“Boys that spend time online are moving a little bit, I’m trying not to be political here, but are moving to the right.”
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Clips have resurfaced on social media of Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, saying that boys who spend time online are moving to the right.
Speaking at the 2024 Common Sense Summit, Newsom, who goes by her self-chosen title “first partner,” told the crowd on the topic of youth mental health, “60 percent of young girls and 69 percent of LGBTQ plus youth have experienced serious hopelessness and sadness, [and] a third of girls have seriously considered committing suicide. We’ll talk about, well, boys, we all know, I think, are increasingly, are realizing that boys are moving away from sort of the more progressive—boys that spend time online are moving a little bit, I’m trying not to be political here, but are moving to the right.”
She said that boys are being influenced by figures such as Andrew Tate, who was making headlines at the time, “and some of that sort of alt-right socialization online that we know is very, very dangerous.” She said that she and her husband were “alarmed” to find out that their son knew who Tate was, and that their son “thought he was pretty cool.”
“So that’s scary. We were like one of the most progressive households, and our son is confused and asking all these questions.”
She said that her California Partners Project at the time was coming out with information for families “to really provide all the best in-class resources and support for youth so that they don’y go down this rabbit hole of very, very dangerous and limiting narratives around, ultimately, what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a boy.”
She said that young boys are seeing content that reinforces “more aggression, obviously, more numbness to violence in the real world, and again, more of this sort of alt-right confusion and curiosity and intrigue. And it’s becoming normalized in boy culture, and that’s scary to me.” For young girls, she said they were seeing content repeating “you’re not enough culture, the kind of brauty myth culture that your value lies in your youth, your beauty, and your sexuality.”
She added, “they’re just conforming more and more and more to these gender extremes, which obviously we know for not gender non-conforming youth is also extremely confusing, but it’s not good for any of us.”
Other comments from Newsom have also recently resurfaced, showing her talking about how she has given her sons dolls, and saying that when she read stories to her sons, she changes the gender of the main character if they are male to female.
“What I have done with both my daughters and my sons is if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she,” Jennifer said. “And it just normalizes for my sons, in particular, it’s not even … I don’t even just do it for my girls. I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting.”