Louis Theroux's Netflix documentary exposes the "Manosphere" as a scam exploiting young men with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, while a New York Times investigation reveals Cesar Chavez sexually abused underage girls, destroying institutional trust. The episode further analyzes Joe Kent's classified leaks regarding Iran and contrasts Tulsi Gabbard's testimony on nuclear threats with recent U.S.-Israel military strikes against South Pars gas fields. Finally, Mark Wayne Mullen faces scrutiny from Senator Rand Paul over past comments before his DHS confirmation, highlighting ongoing tensions between national security needs and political accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
You can be rich, you can be famous, and you can have hot women hanging on your every word, lavishing their attention on you, demanding nothing from you in return.
All you have to do to get all of this is to give the manosphere your money, your brain, and your soul.
We're living in the middle of a gigantic online op.
It is an op designed to suck young men dry and leave them broken and stupid.
It makes their lives actively worse.
That op is called the Manosphere, and it's time to wake up to their Matrix of Evil.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
And folks, remember, if you are watching on the Daily Wire site or app, then you can actually join the live chat and ask me questions in real time during the show.
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Well, speaking of our friends over at the all access chat, I was informed by some of you, and again, this is just another reason why you should subscribe so you can tell me what to watch and cover, that I ought to watch the Netflix documentary from Louis Thoreau called Manosphere.
So I did.
And to be real, it didn't really tell me anything I didn't know, but I'm glad it's illuminating a far broader problem.
The crisis of men without proper guideposts and durable moral institutions being ushered into a world of stupidity and immorality by grifters and liars who traffic in lies, spiritual emptiness, and outright grift.
So in this documentary, Louis Thoreau talked with a series of Manosphere influencers.
One young man who calls himself H.S. Tikitaki, not his given name, Amru Fudel, aka Myron Gaines, Nicholas Ken DeBlenthity, that would be Sneeko, and Justin Waller.
Thoreau didn't actually get the godfathers of this Griffith brothers on film, but he didn't really have to because all these folks are running the same scheme.
Here's how the scheme works.
First, they tell young men that they are failing at life.
And then they tell young men the reason they are failing at life is not because of anything they're doing per se, but because of the Matrix, a system of power, usually run by the Jews that's out to get them.
That system is what is depriving them of women, of money, of social mobility.
Third, these men act transgressively and provocatively.
They violate all social stigmas and then seem magically to achieve all of the things the matrix has placed off limits to young men.
Fourth, they inform young men that they too can have all of these wonderful things, the hot women and the nice cars and the big houses, if only they join a fake university or some BS stock trading app or donate money to the kickstream.
And finally, they tell young men that anyone who says differently is part of the Matrix.
Now, if any of this sounds familiar, this sort of program, that's because it's basically cult recruitment tactics just made viral online.
I mean that pretty seriously.
Cults typically target people who are suffering from a life crisis.
They target the vulnerable and then they love bomb those people.
They say, you're with us.
We understand you.
They offer their most obvious critiques of the world, the unfairness of life, the impossibility of overcoming challenges.
And then they say, you know, the way out of that is the cult.
Cults encourage recruits to cut out all contrary information.
And cults tell these people that people who oppose the cults are actually members of some nefarious outside force.
And if you join the cult, then you are saved or enlightened or awake.
And everyone else is a suppressive evildoer.
Now, this stuff is seductive.
And it's dangerous because it also informs young men of things that are not true.
That, for example, women are disgusting and perverse, but also simultaneously available and completely pliant if you just crack the code.
That you can achieve wealth and fame, not over time, by building a business or something, instantaneously, like this moment, simply by seeing through the matrix and eschewing the 925 hard job in favor of a get-rich-quick scam.
And if you fail, it's because of the matrix.
You just need to give more money to them.
That matrix, by the way, is just code for the Jews.
Tapping into the anti-Semitism, what that does is it allows them to seem both transgressive and also illuminating, which is why, of course, we have tons of clips of these quote-unquote manosphere influencers, as you'll get to later.
All of them are losers singing Ye's Heil Hitler back just a couple of months ago.
This may in fact be the definition of hell would be stuck in being stuck in a small vehicle with this few IQ points at one time.
And of course, Myron Gaines, who is one of the key guests in the Louis Thoreau documentary, is he does this routine all the time.
Halo is right about your because the reality is this.
You fing you guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within, and then you guys go ahead,
and then you band together, you practice nepotism, you keep each other at the highest levels of echelons of government and everything else, you protect your fingers because you silence free speech, you silence anything that criticizes you, and then you get rid of them, and then you go and use stupid terms, fake terms, like anti-Semitism.
We've covered a lot of this on the show before, but this documentary is now trending number one on Netflix.
Where this documentary is useful is in uncovering kind of underneath the hood some of the sick reality here, the sick and tawdry reality.
So, take, for example, this person named HS Tiki Taki.
I'll admit, I never heard of this person.
I guess he is bigger in Europe.
He's a 23-year-old apparent moron named Harrison Sullivan who is raking in cash by scamming young people.
He admits that he is fine with lying to his audience, to marketing pornography to them while maintaining that he actually doesn't like pornography and to robbing people blind.
Here he was being asked specifically why he can't just be a good person, and he says he doesn't do it for morality, he does it for the cash because I openly say I don't give a f and I'm doing it for money, I don't care about the morality of it.
Okay, see, what he is doing here is pretending that he is authentic by authentically admitting that he's a piece of shit.
He's not lying.
He does do it for the money.
And those who invest in him are, by the way, likely to lose money.
So one of the things that this particular influencer does, this manosphere influencer, is he tells people that they can also have beautiful, loose women, and they can be jet skiing upon the oceans, and they can have wonderful apartments in Spain.
All you have to do is sign up for his junk app.
Well, Louis Thoreau actually invested 500 pounds in the junk app, and here's how it turned out.
Well, HS Tiki-Taki Sullivan is actually kind of pathetic.
His own mom, who certainly bears some of the blame for raising this streaming trash bag, bosses him around like a toddler while simultaneously humoring his latest violin pure outtakes.
Gaines happens to be an idiot who picks on people even dumber than he is.
Largely, similarly vile female influencers who are also desperate for attention.
It's this sort of never-ending cycle of loathsome garbage.
Gaines, obviously, is not particularly bright.
Here he was in the documentary pushing just complete myths about how women have children who look like not their husbands, but a prior partner because of retained sperm or some such nonsense.
unidentified
Ever wonder why some kids resemble an ex more than their father?
This is usually why.
The more men a woman has been with, the higher the risk of negative mutations in her future children.
Well, I mean, obviously, he is saying stupid crap, but, you know, that's not really what matters because, more importantly, to his young male audience, Gaines poses as someone worth emulating.
The tough guy who's raking it in and has even somehow found a woman so compliant that she is willing to let him have sex with random women.
And then she's totally happy with this.
That she's locked in, but he's having sex with random women.
And also, she does his cooking and his cleaning.
And it gets kind of awkward because in the documentary, Louis Thoreau asks her how happy she is with this arrangement.
Everybody in the manosphere is just people online who are trying to make a buck, you know, selling ideologies, and people have heard all the talking points already.
I think the world got really crazy for a long time, but I think we're reaching a little more of a balance in terms of what's truthful and what's not.
So he'll admit it, but then he participates in it.
This stuff works.
It works because a lot of young men are looking for an easy solution to life.
They're looking for a shortcut.
All this garbage works for the same reason.
The get six pack in two weeks ads have a high click-through rate.
The dream is more attractive than the reality.
You don't actually want to watch the video that tells you you need to count your calories and exercise regularly if you want the six-pack.
You want to watch the video that tells you that if you just have this powder, that in two weeks you will have a six-pack.
That if you just try this extreme fitness regimen, then you will look like a Greek god within two weeks.
That's the stuff that gets the click-through.
Now, the result is young men who emulate this junk.
Here was Sneeko walking around and getting recognized by middle school boys on the streets in New York, and you have to wonder where are their parents.
And later, what we learn is that these young men are not particularly successful.
And that's not surprising.
I mean, how many young men are likely to actually be successful in life because they follow people like this?
How many of them are likely to become happier or more virtuous or even richer?
How many are going to have successful careers and families by taking this junk advice?
And the answer is zero.
Let's be clear.
These dudes are losers.
They are actual real losers.
It turns out there are lots of losers who are capable of renting apartments and cars, pretending that they own them, inflating their wealth, scamming gullible young men out of their money.
And you can get rich doing that too.
But having a lot of money does not actually mean you're not a loser.
He lives a pretty lonely life, streaming seven hours a day with his fake buddies he pays while trying to avoid being told what to do by his mommy.
Sneeko is a single male, aged 27, no children.
Myron Gaines is 36, no children, no wife.
Justin Waller is unmarried to the mother of his children.
And while both he and she claim they are happy with this arrangement, whereby he has sex with lots of other women and she sometimes joins in, I got to say, it doesn't seem like a particularly healthy arrangement for the kids.
In the documentary, Walt Waller particularly comes off as kind of a sad person with a troubled childhood.
Young men need better role models, you know, people who actually pursue true happiness and fulfillment.
Because in the end, what these men are selling is not a dream.
They are selling a nightmare.
The real crime, by the way, is the people who won't call it out because there are lots of people who know better, but who have fellow traveled with this stuff because it gets clicks.
And they need the clicks.
That is the lifeblood of this industry.
Remember, it's not just that these scam artists have made a cottage industry from streaming for hours and hours and then cutting up the clips and then recutting up the clips and then ramming them onto social media by the thousands and then building fake businesses from them.
Because they have this sort of gigantically inflated popularity, they've been glazed and praised by some of the most popular political commentators, particularly on the grievance party right.
There are just some of them blazing a man who's been credibly accused of sexual assault and sex trafficking.
What you describe it as the matrix, I think that actually is the right term, is that the matrix works overtime to make it seem as though the people who recognize the insanity, recognize the homosexuality, recognize the pedophilia, are in fact the people that are crazy.
Like it's a complete inversion of what's actually happening.
You are naive enough to believe that there are good guys and bad guys in wars and it's as simple as good and bad and that the bad guys are crazy and the good guys want freedom.
Then you need to do a little bit more investigation into what's really happening.
And when you look at the vested interest of any country or any person.
You should not trust people who sell you toxic waste.
And you also should not trust people who then give that toxic waste their own imprimature.
So is there some sort of matrix?
Listen, there are always things that society can do better in terms of providing opportunity.
And yes, obviously there's a grain of truth to the idea that men have been victimized by an increasingly feminist society, that men have been cut out of what their roles used to be.
There's no question that a lot of that is true.
But the solution is not what is being provided here.
Get rich quick schemes, total grift, toxic views of women.
The answer is, wait for it, traditional virtue and decency.
The answer here would be to pursue the same things that have made men successful for hundreds of years.
If people are selling you some sort of newfangled, out-of-the-box solution that involves no effort other than you signing them a check, you are the mark.
You are the sucker.
And the people who participate in all of this are just as bad as the people who are perpetuating it.
In a moment, we'll be joined by Rob Hednerson of the Manhattan Institute, who will join us to discuss the Manosphere.
Plus, we can't leave the ladies out of it.
We'll be breaking down some toxic femininity in just one moment.
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And I think one of the things that the left has done that is really kind of ugly is lump all of this stuff together.
It's not all the same.
You have the super duper toxic, which is what this documentary is about.
And then you have people who will say that Jordan Peterson is Manosphere because he's telling young men to make their bed and buck up.
And when the left combines all of that, what they end up doing is actually legitimizing the bad.
They don't end up just slandering Jordan.
They end up actually legitimizing the worst of these folks.
These are two separate things.
The people who say to young men, listen, you have a problem.
You can solve that problem with effort and with virtue and with values, right?
Those people are, you can say they're part of a manosphere or that they are male-directed shows.
But to lump, say, Jordan Peterson in with Andrew Tate is a complete category error.
It's one I think that some people on the left make on purpose, frankly.
Well, joining us on the line to discuss all of this is Rob Henderson of the Manhattan Institute, best-selling author of Troubled, a memoir of foster care family and social class.
I think a lot of the concerns are overblown, but the lexicon and some of the ideas are spilling over into real life.
There was a very interesting survey recently, which asked representative samples of young men, who do you consider to be someone to look up to?
And it listed famous figures like LeBron James and others, but then also, yeah, Elon Musk, but also people like Andrew Tate and Manosphere figures.
And this is good news, that the Manosphere figures were towards the bottom in terms of how likely young men were to look up to them or think of them as role models.
But still, if you interact with Zoomers, young men in everyday life, you will hear them use phrases like mogging, Chadopoly, Stacy's, a lot of the sort of language that you hear from Manosphere influencers.
So even if they're not directly consuming the content, it is sort of spilling out through social media and then into the real world.
You know, Rob, one of the things that's really interesting, you observed this about Louis Thoreau's approach in this documentary, is that the normal answer to this sort of toxic masculinity would be traditional masculinity, right?
The things that I try to preach on the show that many of us try to preach about the actual virtue of hard work, making commitments to one woman, protecting her, creating a family, all the things that actually we know from the social science generate actual lifetimes of happiness.
But one of the things that the left has done, and Thoreau falls into this trap, is on the one hand, he wants to condemn all of this immorality for being vulgar and terrible.
And on the other hand, because he's socially liberal, he has no language with which to actually condemn this behavior.
And so instead, he suggests that it's more about the grift or that it is more about lack of consent in some cases.
But there's one point in the documentary that's kind of fascinating where he is talking to Justin Waller's wife.
And at a certain point, she's acquiescing in all of this.
And the normal kind of traditional answer would be, it doesn't matter if you acquiesce in this.
What you're doing is bad for yourself and bad for your kids and bad for your family and not a way that you should be living.
But he doesn't have the capacity to condemn it in that fashion.
Well, you know, this is the sort of the consent-based morality of modern secular progressive kind of culture, where as long as everyone agrees to it, if there's a tacit understanding, then anything goes.
But of course, this is, you know, it can erode relationships, a lot of the ideas that the Manosphere peddles.
One example of this, and when I wrote about this piece recently in the Wall Street Journal, there were sort of multiple layers of contradictions and hypocrisy.
So one of them was that these guys, sort of the bedrock foundation of their framework is women are born with innate value and men are not, which there's a grain of truth to that.
But what they say, oh, women are born with innate importance and value.
And then they immediately contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women.
So do women have value or not?
Why are you telling your followers to mistreat women if they have value?
And then they say, okay, well, men have no value.
Well, how do you acquire value?
How does a man signal value?
Well, it's through money.
It's through sex.
It's through status.
Okay, the young guy says, well, how do I get those things?
And the influencer says, well, you sign up for my fake university for my overpriced subscription service.
You join my Telegram channel where I'm advertising OnlyFans content creators.
I mean, it's this very sort of bizarre thing where they're saying, you know, oh, break out of the matrix, escape, and learn how to become this alpha male, this cartoonish vision of masculinity.
But it's all sort of extracting money from their followers.
You know, Rob, one of the other things that's happened here is that a lot of this has become, because we live in such a polarized political time, there are a lot of people on the right who refuse to just condemn it.
They will say, no, no, this is part of our coalition now.
We need association with these sorts of figures.
We can't, I mean, there were very strong rumors, for example, that members of the Trump administration had attempted to call the Romanian authorities to allow the Tate brothers to travel, for example.
And so there is this sort of attempt by some on the right to legitimize these figures mainly because they are seen as joiners in the anti-left coalition.
It seems like that undermines a lot of the main points that the right has to make generally.
You know, this is sort of sort of put for political ends.
These guys have some popularity.
They have some cachet, some clout with these young boys.
And so let's make this alliance with them in order to sort of bolster political support and maybe some sort of cultural support online.
But in the long run, I do think this sort of undermines sort of the moral legitimacy broadly of the conservative movement when you have guys like this who will openly preach to their followers on their podcast.
Oh, you should have a rotation of women.
You should mistreat women.
Hire cam girls and OnlyFans girls and make money off of them.
But then in that documentary, the Netflix documentary, Thoreau would ask these guys about their plan.
Oh, I'm going to have lots of women.
But then when he would ask them in front of their female partners, then suddenly they would walk it back and say, well, maybe I only want to be with one woman after all.
And so they're playing this character on their podcast of this cartoonish alpha male.
But then when Thoreau interviews them in the context of the relationship with the man and the woman present, the man suddenly becomes very timid about this, when in other cases he would be sort of very forceful and very confident.
And so to me, this is sort of a version of the luxury beliefs that I've pointed out on the progressive left, where you often see progressive elites who will get married and live very conventional family lives, but then will openly voice hedonism, short-term gratification, pleasure, have a lot of fun, don't worry about the future.
Well, the Manosphere guys are doing the same thing, a lot of them, where they have a committed relationship.
I know there's, you know, there's, there's, at least in some of the lives of these Manisphere influencers, they have an agreement with their partners or their wives or whatever, but still, you know, they live with them.
They are committed to them as their primary partner.
But then what are they telling their followers?
Have no relationship, no commitment whatsoever.
Sleep around, you know, be an alpha male.
And this is, you know, this is a hypocrisy that they're selling their followers.
And then when you point it out to them, you know, Thoreau points this out to them, you know, you're living one way, you're saying something else, what's going on here?
And they'll openly say, I'm doing it for clout.
You know, I don't believe this stuff.
You know, when they peddle in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Thoreau points this out to them and says, oh, you know, this is just for fun.
It's just, you know, whatever increases my follower count.
It's a very sort of naked, open, just, you know, whatever boosts the follower count.
And in some ways, the fact that they're so honest about this leads me to think like it's not going to last.
You know, there's the whole thing about social media is people want authenticity.
And if they're openly saying I'm inauthentic, I don't think that popularity can last.
There is another side to this, and that is the question that I think the male lizard brain goes to.
When you watch these videos and you see these guys who are surrounded by good-looking women who are fawning all over them, they say, well, maybe it's working.
Maybe it's working.
And they turn off the critical faculty of their brain.
One of the things that happens here is that in the documentary, it is very clear that these young women are also in it for the clout.
That it is not as though these young women are suddenly attracted to these influencers or that they actually care about these influencers or even want to have sex with these influencers.
They believe that they are going to make more money if they somehow do crossover shows with the Manosphere influencers.
So in other words, toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, those are two halves of the same whole.
And the whole game is, you know, how many people are watching this live stream?
How many followers do I have?
How many subscribers do I have?
And you can only play that game for so long.
And you see that for these guys in particular, that real life and social media are one and the same, where they don't know how to behave without the camera on when they're just living their order, you know, going about their lives.
They have to have the camera going.
They have to be watched.
And that's the only way that they can feel validated, legitimate.
What are my followers saying?
What are the comments saying?
And that is a very sort of shallow, superficial, empty way to lead your life.
Maybe when you're 21, 22, that can be exciting, but in the long run, this isn't going to work out for these guys.
And you can see this, you know, when Winthrop presses them in this documentary about their beliefs, they will suddenly start to crack and they'll say, you know, I don't give an F. I'm just doing it for money.
But in some ways, even that phrase feels a little bit inauthentic.
Like they know that the way that they're living their lives is wrong.
But if they can say, oh, well, money's a justification for it.
And in these guys' minds, anything for money is okay.
Then that is sort of the go-to excuse here.
Well, I get the followers, I get the money, then I get the girls.
And what more could you possibly want?
But in many cases, I don't even think they believe it.
Well, speaking of the flip side, okay, well, we'll get to the flip side.
I just want to explain why, by the way, we are taking time with this.
One of the reasons that we are taking time with this is because, yes, we'll get to, I promise, all of the daily news, all the big things happening in the world, but more people in the United States are watching what's happening on Netflix than watching what's happening in the Middle East.
So it is important to note what your kids or what your friends or people like you are probably doing with their spare time because these are deep underlying trends that actually undermine the West.
Okay, so I do want to talk about the other side of this.
I just mentioned it to Rob.
It turns out that toxic masculinity and toxic femininity require one another.
As Thoreau shows in his documentary, many of the female influencers who are posting streams with these grifters appearing there in their bathing suits, they're doing it for the cash.
Here is an OnlyFans model, an influencer named Ellie Nutts, who shows up in the documentary.
I feel like she said that while she was soft-swinging.
Anyway, it apparently all fell apart this week after allegations have waited for it.
Domestic violence against that charmer.
According to Axios, a spokesperson for the Draper Police Department confirmed to people earlier this week, it is now conducting a domestic violence investigation involving Paul and her ex-boyfriend, Dakota Morton.
She has a two-year-old son with him.
All these people have great family lives.
So ABC has a problem.
They're scrambling to figure out what to do, according to Axios.
So their answer was, put her on TV and let her explain.
Yeah, Ben, this is an enormous national story because The Bachelorette, The Bachelor franchise has been around for over two decades.
And what's the whole premise to find love, to find your lifelong partner, and to live happily ever after?
Well, as soon as they announced Taylor Frankie Paul as a bachelorette, I was so mad because I'm like, you could watch this girl in her TikToks, on her reality show, on any interview she's done ever, and can tell she is not mentally stable enough or in any type of form to go on a reality show to find love.
And the fact that The Bachelorette premieres Sunday, as in three days from now, with Taylor Frankie Paul, who is being investigated for allegedly choking her baby daddy with a necklace, and ABC's like, we're going to continue to roll it out.
It's absurd because imagine if the gender roles were reversed.
If this is a man that had these allegations about choking his wife or baby mama allegedly, they would halt production.
They would find something.
But no, like you said, they're putting her on Good Morning America, live with Kelly and Mark, all this thing.
She's on the Oscar's Red Carpet.
And it's like, what are you doing, ABC?
Like, why are you promoting someone that clearly needs to go spend some time away from all cameras, all social media, and maybe focus on her kids, maybe take her kids to the park, maybe just try to live a normal life for a second?
You know, Lyndon, we were talking a little bit earlier on the show about the Manosphere and their views of women, these views of women as promiscuous and terrible and attention-seeking.
And I have to say, I think that when the legacy media prop up women who actually are many of those things, it tends to underline a lot of what the Manosphere says, even if that is broadly untrue about women.
And it kind of grants the premise to a lot of these guys who are saying horrible things about women.
Yeah, I think you're seeing right now the pendulum kind of swing the other way around because on these social media posts that I've seen, you have people that are normally like, oh, like, screw men, like, I hate men, saying, can you imagine if Taylor Frankie Paul was a man?
Can you imagine if the roles are reversed?
And what is the most shocking thing to me?
And Ben, I'm sure you're not just glued to secret lives of Mormon wives, like, you know, a lot of us.
But what is shocking is that just wrapped like their season four finale has already aired.
And in this finale, you have Taylor missing her flight to go to LA to be on the bachelorette because why?
Because she's sleeping with her baby daddy, Dakota, her toxic, on again, off again person, the night before she leaves.
She is FaceTiming this man when she gets to LA on the way to Bachelor Mansion, being like, I love you and I hate you as she's about to go meet, you know, 30 men to date and try to find a husband.
And now we know because of these domestic violence allegations, no arrests, you know, she's already was arrested in 2023 for this.
No arrests have been made right now, but it's all under investigation.
You have child services involved.
And this was from a couple of weeks ago at the end of February, this alleged incident from both sides where there was choking allegedly involved.
So now you know, obviously, her bachelorette season was not a success because she's back with baby daddy and having baby daddy drama.
And it's absurd.
And it makes me so mad as a lifelong bachelor fan that they would do this.
Well, you know, in other gossip that's actually significantly more political, unbelievable story from the New York Times yesterday.
They dropped a bombshell piece yesterday on famed labor leader Cesar Chavez.
So, Cesar Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers Labor Union.
He achieved lasting fame by getting California to allow far broader unionization.
As it turns out, people around Chavez knew for years, for decades, that Chavez was a serial abuser of women and underage girls for years, for decades.
The New York Times Expose alleges that a woman named Mergoya and another woman named Deborah Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were sexually abused by Chavez from 1972 to 1977.
Chavez died in 1993.
The findings from the New York Times are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including Chavez's top aides, relatives, former members of the United Farm Workers, as well as union records emails, photos, audio recordings from UFW board meetings.
According to the New York Times report, quote, Anna Margoya remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him.
She walks along the dirt trail, entered the run-down building, passed his secretary, and stepped into his office.
He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been.
He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her, and pulled her pants down.
Don't tell anyone, he told her afterward, they'd get jealous.
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45.
She was 13.
Mergoya said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times, dozens of times over the next four years.
Apparently, adults knew and did nothing.
Dolores Huerta, his partner in founding UFW and the person who created the phrase, si se pueda, was apparently repeatedly raped by him.
She had two children by him.
Now she's 96, and she put out a statement, quote, I'm nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believe that exposing the truth would hurt the farm worker movement I've spent my entire life fighting for.
I've encouraged people to always use their voice.
Following the New York Times' multi-year investigation into sexual misconduct by Cesar Chavez, I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences.
As a young mother in the 1960s, I experienced two separate sexual encounters with Cesar.
The first time I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, I didn't feel I could say no because he was someone I admired, my boss, and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to.
The second time, I was forced against my will and in an environment where I felt trapped.
She said that both sexual encounters with Cesar led to pregnancies.
She kept the pregnancies secret.
After the kids were born, she arranged for the kids to be raised by other families.
She says, I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farm worker rights was my life's work.
That's the thing, isn't it?
That's the thing.
Chavez was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.
His bust was actually put in the Oval Office by Joe Biden.
So, how did all of this go down for decades?
Well, buried in the New York Times story is the key line, quote, many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement.
His image on school murals and his birthday, a state holiday in California.
Yep, that is always the story, folks.
Here's the bottom line.
There are lots of human foibles.
One of them is supporting institutions over individuals.
Herein lies the locus of an untold amount of human evil.
Individuals are ruined, their lives destroyed, and people stay silent because they hope to uphold the institutions.
And then it turns out that the story comes out.
And when the stories come out, institutions lose their moral standing.
You see this happen over and over and over again.
The most obvious example, obviously, is the Catholic Church and the child sex abuse scandal, the shifting of parish priests around who are known abusers or suspected abusers.
The damage that did to the Catholic Church was inestimable, truly horrifying.
You see this happen with people who are complicit in covering up Jeffrey Epstein, pretend being friends with him, treating him as normal, even though he had already been convicted of sex trafficking of a minor.
By the way, there's new information showing that a lot of those friends got him rich by basically funneling him information.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Epstein for Epstein, the line between social networking and securities law was part of the way he conducted business.
Again, the idea here is that if you want to discredit the institution of capitalism, all you have to do is find people who are willing to back a Jeffrey Epstein character, willing to back somebody like a Jeffrey Epstein.
According to the Wall Street Journal, key advisors to people like Bill Gates passed along information about biotech startups that Bill Gates was investing in.
You want to undermine ideas, provide support for the ideas on the basis of loyalty to an important person.
And then the minute that you do, when that's uncovered, it destroys the entire institution.
Even in non-sexual situations like the scientific community, unwillingness to admit screw-ups by people like Anthony Fauci undermines the institution.
So what should the rule be?
Tell the truth.
Always.
Because failure to do so results in disaster, both for the victims and for the institutions linked with cover-ups of sin.
It's true for the manosphere.
It's true for bad female behavior.
And it's true for historic figures like Cesar Chavez.
Okay, in a second, we'll get to the actual news of the day because there's an awful lot of it first.
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Okay, quick check-in with our members, and then I want to get to the actual news of the day.
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Yeah, I just have to say the chat is so excited that you said bear down yesterday, and they're very excited about the future of pterodactyl.
I mean, the basic idea is you have to model virtue.
It's in the water, right?
I model virtue for my sons.
I have two sons.
I model virtue for them by treating my wife like a queen and by protecting her and by taking her opinion seriously and by making decisions with her.
And yes, of course, I am the man of the house.
I'm the provider, the protector, and the defender.
But you want your kids to be virtuous, model virtue.
Okay, now to the news of the day.
There's breaking news on Joe Kent.
Well, well, well.
According to reporter Shelby Talcott of Semaphore, now confirmed by Fox, Joe Kent, who you'll remember is the former head of the National Center for Counterterrorism, who resigned after making this very loud statement about how terrible the Iran war is, well, he's currently under investigation, oh no, for allegedly leaking classified information.
That investigation reportedly predates that resignation from the administration.
And remember, he wrote this very loud letter saying that he was opposed to the action in Iran, and then he blamed that on the Israelis, of course.
He also blamed the Iraq war and ISIS in Syria on the Israelis for good measure.
Well, Tucker Carlson swooped in like an elp-adled pterodactyl to interview Kent.
This is unsurprising, given that Carlson and Kent have been tied at the hip for a long time.
Kent promptly explained to Tucker Carlson that Iran wasn't developing nukes.
And he knows that Iran wasn't developing nukes because the Iranians told him so.
And he walked off and he went, I believe, into the oval.
So when one of President Trump's closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship with the Israelis, and then he's suddenly publicly assassinated, and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that.
The real question here is how this person, this conspiratorial person, ended up as the head of the National Center for Counterterrorism.
Ridiculous.
That's no wonder that clips of Tehran Tucker and Joe Kent were playing on repeat on Iranian and Russian state TV yesterday.
That is not a joke.
That is a thing that actually happened.
Iranian airspace, their internet, shut down.
But they will definitely play you Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent.
Let's be clear, however, it now appears that Kent was not acting out of some sort of anti-war principle, but on the cynical calculation that he could counter-program news of his investigation by loudly quitting and blaming the Israelis.
So it's fair to ask at this point just what Kent allegedly leaked.
We're going to find out.
We know that Tucker was his first stop.
We also know that Carlson has repeatedly reported supposed inside information, including just this week, when he accused the CIA of targeting him based on Wait for it intelligence sources.
Now, it's also possible that Kent's alleged leaks have nothing to do with Tucker Carlson.
The isolationist wing of the Trump administration is the leakiest shop in town.
And it's a little odd that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, just hired one Dan Caldwell in some unspecified advisory capacity.
You might remember Dan Caldwell from such things as, you know, being fired from the Defense Department amidst accusation of being a leaker.
And this brings us to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday.
She gave a half-hearted response to the question of whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.
This is the worldwide threats hearing where you present to Congress national intelligence, timely, objective, and independent of political considerations.
Now, she won't actually just say the thing, which is that Iran was, in fact, a threat.
She won't say that because, of course, Tulsi Gabbard has always been incredibly soft when it comes to Russia, Iran, and other enemies of the United States in her generalized outlook.
Contrast her language with that of the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who specifically asked about this.
Is there anything to indicate that Iran had ceased in its nuclear ambitions or in its desire to continue to build ballistic missiles capable of threatening American troops and allies in the Middle East?
Now, listen, it's not just that Tulsi Gabbard has been less than overt in support of President Trump's actions.
The vice president, Vice President Vance, continues to signal what can best be described as kind of tepid support for the president's assessment, which again is an odd position for the VP, who seems to be stuck in many ways between the warmth that he has towards some of the Grievance Party and, you know, traditional Trump MAGA.
And I guarantee you the president of the United States is not interested in getting us, you know, in the kind of long-term quagmires that we've seen in years past.
I know the president.
I know the way that he thinks about America's national security.
That is not a risk with this president at all.
What he has also said consistently for 10, 15 years, maybe even longer, is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and he's willing to take action, diplomatic, ideally, but military action if he has to to make sure that that doesn't happen.
That's all this is about.
We don't want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon.
The president's been clear about this, and that's what led to the president's decision of, what, about three weeks ago.
You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know you can't go higher than 100%.
Well, yes.
Actually, there is even a poll that came out on the specific question here.
It's from a group called Jail Partners, and it asks explicitly whether Republican voters trust President Trump on Iran or Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly, who is sort of the new addition to the grievance party.
The answer, 83% Trump, 6% Carlson and Kelly.
But we keep being told Carlson and Kelly are the real voice of MAGA.
So what's really going on?
The answer is this.
At the elite level of the administration, there is, in fact, an attempt to pry MAGA away from President Trump.
Some members of the administration don't want to say this openly because they would like to have it both ways.
They want to simultaneously claim it Trump's mantle and also disown his policy.
Members of the grievance party outside the government are sometimes clearer.
The less cowardly ones, like say a Candace Owens or a Marjorie Taylor Greene, are clearly breaking with President Trump openly.
And then you have the more cowardly ones like Tucker Carlson or Joe Kent or Megan Kelly who are pretending that Trump has been bamboozled, hoodwinked, and that they're really not arguing with President Trump at all.
They're just arguing with the people who are manipulating Trump, puppeteers behind the scenes.
In the end, none of it matters because what's really happening is that a splinter faction of the Trump coalition wishes to run a palace coup.
It's not going to work unless that splinter faction is somehow able to convince President Trump to end the action in Iran before a clear victory is won.
And that's precisely what they would like to do.
They understand full well that if President Trump wins, if the Iranian regime is so weakened that they pose no further offensive threat, if the price of oil dives again, if the Iranian regime is irrevocably weakened and near failure, then their Noam Chomskyite foreign policy priorities will be shoved to the side and they themselves will probably be ostracized from the levers of policy.
So they're banking on America losing.
They're banking on President Trump losing.
Undoubtedly, some of these figures are contemplating a 2028 presidential run themselves.
And that, of course, totally depends on Trump failing.
And so they are betting on that failure and pushing for that failure.
Now, I think that's a terrible bet.
What's worse, given the fact that America is currently facing down in battle, an intractable terrorist enemy responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of American deaths, it is a deeply wicked bet.
And this brings us to the latest in Iran.
So yesterday, as we reported, Israel struck the South Powers gas fields in Iran.
This was reportedly pre-approved by the United States.
The U.S. didn't fly the sorties.
I got to say, it is obvious that Israel would not have hit the South Pars gas fields without coordinating that with the United States, given the extraordinary level of coordination between Israel and the United States in this operation.
And it was done as leverage against the Iranian government.
Leave the strait alone or face the consequences.
So the Iranian government immediately retaliated by firing on Qatari gas facilities.
Yesterday, President Trump issued a statement making clear that Iran had better leave Qatar's facilities alone or the United States would directly hit the South Pars gas field.
So he used some plausible deniability.
Here he said, Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars gas field in Iran.
A relatively small section of the hole has been hit.
The United States knew nothing about this particular attack.
The country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form involved with it, nor did it have any idea this was going to happen.
Unfortunately, Iran did not know this or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar's LNG gas facility.
No more attacks will be made by Israel pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar, in which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars gas field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.
I don't want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long-term implications it will have on the future of Iran.
But if Qatar's LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so.
So it appears that what happened here is that Israel, yes, with the coordination of the United States, hit the South Pars gas field as a warning to Iran to back off the Strait of Hormuz.
And the Iranians decided to go on offensive and hit Qatar instead.
Qatar called up President Trump.
They said, we don't like this.
President Trump then said to the Iranians, listen, you better lay off Qatar or we will blow it up personally.
We'll do it ourselves.
And as far as the Straits of Hormuz, again, I do not think every lever has been pulled there, even remotely yet.
Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian government, which so far has not actually participated in offensive activity, it seems like they are moving closer and closer to doing that.
Because here's the thing: the last thing the Saudis want, because the Iranians hate the Saudis, the last thing they want is to leave a rump Iranian Ayatollah regime in place dedicated to Saudis' destruction.
Well, the Arab League held an emergency meeting to condemn Iran.
And notice what they didn't do.
They didn't call for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation to stop because they are very much on board with what is happening right now.
Regional opposition to Iran is actually growing stronger, not weaker at this point.
Iran's strategy, which was to literally go ballistic at all the other countries in the region, it hasn't just not broken the will of the U.S.-Israel and Arab alliance.
It's actually making it stronger.
At the same exact time, Israel continues to strike individual IRGC and Basij members in pinpoint strikes.
Here's a pretty astonishing video.
You're going to see a Basiji who is exiting an IRGC facility, it appears.
It's just an individual, and he's about to no longer exist.
Like in one second, he's about to be wiped from the earth.
Yep, that's the end of him.
Well, these sorts of strikes, I would imagine, are in preparation for clearing the ground for a popular uprising.
Our Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, seems pretty confident.
Suffice it to say, the United States, it is amazing.
If you watch the legacy media, you would think the United States is being hammered.
It's insane.
It's insane.
Britt Hume actually made a fantastic point on Fox earlier this week.
He said, assume that the countries were averse for a second and assume that the president of the United States was dead, the Secretary of Defense was dead, the Secretary of State was on the run, that the major heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were dead, that we had no Air Force and we had no Navy, and that every single day, members, top members of the brass and pretty much all internal security were being pummeled.
Imagine that were happening to the United States.
Would we be winning or would we be, and we had inflicted basically zero casualties on the enemy.
Would we be winning or losing?
The answer there is pretty obvious.
Well, meanwhile, on the Hill, Senator Mark Wayne Mullen's nomination to head DHS is a hot topic.
Sheer lack of any kind of self-awareness that you're going to be leading thousands of men and women who will have the use of force.
And there's been great questions in our country about how that will be used.
And you think a violent attack is just fine.
So I guess my first question is, do you think that justifying that kind of violence sets a good example for the men and women of ICE and Border Patrol?
So you're jolly well fine, and you want the American public and the people up here to vote that may or may not vote for you to know that you supported the felonious, violent attack on me from behind.
Sir, I think there's everybody in this room knows that I'm very blunt and direct to the point.
And if I have something to say, I'll say it directly to your face.
If you recall back in your, back in my house days, we actually did have this conversation because of remarks that I made.
You were in a room.
I simply addressed that I said I could understand because of the behavior you were having, that I could understand why your neighbor, why the neighbor did what he did.
As far as my terms, the snake in the grass, sir, I work around this room to try to fix problems.
I've worked with many people in this room.
Seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.
I did address those remarks.
I did explain your gimmicks by the amendment you put forth.
And as far as me saying that I invoke violence, I don't.
I don't think anybody should be hit by surprise.
I don't like that.
But if I do have something to say, everybody in this room knows I'll come straight to you.