During the coronavirus pandemic, California Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed draconian anti-COVID measures, which of course he never had any intention of observing himself. Newsom (along with Nancy Pelosi and other ruling-class Democrats) broke his own rules with impunity.

Now Newsom is doing it again, violating the state's ideological ban on government travel to states that "discriminate" against transgenderism. Newsom, it turns out, doesn't mind spending money to go to those states because he is now traveling to three of them as part of his undeclared shadow campaign for president.

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Newsom's trip to Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi to raise money for his new Super PAC has made democrats uncomfortable enough that one of them proposed repealing the ban just before he went. For his part, Newsom insists that his travel is kosher because "no state-paid staff will be on this trip."

That isn't quite true — Newsom is himself a government-paid employee.

But as Susannah Luthi observed in breaking the story at the Free Beacon, it at least goes to show that the travel ban has backfired. It originally was meant to apply to just four states when it took effect in 2016. Today, it applies to 23 states.

And it should be noted that nearly twice as many Californians move to those 23 states each year (a combined 324,693 in 2019 alone) than move the other way (185,000 in 2019). So they can't be that bad.

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The rapid expansion of the number of states deemed "bad" is a result of the increasingly firm grip that the delusion of transgenderism — the ideology that says men can become women by force of will and of cartoonish effeminate affectations — has taken on the Democratic mind over the last seven years.

But it is nice to see that even those most committed to this fringe idea are too practical in their personal affairs to follow the rules they make for others to enforce transgender orthodoxy.