Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Feb. 19, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:16:08

Elite Meltdown: Hundreds Sign Letter Denouncing NY Times’ Trans Coverage, Nikki Haley’s “Racist” Nickname, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #43

Elite Meltdown: Hundreds Sign Letter Denouncing NY Times’ Trans Coverage, Nikki Haley’s “Racist” Nickname, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #43 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good evening, it's Thursday, February 16th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight, several hundred New York Times staffers and contributors, along with various LGBTQAI2 plus activist groups, signed an open letter to the paper denouncing it for what the letter alleges is the paper's anti-trans bias.
	and how it has been reporting on and covering the debates surrounding gender ideology.
	In other words, they claim that the Manhattan-based newspaper, The New York Times, is unfair to liberals and their views on cultural issues.
	We'll examine that letter, The New York Times' response to it, and what all this says about how many Americans view journalism and what they expect it to accomplish.
	Then, one of our least favorite politicians in the country, former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations, Republican Nikki Haley, this week announced her intention to run for president in 2024.
	As part of her video announcing her candidacy and subsequent speeches, she talked about the success she's experienced in the U.S.
	as the daughter of Indian immigrants and used that experience to argue that the U.S.
	is a country of fundamental goodness and fairness and not dark and hateful racism.
	Few arguments threaten the liberal commentariat more than that.
	That the U.S.' 's intrinsically and irredeemably white supremacist dystopia is central to the careers of countless columnists, pundits, and activists.
	And they thus unsurprisingly unleashed attacks on her of the most vicious kind.
	The leading attack was to mock her name and her marriage in the most overtly racist ways imaginable.
	We'll examine that controversy and its implications as well.
	And for each of these stories, we'll be joined by the independent journalist, Michael Tracy.
	As we do every Tuesday and Thursday, as soon as we're done here with our one-hour show on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
	To obtain access to our aftershows, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community.
	The red button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	There's something about American liberals, meaning the establishment of the Democratic Party, that I know is true, but I have a very hard time convincing people who aren't liberals that it is true.
	No matter how many times I try to tell them this, they don't believe me.
	Liberals believe, I swear, that the corporate media is biased against them.
	They believe that newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post and news outlets such as NBC News and CNN are excessively critical of Democratic Party leaders and insufficiently critical of conservatives.
	They believe that those media outlets, for example, were not harsh enough when talking about Donald Trump and reporting on his presidency.
	Now, I've spoken before about my own view of what bias the corporate media has.
	I was never somebody decades ago who believed the standard conservative claim that the United States is played by what Rush Limbaugh always called the liberal media.
	I always thought it was more nuanced than that.
	I always instead believed that their allegiance was not so much to leftist political ideology so much as it was to establishment power and institutions of authority.
	It certainly is true that when it comes to cultural issues, things like abortion and LGBT rights and gun control, these newspapers are, I think, reasonably characterized as having a bias more to the left.
	After all, these reporters are people who live in large blue cities like New York and Washington and Los Angeles.
	They go to liberal arts colleges, generally, on the East Coast, and they're inculcated with the same kind of cultural liberalism as everybody else who has that same trajectory.
	But it was never really true of foreign policy or economic policy.
	Most, certainly, corporations that own media outlets are not leftists when it comes to foreign policy or economic policy.
	And remember that after the War on Terror, it was the media outlets that are considered most liberal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic.
	that were most vocal in support of the Bush-Cheney plan to invade Iraq and the broader war on terror.
	It was the New York Times and their columnists like Tom Friedman and the New Yorker and their star reporters like Jeffrey Goldberg who did more than anyone to launder the falsehoods that emanated from the CIA and from Dick Cheney's circle of neocons.
	That Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein were in an alliance with Al-Qaeda, convincing Americans, 70% of them, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
	That didn't come from Fox News, which is also saying it, because conservatives didn't need to be convinced.
	They were behind the Bush-Cheney agenda, most of them were.
	What was needed was for liberals to be convinced, and that's where the corporate media came in.
	It's very hard to claim that they're leftist on foreign policy when they were united with George Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons in most of what became the war on terror and certainly the war in Iraq.
	And even during the Cold War, it was also Time Magazine and the New York Times serving as the outpost for CIA propaganda when it came to the Cold War, whenever the CIA wanted to engineer a coup of a democratically elected country.
	It would be Time Magazine and the New York Times that would claim that it was an uprising on the part of the people against a corrupt dictatorship, meaning the government that had been democratically elected.
	And whenever the CIA wanted to install typically a right-wing dictatorship, the New York Times and Time Magazine would herald that as some sort of advancement for democracy.
	They always were on not so much the side of the left When it came to economic policy and foreign policy, but on the side of the establishment of the CIA, the US security state, and on economics as well.
	They were not near Bernie Sanders, say, in terms of his view of economics.
	Instead, they worship people like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, the kind of neoliberal brain trust that has governed the American economy and American economic policy for decades, regardless of which political party ended up winning Elections.
	So I always thought the liberal media was a simplification, an oversimplification, at least when it came to most issues other than the cultural war.
	I always thought it was reasonably applicable there.
	All of that, like so many things, changed with the emergence of Donald Trump.
	And that's because media outlets and the left liberal circles, which they populate, came to see Donald Trump not as a president with whom they disagreed or who had a bad ideology, but as a unique existential evil, essentially a threat on par with Nazism, that he was the new Hitler.
	And as a result, they began much more openly siding with the Democratic Party, not really even hiding it anymore.
	And as I've said before, if you really believe That Donald Trump is some sort of Nazi-like figure, posed to end American democracy and institute a white supremacist dictatorship.
	It almost becomes rational for you to cast aside your journalistic ethics and your sense of what the journalistic mission is supposed to be in favor of the overarching priority of doing everything possible to defeat the new Hitler.
	On some warped level, that makes sense.
	And that's why when Sam Harris said what he said, Which essentially was that, that given what an evil Donald Trump was, everything and anything, including lying and censorship, became justified to stop him.
	It had so much resonance.
	It had such an impact because he was explicitly giving voice to the voice of the liberal elites, of liberal establishments, including the nation's media outlets.
	But even there, I would caution a little bit about claiming that the bias of the New York Times or the Washington Post or NBC News became left liberal ideology simply because they were against Trump.
	I think it's very important to remember that even in their opposition to Trump, they were still citing With the institutions of authority and institutions of establishment power with which they had always been most aligned.
	It wasn't just left liberals who came to believe Donald Trump posed some unique evil and that everything and anything was necessary and even obligatory to stop him.
	It was the same institutions of power to which they've always maintained their subservience.
	The US security state and the CIA, which is where Russiagate emanated, Wall Street, big tech, even establishment Republicans, the kind of never Trumpers who believe that the Republican Party had it right all along and still does and wanting to cut taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and go to war every single time somebody says anything a little bit negative about the United States.
	All those people united.
	As the now notorious Time Magazine article in 2021 admitted in order to sabotage Donald Trump.
	So even in their overt effort to join that campaign to sabotage Trump, they did become more overtly partisan.
	But again, I wouldn't submit it was because of some kind of left liberal ideology.
	Instead, it was just they were serving the same factions they've always served, which is institutional authority in the United States that also saw Trump that way.
	Now just to offer one example here from CNN, if we can bring that up, a CNN article from 2020.
	The title there is, Wall Street is shunning Trump.
	Campaign to note donations to Biden are five times larger.
	So there's always this perception that the Republican Party is the party of the wealthy and of Wall Street and the Democrats are the party of the downtrodden and of labor.
	That's the iconography of the Democratic Party and yet it's been untrue.
	The reverse has been true for many years and it was certainly true In the era of Trump, the CNN article states, quote, the securities and investment industry donated just $10.5 million to Trump's presidential campaign and outside groups aligned with it.
	According to a new tally by Open Secrets, it has sent nearly five times as much cash, $51.1 million, to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
	That means Trump is losing the fundraising race among Wall Streeters by a slightly greater magnitude than even in 2016.
	During that cycle, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, in groups outlined with her, raised $88 million from the security industry and investment industry, while Trump took in just $20.8 million.
	So even by siding with Democrats against Donald Trump, as the media very brazenly did, it doesn't actually mean that the media became left liberal.
	It means that they were joined with the establishment, which also saw the Democratic Party as the party that would best serve their interests.
	Remember that in 2008 as well, when President Obama first ran against John McCain, Wall Street overwhelmingly supported the Democratic candidate over John McCain.
	The Democratic Party has long been the party of the establishment, so by siding with the Democrats, they're really siding with the establishment, which is what they always do, and that is also true of Big Tech, which overwhelmingly, by even greater margins, supported Joe Biden and the Democrats in the 2020 election, as opposed to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
	Now, nonetheless,
	Despite all of that, despite the fact that the New York Times, NBC, all of them are now overtly aligned with the Democrats, somehow American liberals, liberal activists, liberal journalists, and people in the LGBTQAI+, hope I didn't forget one of those numbers or letters, circle, believe, genuinely believe, they're not just pretending to believe, they genuinely believe that the corporate media is aligned against them.
	that the media is unfairly biased against Democrats, against liberals, and against their cultural agenda, which, if anything, is where one can most easily and compellingly argue that the corporate media is on their side.
	And so this week, there is a new letter It's dated February 15, 2023.
	There you see it.
	It's to the attention of Philip B. Corbett, the Associate Editor, Managing Editor for Standards at the New York Times.
	And what this is, is an article signed by hundreds of New York Times contributors and staffers
	It's a letter organized by the LGBTQAI2Plus group, LADD, and their argument is that the New York Times, by reporting on the debate surrounding very new and radical dogma of gender ideology, and this explosion of people, particularly younger Americans, who now identify as non-binary or trans, obviously that's going to give rise to debates.
	When you want to usher in radical change, as these activists acknowledge they seek to do, they basically seek, they say, to deconstruct what we think of men and women, of the gender binary, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, in ways I personally often find quite regressive, including the idea that the minute a boy starts to exhibit what these alleged progressives view as feminine behavior,
	A desire to, an interest in fashion, or a desire to play with dolls, and an aversion to sports.
	Immediately that boy gets told, you're not really a boy, you're a girl.
	Based on decades-old stereotypes about what boys and girls do, and conversely, if a girl wants to cut her hair, and wear jeans instead of dresses, and exhibits an interest in sports, they get told, you're not really a girl.
	It's not girls, dude.
	Girls wear makeup.
	Girls like to cook.
	Girls wear heels and dresses.
	You don't play sports.
	If you're a little girl and you're playing sports, you're not a girl, you're a boy.
	Congratulations, you're a boy.
	So, there's lots of reasons why These are giving rise to debates.
	If you suddenly tell society that they need to dismantle the beliefs that they've held about fundamental cultural and social issues for centuries, of course people are going to ask questions.
	Some people are going to resist that and have doubts about its wisdom.
	I recall very well in the 70s and 80s when the gay and lesbian movement was pushing for what they acknowledged were radical changes in the definition of marriage, in the acceptance of gay, men, and lesbians, and their ability to work and to be married and have recognition of family rights and the like.
	There was an obvious recognition that these were very fundamental changes, and of course there was resistance.
	And instead of trying to shut down debates over that, I remember often seeking out people who had confusions or doubts or questions because every time there was a person there who was opposed, that was an opportunity to change someone's mind and convince them to see things differently.
	And ultimately, that is why the gay and lesbian movement won, and it did win.
	By 2019 and 2020, large majorities of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to marry, including large percentages, even majorities of young conservatives.
	That culture war debate was won by the advocates of treating gay men and lesbians equally.
	Not because they sought to shut down debate, but because they engaged it all the time.
	But trans activists and their allies in the media, most bizarrely, I think that the debate itself is too dangerous to allow, that even acknowledging the existence of these questions and doubts is something too dangerous to do, that it puts people in danger, even though the job of reporters is to investigate claims by activists and to examine debates that our country is having.
	That's the job of journalists, certainly one of them.
	And it's what The New York Times, to its credit, has been doing.
	And that has prompted this angry letter.
	Let's just take a look at a couple of its provisions.
	Let me just see here.
	It's right on the screen.
	So let's pull that up.
	Hold on one second.
	I think I can Alright, let's pull up the first paragraph of that letter.
	It says, plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly.
	Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.
	Think about what they're complaining about there.
	There is a movement to empower doctors to perform medical treatments, novel medical treatments on children.
	Sometimes the treatments are being performed when it comes to puberty blockers and hormonal treatments On children as young as 10 and 11 and 12 years old, surgeries as young as 15 and 16, including the removal of healthy breasts on young girls or other permanent biological and anatomical changes to young boys that can never be reversed Of course, there's going to be debate about that.
	There should be debate about that.
	There has to be questions asked about the safety of these procedures, about the long-term effects of some of the drugs that are being used, not just for society in general, but for trans people in particular, and for their parents and their caregivers.
	Of course, that's urgent to know whether or not these treatments are doing more harm than good, whether or not they can be safely used.
	And that's exactly what the New York Times has been doing and they're complaining that the New York Times has somehow devoted too much attention to these incredibly radical changes being proposed that maybe end up being proven good and maybe end up proving bad but of course people are going to debate it and the Times should debate it and examine that debate and that's what they're doing.
	The article goes on, the Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic charge language.
	while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources.
	Some of us are trans, non-binary, or gender non-conforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record.
	In other words, they're trying to turn this into a labor issue, saying you're willing to use our writing as though these are factory workers being exploited in their labor because they're trying to get published in the most influential newspaper in the country and to write about these controversial topics and are permitted saying you're willing to use our writing as though these are factory workers They're turning this around and saying you're exploiting our labor as...
	As though we're underpaid factory workers for your own profit, your own corporate profits, even though you don't regard us as human.
	So they're essentially saying you don't even respect our humanity.
	It goes on in that vein, quote, some of us are cis, these are The good allies to the trans people.
	They're cis, but they're very good allies.
	And we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we hear protest.
	All of us dare say our stance is unremarkable, even common, and certainly not deserving of the Times' intense scrutiny.
	They don't want the Times' scrutiny on what, by all accounts, even if you're in favor of it, is a radical new agenda to overhaul how we think of sex and gender.
	The article goes on, a tiny percentage of the population is trans, although that percentage is increasing rapidly, and an even smaller percentage of those people face the type of conflict the Times is so intent on magnifying.
	There is no rap reporting on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children, or on the hardworking professionals at the New York Times enduring a workplace made hostile by bias, a period of forbearance that ends today.
	We await your response.
	So you can see their arguments there.
	They're simply angry about the publication of what we're about to show you are very benign articles that examine in a kind of on the one hand on the other hand way the debate that the country is having and will continue to have
	Whether or not these activists want the newspapers to note that these debates are taking place, I find it remarkable that these journalists at the New York Times are now united with activist groups and demanding the same thing of the newspaper.
	Of course, activists are going to pressure newspapers to publish articles that better reflect their bias.
	That's one of the things you do as an activist.
	But the fact that journalists at the New York Times are now united with them Demonstrates that these journalists don't see the world differently as activists in any way.
	They don't want the New York Times to write articles that wouldn't be written by these activists themselves.
	They don't want any questioning of the activists' claims.
	They don't want any scientific examination of these treatments.
	They don't want any airing of any questioning at all on this radical new debate.
	Because according to them, that creates a hostile environment for them.
	I would submit that you're going to create a lot more hostility if you try and prevent people from asking these questions.
	You're going to do a lot more harm if you bar any discussion of scientific research into a lot of these treatments and you're gonna end up deceiving a lot of parents and a lot of trans people into believing things about these treatments that in fact are untrue or are unproven scientifically.
	Now let me just, first of all, let's bring Michael Tracy on because I know he gets very agitated if he has to wait too long.
	And we're going to talk to him about this.
	I'm about to show Michael the three articles that have prompted the greatest amount of ire when it comes to this letter.
	I'm sure you have some things to say so far about your reaction to all of this, so why don't I go ahead and give you a couple minutes to do so.
	Being so considerate and Recognizing that sometimes I can act out behaviorally if I have to listen to you deliver a screen for too long.
	You know, one thing that just occurred to me as I was waiting is in that they make this insinuation that there's some question of labor rights at stake or that there's some issue of times employees and contributors being somehow besieged and improperly treated as a result of the editorial choices that they've made on their coverage of trans kids issues.
	The whole point of this letter and why I thought that they were able to assemble such an annoyingly large group of signatories who could melodramatically posture about having signed this glorious letter, taking this bold stance, is that it's like a bunch of just really peripheral contributors to the New York Times.
	I feel like you could probably have signed this letter because you've debated Bill Keller in the New York Times in 2013 or something.
	Yeah, I know.
	I think by New York Times contributor, they mean anybody who has ever contributed any kind of content to the New York Times.
	So I've written a couple of or a few New York Times op-eds.
	Over the years, I've exactly engaged in a debate with its then executive editor, Bill I participated in many of those debates they used to have, where they would publish different people's views on various issues of controversy.
	So exactly, I'm as much of a New York Times contributor as the vast majority of people who have signed this letter claiming that their labor is being exploited as trans people, even though their humanity is being denied by the paper.
	Right, so these people who could have signed a letter because they wrote one op-ed twelve years ago are saying that they are being harmed, or they're asserting the existence of harm that really isn't spelled out in any great detail, which I guess is probably deliberate because that would probably result in lots of embarrassment for them if they did try to be more tangible in what they're actually claiming is the, you know, danger that's being wrought by these articles.
	But, you know, somebody who wrote an op-ed 12 years ago is now saying that there's, like, workplace oppression happening at a workplace that they're not even involved in, which I think is maybe just sort of a representation of the maybe not-so-perfect logic that's underlying the impetus for this particular letter.
	Yeah, and, you know, I think I think there are a few New York Times staffers who actually signed on to this letter.
	There's a second letter as well that specifically names several of the reporters of the New York Times who they regard as The culprits, so you kind of have people who are actually more affiliated with the New York Times in a regular way who are on staff there, signing onto a letter that criticizes publicly their own colleagues, and the New York Times seems not to have appreciated that.
	Let me show you, Michael, the articles that the New York Times published that has specifically provoked the anger of these joint activists and, I guess you'd call them like journalists, if you're wanting to be generous.
	In this letter.
	So here's the first one, which honestly I found one of the more interesting articles ever published on this topic.
	Yeah, I read it too.
	Yeah, it was from January 22nd, so just a couple weeks ago, and it was entitled, When Students Change Gender Identity and Their Parents Don't Know.
	And it's essentially examining the fact that oftentimes in schools, Schools will socially transition your children, meaning start calling them a different pronoun, give them a female name even if they're born male, or vice versa, and start letting them dress as the opposite sex, being treated as the opposite sex, kids as young as 9 and 10 and 11, without telling their parents this is going on.
	And as a father, I imagined School bureaucrats or teachers doing that to my children, taking extremely significant steps that are going to affect them emotionally and psychologically for life.
	And taking it upon themselves to do that, having this, like, second secret life that they have at the age of 11, and not even telling me about it.
	You know, it'd be one thing if, like, they told me, and then I, like, threatened my kids or something, or started abusing them, and then I think there is a role for teachers to play in protecting children from parents who seem abusive.
	But oftentimes, they won't tell the children.
	They put themselves in the role of the parent, and take it upon themselves To decide what's best for other people's kids.
	Here's the article.
	Although the number of young- But they're barred from being told, from you being, they're barred from telling you.
	It's not that they just discretion, use their discretion and then decide not to tell you.
	Yeah, it's a school, it's a school policy.
	Where they're actually barred from telling you.
	Yeah, so let's look at this article.
	This is, and again, The New York Times wasn't even taking a position here.
	They were airing what is obviously a real debate about how do you balance the need for children to experiment freely Versus the natural, instinctive desire of parents, something probably many of these people don't know because they don't have kids, to actually want to protect their children and be involved in crucial decisions about their life.
	That's the role of a parent.
	That's something that you naturally want.
	Quote, although the number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States remains small, it has nearly doubled in recent years, and schools have come under pressure to address the needs of these young people amid a polarized political environment where both sides warn that one wrong step could result in irreparable harm.
	The public school that Mrs. Bradshaw's son attends, this is a mother who is a liberal who is concerned about what was done to her son, is one of many throughout the country that allows students to socially transition, change their names, pronouns, or gender expression without parental consent.
	Districts have said they want parents to be involved, but must follow federal and in some cases state guidelines meant to protect students from discrimination and violations of their privacy.
	But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seem to think that they, not the parents, know what was best for their children.
	They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home, although some didn't want their children to transition at all.
	Others said they were open to it.
	But Phil, schools forced the process to move too quickly and that they couldn't raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled unsafe.
	Now, let me emphasize again, Michael, what the Times is doing here is not taking a side.
	There's actually a debate out in the world About whether or not this school policy to socially transition children, to start calling young boys girls and treating them as girls or call girls boys without their parents' knowledge, whether this policy is good or not, that actually is a debate the Times is reporting on the existence of this debate and examining the contours of it.
	And what the trans activists are angry about, and by trans activists I mean these reporters who support the trans agenda, not just the non-binary and trans people, but also their incredibly selfless cis allies who are on board with this as well, what they're angry about is that the Times reported on this debate at all.
	Yeah, and they made no substantive criticism in that letter of Katie Baker's article, which you just quoted excerpts from.
	One irony of that article in particular being cited as an offending example here that somehow gives credence to this whole theory that the New York Times is like systematically vilifying trans and non-binary people and bringing harm to marginalized communities is that Katie Baker is a journalist who I actually recall meeting just socially here and there in the past decade or so.
	And she was sort of in this milieu of being with these sort of left-wing media types in Brooklyn and whatever.
	And she's done good work over the years.
	I remember she was at BuzzFeed for a while.
	She would have, like, too long reform journalism.
	In other words, she's not somebody who seems like she would have this nefarious, long-time motive of somehow, like, wreaking havoc on the ability of trans kids to express themselves, or is trying to, like, do violence to the trans movement, or what have you.
	It seems like somebody who would actually be probably If you asked her, and she was being honest, I don't know, this is speculation, granted, I'm not claiming I know her well, but I would probably surmise that she's somebody who would be inclined to be in favor of the activist goals of the trans movement, but because she's a journalist, and a very good one, she competently sort of seems to put that to one side and does actual good journalism, which requires taking a broader view and assembling divergent
	Perspectives and synthesizing that into something that is a reasonably good approximation of Reality.
	And when that article came out, just like often happens with these episodes, there's just a gigantic torrent of some heaped on journalists.
	I mean, remember when we were all told for like three or four years, or however long it was, that journalists are under siege in the United States due to online harassment and around the world, and this is like one of the most pressing issues of human rights that we all needed to be super concerned about?
	Well, Katie Baker, she was driven to deleting her Twitter account after this article came out, after having used it professionally for like 12 years or something, because of just the utter throbbing contempt that she was treated to by these activist-inclined types who were saying that she's like, Clearly.
	You know, I think a couple things are important to note here.
	suicide because she did a reasonably even-handed journalistic account of an obviously live debate that's happening.
	Yeah, you know, I mean, I mean, no, I mean, no, I, if the number of trans kids only, yeah, if the number of trans kids has doubled, that's an exponential growth, which is like notable as a phenomenon.
	Clearly, you know, I think a couple things are important to note here.
	For one thing, the editor of the New York Times, when chiding his actual staff members for signing onto this activist letter, you know, that attacks their own colleagues, he He said, and I doubt he's prone to hyperbole in this regard, that many of these reporters have had serious threats made against them.
	There have been a months-long online hate campaign.
	The minute you criticize a single journalist that liberals like, like Taylor Renz, or Brandi Zasobny, or Ben Collins, or any of those little, you know, kind of like pro-censorship activists, They'll immediately accuse you of putting them in danger, but they feel totally free to conduct their own months-long hate campaigns.
	They've done it against me and you and any journalist that they dislike.
	And I think, let me just say two things here.
	One is that, I told this story before, but I had dinner back in 2017 in New York with two very, very well-known and well-established successful journalists who have a very Successful career.
	They have a very secure journalistic position.
	They're both parents who live in Brooklyn, which is where most of these journalists live.
	And they have kids who are teenagers.
	And they told me that they are very concerned that there seems to be this kind of societal pressure On teenagers to either declare themselves non-binary or trans, that if you don't, if you're cis, you actually are looked at as a, you know, kind of a scant.
	And that furthermore, there's this sort of social value that gets attached to parents, especially in these liberal enclaves, who come out and say, oh, I have a, you know, cis, I have a trans daughter or a non-binary son and we couldn't be more proud of them and everyone applauds them.
	And after, you know, we had a very kind of nuanced discussion about the various parts of this agenda, and after I left, I realized that there is absolutely zero chance that either of those two journalists, no matter how secure their platform is, since they're associated with the liberal left, would never, ever, ever Admit publicly that they harbored those thoughts that we discussed that night at dinner about their concerns.
	Never!
	They would only write about this issue if they wrote about it at all in a way that completely conformed with the dogma of trans activists because they're petrified of being accused of all the things that these reporters get accused of, of endangering trans kids, of wanting to put trans people in concentration camps.
	That's how repressive The claim it is.
	The other thing I would add is that I did have a really important second point that will come to me in a minute, but it is kind of amazing.
	- Let me see if it's jogged in memory.
	So, one of the claims in this letter, which is maybe one of the most farcical claims, at least as I see it, is that they're really contending that the New York Times has made an editorial decision to quote, "Follow the lead of far-right hate groups." And of course, to establish that the groups they're referring to are far-right and hate-oriented.
	They link to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which of course is just a repository of objective wisdom on these things.
	no one could deny.
	But really, you think the New York Times, whose primary base of subscribers and its whole Orientation as an institution has been, like, tethered to the sensibilities of, like, liberal secular Jews on the Upper West Side all of a sudden are partnering with, at least in spirit, the most, like, fervid and vicious right-wing far-right hate groups.
	Like, that's what's dictating their editorial choices.
	If you actually think think that, which apparently all these media people do who signed on to it, which, you know, I would think indicates that they affirm what's said in the letter, then you're like operating on some plane of delusion that is weird and I've never accessed it.
	And I would like to, because it sounds like a fun, like hallucinatory experience.
	You know what this reminds me of?
	Ever in 2020, when all the George Floyd protests happened and so forth, and then, you know, by late 2020, early 2021, a controversy erupted over whether schools were adopting what was called critical race theory, and whether this was appropriate, and whether parents ought to have input on whether that curriculum was, you know, reasonable or age appropriate.
	And what you often heard from people who were critical of that narrative, or critical of the generally right-wing tenor of that narrative, was that no one's teaching critical race theory in schools.
	It just doesn't exist.
	They're arguing against a fictional phenomenon that they made up just to wage the culture war.
	Now, of course, there was overstatement on the part of the right-wing purveyors of that narrative in particular instances, but I personally went to a George Floyd protest rally thing in suburban Philadelphia like a week or two after they erupted where I got, I still have it, they were handing out, I mean the organizers were handing out leaflets and packets of informational material
	Try to educate the participants of the rally on how they could lobby for their local school district to incorporate elements, yes, of critical race theory into the curriculum of the school district.
	They weren't trying to hide it.
	That was just the overtly stated goal.
	And then the goal, because the activists were very successful in that movement, very adept at Uh... orchestrating support for their desired aims from all sectors of society, corporate and governmental, and everything in between.
	And then, so they got lots of what they were demanding enacted.
	Then the enactment provokes a response, and then there are counter-arguments to say that the thing that got enacted was never enacted at all.
	They can't recognize, like, the power that they wield?
	No, but, okay, this is the key point that actually, thank you for jogging my memory of the second point I wanted to make, which is exactly that.
	I think the big, big problem here is if you look at these groups like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign and stuff and the ACLU that only talk now about trans issues, prior to 2015 they almost never talked about trans issues.
	There's this gigantic spike that happens in their obsession with trans issues to the exclusion of everything else after 2015.
	What happened in 2015?
	The Supreme Court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional and therefore same-sex marriage equality became the law automatically under the Constitution in all 50 states.
	Or put another way, These groups won.
	They won all of their goals.
	And that was representative of that consensus I referenced earlier that adults should have the right to choose their own spouse, to decide if they want to have an opposite-sex or same-sex spouse that even conservatives began accepting.
	And I believe very strongly that had the trans agenda confined itself to what had always been the core desire and objective and argument and value of the LGBT movement, which is the right of adults To do what they want in their own lives, everybody would have agreed with that consensus and applied it to trans people and said, live and let live.
	Our society should be constructed not to impose morality on other adults, but to enable people to achieve their self-actualization.
	If that means that biological males want to have a series of surgeries and live their life as women or vice versa, That's not my business.
	The problem is activist groups can't win because when they win, they run out of grievances.
	And if they run out of grievances, they no longer have a reason to exist.
	They always have to provoke resistance so that they can continuously claim they're fighting bigotry.
	And as a result, they always need to go one step further and society is willing to accept because they only can exist if they provoke anger and opposition.
	And so that's what happened is they won everything else and the only thing that was left for them to do was to start going to people's children and saying, we're going to transition your children without your knowledge.
	We're going to demand that 15-year-olds have the right to remove their breasts even though they're completely healthy.
	We're going to start giving you drugs to kids that are 12 and 13 to delay the onset of puberty even though there's no knowledge scientifically about whether it's safe.
	They purposely went into areas that they knew would provoke anger and objection because that is what activists have to have.
	So let me just show you, Michael, this.
	This is another one of the ones that I personally found very interesting and was happy to read about because it answered questions on things I didn't know the answers to.
	This is one of the articles they're angry about.
	It's from January of 2022, so over a year now.
	Doctors debate whether trans teens need therapy before hormones.
	Clinicians are divided over new guidelines that say teens should undergo mental health screenings before receiving hormones or gender surgeries.
	And it describes, again, the debate that the medical profession is having.
	Quote, enough surgeon teenagers requesting hormones or surgeries to better align their bodies with their gender identities has ignited a debate among doctors over when to provide these treatments.
	An international group of experts focused on transgender health last month released a draft of new guidelines, the gold standard of the field that informs whether insurers will reimburse for care.
	A new chapter dedicated to adolescents says they must undergo mental health assessments and must have questioned their gender identity for, quote, several years before receiving drugs or surgeries.
	Experts in transgender health are divided on these adolescent recommendations, reflecting a fraught debate Over how to weigh conflicting risks for young people who typically can't get full legal consent until they are 18 and who may be in emotional distress or more vulnerable to peer influence than adults are.
	Puberty blockers, for example, can impede bone development, though evidence so far suggests it resumes once puberty is initiated.
	And if taken in the early phases of puberty, blockers and hormones lead to fertility loss.
	Patients and their families should be counseled about these risks, the standards say, and if preserving fertility is a priority, drugs should be delayed until a more advanced stage of puberty.
	Trans health specialists are concerned by the sharp increase in adolescents who are referred to gender clinics and worried that the desire for hormones and surgeries may be driven partly by peer influence on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
	Quote, the kids presenting these days are very different than what I was seeing in the early days, said Dr. Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 helped set one of the first youth gender clinics in the United States in Boston.
	Dr. Edwards-Leeper said that now she was more likely to see adolescents who had recently begun to question their gender, whereas a decade ago, her patients were more likely to have longstanding disgust about their bodies.
	So there's a major debate within the health professional field, including among people who provide gender identity treatments and therapies to adolescents, some European countries, due to medical studies, have banned the use of certain hormonal treatments and putter blockers out of concerns that they cause long-term medical health risks. have banned the use of certain hormonal treatments and putter
	It is grotesque and immoral and cruel to say that the New York Times shouldn't be publishing the arguments on both sides of these debates.
	If you're a parent of a trans teenager or a teenager who claims they're trans, and you're deciding whether or not or what treatments to give to your child, or if you're one of those adolescents and you're making those decisions, of course you should know.
	About what scientific studies say about the long-term effects of these drugs.
	It is demented, Michael, to claim that it is not the proper role of a newspaper to report on these issues.
	Yeah, you and I a few times discussed the gender identity law that was recently enacted in Scotland.
	And it just so happens that within the past day or so, the First Minister of Scotland, who was one of the champions of that bill, which allowed, remember, 16-year-olds to essentially Have a legal recognition of their change in gender identity without having to undergo any sort of medical scrutiny.
	She just resigned, Nicola Sturgeon, in part because her political standing having diminished as a result of her insertion into this major culture war issue that also provoked conflict with Mr. Government.
	But, you know, one thing that I wanted to slightly disagree with you on, Glenn, and I want to see if you find this to be Plausible.
	Is when you say that you think that post-2015, obviously the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD were not going to dissolve themselves after the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide, right?
	So they had to come up with some other reasons to justify their continued existence, some other sort of urgent appeals that they could make to donors to fund their organizations.
	And so they do concoct sort of extraneous reasons for why they need to continue doing this activism that their organization was predicated on.
	But I'm not so sure really that if they had simply confined themselves to adult activity as relates to gender transition or other issues related to gender fluidity that became much more mainstream over the past couple years, that it would have kind of preempted any of the pushback or any of the consternation because they're now also doing a lot of advocacy around children.
	Because if it just had, you know, the number of 18 to 22 year olds Who transitioned their gender or became some sort of new gender status, doubled in the span of like a year or two.
	And there was exponential growth in that demographic.
	I don't know, I feel like people would notice that and want to suss out the societal ramifications for that and also kind of probe what other implications it has for policy and just kind of a general societal... I remember even when Chelsea Manning transitioned while she was in military prison, And she was trying to acquire medical assistance to facilitate that.
	Obviously transit issues were not anywhere near as prominent as they were then as they are now.
	I think this was 2013 if I'm not mistaken.
	But there was a question that was should the government be subsidizing through its various provisioning health services to the population.
	Should the government subsidize Gender Transition Medical should the taxpayers underwrite it.
	I think you could still have issues like that that would be coming up even if these organizations could find themselves to be concerned solely with adult activity.
	They could still change school curriculums even if they're not talking about like forgiving hormones to 15 year olds or what have you.
	It's a very meaty issue and it has a lot of far ranging societal implications.
	I think people are fascinated by and very eager to debate.
	I'm not saying there wouldn't be discussion about it if there's this gigantic explosion in the number of people who are young adults claiming to be trans or not binary people.
	People are going to want to understand what's going on and they're going to talk about it and some people are going to be disturbed by it.
	All I'm telling you is, whenever it comes to children, that's always a red line.
	I mean, the reason one of the main attacks on the gay movement for decades Was that, you know, to try and claim gay men are pedophiles, that they're predators, that they're coming after your children, is because when you start talking about children, as I was saying earlier, there's an instinctive desire to protect your own kids.
	So if you can present a movement as a threat to children, you're going to provoke a lot of rage.
	People know what they're doing when they do that.
	That's the reason they do it.
	And the argument of the gay and lesbian movement was, What we are interested in is autonomy for adults to make choices for their own lives.
	And that was the reason why I think it succeeded.
	Because there still is a live and let live sentiment in ethos that is predominant not throughout every part of American culture.
	There are still people who are opposed to same sex marriage.
	A reasonably significant minority, but it won because it was focused on that.
	So I think if the issue had been, we think that adult people who are trans, who have been around forever, I mean, I remember hearing about trans people when I was a kid, should have the right to seek medical treatment and to be respected and to be treated as the gender that they choose.
	And all of the other things that go along with adult autonomy, of course, there'd be some opposition, but I think it would be far less Virulent and what has happened instead because they deliberately made their agenda about kids.
	It has not only provoked the kind of hatred they're worried about but it's also threatening to unravel what had been the consensus because it is called the LGBT movement even though increasingly there seems to be a divergence between parts of those groups.
	Many of the people most opposed to the kind of most extreme versions of gender ideology are often gay men and women.
	I just had Katie Herzog on my show a famed lesbian writer, actually talked about the impact of this identity and this ideology on the lesbian community and the concerns that she has about it.
	So I'm not saying it wouldn't have provoked any kind of opposition, but I think it would have been far less kind of vituperative than when you start involving children.
	Anyway, let's move on to the next topic.
	We just have a few minutes to talk about it, but I do want to actually cover it because I find it kind of amazing.
	It's about the launch of what should have been the completely trivial, irrelevant, and unnotable presidential campaign of Nikki Haley, who announced this week she's running for president.
	I think she has no chance to win.
	I'm happy she has no chance to win.
	And yet liberals decided to elevate her stature by launching the most Disgusting and racist attacks they could possibly conjure to attack her.
	And the reason is that one of her themes when announcing that she ran is that she considers herself a tribute or a symbol of America's goodness, that the child of Indian immigrants who is non-white can rise to become the Republican governor of South Carolina and the U.S.
	ambassador Joe and Kamala even say America's racist.
	kind of holding herself out as a representative of the American dream and in the process denying that America is a fundamentally racist and white supremacist country.
	Let's look at her campaign video.
	Joe and Kamala even say America is racist.
	Nothing could be further from the truth.
	The American people know better.
	My immigrant parents know better.
	And take it from me, the first minority female governor in history, America is not a racist country!
	So Michael, if you want to provoke the rage of the liberal commentariat, other than questioning whether or not 16-year-old girls should be able to have mastectomies based solely on their appearance at a clinic and their declaration that they're a man, I think there's almost nothing you could do more than arguing that America is not a racist country.
	The fact that it is a racist country, fundamentally and even irrevocably, is too important to people's careers.
	Predictably, it did provoke I need to turn away from my monitor.
	and anger from the very people who you would expect to do it, and they chose to do it on the most disgusting grounds.
	So here's Wajahat Ali, who has written for The New York Times, so he's a New York Times contributor.
	I need to turn away from my monitor.
	I'm sorry.
	He wrote, quote, In the 2023 racial draft, I, on behalf of all self-respecting South Asians, he's speaking on behalf of all self-respecting South Asians about a racial draft that he's imagining will take place, hereby announce we are cutting Nikki Nimrata Haley from our team We advise you not to pick her off of waivers.
	Oops, too late!
	GOP scoops up another token.
	Well, we warned you, good luck.
	So, according to him, she's not a real member of the self-respecting South Asian community.
	She is only in the GOP because they need a token.
	He sees her as nothing but a brown woman and he's apparently angry that people who voted for her to be the governor of South Carolina are able to see her as something beyond her race.
	Here is Asha Rangappa, the former U.S.
	security state agent who, like pretty much every U.S.
	security state agent, went and got hired at CNN.
	She attacked Nikki Haley for supposedly whitewashing her name by not using her real first name, which is Nimrata, instead using Nikki, which is the name on her birth certificate as her second name, Claiming that she did it because the Republican Party is so racist that if they knew her real name and knew she was Indian, even though she talks about it all the time, they would never vote for her.
	It turns out that Asha Rangappa, that is not actually her full name.
	Her first name is Renuka.
	And when people pointed out that you did the same thing as Nikki Haley did, chose to be known by your middle name, she changed her Twitter name to reflect that.
	And then she said this.
	Also, Rangappa is kind of a problem if I were trying to pass as white.
	implying that Nikki Haley is trying to pass as white.
	And she adds, "I didn't change my last name when I got married to a white guy." So not only are they angry that Nikki Haley does not use her first name but her second name, she's also angry that six years before she entered politics she married a white guy, in their words, and did what many women do in the United States and have long done, which is changed her name to reflect her husband's name.
	These people cannot see any people or anything outside of the framework of race.
	Here is Asha Ranganna.
	You already couldn't do that!
	What's that?
	Didn't Hillary Clinton do that, meaning change her surname?
	Yes, Hillary Clinton did.
	Well, she changed it and then changed it back for a while.
	Here is, from the Atlantic's, Jameel Hill, who Asha Mangappa retweeted.
	Nikki Haley is here in the video saying she doesn't think America is a racist country.
	And Jameel Hill says, well then why did she change her first name?
	This is an outright lie that Nikki Haley changed her name.
	Her name that she had, she got rid of and she used a fake name which is Nikki instead.
	Here's Mary Trump, a white lady, who feels comfortable tweeting this.
	First of all, fuck you, Nimrata Haley.
	Second, you are a racist, anti-American sellout.
	White women are apparently allowed to call women of color racist as long as the ideology is right.
	Third, my friend D2 Sense, this is a black woman who Mary Trump wants everyone to know is her friend, has more integrity, intelligence, passion, and decency than you will have in your entire being.
	Finally, Nikki Haley, you will never be president.
	USA Today, like many other outlets, fact-checked this lie.
	That Jamil Hill of the Atlantic spread that Nikki Haley changed her name to whitewash it.
	They're trying to claim that if she used her real name, Republicans wouldn't vote for her.
	They'd realize she was Indian, as if they don't know that now.
	And the USA Today said, claims that former U.S.
	and U.N.
	Ambassador Nikki Haley changed her name have resurfaced across social media after she tweeted about racial division in the United States.
	Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was born Nimrata Nikki Radwana.
	She has received criticism about not using her first name since as early as 2016 with people claiming she changed her name to, quote, get ahead in politics.
	WeRay claims that Haley whitewashed her name as false.
	Based on her research, Haley has gone by Nikki, her legal middle name, since birth, which means she started using it before she started her political career at 32.
	Since it's also a common Indian name, she claims that she anglicized or whitewashed her name are inaccurate.
	Haley adopted her husband's last name, Michael Haley, her white husband, they want you to know, when they wed in 1996, becoming Nikki Haley at age 26, six years before she entered the political arena.
	Lo and behold, Michael, it turns out that Kamala Harris's mother, Who is also of Indian descent.
	Here we have the birth certificate of Kamala Harris, and I don't know if you can see it on the screen, but her father is listed here as Jamaican.
	It says, let me see what that...
	field asked for on the, it says color or race of father, and it's listed as Jamaican.
	And then here's her mother's name, and it says color or race of mother, and it says Caucasian.
	So Kamala Harris's birth certificate reflects that her mother, who's a Tamale Indian, identifies as Caucasian and Jed Zalani.
	The journalist explains, he's of Indian and Pakistani descent, that that's because for a long time there was no form or space on First Certificates for Indians to pick their actual race, and so they identified as Caucasian.
	I can't stand Nikki Haley.
	I would literally vote for a randomly chosen person from the phone book to be president over her.
	I think she's a neocon in foreign policy.
	She's everything about the old GOP establishment that Trump rejected or at least ran against in 2016.
	I'm defending somebody here who I can't stand on any level politically.
	There's nothing redeeming to me about Nikki Haley's politics.
	And yet it's amazing to watch this liberal commentariat use blatantly racist
	Insults and attacks and disinformation along with it, claiming that she changed her name when it's her legal name on her birth certificate, and basically insisting that everybody has to be viewed exclusively or at least primarily through their racial prism, which is the defining feature of a racist, to refuse to look at individuals and only see race instead because they're very threatened by anybody who says,
	That actually Republicans evidently are willing to vote for non-white people the way they did with Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, or Nikki Haley, who as she rightly points out was the first woman of color ever elected governor.
	She happens to be a Republican.
	The idea that Maybe there are a lot of Americans who aren't racist, that there are parts of American society that aren't white supremacists.
	It enrages them so much that they're so blind with anger that they just launch these racist attacks based on the belief that because they're liberals, they're inherently immune from racism.
	What do you make of all this garbage that's spilling forth with such force at Nikki Haley?
	Well, I think Bobby Jindal actually did change his name to Bobby so we would have a more Americanized name.
	Like Ben O'Rourke, for example.
	All those Jewish immigrants who came to the United States and Ellis Island changed their names to Americanize it to assimilate better.
	Right, it was in the name of assimilation that Jewish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants from elsewhere in Europe who came in the early 20th century anglicize their names because they thought that that was the right thing to do and to assimilate into the culture that they had adopted.
	If anything, you can make like a patriotic argument as to why that they would want to do that, which would be in theory in keeping with the general sort of Republican worldview.
	But for these people, they have to think that there is no way it's possible for non-whites to actually have a sincere affinity with any kind of conservative political program, which in the case of South Asians is especially bizarre because it's not like Indian conservatives are especially obscure.
	I mean, I think that's the way Modi tends to be regarded anyway.
	I mean, I'm not an expert on Indian domestic politics, but he was seen as sort of like a, when he was first elected in 2014, he was seen as like this Indian incarnation of Ronald Reagan or something.
	But they have to have this sort of conceit, meaning the critics of Haley on these grounds.
	The conceit that anybody who would support her from what they say is a conservative perspective is only doing so 'cause they are trying to conceal their fundamental racial sort of loathing and make themselves feel better.
	During the 2016 primaries, if you recall, there was a period where Ben Carson was leading the polls in the Republican primaries.
	And there was actually a decent chance at one point that he might actually win the Iowa caucus.
	But we were being told that, again, that was just Republican primary voters projecting because they were so ashamed of their racial bias and wanted to somehow compensate for that.
	It couldn't be that Ben Carson spoke in a language that resonated with them, you know, appealing to evangelical Christianity and this, like, up by your bootstraps narrative that has been a core feature of conservative dogma forever.
	No, it had to be this, like, you know, Underhanded kind of racial calculation that these voters were making when they expressed a preference for Ben Carson.
	And you see this over and over again, but it's especially weird with Nikki Haley because it's not like, again, anybody should be confused about a conservative tendency that Indians or Indian Americans in particular exhibit.
	I think, you know, I didn't actually realize, I didn't listen to her speech as you did, and I applaud you for that, that Nikki Haley was the first Minority female governor in American history.
	It's very inspiring, and now I'm actually contemplating supporting her on that ground alone.
	I mean, it is funny how Republicans kind of invoke these first-in-the-nation sort of achievements in the same way that they kind of malign when Democrats do, when it seems, like, circumstantially advantageous for them.
	And it seems like Nikki Haley is at least kind of, like, gesturing in that direction.
	I thought it was funny when, in her announcement video, The worst ones do.
	Let me show you this video that I have to say I give.
	Do we have his name?
	I don't see it on the video itself.
	If we can get his name, that would be important.
	Anyway, this producer at MSNBC, who is of African descent, recorded a video
	His name is Manny Fidel and he recorded a video in which he is very unflinchingly and unapologetically disgusted with these attacks that are coming from the liberal sector of the media and the fact that he works at MSNBC and was willing to say all this, I think is incredibly impressive and merits a great deal of credit because he knows he's condemning
	Many of the people who work at his network and within the part of the media that he will likely depend upon for future jobs and yet he clearly is offended by these attacks sufficiently to say what I'm about to show you.
	He said this is a video he recorded for TikTok and it made its way onto Twitter.
	Listen to this.
	Attacking Nikki Haley for changing her name is not the own you think it is.
	First of all, Nimrata Nikki Haley is the daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants, and Nikki is literally a Punjabi name.
	Secondly, she didn't change her name, she just uses her middle name.
	This is no different than Presidents David Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
	Finally, naming conventions differ all over the world.
	For example, in Eritrea, where my family is from, your last name is your paternal grandfather's first name.
	Therefore, the last name on my birth certificate is Okbozgi, which is a person and name that I cherish and love.
	However, if my family had used the American naming convention when they immigrated to the United States, my last name would be Fidel, which I use in my professional life to honor my great-grandfather who put a lot of work into building our family.
	Now, similar to Nikki Haley, people have accused me of using Fidel instead of Okboski because it's easier to say or because I'd get further in life or something.
	And frankly, those people are idiots.
	Just because your ignorance is stopping you from understanding someone's connection to their family doesn't mean anything nefarious is going on.
	So for the love of God, liberals, stop making me defend Nikki Haley!
	You know, the reason why, let me just say, before you weigh in, let me just say that, like, the reason why I just, I want to just, you know, this is my reaction, the reason why I like that video so much, aside from the fact that we need a lot more people who are willing to denounce their own side when they're engaged in grotesque and racist attacks is You know, as the father of non-white children, one of the things that I think about a lot is, like, what is the thing that is going to make their lives better in the future?
	What do I want the world to be for them?
	And honestly, one of the things that I worry about the most as I think about their future is this attempt to basically tell them, before they can even figure out anything about who they are and what they think, that by virtue of their race or their skin color, they're essentially obligated to take a particular dogma and set of ideological precepts and adopt them as their own because they're somehow duty-bound to do so by virtue of the color of their skin and wants to rob them of their own ability to autonomously they're essentially obligated to take a particular dogma and set of ideological precepts and adopt them as their
	And, you know, as he said, he's getting attacked for having decided what his name wants to be, for honoring his great-grandfather.
	I have no doubt that liberals are going to attack him and impugn his motives in all sorts of ways because he's a non-white person weighing in on that side of the debate.
	These people have an absolute incentive, a career incentive, to maintain the racism they say they're denouncing and working against, and they do everything possible to ensure that it's constantly fortified.
	And the thing that threatens the most is kind of like the activists we were talking about before is any notion of success.
	Yeah, my own last name.
	My surname, Tracy, was actually anglicized at Ellis Island.
	The spelling of it was, because in Gaelic it was spelled T-R-A-E-C-E-Y.
	And guess what?
	That's slightly more confusing when you read it in English.
	I mean, I didn't know that I should be going through life in deep shame that that happened a hundred plus years ago.
	You know, I was... You would never have gotten on this show if you had used your extremely Italian surname.
	So apparently it worked to help you get ahead in life.
	I impulsively screamed before that because I was it occurred to me when I was watching that Manny Clip Barack Obama earlier in his life went by Barry Because it was just a way to integrate himself into the milieu that he was in socially I mean, this is just such a common feature of not just the United States which is unique in terms of the number of The range of immigrants it accepts from around the world, but you see the other societies as well
	So this idea it was like it's a unique is uniquely impugns or You know cat shows Republicans who engage in it to be Sinister racists just like nonsense, but here's the broader point that I think is worth emphasizing here You say that Nikki Haley is like this in Personification of hardcore sort of more traditional Bush era foreign policy views.
	I think that's true although I'm not so sure about the the assertion that it's like meaningfully discrepant from the Trump MAGA worldview.
	I mean, Trump is the one who made her the UNFSA.
	We can argue about that another time.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's a side point.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right, right.
	That's a side point.
	Look at what prompts the most visceral immediate reaction when Nikki Haley declares that she's running for president.
	Not that she's this, like, ultimate Uber hawk who probably would get the United States involved in a shooting war in the South China Sea within about two days upon taking office.
	It's this kind of very tedious, predictable, racially inflammatory side narrative that gets everybody worked up and forces this cyclical identity politics sort of session.
	Because I don't think most people are even going to be aware, all these outraged liberals are probably not going to even be apprised that Nikki Haley has these foreign policy views, in part because Her foreign policy views, as neoconservative or hawkish as they are, they're really not that different from what the just general bipartisan consensus is now vis-a-vis China and Russia.
	I mean, I don't know what, she's probably going to have to manufacture criticisms of the Biden administration in that area, but they're not going to be, I think, that convincing of criticisms because she's going to be shown to be more aligned with Biden than apart from him.
	But all that kind of gets ignored or treated as this secondary or tertiary issue.
	And the main issue that we all have to get really exercised about is whether she changed her name for some sort of political advantage to capitulate to white, hierarchical, patriarchal society.
	And the irony of it all is that just like in the first segment, we were talking about these people who want to victimize themselves, like they're factory workers working 16-hour days, seven days a week for tiny little pay when in reality, most of them are like Harvard and Yale educated authors and poets and commentators who are of a tiny, tiny sliver of people privileged enough to be able to speak their mind and be heard in the nation's most influential newspaper in the New York Times.
	The most privileged people in society who want to be victimized and self-victimized constantly.
	The people who are insisting That America really is this fundamentally and aggressively racist country that no non-white person can get a head ever in, that are offended because she's saying otherwise.
	These are also the most privileged people in the world.
	You know, Jameel Hill had a multimillion-dollar contract at ESPN where she was on the air constantly on television, becoming famous, commenting on sports, and now she writes for The Atlantic, one of the most influential and prestigious magazines in the country.
	That's true of Wajahat Ali, who was, you know, welcomed to The New York Times and all these other places.
	That's what this is ultimately all about.
	They're angry at the suggestion because it's so fundamental to their self-identity that they're not somehow inherently victimized because they've been able to succeed in ways that the vast, vast majority of people in the United States, including white people, could never dream of.
	They've achieved success beyond the wildest dreams of most people.
	It's so critical, especially to them, to insist that despite all their success, their country actually hates them, is irrevocably opposed to them, and racist against them.
	And that's why they're so threatened by Nikki Haley, not just because she is a success story like they are, but because she describes herself that way instead of as a victim.
	And I think you're absolutely right.
	the reality is that most liberals can't attack Nikki Haley on ideological grounds because they share most of her worldview on foreign policy and economic policy.
	What are they really going to object to?
	She's a, for example, vehement defender of the war in Ukraine, just like they are.
	She loves the CIA and the FBI, just like they do.
	They don't really have any grounds on which they can attack her because we have this uniparty consensus on ideology, and so this is all they have.
	Yeah, Ben Shapiro called her his spirit animal several years ago in part because he was just so supremely impressed by his personal confidings with her when she was UN secretary and And of course, the main thing that Shapiro cited as to why she was his spirit animal Was her unwavering, unshakable support for Israel.
	And, you know, I doubt that's really going to inflame much left liberal resentment as much as it would that they can have this sort of like nomenclatural fight over Nikki versus Nicotra or whatever.
	I mean, who cares?
	If you really care that much about that, you need to examine your priorities in life.
	Well, they care, again, not because of the name issue, but because of the implications for whether or not America is actually a racist country, whether the Republican Party would be willing to vote for somebody who they know is Indian, as if they don't know that about Nikki Haley.
	But when Bill Kristol was pretending to try and find a primary challenger for Donald Trump in 2017, claiming that there were millions and millions and millions of Republicans, just like Bill Kristol, angry about Donald Trump and wanting to remove him, his choice for who the person should be that would primary Donald Trump that he would support, Was Nikki Haley because she is part of that kind of uniparty consensus.
	Michael, I would love to spend several more hours chatting with you but we actually do have an end of our show that we've now reached so we're going to have to dismiss you for the evening but only with the greatest amount of gratitude and thanks for taking the time.
	I need to end on a quip before you dismiss me.
	Go ahead.
	Bill Kristol in 2016 settled on a conservative independent candidate to challenge Donald Trump and it was David French Who is now a columnist for the New York Times and was cited in that letter as somebody who worked for an organization that is endangering the lives of trans children.
	Exactly.
	Just to come full circle.
	Absolutely.
	All right.
	That's a very good connection, Michael.
	Thank you, as always.
	It was nice to talk to you.
	We will see you again shortly on our show.
	That concludes our show for this evening.
	As we mentioned at the top, we will be on our Locals After Show in just a few minutes to take your questions and to comment on your feedback.
	Thank you all for those of you who have been watching.
	We hope to see you back tomorrow night and then every night at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rebel.

▲