California's first lady, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is back in the spotlight, and not for anything resembling a serious policy contribution.
Resurfaced clips show Gavin Newsom's wife cheerfully describing how she gives her boys dolls to play with and rewrites the characters in their bedtime stories, swapping male protagonists for female ones on the fly.
As reported by the Post, the undated interview, which resurfaced on X, features Siebel Newsom explaining her approach to child-rearing with the kind of casual ideological confidence that only comes from never being challenged in your social circle.
"I've given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off." Even the kids seem to be pushing back.
She went further, framing the doll initiative as a moral project:
"I've given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that's reserved for women, but that it's also an activity that is a responsibility of men."
Then came the part about rewriting literature in real time. Siebel Newsom described changing male pronouns to female ones when reading books to her children, as though the written word is just a rough draft awaiting her editorial corrections.
"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."
Her reasoning? She wants her sons to see that "women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting." A noble sentiment, perhaps, if the method weren't so deeply strange. There are thousands of books with female protagonists. You could just pick one up.
The clips aren't isolated. In a 2016 interview published by Salon.com, Siebel Newsom made similar remarks about giving her boys dolls. She also laid out her broader philosophy with the kind of language that sounds like it was workshopped in a faculty lounge:
"At the end of the day, we're all kind of like in this place in history maybe where we're recognizing what it is to ultimately deconstruct all these gender roles and ultimately be human, and that's exciting to me."
Count the qualifiers. "Kind of like." "Maybe." "Ultimately," used twice in one sentence. For someone so excited about deconstruction, the thought itself could use some construction.
She continued in that same interview, asking a question she clearly believed was rhetorical: "What do we need to do to combat that straitjacket of gender stereotypes that we put our kids into?"
Her answer was a full manifesto. Encourage boys to play with dolls and stuffed animals. Teach them that "caregiving and nurturing and love and empathy are not just feminine pursuits." Encourage girls to build things, play with Legos and trucks, and kick a ball. All of which sounds perfectly fine as individual parenting choices. The issue isn't whether a boy picks up a doll on his own. It's the ideological framework draped over every toy and every bedtime story, the insistence that normal childhood behavior is a "straitjacket" that demands adult intervention.
What makes these clips resonate beyond the parenting debate is what they reveal about the progressive worldview at its most unguarded. This isn't a policy argument. It's a window into how a certain class of progressive elites thinks about the basic building blocks of childhood: stories, play, identity.
Siebel Newsom told her interviewer she would "just continue to kind of do my work and try and deconstruct all these limiting narratives about ultimately what it means to be human." That's not a parent talking. That's an activist with a captive audience of children.
The left has spent years insisting that concerns about gender ideology in schools and culture are manufactured panic. Meanwhile, the wife of California's governor is on camera explaining, with zero self-consciousness, that she edits books mid-sentence to impose her worldview on her own kids. Imagine what she'd endorse in a classroom.
Siebel Newsom also recently drew attention from a resurfaced 2022 interview with journalist Elex Michaelson, then working at a local Los Angeles station, in which she claimed evangelicals are "pulling us back as a country." The remark drew criticism, though the source material doesn't specify from whom. It doesn't need to. The comment speaks for itself: millions of Americans who hold traditional religious convictions are, in her telling, obstacles to progress.
This is the consistent thread. Traditional faith is regressive. Traditional gender roles are a straitjacket. Traditional stories need to be rewritten on the spot. Everything inherited must be deconstructed. Nothing is left to simply be.
Parents across the country are making different choices. They're pulling their kids out of schools that treat childhood as a social experiment. They're choosing curricula that teach reading, not ideology. They're letting their boys be boys, and their girls be girls, not because they're trapped in stereotypes, but because they trust their children more than they trust the latest academic theory.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom's boys tore the heads off the dolls. Sometimes kids know exactly what they think.