Open The Books report on some right-wing billionaire eager to see “Republicans pounce” on the poor, victimized Newsoms.
If the media takes the latter tack, or even just refuses to delve deeply into the Newsom’s dubious dealings, the media’s own scandalous dereliction will be unerasable. Either way, the Newsom’s sleaziness is utterly indelible.