California Governor Gavin Newsom excels at failing, as a cringe-worthy example involving his “First Partner,” Jennifer Siebel Newsom, reveals. With the confidence of a Pacific Heights wine mom, Siebel Newsom told former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a 2023 interview that she had deliberately taken her children to Alabama, Florida, and other Red states so they could witness bullying, misogyny, and racism firsthand. It was educational poverty tourism for the Bay Area set.
Siebel Newsom embarked on a fact-finding mission to discover she was missing the facts. Too bad the Sunshine State’s governor failed to intercept her on the way out — it would’ve saved the first couple a lot of time and frequent flyer miles — because the data exists and it starts in their own backyard.
Since 2015, hate crime events in California have increased by 141.7%. In 2024 alone, hate crime offenses rose nearly 9%, with anti-LGBTQ incidents up over 13% and anti-Jewish bias events reaching 310. Meanwhile, California’s own Civil Rights Department estimates that roughly 1 in 11 Californians directly experienced an act of hate in 2024 — approximately 3.1 million people. That is not a Red State statistic. That is the state Siebel Newsom’s husband governs, with runaway hate crime statistics and a blatant failure of public safety.
The racial inequality picture inside California is no more flattering. The black homeownership rate in California stands at just 36.6% — nearly 28 percentage points below the rate for white households, the second-lowest homeownership rate of any state in the nation. According to the most recent census data, the gap between white and black homeownership rates in California has actually widened — from 20 points in 1980 to 27 points in 2020. A UCLA analysis found that closing the racial gap between black and white Californians at the current rate of progress would take over 248 years.
Contrast those findings with the targets of Siebel Newsom’s red-state “racism safari.” Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana — the very states she treated as cautionary tales for her children — consistently rank among the lowest in per-capita hate crime rates nationwide. Far from being the racist hellscapes her narrative requires, these states are, statistically, among the least likely places in America for a bias-motivated crime to actually occur.
Black Americans are noticing. They are leaving California and relocating to the South in significant numbers, drawn by lower costs of living, genuine economic opportunity, and the basic dignity of being able to afford a home. The states Siebel Newsom used as props for her children’s moral education — Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas — have historically led the nation in both the number and percentage of black elected officials. These are not Jim Crow relics preserved in amber. They are places where black Americans hold real, consequential political power, and increasingly, real economic opportunity.
On the other hand, California lost over 200,000 residents to other states in the last year alone. These are people escaping not Republican cruelty, but Democratic policy outcomes: soaring taxes, pervasive homelessness, brazen property crime, and a cost of living that has rendered the middle class functionally extinct in most major cities.
What Siebel Newsom failed to address was her own house.
Just last week, her husband — the former mayor of the most gay-friendly city in America, San Francisco — used homosexuality as a slur. Also last week, a scheduled debate among Democrats vying for the California gubernatorial nomination had to be canceled because the candidate field was too white. In California, the state is lecturing the rest of the country on racial inclusivity. And who could forget Gavin Newsom’s recent attempt to connect with black voters by informing them that he, too, can’t read. These aren’t exactly the types of things one would include in the equal rights “W” column.
Then there is the misogyny. Siebel Newsom built her public identity around Miss Representation, a documentary that explicitly condemns the objectification and exploitation of women in Hollywood. It is her brand and the moral foundation of her platform as First Partner. So it is worth noting that, even after Weinstein’s lawyers described their relationship as “transactional sex,” she still kept in contact with him, and asked Weinstein — the very face of the exploitation she built a career opposing — for PR help regarding her husband’s extramarital affair. This was all after the alleged assault took place.
And when it became public that her husband cheated on his first wife with the wife of his then-campaign manager, she reportedly called the other woman the “culprit.” The woman who made a film about how women are blamed and diminished for being victims called the woman her husband pursued the culprit.
For someone who has built a career performing progressive virtue, the optics aren’t ideal.
If Jennifer Siebel Newsom wanted to show her children what intolerance and moral failure look like, she did not need to book flights south. She could have opened the door of her $9 million gated estate and schlepped through the state her husband governs. All the tent cities, crumbling schools, and public disorder are on full display.
The most corrosive thing about performative progressivism is not the hypocrisy itself — hypocrisy is often a human constant. Rather, it’s the confidence. The certainty that the lesson is always somewhere else, in someone else’s state, in someone else’s home, even as the governor’s policy failures are undeniable.
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