Governor Gavin Newsom of California has been ridiculed after a Tweet where he claimed to be reading books that republicans had banned from schools in their states. The tweet included an image of the governor reading, with a stack of books in front of him.
On the top of the stack was “To Kill a Mockingbird” which was ironically banned from schools in Burbank California while Newsom was governor. The book was removed in 2020, while Newsom was elected in 2019.
The book was banned from Burbank schools over “concerns of racism” and racist language contained in the text of the book.
Newsom’s tweet was meant as an insult to Republicans, though Burbank is a strongly liberal city, nested in the even more liberal Los Angeles county. Polls show that at least 70% of LA county residents vote Democrat.
“Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of,” Newsom said in the Tweet
The statement seems to be directed specifically at Texas after a viral Tweet claimed that the state had banned titles like George Orwell’s 1984, and “Maus” a cartoon-based book about the holocaust. You could probably guess, that these books were all in Newsom’s stack.
The only problem is that these books are not banned in Texas. Politifact ruled the statement outright false. Politifact found that there is no state ban on these titles, and also no district bans.