Newsom mocks other states for banning books—but California has banned them too

"Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of," Newsom said on Twitter, attempting to mock certain states.

In the photo posted to Twitter, Newsom is sitting at a table next to an empty plate reading the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved African-American woman who killed her child to spare them a life of slavery and has been banned and challenged in five US schools over the book's graphic mention of bestiality, rape, sex, and racism.

Ironically, in 2020, during Newsom's tenure, The Bluest Eye by Morrison was reportedly removed from the Colton, California, Joint Unified School District’s English curriculum before being reinstated later the same year.

Sitting on the table next to Newsom are the novels To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1984 by George Orwell, and two others that are obscured in the photo–all of which have received similar bans to Beloved.

In September of 2020, the Burbank Unified School District in California voted to ban To Kill a Mockingbird in middle schools and high schools after parents raised concerns about racism, according to Newsweek.

The California school district also banned Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor's The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Sparing no time after catching wind of Governor Newsom's hypocrisy, political commentators and officials took to Twitter to slam his mistake.