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Jan. 25, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:19
California vs. Florida: The Great Battle | Ep. 1654
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California ratchets up the insanity as Governor Gavin Newsom inches toward a presidential run, the media panic over Governor Ron DeSantis' conservative actions in Florida, and the DOJ moves to break up Google's ad monopoly.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Things don't seem to be getting much better any time soon.
Now, one of the reasons I left California, many of the reasons I left California, are implicit in the news that comes out of the place absolutely daily.
I left California for Florida, so I am biased in this matter, but it appears to me on a national level, one of the things that we are going to be deciding in the very near future is whether California is the future of the United States or whether Florida is the future of the United States.
And these futures look unbelievably different.
In California, the solution for every single problem is more government.
It is more government.
It is more government interventionism.
It is more encroachments upon your economic rights.
It is more left-wing indoctrination of your children.
That is always the answer.
And in Florida, the answer seems to be more local control.
More leaving parents to their own devices.
More of the state allowing you to bring up your children in the way that is traditionally fit in the United States.
And this is the real gap that is emerging in American public life.
This is why the solution in the end may be that California is going to get to be California and Florida is going to get to be Florida and federalism rules the day.
But until that point, The incipient conflict that is building up at a national level is whether the entire nation is going to move more toward Florida or whether it is going to move more toward California.
So we begin in California.
In California, there have been two mass shootings over the course of the last 72 hours.
There's another mass shooting at In Half Moon Bay, apparently over the course of the last 48, the Washington Post reports the suspect accused of killing seven people at two farms was believed to be a co-worker of the victims, officials said on Tuesday, describing the attack as workplace violence.
Details about what happened on Monday were slow to emerge as authorities worked to reach the victims' families and to further investigate ahead of a planned Wednesday arraignment for the suspect, who happens to be a 66-year-old who engaged in the shooting.
That is a very elderly mass shooter.
Typically, mass shooters tend to be in the 17 to 22 range.
They don't tend to be in the 60 plus range, but we have been seeing a rising number of bizarre mass shootings involving much older people ranging from the Las Vegas shooting to the shooting that happened a little bit earlier this week in California to this shooting in Half Moon Bay.
Apparently, according to the Washington Post, there have been nearly 40 mass shootings so far this year.
We only focus on a certain number of them, obviously.
The media tend to focus on the more spectacular shootings, the ones that kill more people at one shot, and don't happen to be linked to gang violence.
The reality is that shootings in the United States tend to be linked overwhelmingly to either interpersonal disputes or gang violence.
Most of the most spectacular shootings that you see on the news are statistical anomalies.
That doesn't mean that they're not acts of tremendous evil, doesn't mean they're not important, doesn't mean we shouldn't address them, but the media tend to focus in on these anomalous actions as opposed to the more run-of-the-mill shootings, because if you were to look at the run-of-the-mill shootings, it might represent a different set of policy prescriptions.
According to the Washington Post, on January 21st, a shooter opened fire on the eve of Lunar New Year at a dance studio in Monterey Park, a majority Asian Los Angeles suburb, killing 11.
Two days later, related shootings at two locations around Half Moon Bay near San Francisco killed seven people as well.
There have been already 39 mass shootings in 2023 in the United States.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more shootings than any other January on the database's record, which go back to 2014.
Mass shootings, where four or more people not including the shooter are injured or killed, have averaged more than one per day in 2023.
Every week has had at least six mass shootings.
Again, a lot of folks have been claiming that this has to do with the prevalence of guns in the United States, but it's hard to make that link considering what's happening in California.
And here is the rule.
If there is a link, if there is a mass shooting that cannot be explained by white supremacy or right-wing rhetoric, it immediately turns into a gun control narrative.
We don't bother to look into the motive.
We don't bother to look into any other factor.
We don't look into mental illness.
That's because the media have a stake in the gun control narrative, which is why you have articles like the one from Eugene Robinson over at the Washington Post in response to shootings in California, one of the more gun-controlled states in America.
Eugene Robinson says the only way to stop senseless mass shootings?
You know the answer.
The answer, of course, is the gun, the gun, the gun, the gun.
The common factor always is the gun.
There's one way the mass shootings Saturday in Monterey Park, California could have been prevented.
One way that all mass shootings and individual shootings and gun suicides can be prevented.
Keep deadly firearms out of the hands of those who would use them to kill.
Okay, well, the problem is you don't know who would use them to kill all the time.
We all agree.
People who are irresponsible with guns.
If there were a way to weed them out, no one would want those people to own guns.
If there were a way to weed out people who are mentally ill, it would be great to weed out people who are violently mentally ill from owning a gun.
However, saying the gun is the major factor in violence is sort of like saying that money is the major factor in embezzlement.
Yes, it is a vital tool for achieving the crime, but also it happens to be used for a lot of other things that are legal and necessary.
But the left-wing view, always and forever, is that if there is an evil person who does something terrible with a gun, all the people who are law-abiding have to have their guns removed from them, which is exactly what Eugene Robinson writes, as mass killers have different profiles and different motives.
Most are male.
Many are young.
Few are old.
By definition, virtually all are struggling with mental health issues of some kind.
Happy, well-adjusted people do not kill innocents at random.
In all cases, though, the assailants have been able to obtain guns and ammo, usually legally and with ease.
California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, Eugene Robinson notes.
The state makes it illegal to possess the kind of weapon used in Monterey Park, a semi-automatic assault pistol with an extended magazine.
It is not yet known how the assailant obtained the outlawed gun.
It would have been a simple matter to purchase the weapon in a state where it is allowed.
Or, I mean, the guy broke a bunch of gun laws.
Okay, so passing more gun laws ain't going to do it.
But again, the idea from California is that we can always solve every single problem with more legislation.
If you look at California's gun laws, they're very restrictive.
California already has a so-called assault weapons ban.
California already has a red flag law that was enacted in 2016.
And that law allows law enforcement, family members, employers, co-workers, and school employees to file a gun violence restraining order against an individual suspected of being a danger to themselves or others.
This is according to the California government website.
California already has a waiting period of 10 days for all gun purchases.
It's one of nine states and D.C.
that have waiting periods.
California's waiting period is among the strictest.
California already requires background checks on all gun purchases and transfers, including private transfers and sales of gun shows.
It is one of 14 states and D.C.
that require universal background checks.
So basically, all of the national legislation that Democrats would pursue already is in place in California, and it is not stopping these sorts of mass shootings from happening.
A huge number of them happen in California.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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But again, the idea in California is that if the policy fails, you just do more of it, which presumably is why you have a Governor Gavin Newsom who obviously wants to run for President of the United States.
That is the reason he has been running aggressive ads in Florida.
I noticed that California isn't in Florida.
Many of us in Florida tried to flee California, but Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be following us there with his ridiculous ads.
Well, now he is out there saying that the Second Amendment is a suicide pact.
Nothing about this is surprising.
Everything about this is infuriating.
California has the strictest gun laws in the U.S.
I mean, the Second Amendment's becoming a suicide package.
But there's many people in this country that support the Second Amendment and are lawful gun owners.
Yeah, I have great respect.
No you don't.
No you don't, dude.
Now Gavin Newsom obviously wants to run for president.
There only happens to be one problem for him, and that is that his policies are not working.
They seem to be failing almost across the board.
You have a mass homelessness crisis in California.
The supposed budget surplus that was supposed to materialize has completely dissipated under Governor Gavin Newsom.
By the way, it is amusing to watch as the Senator from California, not Gavin Newsom, Alex Padilla, he says, the solution here would be more background checks.
Again, I noticed universal background checks are the law of the land in the state of California, Senator.
How is it, Senator, that we can stop this from being normal?
Well, there's clearly a lot that needs to happen.
Is it broader education, embracing of diversity, and yes, including smarter gun control laws throughout the United States of America.
We did make some progress last year in Congress in strengthening the background checks required for gun purchasers under the age of 21, but clearly more needs to be done for those that are older than 21. And that's just the purchasing of a gun.
So Senator Padilla's solutions here involve more diversity training and gun control.
It's working great in California, by the way.
Both of the last two mass shooters in California are apparently of Asian extraction, which is a rarity and a weird oddity, but it makes it kind of odd to suggest that the solution to this is proper diversity training.
Meanwhile, again, California is leading the nation in radical policy prescriptions.
Abigail Schreier has a fascinating piece over at City Journal, super disturbing, talking about how California is now creating a predator's paradise, particularly for LGBTQ youth.
Says Abigail Schreier.
In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephanie Powell on a tour of the track on Figueroa, one of California's busiest prostitution areas.
For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.
In our post-feminist era, prostitution is so often idealized, sex work is work, that it's easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job.
Quote, the horror stories I could tell you about prostitutes being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped, said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking non-profit based near Oakland, and the PTSD and all the mental health and the trauma bonding and the psychotic breaks.
Maybe you're somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day, but 9 to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old.
One day.
That's healthy living?
I don't think so.
The body is not even made for that.
While the past few decades have seen an increase in human trafficking, women in all three of the anti-trafficking groups I spoke to, says Abigail Schreier, across California agreed, nothing compares with the stunning rise in trafficking they've witnessed in recent months.
Powell, formerly a sergeant in the LAPD, knows the city's streets intimately.
Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled.
Doubled in six months.
On Figueroa, she says, between 65th and 75th in an hour.
You might see about 30 girls out there.
Now, you can see 60 to 65 girls in an hour.
What shifted?
Senate Bill 357.
Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution.
So it used to be that if there was some John who was hanging around the prostitutes, he could get cited.
Now he can't get cited anymore.
The bill did not officially take effect until January 1st of this year, but from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed.
The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets, said Powell.
On social media, the pimps were saying, you better get out there and work, the streets are ours.
The pimps were right.
Police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged.
The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring.
Powell said, as a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate.
So if I have a law that says you can't loiter in this area with pasties and g-strings flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you're loitering.
But if I say I'm stopping you because you look kind of young, that's a little weak, so it takes away a tool.
Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied.
Henceforth, questioning the girls came to seem a pyrrhic gamble, one that California's police officers would now avoid.
Prostitution is still illegal in California, but police have lost significant ground in the effort to contain it.
Women at anti-trafficking non-profits in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles all emphasized.
You might wonder who actually benefits from Senate Bill 357.
According to Sgt.
Marcos Campos, he's not sure.
He says, not the communities, not the sex workers, many of whom rely on police officers for help in escaping their pimps.
He said, I think if anything, it probably helps the sex traffickers.
Get to more on this in just one second.
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So why exactly would anyone propose such a law?
Why would the California State Legislature pass it?
So Abigail, she actually asked the author, the San Francisco-based State Senator Scott Wiener.
You've heard his name before because he has promoted a bevy of bizarre, odd, and perverse legislation aimed at opening up California wide to some of the worst perversions in America.
This is one of them.
The answer he gave is the one that he supplies for so many of the bill he authors.
He says it was necessary to advance the rights of LGBTQ people.
This is what he says all the time.
This is why he's tried to make California into a trans haven.
So now essentially, if you are a parent of a child, and let's say your wife decides that your boy is actually a girl and she flees to California, now California will provide a haven state for this.
So you have no say in it.
Remove the kid from your home, put him in California, California's law can even be interpreted so that if a minor runs away from parents and ends up in California and says that they're a member of the quote-unquote transgender community, that the state of California will then not return the kid to the parents depending on the circumstances.
So on this one, Weiner says, quote, If you're standing on the sidewalk with high heels and you wear your hair a certain way and you wear tight clothing, an officer can say, I think you're loitering with the intent to commit prostitution and arrest you.
That is not how we should be doing things in the United States of America.
Arresting people for how they look.
And when you do that, not surprisingly, it's only certain kinds of people who actually get arrested.
It's trans women.
It's black women.
It's an inherently profiling law.
Randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women for how they look is not protecting potential victims of human trafficking.
Well, I mean, maybe it is.
Maybe some of those black trans women, meaning black young men, maybe they are victims of human trafficking.
So maybe they are disproportionately helped by the law.
But were the police indeed randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women, says Abigail Schreier?
The anti-trafficking advocates I spoke with dispute this.
For starters, Wilson, Powell, and Russell say the biological women and girls constitute the vast majority of people trafficked.
Nearly every report on human trafficking by global human rights organizations confirms this observation.
And if the women I saw on Figarous as Abigail are any indication, discerning which are involved in prostitution does not require sophisticated sartorial judgments, but only two eyes and a brain.
If a woman is wearing a g-string bikini in the middle of the street and she is flagging down cars, while men in dark clothes stand watch as if holding an invisible leash, she is likely to be a modern-day sex slave.
Apparently, she says, on my ride along with Pal and Wilson in L.A.
just after 10 p.m., before the track really gets going, I saw several lines of vehicles stretching around the block, each manned by a prospective client, waiting for his chance with one of the girls.
At least 35 females worked the line, most of them white or Latina.
Many looked very young, under 18.
I identified only one prostitute as transgender, but Pal noted there were likely others at a second location on Western.
Powell and Wilson told me traffic starts to pick up at 11 and peaks at midnight.
As the hour neared 11, more and more women appeared along Figueroa.
But Powell and Wilson made certain that we left before midnight.
After 11.30, the chance of gun violence erupting among the pimps escalates and we wouldn't be safe.
So, who is the problem here?
Well, Wiener is one of them.
In the six years since the Harvard grad took office, he has managed to author and get past a series of radical gender and sex-related bills.
The measures have allowed biological male felons to self-ID their way into women's prisons, assigning criminal penalties to healthcare workers who fail to provide gender-affirming care.
That is supposedly a ban on conversion therapy.
By this, Scott Wiener means that if a child comes in and expresses gender confusion and you don't immediately say that you're a member of the opposite sex, Then you might be violating the law.
Made California a sanctuary state for LGBTQ youth, as we've already discussed.
Expanded access to quote-unquote gender-affirming care for LGBTQ identified youth with and without parental approval.
Proposed jail time for healthcare workers who willfully and repeatedly misgender a patient.
So if you are a doctor and you repeatedly address a biological male as a biological male and diagnose them as such, you might end up in jail.
Decriminalize the intentional exposure of a sexual partner to HIV.
That one is absurd.
So you have HIV.
You don't tell your sex partner you have HIV.
And then you have sex with them, unprotected.
That used to be a prosecutable offense because you're attempting to expose a person to what could be a fatal disease.
Scott Weiner decriminalized it.
He also attempted to reduce criminal penalties for sex offenders.
Another Wiener bill introduced in 2021 sought to decriminalize psilocybin and ketamine.
It failed to pass, partly because of the vocal opposition of former state senator Melissa Melendez, a Republican who railed against easing restrictions on ketamine, which is a drug notorious for facilitating date rape.
I'm like, do you guys not see the agenda here?
I mean, honestly, in the legislature, I think people came to sort of accept these bills because he's from San Francisco.
Undeterred, Wiener then tried to introduce a modified version of the bill again in December.
As both a former Senate aide and a California Republican Party strategist told me, Wiener, one of the country's most prominent and outspoken defenders of LGBTQ rights, is uniquely difficult to oppose.
The moment you speak out against one of his bills, just like he does with me, he turns around and says, you're homophobic or transphobic, you're this or you're that, I don't care, you can call me whatever name you want, I'm Melendez, that doesn't change the fact of what your bill does.
If some of Wiener's bills seek to protect LGBTQ youth, they also represent a golden opportunity for adults who would groom them.
Weiner is an extremely dangerous person.
So extremely dangerous, I cannot believe people can't read between the lines, said Marissa Ugarte, who runs the anti-trafficking nonprofit Bilateral Safety Corridor Correlation.
Weiner, she said, is turning California into a sex trafficking paradise.
But here is the thing.
Gavin Newsom is signing all these bills, guys.
It's not just one legislator.
It is being passed by the Democratic legislature, and then it is being signed into law by Gavin Newsom.
This is the California model.
Defenders of the law have noted there's long been judicial latitude in California in whether to place perpetrators of statutory rape on the Sex Offender Registry if the crime involved was vaginal intercourse with a minor, the minor was at least 14 and the offender was within 10 years of her age.
Wiener's bill, however, extended such potential leniency to statutory rape involving anal or oral sex.
He has many times defended the bill as required to end blatant discrimination against LGBTQ young people regarding the Sex Offender Registry.
This is amazing.
Instead of trying to seek to put everybody on the registry, he's trying to delist everybody from the registry.
Something very fishy is going on.
But put Wiener's bizarre motives aside, the thing that really should be scaring the hell out of you is why in the world Gavin Newsom is signing this stuff into law.
And the answer is the California model.
Again, it combines the worst sort of government seizure of private property and intervention in the economy with the idea that every person's subjective sense of sexual identity must be not only greenlit but approved and sponsored by the state of California up to the point of decriminalization and possibly being given tax dollars.
Speaking of which, all of this stuff costs a lot of money.
It turns out that it is very expensive to run your state like an idiot.
And so now California Democrats are considering something new.
According to Fox News, Assemblyman Alex Lee, a progressive Democrat, last week introduced a bill in the California state legislature that would impose an extra annual 1.5% tax on those with a worldwide net worth above $1 billion starting as early as January 2024.
As early as 2026, the threshold for being taxed would drop.
Those with a worldwide net worth exceeding $50 million would be hit with a 1% annual tax on wealth.
Billionaires would still be taxed 1.5%.
Just to keep this straight, folks, what that means is that if you have a worldwide net worth exceeding $50 million, they're going to tax you annually 1% on your wealth.
Well, 1% of $50 million is about $500,000 annually.
The problem is, how do you actually assess what somebody's wealth is worth?
Let's say they are an owner in a privately held company that is not publicly traded on the stock market.
There's no way to actually know what your market capitalization is because your stock is not actually tradable.
It's not fluid.
So theoretically, you could actually be hit with a 1% tax, a $500,000 tax, without even necessarily earning that much money in a given year because you can't actually liquidate your wealth.
Alright, I'll get to more on this in just one second.
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That's not the worst part of this bill.
This bill also includes an exit tax.
The current version introduces a measure to allow California to introduce wealth taxes on residents years after they left the state and moved elsewhere.
This bill includes provisions to create contractual claims tied to the assets of a wealthy taxpayer who doesn't have the cash to pay their annual wealth tax bill because most of their assets aren't easily turned into cash.
This claim would now require the taxpayer to make annual filings with the California Franchise Tax Board and eventually pay the wealth taxes owed, even if they have moved to another state.
So, by the way, this just means people are going to leave faster.
I remember having this conversation before we moved our company and before we left for Florida.
I remember talking to my wife and saying, we need to get out before they do something like this, because then they'll just try to lock you in financial prison, essentially, by forcing you to pay back taxes to the state of California, even though you've left.
They're apparently trying to now tax people even after they leave the state, which is just insane.
So, you know, the reason they're doing this, by the way, is because somebody's got to pay the taxes.
According to Fox News, past studies show that the top 1% of taxpayers pay about 50% of all state income taxes in New York, California, and elsewhere.
Watch as everybody who has the ability leaves the state of California as soon as humanly possible.
That will be the precise outcome that California wishes to avoid, but that's what they're going to achieve.
Okay, so you have one model of governance, that is the California model of governance.
Meanwhile, there's a separate model of governance and it is taking place over in Florida.
That model of governance is turning a purple state red, bright red.
So much so that the Washington Post now has a piece titled, There is no plan, there is nothing.
Florida Democrats in despair over future.
To which all I can say is, uh, Emperor Palpatine, good, good.
I only hope that you are in despair over my new state turning bright red thanks to people like me leaving California and coming to places like Florida.
According to the Washington Post, More than two months after enduring humbling midterm losses, Democrats in Florida are in a state of disorder.
They have no clear leader, infrastructure, or consensus for rebuilding, according to interviews with more than a dozen organizers, former lawmakers, donors, and other leaders.
These factors have compounded their worries about Democrats outside Florida all but writing off the nation's third most populous state, which was once seen as a marquee battleground.
Democrats have struggled there in recent elections, hitting a new low last fall when Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won a second term by nearly 20 points and carried the majority Hispanic Miami-Dade County.
That's something a GOP gubernatorial candidate has not done in two decades.
Republicans also secured a supermajority in the state legislature.
Now, as Democrats look to 2024, there are a few early signs that Florida will be a top priority for Joe Biden, who said he intends to run for re-election.
A Biden advisor who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe strategy said decisions about whether a re-election campaign would even invest in Florida would be based in part on the Republican nominee.
Some Democrats see little hope in contesting Florida's 30 electoral votes.
Only Texas and California have more, if DeSantis is the nominee.
Fernanda Amandia, federal Democratic operative said, The thing about Florida Democrats is we keep learning with every passing year.
Just when you thought you had hit bottom, you discover there are new abysses to fall deeper and deeper into.
There is no plan. There is nothing.
It's just a state of suspended animation and chaos.
More than anything, it's the mournful regret and acceptance that Florida has been cast aside for the long foreseeable future.
Yup.
And there's a reason for that.
And that is because the governance in Florida, which has been largely Republican for quite a while here, has been excellent.
And it's turned a bunch of Democrats into Republicans, at least in the state of Florida.
And that includes Governor DeSantis' supposed culture wars.
So the left keeps declaring that Ron DeSantis' culture wars are somehow damaging him, that they're really, really bad, and how could he possibly do this?
They keep saying that he's such a radical.
The problem is that the culture wars that he is picking are not radical.
So you'll recall that they suggested that when he passed a bill saying that you should not sexually indoctrinate children under the age of eight, the entire media labeled this the Don't Say Gay Bill.
And then polls showed that over 50% of Democrats in Florida approved the bill.
You'll recall that Ron DeSantis said he didn't want Disney getting involved in the politics of the state on behalf of the Democrats.
And he said, you don't get special benefits from the state if you choose to play sides.
And people outside the state were like, how dare he do this?
And you know what the impact was?
Nothing on Ron DeSantis.
He won by 20 points.
Well now, Ron DeSantis is making a couple of other moves.
And they have to do largely with the school system.
It's such smart politics, it also happens to be good.
So the chief issue that is facing parents right now in the United States is the attempted indoctrination of their children by major teachers unions like the AFT and the NEA.
The fact of the matter is that there are a bunch of very motivated political partisan hacks who are in the classroom.
It is a scary thing.
It happens to be true at a bevy of public schools all around the nation.
The selection of teachers is not coming from the community very often.
Now at public schools, it's coming from teachers union members who have gone to the ed school at the state college or out of state and they are coming back and they are taking all of their left-wing values and they're now implanting those in their kids.
Well, Ron DeSantis is doing the right thing.
He's attempting to break the teachers unions in the state of Florida.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Governor DeSantis unveiled a series of proposals on Monday aimed at school boards and teachers unions.
The latest salvo in his battles over education policy in the state.
Again, education policy is a very good thing for Republicans to go after because Democrats for some reason have decided to simply surrender parents as an actual block.
Now they want to defeat parental rights.
If you're a parent and you say, my boy is a boy, my girl is a girl, the Democrats now say that you may be an abusive parent on that basis alone.
They want this stuff instead mainstreamed into the classroom, and they want to make sure that you're never told about this stuff.
If your kid goes to school, expresses gender confusion, and everybody at the school starts calling your kid by a dumb alternative name and pretending they're a member of the opposite sex, they don't even want to tell you about it.
DeSantis is saying no to all of that.
DeSantis has now unveiled what he calls a Teacher's Bill of Rights.
At an event in Jacksonville, it would give teachers the go-ahead to oppose their school boards if they believed their policies were against state law.
He also proposes banning teachers' unions from automatically deducting dues from paychecks, imposing stricter term limits on school board members, and changing the state constitution to allow school board candidates to reveal their political parties in what are now nonpartisan races.
That'd be a good thing also, because you don't know who to vote for in your school board race.
Now, if they identify as a Republican, presumably, they're not going to be sexually indoctrinating your children or attempting to do so.
Also, his attempt to stop teachers' unions from automatically deducting dues from paychecks.
This is one of the scummiest things in American politics.
It's been happening for a very long time.
Public sector unions, believe it or not, actually have the right that if the state sends your paycheck, they don't send it to you, they send it to the union.
The union then removes your dues and passes along the check to you.
That's insane.
You should have to opt into paying your teacher's union.
Because that would make you think about whether maybe you want to pay your teacher's union.
Instead, they treat it like tax withholding for social security or something.
It's ridiculous.
It essentially makes the government a partner with the teacher's unions in exacting money from the members of the union.
Which is crazy towns.
Andrew Speier, the head of the Florida Education Association, called DeSantis' proposals an attempt to punish and divide.
Well, I mean, I hope it's an attempt to punish some of the worst teachers unions in America.
DeSantis said he wants an additional $200 million to be added to the special fund created to raise teacher pay, bringing the total to $1 billion for teacher pay in his recommended budget for the next year.
So, at the same time he is saying they should break the unions, he's saying we should pay teachers more.
I mean, that seems like a pretty good policy.
In a statement, FEA spokeswoman Joanie Branch said, due to a tangled web of laws and rules governing pay, teachers with years in the classroom continue to face an experience penalty that can leave them at making little more than new hires.
The answer to which is, good!
The reality is seniority should not be the point of teaching.
Quality should be the point of teaching.
You've seen all over the country bizarre situations in which the teacher of the year will get fired because the teacher of the year is like two years in.
And some schlub with 20 years on the job who's been rubber-roomed, meaning you can't fire him for legal reasons, but actually that person can't be in the classroom because they've been sexually harassing the students or something.
Instead they just literally put them in a room and they leave them there and they pay them.
It's been a major issue in New York for literally years.
DeSantis' proposals on school boards came after he inserted himself into local board races to an unprecedented degree for a governor, boosting conservative candidates across the state.
That is a very good thing.
Another area where DeSantis has gotten active is the Florida Department of Education has now rejected an AP African American Studies course because it was, effectively speaking, critical race theory.
The state of Florida bans critical race theory under the so-called WOCA Act.
It essentially says that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution and the Florida State Constitution.
That it treats students disparately by race, it creates hierarchies of race in the classroom, and that is barred by Florida law.
So they said we are not going to have an AP class approved for use in the classroom that includes these sorts of elements.
And this, of course, set the world on fire.
The entire left began lying about this quite quickly.
According to Fox News, Florida rejected an Advanced Placement African American Studies course because it contained elements of critical race theory and black queer studies, according to a document shared with Fox News Digital detailing the concerns identified by the Florida DOE, the Department of Education.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz also tweeted a graphic that detailed six particular lessons outlined in the syllabus that didn't comply with Florida law.
So it wasn't just they rejected the whole thing, they said, here are the things you have to fix.
So what exactly are those things?
Well, one of the topics from the AP course was intersectionality and activism.
Which is not education, that's indoctrination.
There was one titled Black Queer Studies, which included readings from people like Rodney, Roderick Ferguson, who said, quote, we have to encourage and develop practices whereby queerness isn't a surrender to the status quo of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It means building forms of queerness that reject the given realities of the government and market.
That's just left-wing activism in the name of LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign stuff.
It includes topics like black feminist literary thought, including Bell Hooks, who is the author of many intersectionality texts, who says in the recommended reading, quote, I began to use the phrase in my work, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and this indoctrination of students, not into a theory, but into the praxis of the notion that America is systemically racist, capitalism is inherently evil, and all of the the rest. So Florida rejected all of this.
And guess what?
Because Florida rejected all of this, the College Board is now updating the studies course.
Which is exactly what is supposed to happen.
Students will still have AP African American Studies.
Instead, they're just going to edit out all the garbage.
Good!
That's the way it's supposed to work.
from use in the state of Florida, according to News Channel 8, the college board, the nonprofit organization that designs and maintains AP courses, announced the rejected pilot program of their AP African-American Studies course would now be updated.
Good, that's the way it's supposed to work.
You reject the indoctrination, and then you get something better.
The left is running scared of all of this sort of stuff.
They're trying to lie about it.
So, we play one of our favorite games in the media, which is, it's not happening, and it's good that it is.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, Ron DeSantis, he is winning, and he is winning big in the state of Florida.
And this is scaring the living hell out of the left, so they have to lie about it.
Whoopi Goldberg, over on The View, which is the repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the universe, she suggested that no one is actually teaching critical race theory.
Again, this is part of the ongoing left-wing series.
It's not happening, and it's good that it is.
Here's Whoopi Goldberg.
He was conflating it with CRT, which is something I think you can have a conversation, critical race theory.
I wish somebody would show me a book, okay?
Show me the school book that everybody is talking about that is teaching CRT.
It's at Harvard Law School, actually.
Yeah, I want to see the one that they're doing with the little kids.
I haven't seen that one.
But I'm demanding it now because I'm tired of it.
That book that you think your kids have been learning from is a book about what has happened in our country.
See, there it is.
I love that.
I love that.
It's not happening, and it's good that it is!
And it's good that it is.
It's stuff that's happening in our country, but also it's not in the book.
It's not in the book.
Guys, critical race theory exists.
I've talked about it many times on the show.
It is essentially a theory that has been mainlined into mainstream history by places like the New York Times.
The 1619 Project is replete with all of the echoes of critical race theory.
Meanwhile, Don Lemon is going even further over on CNN.
I'm not, I didn't even know he still had a job, but apparently he does.
He says it's going to be illegal in Florida to teach slavery in schools.
No, it's not, you idiot.
Slavery was political at one point.
Martin Luther King, obviously, as Republicans love to talk about, you know, every January, this was a political movement, and no one wanted to learn about that then either.
If that's the kind of lineage he wants to join, you know, people who are saying don't talk about the political thinking of marginalized groups, he's welcome to do it.
So slavery became illegal.
Now it's going to be illegal to teach slavery in schools.
It seems really odd.
I mean, where is he going to draw the line?
Somewhere between abolition and now?
I don't know where Ron DeSantis considers the history versus the now.
These are the objective journalismers.
That's Audie Cornish, an anchor and correspondent.
No, slavery has been taught in every American school of which I am aware for generations.
The hell are you talking about?
But again, they're just gonna lie.
The problem is that most Americans can see through these lies, so the left are having a real tough time.
Which is why, again, they just have to keep exaggerating and exaggerating and exaggerating.
MSNBC's Michael Beschloss says, Okay guys, you can get any book you want in Florida.
You just can't mainstream it to the kiddies.
I don't understand why this is so tough to accept.
You can go down to your local porn shop and you can buy a copy of Playboy.
That doesn't mean it should be taught in third grade.
I don't understand why you guys can't seem to understand that free speech is not the chief issue in the classroom.
In the classroom, the chief issue is what gets taught to our small people.
But I guess this all comes down to this notion that children are basically just small adults who are vested with full autonomy, up to and including deciding their own sex and the ability of whether they ought to, you know, mutilate their own genitals and such.
Anyway, here's MSNBC's Michael Beschloss.
This genius, by the way, writes speeches for Joe Biden.
If you quizzed public school, elementary school kids, high school kids today about John F. Kennedy administration, what would they know?
He'd get shot.
Maybe that's it.
Or they might say, is that the guy who's coming back to run with Donald Trump next year?
And they also might say, you know, was it the idea of our founders, as we're now seeing in Joe and Mika's home state of Florida, was it their idea that books would be banned and taken out of classrooms?
And you'd have lists saying, these books are okay, these books are not.
Yes, the founders would have been fine with that.
Are you insane?
Yes, the founders would have been fine with the notion that there are certain books that do not belong in the classrooms of small children.
I mean, honest to God, Michael Beschloss is supposed to be a historian.
Has he ever read a book?
It's unbelievable.
Read a book.
Read a biography of John Quincy Adams and see how John Adams constructed his education, like book for book.
Do you think he was like, well, you know, John Quincy does have to see everything.
Here's some wood carvings of a naked lady.
I'm going to send those over to John Quincy and we'll see how he handles that.
Like what is wrong with you people?
But you're cruisin' for a bruisin', so if this is the way you want to play it, then I guess this is how it's going to go.
And meanwhile, in other news, the Department of Justice is now suing Google, apparently seeking to break up Google's business brokering digital advertising across much of the internet.
It's kind of a fascinating thing, because there is in fact a bipartisan consensus that Google has effectively a monopoly in the ad business.
Filed in federal court in Virginia, according to the Wall Street Journal, the case alleges that Google abuses monopoly power in the ad tech industry, hurting web publishers and advertisers that try to use competing products.
Eight states, including California and New York, have joined the DOJ lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks the court to unwind Google's anti-competitive acquisitions, such as its 2008 purchase of ad-serving company DoubleClick, and call for a divestiture of its ad exchange.
AG Merrick Garland said at a press conference, for 15 years Google has pursued a course of anti-competitive conduct that has allowed it to halt the rise of rival technologies, manipulate auction mechanics, insulate itself from competition, and force advertisers and publishers to use its tools.
By calling for specific divestitures from Google's ad tech business, the Justice Department went further in seeking a breakup than some antitrust experts had expected.
This is why Alphabet shares fell by about 2% in trading on Tuesday.
The ad tech tools controlled by Google facilitate much of the buying and selling of digital ads that helps fund online publishers.
Google's businesses include tool publishers can use to offer ad space, a product for advertisers to buy those slots, and an exchange that links the bidders with the web pages.
But there are a lot of people who are deeply worried that Google has been basically manipulating all of this to their own ends.
Some of those ends political.
Alphabet gets about 80% of its business from advertising.
The Justice Department's new suit targets the subset of that ad business that brokers the buying and selling of ads on the other websites and apps as well.
The idea is that they are privileging their own above other people's.
Last year, Google offered to split off parts of its ad tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella.
Well, one of the things that's sort of fascinating here is just how wide the bipartisan acceptance of the attack on Google is.
So, you know, there are always a couple of sort of theories when it comes to monopoly power. One is that monopoly power should be broken if it harms the consumer. The other is monopoly power should be broken if it represents too heavy a percentage of the market. I tended toward the first theory, if it harms consumers. I certainly can say that Google's monopoly on ads has harmed consumers for sure.
That is a very real thing. And so the possibility that the DOJ is moving to break up the ad business probably is not necessarily a bad thing. Now I will say that the same people who are looking to crack down on Google's ad business from from the Biden administration are also looking to crack down on free speech over at Twitter.
Yet again, there's another study out, so many studies out, every single day, a study out showing violence is increasing.
Well, yeah, we know.
And now they're blaming Twitter.
According to the Washington Post, attacks on U.S.
Jews and gays accelerate as hate speech grows on Twitter.
Maybe the attacks on U.S.
Jews and gays are accelerating, not because of Twitter, per se, but because you took the cops off the streets and told them not to police anymore.
I've noticed that they are accelerating, particularly in areas where you've been weak when it comes to policing crime.
But you gotta find some way to crack down on the only possible free speech mechanism on the internet these days.
New research to be released later this month by the misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute suggests a connection between real-world incidents and variations of the word groomer, often aimed at gays and suggesting they are adults bent on seducing children.
Although polls indicate a significant minority of the population believes otherwise, gay people are not more likely to be predators than straight people.
So now they are trying to claim that the rise of the use of the term groomer on Twitter is leading to attacks on gay people.
I'm gonna have to see the evidence on that.
The answer is they actually have none.
At the beginning of this Washington Post story, they begin with the FBI charging a Florida man with making a detailed online threat to murder 100 gay people.
He had also threatened to kill black people and tear gas the synagogue.
Apparently, he liked 11 tweets before his arrest.
Quote, there is no evidence that what Albert saw on Twitter inspired him to make his own posts.
So, there's not even a link there.
See, this is the problem.
I'm perfectly fine with the DOJ actually showing, with 149 pages of supporting evidence, that the internet is being skewed by Google.
I do have a fairly significant problem with the notion that the same people who are complaining about Google are also complaining that Twitter's free speech mechanisms are damaging to the United States to the extent that they're actually facilitating violence.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Mike Pence apparently finding classified documents over in his home.
Also, we'll be getting into the New York governor refusing to reinstate those healthcare workers she fired for not getting vaccinated.
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