by Frank Holmes, reporter
The Democratic Party and Hollywood have been joined at the hip for decades, but the partnership just got murkier—and may drag two of rising Democrats deep into a scandal.
Both are possible 2028—or even 2024—presidential contenders, and both seem to have used taxpayer dollars to promote movies about themselves to captive audiences.
The scandal, like everything else, is worst in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom may have profited from taxpayer dollars that funded his wife’s movie career.
New’s wife is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, whom media describe with the gender-neutral term the “First Partner,” and she heads The Representation Project, which has produced at least four movies promoting the Woke ideology.
She and her husband may have made a bundle promoting these sex-filled movies to public school students.
The company charges taxpayer-funded public schools $270 each for the privilege of showing these movies to their kids. School administrators know that the producer’s husband has final control over state funding. So, many of them sign up.
“Who’s Watching? 2.6 million students in 5,000 schools,” said the watchdog Open the Books, whose tireless research broke the story.
Not only is she subjecting parents in all 50 states — especially California — to her left-wing propaganda, but critics say the movies are also sexually charged.
“Newsom’s films and curricula are saturated with images lifted directly from pornographic websites, their URLs visible onscreen,” said Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski.
Worse yet, these movies also teach young children to hate their own country and feel “shame” about U.S. history.
“Minors are exposed to social commentaries about privilege and oppression, and one commentator says Americans need to ‘express shame and sorrow about who we are and what we’ve done’ as a society,” said Andrzejewski.
In an Act II twist worthy of Shakespeare, the movies’ private-sector funders may be using the “First Partner” to funnel illegal campaign contributions to her husband in exchange for favors in the statehouse.
In 2019, The Representation Project cashed checks totaling $350,000 from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), which has been linked to the most destructive wildfires in state history.
The Newsoms also collect substantial donations from such Big Businesses as AT&T, Comcast, and healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. They also rake in cash from Planned Parenthood. All benefit in a big way from decisions he makes in the largest state in the union.
Sometimes the money flows the other way — as it did with Pete Buttigieg.
Before Joe Biden named him secretary of transportation, Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a rival of Biden’s for the 2020 presidential nomination.
Hollywood made a documentary about his 2020 campaign, titled Mayor Pete, which was released to Amazon in late 2021.
Buttigieg didn’t make any money from the movie, unlike the Newsoms, but having a large audience see the documentary would boost any future campaign, including another run for president.
The Department of Transportation sent out almost a dozen emails to the agency’s 60,000 employees nationwide, bombarding them with news about the movie—including its release date and where they could watch it.
“The emails often contained summaries of ‘key” aspects of the linked news stories, such as “Pete Buttigieg hasn’t given up on his dream of being president,” “[on the campaign trail] he also faces [d] blatant homophobia and tough questions about racial politics,” and “the breakthrough of the film is its documentation of his relationship with his husband.” ’” reported the group Protect the Public’s Trust, which broke the story after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “It is difficult to discern how these stories have relevance to the work of DOT.”
Those movie summaries probably had as much to do with DOT’s work as Buttigieg’s obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) had to do with keeping America’s planes traveling smoothly over the holidays.
But DOT’s promotion of Mayor Pete may not just walk the ethical line; it might just run a legal stop sign.
Their actions “may run afoul of ethics regulations prohibiting federal employees from using their positions to induce subordinates to provide any benefit, whether it be financial or otherwise, to the employee, his friends, relatives, and others with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity,” reported the nonprofit watchdog.
How much illegal activity is taking place in the political-entertainment complex? The two Democrats make it impossible to tell. We only know the names of the corporations that have formally donated to Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit because of tax laws; she refuses to report the names of individuals or corporations who buy the rights to screen her film…just like Hunter Biden refuses to name the people who buy his “artwork.”
Could those corporations have business pending before Gavin Newsom? Would that affect his decisions? Has that already happened with the Bidens, touching his wholehearted intervention into Ukraine or his refusal to shoot down a Chinese spycraft?
The plot would make a good movie — if Hollywood had any interest in exposing the Left.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”