The First Lady’s Propaganda Machine: How Jennifer Siebel Newsom Turned California Classrooms into Her Personal Film Studio

While California students plummet to historic lows in reading and math, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife has been profiting handsomely from peddling woke documentaries about “toxic masculinity” to the state’s failing schools—with a major assist from her husband’s own education department.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom has built a lucrative empire on the backs of California’s struggling students, raking in up to $300,000 annually through her nonprofit The Representation Project and for-profit company Girls Club Entertainment. Her secret weapon? The full force of the governor’s office and state education bureaucracy pushing her films into classrooms across the Golden State.

This isn’t filmmaking. It’s state-sponsored indoctrination with a profit margin.

The Perfect Political Hustle

Here’s how the scheme works: Siebel Newsom produces progressive propaganda films featuring her husband as a humble-bragging champion of social justice. Then, conveniently, the governor’s own Department of Education recommends those same films in official state guidelines. Schools desperate for approved curriculum materials snap them up—paying anywhere from $49 to $1,500 per license.

The conflicts of interest are breathtaking. Even the liberal New York Times called her film “The Great American Lie” fundamentally “disingenuous” because it’s directed by a sitting governor’s spouse—a relationship never disclosed to the millions of unsuspecting viewers, including vulnerable schoolchildren.

Using Public Office for Private Gain

The timeline reveals everything. Shortly after Newsom became governor in 2019, his Board of Education recommended Siebel Newsom’s films in controversial health education guidance that sparked heated debate for its obsessive focus on sexuality and gender identity. The state education department dutifully adopted the recommendations.

By 2020, the Department of Education partnered with Siebel Newsom’s state-sponsored Office of First Partner to push “social-emotional learning” in low-performing schools—again recommending her films. Never mind that these same schools were cratering academically. The propaganda must flow.

The Representation Project bragged in a 2014 tax filing that its films and curricula were already being used in 1,000 California public schools. That number has since exploded to 5,000 schools across all 50 states, reaching 2.8 million students, according to Siebel Newsom’s own 2021 impact report.

Follow the Money

The financial arrangements stink of corruption. Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit has generated over $3 million in screening and film sales, paying her a $150,000 salary plus additional reimbursements worth up to $150,000 annually, according to IRS filings.

Meanwhile, her for-profit company Girls Club Entertainment produces these films from the Newsoms’ palatial $9 million estate in Kentfield. That’s right—the daughter of a multimillionaire Republican is lecturing working-class families about “privilege” while living in spectacular luxury funded partly by public schools.

The curriculum materials are exactly what you’d expect from coastal elites utterly disconnected from reality. Middle schoolers are quizzed on terms like “pansexuality” using a diagram called “The Genderbread Person.” Students are subjected to degrading “Privilege Walks” that sort them by race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.

Indoctrination Over Education

Assemblymember David Tangipa cuts through the nonsense: “This is a very clear attempt to indoctrinate the next generation of Californians. It’s a lot easier to control an uneducated group.”

The results speak for themselves. Forty-four percent of California 11th graders failed to meet reading standards in 2024, according to the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. Nearly 70 percent fell below par in math.

“We’ve seen literacy rates at the lowest that we’ve ever had in the state. And we’ve seen math rates at the lowest we’ve ever had in the state,” Tangipa noted. “For the first time in history, this generation is significantly lower educated than our parents and grandparents.”

But why focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic when you can force-feed kids progressive ideology about “extreme masculine ideals” and “hypermasculine value systems”?

The Films Are Partisan Propaganda

Siebel Newsom’s documentary trilogy—”Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live in,” and “The Great American Lie”—reads like a greatest hits compilation of leftist talking points. They feature a rotating cast of Democratic politicians, liberal activists, and progressive academics hammering viewers with solutions like raising the minimum wage as a cure for gender inequity.

Governor Newsom himself appears prominently in multiple films, delivering what amounts to campaign speeches. “We have the ability to step up and solve big problems … it’s just a question of prioritization, of political will,” he pontificates in “The Great American Lie.”

“The Great American Lie” blames America’s economic inequality on its “hypermasculine value system” and “extreme masculine ideals of money, power and rugged individualism.” In other words, everything that made America the most prosperous nation in human history is actually toxic masculinity.

Her other film, “Fair Play,” features Democratic Rep. Katie Porter and philanthropist Melinda Gates discussing gender inequity at home. Siebel Newsom is currently “prepping a film that’s about climate, Mother Earth and the feminine,” because apparently California’s problems aren’t intersectional enough yet.

Parents Fight Back

When parents actually see what’s being shown to their children, they’re rightly outraged. In school districts like Campbell Union and Stanislaus County, parents erupted after an uncensored version of “The Mask You Live In”—featuring profanity and references to pornography—was mistakenly shown to middle schoolers.

The damage extends beyond K-12 education. At the University of Texas Austin, a male student found guilty in a contested Title IX investigation was forced to watch “The Mask You Live In” and write an essay as punishment. Using films as tools of political re-education is straight from the authoritarian playbook.

The Corruption Runs Deep

Jennifer Siebel Newsom refused to respond to questions about her nonprofit’s operations. That silence is deafening.

This arrangement represents everything wrong with California’s political class. While ordinary families struggle with inflation, crime, and crumbling infrastructure, the governor and his wife have created a self-dealing scheme that profits from educational failure.

They’ve turned the state education department into a marketing arm for the First Lady’s film company. They’ve substituted academic rigor for woke propaganda. They’ve prioritized gender ideology over literacy and mathematics.

A mysterious delay has postponed the sequel to “Miss Representation,” dubbed “Miss Representation: Revolution.” Perhaps someone finally realized that revolutionizing California’s education system might require actually teaching students to read.

The Bottom Line

California families deserve better than a governor who uses his office to enrich his wife while their children fall further behind academically. They deserve an education system focused on excellence, not ideology. They deserve leaders who put students before politics and profits.

Instead, they get the Newsoms—living in their $9 million mansion, producing propaganda films, and wondering why California students can’t read or do math.

The answer is simple: When you replace education with indoctrination, everybody fails. Everybody, that is, except the grifters running the con.