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Dec. 8, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:22
Whatever You Do, Don’t Call Them Groomers | Ep. 1626
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The grooming of young students into radical gender and sexual ideology continues.
The New York Times experiences the consequences of its own philosophy as 1,100 employees prepare to walk out, and the White House refuses to answer whether they will shut down Chinese Operation TikTok.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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There's a word you're not allowed to say in social media anymore.
It's a word that has become absolutely forbidden.
That word, of course, is groomer.
If you say the word groomer, this means that you are some sort of bigot.
The word groomer does have a history, a semantically overloaded history because there are two types of grooming.
There is grooming as in you are a sexual predator and you are actively talking to small children about sex because you want to have sex with the small children or with young teenagers and this sort of Language was used as a slur for many gay and lesbian homosexual people over the course of history.
The idea was that if you were gay or lesbian, what you really were you were attempting to groom kids.
And that was used as a slur because the notion that that gays and lesbians prey on children at a rate that is wildly different from that in the straight population, there's not a lot of evidence to support that particular viewpoint.
Okay, fair enough.
There's another meaning to the word grooming.
And that is how the word grooming actually is typically used.
So if you groom somebody politically, what that means, if you're grooming somebody for higher office, it means that you are training somebody for higher office.
If you groom somebody into an ideology, the idea is that you are grooming them into a certain way of thinking.
You're ushering them and indoctrinating them into a certain way of thinking.
And it's that second sense of the word grooming that is now being utilized in our public schools, in our private schools, with regards to radical gender and racial ideology.
It is happening at public and private schools all across the country.
The more elite, the more it's happening.
I know a lot of conservatives who live in red areas who seem either unaware or unwilling to pull their kids out of schools where this kind of crap is going on because they just don't want to believe that it's going on.
But it is, in fact, going on.
You have many people who are in the upper levels of administration in public and private schools who have decided that radical gender and sexual ideology must be taught to children.
That the way that you create a better world is by indoctrinating them in the rules of tolerance.
And when they mean tolerance, what they mean is sexual confusion, sexual fluidity.
If there's a human cost to quote-unquote tolerance, and we don't mean tolerance as in we won't hurt you, we mean tolerance as in what you are doing is morally acceptable and praiseworthy.
If the cost of that is confusing a bunch of young children, if the cost of that is giving kids a chaotic picture of life that they are not ready for, If the cost of that is not providing the rules for the road that are necessary to create the preconditions for human happiness, they will happily do that.
And this is why, because you have to wonder why it is that so many administrators and teachers are not only going along with this sort of ideological and sexual grooming, why exactly they are doing this sort of stuff.
You have to wonder why they're so enthusiastic about it, because that's what's really amazing about all of this, is that we went from We just want whatever we want in the privacy of our own bedroom to we must teach your kids actively because the institutions of society are bad and they teach your kids bigotry and evil.
And so we are going to ideologically groom an entire next generation of people who believe like we believe.
And that means we have to grab them at the earliest possible age and indoctrinate them in our viewpoint as to sexual fluidity and sexual orientation and gender identity.
And we have to do that at the earliest possible without the parents involved.
In fact, because we need the parents not involved.
The parents are an obstacle to our utopian visions of reshaping the next generation.
And this obviously is having an extraordinary effect on kids.
You can see it by the numbers.
You can see that the amount of LGBTQ plus identification among the younger generation is now in excess of 20 percent.
Like one fifth.
And when you talk about the youngest generation, it's gonna be higher than that.
It's gonna be closer to one third.
That is not because society has suddenly become more tolerant and genetics stayed the same.
That is because society has now created a social contagion where it is considered praiseworthy and good.
And attention-getting, if you involve yourself in this sort of identification at the center of your being, at the core of your being.
And this is being pressed down from the heights of our culture.
This is why it matters when Disney says that they are pushing a quote-unquote not-so-secret gay agenda.
And this is why it matters when you see public school administrators who are saying quite openly that they are indoctrinating kids into the wide variety of sexual pleasures available to them at the age of 13 or 14.
With any partner of any kind, it's all morally equivalent.
And anybody who says different, shut up, you bigot.
We'll get back to the show in just one second.
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This comes up today because Project Veritas has revealed tape of a Dean of Students, a guy named Joseph Bruno, at Francis W. Parker School, which is apparently an elite school in Chicago, bragging about Pride Week that they have at this elite private school.
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This comes up today because Project Veritas has revealed tape of a dean of students, a guy named Joseph Bruno at Francis W. Parker School, which is apparently an elite school in Chicago, bragging about Pride Week that they have at this elite private school and what they do. They had their LGBTQ plus health center come into the classroom, and he describes in great detail what exactly is taught to very young students.
We're talking about 14, 13 year old students.
What is taught to them during LGBTQ plus pride week?
Again, this is not saying treat all your students, your fellow students.
Well, this isn't saying don't bully anybody else.
This is actively indoctrinating kids into sexual fluidity and radical gender ideology.
That's what this is.
And there's only one reason for that.
And it is because you are trying to indoctrinate them.
You're trying to change how they think.
You're trying to change how they act.
You're trying to usher them in a world of sexual chaos.
That's... Now, your chief goal, by the way, as a parent, is to protect the innocence of your kids.
But there are a lot of administrators, like this one, who apparently their chief goal is to make sure that your kid's innocence is not protected because, in their mind, the least innocent thing is moral standards.
Moral standards are not innocent.
See, they believe that non-judgmentalism is the highest form of morality.
Which means that judgmentalism is immoral.
If you believe something is wrong, then that is because you are immoral.
And you're ruining the innocence of your kids if you teach them right from wrong.
Right and wrong are biases.
Right and wrong are forms of discrimination, because you're discriminating against behavior.
And that ruins innocence.
Because innocence is you look at everything with a naive eye.
You look at everything and everything is morally equivalent to everything else.
Well, in a certain sense, you understand why that sort of semantic game is being played.
When you see a baby, a baby is innocent, not capable of judgment.
But when it comes to moral innocence, that is a very different question.
Moral innocence also presupposes the idea that there can be moral guilt.
And moral guilt attends to sin, typically speaking.
Moral guilt also attends to behaviors that are damaging to people.
And it turns out that sexual caste is quite damaging to teenagers.
On just a utilitarian level, put aside your own moral prerequisites, even if you're utilitarian.
The kind of ideology that we're teaching to our kids right now, which is resulting in extraordinary levels of suicidal ideation, confusion, depression, anxiety.
It turns out that when you teach kids chaos, they become incredibly anxious.
They become incredibly suicidal.
This is not any sort of mystery.
We've known this in psychology for literally decades.
There's nothing new about this.
It turns out that kids, more than any other species of being, kids are prone to choice paralysis.
And when they are faced with an enormous number of choices, and they understand the consequences of none of them, and you refuse to teach them the consequences of any of them.
They become anxious and confused.
Kids need rules of the road.
But we now have an entire system that is predicated on the idea that if you teach kids rules of the road, this makes you a bigot.
And so we have to indoctrinate you.
If the needle is moved in one direction toward traditional morality, it's not enough to go to sort of some moral neutral.
We just won't teach this stuff in school.
We actually have to push all the way to the other side, which is essentially Promiscuity or polymorphous perversity in the Herbert Marcuse model.
I don't know how to explain what you're about to hear from Joseph Bruno, the Dean of Students at Francis W. Parker School.
Like our LGBTQ plus health center come in.
They were passing around butt plugs and dildos to my students, talking about queer sex, using glue versus using spit.
Meet Joe Bruno, Dean of Students at the prestigious Francis W. Parker Private School in Chicago, which happens to charge $40,000 per student.
They're just like passing around dildos, butt plugs.
The kids are just playing with them.
They're like, how do you, how does this buttplugging work?
How do we do, like, how does this work?
That's a really like cool part of my job.
Wow.
I mean, they teach them about lube.
They teach them about spit.
Joseph Bruno goes on to talk about how the kids pass around dildos and buttplugs.
I kid you not.
In this clip.
And this apparently is what kids must be taught at the age of 14.
And by the way, it's not just radical sexual ideology, it's also radical gender ideology.
In fact, if you just go to the Francis W. Parker School website right now, they have an upcoming event, January 23rd, starring the writer, speaker, and internet yeller, Ijeoma Oluo, in So You Want to Talk About Race.
For the fifth annual Dorita and Robbie Robinson Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Belonging speaker.
Wow, they've now turned it not just into DEI, it's now DEIB.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging speaker.
They also have a lecture on January 19th from Dr. Daniel Siegel, Intraconnected, Self, Identity, and Belonging.
Ah, all of this sounds just like wonderful, wonderful, totally apolitical stuff.
All of this is part of a broader agenda, and that is to inculcate in the youngest generation a complete aversion to any sorts of rules, to any sorts of roles, to any sorts of tradition.
And to say to these kids that you are basically a Cartesian sexual being that exists in opposition to your body very often.
This is how you end up with trans ideology is the idea that you're sort of some disconnected soul in a meat body and that all you have to do is shift your meat body to meet with the dictates of your soul and then you will be alright.
But then that's why your real sex is what you feel inside.
It is not your body.
Your body is just sort of a meat suit you wear around all day.
This bizarre notion that the core of identity lies in an amorphous view of your own sexual identity, it is so core to what all of the left is now teaching, the radical left anyway.
All of the radical left is predicated on the idea that institutions, historic institutions are shot through with racism and sexism and bigotry and they have to be torn down and the best way to tear them down is grab the kids and grab them early and groom them into this ideology and make the messengers of the ideology.
Now, there are a lot of conservative parents who just are unaware of this.
A lot of conservative parents, they're still operating on the same track that their parents and their grandparents were operating on.
And they're trying to climb that ladder of success.
And the way that you climb that ladder of success, historically speaking, is you do fairly well financially.
You send your kids to a better school than you did.
Your kids send their kids to a better school than they did.
And eventually, when your kids get into Harvard, become super rich, and that's sort of the culmination of the American journey.
There's one problem with this.
There's a lot of baggage that comes along with this these days.
And if you are more interested in climbing the ladder of financial and material success than in protecting the innocence of your kids, if you're willing to ignore the indoctrination, because the targeting of kids for this sort of ideological grooming, and I keep using the word over and over because that's what it is.
It is indoctrination into a particular idea about life, into a particular worldview, and it is terrible for children.
You're gonna have to show me why it's better for kids to teach them that all forms of sexual activity are morally equivalent and good.
Why it is necessary to show 13, 14-year-old kids butt plugs and dildos, as this dean of students is talking about.
You're gonna have to explain to me why five-year-olds should be exposed to drag queens.
Or, for that matter, why drag queens feel the necessity to expose themselves to five-year-olds?
And why exactly do they feel that that is a good thing?
And the answer is, they feel that that's a good thing, because they are going to pied piper-like take your children from you, and then they're going to return your children in a different form.
They're going to indoctrinate your kids, and then they're going to send your kids home, and your kids are going to argue with you that you don't accept your kids as they are.
They are placing kids in opposition to their parents.
And the truth is, very often, they're just outright and upfront about all of this.
In fact, just a few years ago, I think this is maybe the single most telling video in the history of all video.
The San Francisco Gay Men's Choir did a song, and it was all about how they were going to take away your children.
We're going to indoctrinate your children.
The lyrics to that song say, we will convert your children.
That is literally the title of the song.
Let me play a little bit of it.
We'll convert your children.
Then we'll turn to you.
Giving up the fear inside.
It's screaming like you never knew.
Go and see San Francisco.
Go and turn up that disco.
You'll forget you were ever upset.
We'll convert your children And make an ally of the United States The lyrics to that song go like this You say we all lead lives you don't respect, but you're just frightened.
You think we'll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked.
Funny, just this once, you're correct.
And they're overtly saying this.
Now again.
What they will say is that when I say that they are grooming kids, that what I'm saying is that they actually just want to have sex with the kids.
I'm not arguing that.
There may be some fringe of these people who actually are pedophilic.
That may be true because that's true in a lot of groups.
I mean, that's true in, unfortunately, nearly every community on earth.
There are people who are actual sick pedophiles.
But what they certainly are doing, and they're just open about it, is ideologically grooming these kids into their, they're not their kids, they're your kids.
And they will grab your kids and turn them against your value system.
That is an overt goal.
This is not, it's not hidden.
It's not a conspiracy theory when you just say it out loud.
Quote, will convert your children, happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it.
Just like you're worried they'll change their group of friends, you won't approve of where they go at night, and you'll be disgusted when they start finding things online that you kept far from their sight.
They say it's tongue-in-cheek.
It's not tongue-in-cheek.
I mean, they actually mean this, obviously.
That's why you end up—and it is—it gets into the policy of the schools.
And then when parents find out about it, then all hell breaks loose.
And that's what's happening right now in Loudoun County, Virginia, thanks to the intrepid reporting of Luke Rosiak, one of our investigative reporters over at Daily Wire.
He uncovered a case in which there was a boy who would wear a skirt into the girl's bathroom and apparently he allegedly raped a girl in that bathroom.
And then the school district pretended that nothing like that had ever happened before.
So according to Luke Rosiak, a Virginia grand jury investigating a public school district's apparent cover-up of a rape of a girl by a male student in a girl's bathroom blasted school officials for their stunning lack of transparency and intentional amnesia in a much-anticipated report released on Monday.
In the fact-finding report, the 9-person Loudoun County panel disclosed for the first time that a teacher's aide walked into the bathroom while the 9th grade victim was being raped by her male classmate and saw two pairs of feet under a stall door and did nothing.
The 91-page report called out district officials for a host of lapses that continued long after the initial attack.
According to the report, quote, we believe that throughout this ordeal, LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS.
This invariably led to a stunning lack of openness, transparency, and accountability, both to the public and to the special grand jury.
The report also found that the district concealed the nature of the attack, even as the district was preparing to impose a controversial new transgender bathroom policy, which of course would suggest that biological boys are allowed to go pee-pee next to the girls.
After the rape, the student was transferred to another school where he was involved in multiple incidents of misbehavior against girls that were known to officials, but until now, unknown to the public, the report said.
Even the rapist's own grandmother told officials he was a sociopath, but little was done.
The rapist soon committed another sexual assault, this time in a classroom.
On May 22, 2021, a male student wearing a skirt anally raped a ninth grader in a girls' bathroom at Stonebridge High School shortly before the school board was to vote on a policy for transgender bathroom use.
The school did not disclose that incident publicly, nor a second sexual assault committed in a class from October 6th.
Even school board members only learned the same person was behind both when the Daily Wire broke that story on October 11th, according to the report.
The second assault could have and should have been prevented, according to grand jurors.
The report reveals that in the days before the bathroom rape, a teacher's assistant wrote to her department's chair the student has, quote, come into class more than once with his arm around a girl's neck.
I've caught him sitting on other girls laps several times.
If this kind of reckless behavior persists, I wouldn't want to be held accountable if someone should get hurt.
School officials seemed more interested in getting the teacher's aide in trouble than the student.
The department chair questioned the true motivation of the author.
The department chair mentioned the email to an assistant principal, who questioned whether the author of the email had followed proper protocol, even though it had been only 14 days since school had opened for the year because of COVID.
Two weeks later, he raped the ninth grade girl.
Messages obtained by the grand jury show the rapist using a school computer to send a message to his victim, saying, quote, you want to be bleeped, to which she responded, no.
On May 22nd, they met in a bathroom around noon, where the rapist became, quote, handsy and then more aggressive, which caused bruising on her chest.
The female lay down on her stomach on the floor, and the male held her arms down as he penetrated her, and a special ed teaching assistant walked into the restroom, which caused the male student to jump up.
The female student was in a lot of pain, got up slowly.
When she was in seated position, the male student pushed her shoulders down and grabbed her face.
The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but did nothing about it.
Hey, this of course set off a widely publicized incident in which the father of this girl went to a school board meeting and yelled at the school board.
And people were like, ah, this is a crazy guy.
Really?
Was he that crazy?
At 4.46 p.m., an email attributed to Principal Timothy Flynn went out to the school community, notifying them of a security incident, the victim's father's unruliness, because he showed up at the school saying, what the hell is going on?
The school district did not disclose the rape in a state database as required and did not discipline the student.
Instead, it merely intended to separate him from his victim for the rest of the year.
And then, of course, the same student apparently did essentially the same thing to another girl.
So here is the question.
What does that have to do with ideology?
Well, I highly doubt that if this particular student had not been wearing a skirt, that the thing would have gone the same way.
They ignored this case in service to a broader ideology.
And if there are victims, then the victims don't matter.
Because after all, the ideology must win.
That is the most important thing.
There are unintentional victims here, and there are intentional victims here.
And neither type of victim actually matters to the people who are pressing forward an ideology that generates suffering.
It is a bad ideology.
It makes kids worse off.
It destroys their actual innocence.
It destroys their moral status.
When you remove all moral barriers, people engage in behaviors that hurt themselves.
This is nothing new.
This has been true throughout human history.
Pretending that we have stumbled upon some new form of ideological genius that is going to liberate humanity.
I guarantee you that this liberation is going to look a lot more like destruction than it is like liberation.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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The good news is that a Virginia school board did fire its superintendent on Tuesday night, more than a year after the Daily Wire revealed that he lied about the rape of a female student in that girl's restroom.
Loudoun County School Board voted unanimously according to the Daily Wire to sack Scott Ziegler without cause, meaning according to his contract, he will be paid a golden parachute worth about $350,000.
He'd been given a $28,000 raise just in July.
That's despite a grand jury finding that at a meeting a month after the rape in which the board members debated a policy allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice, Ziegler dismissed all safety concerns.
The school systems communication arm, which the grand jury revealed, ordered staff to quote, take no action in response to the Daily Wire's October 2021 inquiry.
Similarly, did not return a request for comment on the firing.
So, again, the victims don't matter here.
The only thing that matters is the pressing forward of a perverse ideology on students.
And so, parents, be warned.
You gotta vet everything.
You gotta vet your kid's school.
You gotta vet who your kid's teachers are.
You are in control of ensuring that your child grows up happy and healthy and within the bounds of normality with regard to morality.
This is your goal as a parent.
Now, you get to make these decisions as a parent.
It is important that you make the right decisions, and you don't let any other priorities interfere with that.
And now, listen, I have kids who are 8, 6, 2.
It's very difficult to be a parent right now, because the cultural forces that are attempting to impose themselves on your kids are so strong.
And because the access to technology is so great, and so your kids have an access to a cell phone, you have kids having access to a computer.
First of all, if you are a good, responsible parent, I will not provide my kids with a smartphone until they hit about 18 years old.
They're not going to be on social media.
It's not something I want them involved with.
If you are a responsible parent, you should be worried about the kinds of messages that the culture is trying to impose on your child.
Messages that go directly to the id of your child without ever reaching the actual prefrontal cortex of your child, which is underdeveloped in the first place.
Messages that pit you directly against your children and an alternative value system that does not care about your kid and seeks to use your kid as a tool in the imposition of a radical ideology on our civilization.
Use your kid as that tool.
That's what that ideology seeks to do.
And pose you as the opposition.
Protect your kids.
Find a community where people share your values.
Find a school where the administration shares your values.
Insist that your local school board share values.
And this is why I've contributed money to the 1776 project run by Ryan Godersky.
Public school boards must be taken back by actual parents who care about the raising of their children in a proper and moral fashion.
I know the word morality has gone out of fashion in our society.
And again, the only thing that matters is quote unquote nonjudgmentalism.
It turns out nonjudgmentalism is a bowl of steaming crap because nonjudgmentalism is quite judgmental about people who hold by traditional morality.
It's not a universal rule.
It is a new form of morality that has a very judgmental and censorious view about actual traditional forms of morality.
And there can be no middle ground there.
One morality or the other will be taught.
Because the people who are promoting this secular radical morality, those people have essentially decided that there will be no neutral.
It's not that they won't teach the stuff in schools.
They will teach the stuff in schools.
They'll teach it their way.
And they will take your kids away from you in order to do it.
It's incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
Okay, meanwhile, the New York Times, ironically, is now bracing for a historic mass walkout.
And I have to say that I am amused.
So the New York Times is very, very much into everything ought to be unionized.
Unions must be stronger.
We need unions to get better deals and all the rest.
Well, apparently the New York Times staff is now planning a massive walkout over their union contract.
According to the Huffington Post, unionized staffers at the New York Times are preparing to go on strike today as negotiations with the newspaper's management have failed to result in a new contract around 20 months after the last contract expired.
More than 1,100 members of the New York Times Guild voted Friday to authorize a strike if both sides did not reach an agreement by December 8th.
Wednesday evening, management, quote, walked away from the table a little before 7 p.m.
Eastern and refused to return with five hours to go, said the Guild.
Though members have acknowledged a slight tone shift at the bargaining table and increased urgency from company representatives, Times management would not agree on core issues.
The potential walkout would last 24 hours, beginning at midnight, decimating the newspaper's workforce as the company faces continued pressure to publish a daily paper and maintain its website.
Members of the Guild are encouraging Times readers to steer clear of the site, everything from the homepage to its recipe section to its games, including the crossword and Wordle, for the duration of the walkout.
So, I'm now encouraging my listeners for the first time to go visit the New York Times website.
Mainly because News Guild unions are bad for pretty much everybody, including many members of the union, who will end up in places of non-seniorage and will not actually have the benefit of being at the top levels of the union.
The unionized staffers are expected to picket outside the New York Times building.
The rally will feature speakers like journalist Nikole Hanna-Jones.
By the way, when's the last time Nikole Hanna-Jones wrote anything for the New York Times?
Using the term journalist to apply to a lady who writes one piece every two years and then has the newspaper place millions of dollars behind ahistorical nonsense, that's a pretty sweet gig.
I'm not sure what Nikole Hanna-Jones is striking over.
I mean, that lady has the sweetest gig in American public life.
It's pretty incredible.
New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhodes-Ha told Huffington Post by email, while the company is disappointed in the looming strike, we're preparing to ensure the Times continues to serve our readers without disruption.
Apparently, some desks will lose up to 90% of their manpower in the event of a walkout.
The New York Times richly deserves it, obviously.
New York Times feature writer Sean McCreach told WNYC's Brian Litter on Tuesday that what has the newsroom up in arms is that they are fed up with incremental gains in pay, while the New York Times company has flourished.
Well, I mean, I assume that that is because the New York Times company includes all of the people who own it and have taken the capital risk of running the company.
McCreech said, when the pandemic hit, everybody was similarly freaked out and sitting at home on their phones all day long.
Subscriptions continued to boom.
Now we're coming out of that era and subscriptions are falling flat at other news organizations.
But the Times used the momentum from that era to transform the business into something beyond a newspaper.
They made other acquisitions that diversified the revenue stream.
It's the greatest success story in the legacy media these days.
That's why employees are really sort of steamed right now.
Now, normally you would say, well, aren't you just happy you're not getting fired?
CNN is laying off hundreds of employees.
There are a bunch of buzzfeeders laying off hundreds of employees.
The New York Times is not laying you off, and you're whining because they're successful?
This is one of the big problems with the way that many labor unions view the businesses with which they work, is that if the business is successful, then this means the unions aren't getting enough.
Alrighty, well, you know, the New York Times, as I say, richly deserves it.
Speaking of the journalismists and their incredibly nonpartisan, objective journalisming, there is a picture that has now emerged via Farnoosh Amiri, a congressional reporter at the Associated Press.
And it is worthy of a bit of examination.
This is a photo of Nancy Pelosi with the women of the Capitol Press Corps.
This is what she tweeted out.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and most of the women of the Capitol Press Corps.
There are a few things to note here.
One, that's a lot of white people right there.
That is a lot, a lot of white people.
And every woman in this picture would be tweeting about how non-diverse this crowd was if it were literally any other industry.
In fact, many of them were.
I guarantee you that all you would have to do is examine the Twitter feeds of many of these journalists and you would find some sort of critique of Elon Musk's All male, largely white, upper crust team over at Twitter.
All the greatest advocates of diversity are perfectly fine hanging in non-diverse circles.
They're saying that the revolution in China right now is the so-called white paper revolution.
This is the white journalist revolution right over here.
Incredibly diverse.
Not one black person in that photo.
Not one.
Really well done, journalismists.
Second point to make here.
Look at all these wonderful journalismists who are just sitting there with a person they're supposed to be covering.
Isn't that delightful?
You think they're going to do that with Mitch McConnell?
You think they're going to do that with, I don't know, any other Republican?
Literally any other, like, Joni Ernst?
Like, any other historic female Republican?
You think they would do this with Condi Rice?
I have serious, serious doubts as to whether that is the case.
And yet here they all are, grinning broadly, because after all, this is the person they cover.
And they love her.
And she loves them.
And why wouldn't she love them?
They're her lapdogs.
In fact, one is even carrying a lapdog in a small purse.
This is a picture of the people who cover the industry.
So, if all these people decide to go on strike tomorrow, I'm with them.
More power to the people.
Well, let all of these journalismists go on strike and stay on strike literally forever.
And I think that the country may in fact be better off.
Speaking of media, TikTok is running into a bunch of headwinds from various states.
So the state of Indiana is now suing TikTok, accusing TikTok of deceiving consumers about its content and data security.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this is the latest in a growing number of moves by state officials to push back against the platform's influence on kids and its connections to China.
The state said its lawsuits are the first of their kind against the popular app and its owner, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd.
In one of the complaints, Indiana alleged that TikTok's algorithm is designed to addict young users and promotes harmful content that isn't appropriate for them.
The lawsuit cites studies and reports linking heavy use of the platform to mental disorders among teenagers, including eating disorders and depression.
By the way, again, one thing that I think is really ironic here is many members of the left will agree that TikTok and social media apps facilitate suicidal ideation.
That these things facilitate confusion among kids and anorexia and social contagion, but apparently not with regard to radical gender ideology.
So the radical uptick in the number of people identifying as LGBTQ plus minus divided by a sign happy face emoji is rising radically.
That has nothing to do with the availability of social media and messages being pushed by social media.
That's just a pure upswing because of because of freedom, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Anyway, TikTok is now being pursued by the state of Indiana.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said, quote, TikTok is actively exposing our children to drug use, alcohol abuse, profanity and sexually explicit material at a young age.
TikTok is deceiving Indiana parents.
The second lawsuit alleges that China has the ability to use TikTok's data to spy on, blackmail, and coerce users to serve the country's national security and economic interests.
Both lawsuits seek changes to TikTok's practices as well as civil penalties for each alleged civil violation.
Also on Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned the use of TikTok on government-issued devices, citing concerns the platform could assist China in the surveillance of Americans and other intelligence work.
Other states have started making similar moves in recent weeks.
Abbott said, quote, this TikTok ban extends to all state issued cell phones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers, and other devices capable of internet connectivity.
And it must be strictly enforced. TikTok says, quote, the safety, privacy and security of our communities are top priority. We build youth well-being into our policies, limit features by age, empower parents with tools and resources, and continue to invest in new ways to enjoy content based on age appropriateness or family comfort. We're also confident we're on a path in our negotiations with the US government to fully satisfy all reasonable US national security concerns. Yeah, I do not think that that is true.
I have serious doubts as to whether that is the case.
The White House, for its part, has no comment on any of this.
Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, she was asked specifically about TikTok and states cracking down on it.
She had no comment.
Thank you, Karine.
I just wanted to follow up on TikTok.
I know you said you can't comment, but the U.S.
business operations of the company have effectively been in question for nearly three years.
And I'm wondering at what point you think there might be an outcome one way or another on whether it can operate here.
I'm just not going to comment on an ongoing review that CFIUS is doing.
And as you know, the review is ongoing to address the concerns posed by the app.
I'm just not going to comment from here.
Do you trust that the CCP is not going to, given that TikTok is essentially a state-owned application by the CCP, do you trust that they're not doing anything nefarious with data they're presumably reportedly gathering on the wills of Americans?
I would not go that far.
Yeah, you probably shouldn't go that far.
And maybe you ought to take more seriously the threat that China poses to the United States in terms of its intelligence and surveillance capacity.
Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get you breaking news that Britney Griner has now been released from a Russian prison in exchange for, you know, actual serious hardcore criminals.
We'll talk about whether that's a good deal or not in just one second.
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Okay, so in breaking news, Britney Griner has now been released from a Russian prison.
The Biden administration traded away an arms dealer.
For the WNBA basketball player who decided it would be a wonderful idea to travel to Russia with some pot in tow.
A genius move in the middle of a war between Ukraine and Russia.
According to Fox News, Brittany Greiner was arrested in February before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war for bringing in vape cartridges containing oils derived from cannabis through a Moscow airport as she was returning to the country to play for a basketball league in the country.
About 10 months later and weeks before the Christmas holiday, Greiner is now coming home.
This would be after Greiner had spent years ripping on the systemic evil racism of the United States.
Greiner was freed from a Russian penal colony on Thursday in a prisoner exchange for convicted Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, a U.S.
official confirmed to Fox News.
U.S.
and Russian officials have expressed optimism in recent weeks about a potential deal for Greiner.
President Biden tweeted about Greiner's release.
He was seen in pictures with Vice President Harris and Greiner's wife, Sherelle Greiner.
And he tweeted out, which is all quite reminiscent of the Beau Bergdahl trade.
You'll remember that one.
That was the one where Barack Obama decided that it was deeply necessary to bring home a man who had deserted his post.
He was actually convicted of desertion.
He was actually charged by the U.S.
Army with desertion and deserted his post in Afghanistan.
Which prompted a duty status whereabouts unknown that ended with a couple of American soldiers, one being wounded, one being killed, actually, in the search for him.
And then Barack Obama decided, what if we trade away five high-level Taliban operatives in favor of Bo Bergdahl?
And then he did a sort of victory lap at the White House with Bo Bergdahl and his parents.
It was all really awkward and really weird.
This is a much lower-level version of a similar thing.
Bout is known as the Merchant of Death.
The possible swap for him was floated back in May.
He was in the middle of a 25-year sentence in federal prison after he was convicted of a conspiracy to kill Americans relating to the support of a Colombian terrorist organization.
He was dubbed the Merchant of Death because of his notoriety for running a fleet of aging Soviet-era cargo planes to conflict-ridden hotspots in Africa.
This guy was so prominent as a weapons dealer that he inspired the Nicolas Cage film Lord of War.
Paul Whelan, another American imprisoned in Russia, was not part of the swap.
He's been jailed on espionage charges that his family and the U.S.
government have set her baseless.
So, once again, not a particularly good trade here by the Biden administration.
We got Brittany Griner and a prisoner to be named later, maybe, for one of the worst arms dealers on planet Earth.
Yeah, I feel like that's not an amazing deal.
I'm just going to put that out there.
Again, I'm glad Brittany Griner is coming back.
She's an American citizen.
The American government should do whatever it can to achieve the release of an American citizen trading away one of the world's worst arm dealers for a basketball player who actually did commit a crime in Russia.
Seems like not the world's strongest move from the world's strongest power.
So, great job there, Mr. President.
Glad you're taking a victory lap on that one.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles continues to decline into the mire.
I was talking to a cop friend of mine in LA the other day and he was talking about the extraordinary levels of violence that Los Angeles is seeing right now.
The LAPD are basically being told to reclassify violent felonies as misdemeanors and misdemeanors as nothing.
This is the way that it works over in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney, George Gascon, who is a nut, He now says that prosecutors in L.A.
County will have to weigh the effects of charging decisions on immigration status of suspects and are encouraged to seek diversion programs to help avoid deportations according to a new directive.
As Fox News reporting, the policy from District Attorney George Gaskin is another in a long list of progressive measures to overhaul how justice is sought in the nation's largest DA's office.
I've worked in that office.
It is routinely overloaded.
When I was in law school, I did a summer at the LADA's office.
It is wildly overloaded.
They're doing their best to prosecute crimes, unless apparently you are now under the jurisdiction of the DA, George Gaskin, who's literally telling people that you should reclassify crimes so that people don't get deported.
It is very important to keep criminal, illegal immigrants in the United States.
So we have to make sure that we minimize the criminality because they're illegal immigrants.
You understand how backward this is?
You understand how insane this is?
So you have a person who shouldn't be here in the first place.
They commit a crime.
And now we are supposed to go soft on the crime so that they don't get kicked out of the country, which they should have been in the first place.
So the illegal immigration is now supposed to be a militating factor against prosecuting a crime.
As opposed to, you know, an additional reason to prosecute the crime so that we can throw them out of the country.
It's an amazing, amazing statement here by George Gaskin.
According to the policy obtained by Fox News, alternatives to criminal convictions should be considered, such as avoiding charging for criminal enhancements, which can significantly increase one's prison sentence that would turn an otherwise immigration-neutral offense into an immigration-damaging one.
This is madness.
Eric Siddall, vice president of the Association for Deputy DAs of LA County said, that's basically saying, we're going to give you a pass because you used a gun.
Anyone under criminal investigation can contact the DA's office to present information concerning adverse immigration consequences before a case is filed according to the measure.
All charging determinations shall be undertaken with the goal of avoiding or mitigating the adverse immigration consequences of a decision when known possible PR permitting, the policy says.
Under these circumstances and when consistent with public safety alternatives to filing charges exist, those alternatives shall be pursued.
So they are now so eager to have illegal immigrants in the county of Los Angeles that they are actively not prosecuting crimes so people don't get kicked out of the country.
The district attorney's office says the policy prioritizes public safety and protects immigrants.
Oh, that's the important thing.
Tiffany Blackwell, communications director for the DA's office, told Fox News Digital, Overly punitive according to whom?
According to whom?
of crafting a comprehensive immigration policy that protects vulnerable victims and prioritizes safety while attempting to avoid overly punitive consequences for the accused.
Overly punitive according to whom?
According to whom?
Man, you get what you pay for in Los Angeles.
I will say that.
There's a reason my family and my company fled, screaming the city of Los Angeles.
There's just another reason.
Turns out they are more interested in preserving the amnesty of illegal immigrants who are criminals than in actually prosecuting criminals if it results in the removal of the illegal immigrants.
Taxpayers, this is exactly what you are paying for in Los Angeles County.
So really, well done you.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into Cory Booker, who's very upset that Republicans might look into Hunter Biden.
Plus Democrats still complaining about voter suppression in Georgia, despite the fact they just won a Senate seat there.
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