Appellate Court Upholds TikTok Ban; SCOTUS Trans Case & Advocacy Groups' Perverse Incentives; System Pupdate: Toby's Rescue Story
An appellate court upholds the TikTok ban on national security grounds, and the app's future remains uncertain. The ADL releases a report claiming that Jewish Americans are discriminated against in the job market, showing how advocacy groups must continuously fearmonger to continue to exist. PLUS: Another segment of "System Pupdate" sharing Toby's rescue story.
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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, one of the most direct assaults on free speech received a significant push forward today.
As a federal appellate court in Washington, the court immediately below the Supreme Court...
Upheld the constitutionality of the bill that forces a sale of TikTok and failing that would ban the app entirely in the United States.
The idea for this bill originated with Republicans during the Trump years.
It passed only after the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. That was when enough Democrats finally blamed TikTok for the rise of pro-Palestinian sentiment among Americans' youth, concluding that the TikTok app had to be banned from the United States because...
It allows too much free speech, namely criticism of Israel.
Now, while Joe Biden signed the TikTok ban into law, Donald Trump during the campaign repeatedly announced his opposition to the TikTok ban, vowing to save the app if he were elected.
Since his victory in November, he has again signaled his opposition to this bill, one that has a lot of support among Republican Party loyalists and even conservatives and even among a lot of his own followers, given that originally Trump supported the bill.
But with only one appeal left, despite Trump's opposition, that one to the Supreme Court, and the date for the forced sale of TikTok looming, which is in late January, they did it right after the election, this remarkable assault on the right of Americans to use whatever social media apps we want appears closer than ever to becoming law.
We will examine who exactly is for this and against it and why and what the implications would be if it actually became law.
Then, on last night's after show on Locals, we were asked by several viewers to discuss our views of the oral argument that was held earlier this week in the Supreme Court regarding the law enacted in Tennessee That bans giving minors so-called gender-affirming care, such as cross-sex hormones.
That is a law that was enacted not just in Tennessee, but also in 24 other countries.
Now, given the apparent interest in that case, I do want to offer a few thoughts about it, but I really want to focus more on the question of how we actually got here.
Namely, how is it that a decades-old civil rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, that had long stressed, emphasized, insisted That it focused solely on the rights of adults and what adults can do in the privacy of their lives and with their individual choices.
How is it that that movement instead ended up so focused on what they insisted are so-called trans kids and what trans kids should be able to get in terms of highly questionable medical treatment in their adolescence or even in their pre-adolescence?
A lot of that has to do with the perverse institutional incentives of advocacy groups that purport to represent marginalized minority groups that they never actually want to win, they can never win.
But instead they're always looking for ways to insist that they are losing, all as a way to justify their budgets and their power and their existence.
Earlier this week the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League announced, and I kid you not, A new study shows that American Jews are suffering from systemic discrimination and exclusion to employment in the U.S. and access to American elite institutions.
Indeed, everybody knows that the one thing that if you're a Jew, you cannot do is get a job or get access to elite institutions, whether it's Hollywood and Wall Street or academia or media, you're simply excluded.
And that was the view of the ACL. Now, the absurdity of that view illustrates the same dynamic about what drives advocacy groups like this to deliberately seek the most preposterous and laughable and therefore ultimately unpopular positions All of which is in their interest, but not the interest of the people they claim to represent.
So we'll use all of these events to examine that institutional dynamic.
And then finally, last week, we announced the debut of our new series entitled System Pup Date, where we will end our show for the week, namely every Friday, by featuring a five to seven minute video showing the rescue story of one of our 26 dogs that we have at home, as well as another 150 or so dogs at our shelter.
Each week, we'll pick a particular dog because each of their rescue stories, like the personality and the trajectory of each of those dogs, really is a unique story.
And it provides a singular way of understanding things that might be a little bit different than trying to access those things in other ways.
So at the end of our show, this being Friday night, we will continue that series by showing you episode two, which focuses on our dog named Toby.
Before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
TikTok is easily the most popular app among Americans under the age of 35 and it's one of the two or three most popular social media platforms in all of the United States for people of any age.
There are more than 100 million people, close to a third of the American population, who choose voluntarily to To use that platform.
Nobody forces them to.
Nobody manipulates them to.
No one hypnotizes them to.
No one coerces them to.
No one blackmails them to.
They choose voluntarily on their own to go onto that app for a whole variety of reasons, including expressing their political views to as many people who will hear them.
To hear other citizens express their political views so they can listen.
It's a place where they go to organize political activism and political protests of the kind the Constitution guarantees and it's a place that they go to seek human connection and building social and political communities.
It's very important to the lives of It's a place where they follow the news.
They build a platform to be heard.
And the idea that the United States government Can sweep in, give in dislike for the content of what is taking place on that platform, and that's exactly what has motivated this ban, even though it has a different justification as we're about to show you.
The idea that the U.S. government can actually ban the entire app in the United States under the guise of forcing a sale From the company that owns it, which is a company that is Chinese, ByteDance, although it's run by a Singaporean CEO with American investors who are the ones making the money off this capitalist venture,
The idea that the United States government could ban TikTok and therefore ban similar social media platforms whenever that same rationale or a similar rationale is invoked is a far graver threat on our free speech rights than I think has been appreciated by most people.
This is not a topic we're covering for the first time.
We've devoted entire shows to arguing about the dangers of the TikTok ban.
Although Donald Trump was an early proponent of it back in 2020, 2019, 2020 when this issue first arose, he has since become one of the most vocal opponents of banning TikTok, valing during the campaign that he would save it.
continuously railing against this law and the injustice of it, insisting that if he were to win, he would take whatever measures were necessary to save TikTok from being subject to a forced sale and a ban.
Other people who are free speech advocates, such as the ACLU and Elon Musk, both have exactly the same position, namely that banning TikTok is a grave threat to the free speech rights of American citizens and the right of social media to exist freely online.
Elon Musk has that view, even though, as he himself notes, it would be obviously beneficial for the social media platform that he does own, X, to have a major competitor banned and presumably have millions, if not tens of millions of former users of that app migrate to his and, And yet, based on free speech grounds, he understands that that precedent could easily be used to one day ban X if it offends enough people in power as well.
TikTok sued in order to enjoin the law during the Trump campaign when there were threats of banning it.
They were actually successful in getting an injunction.
But the law never really had enough votes in Congress until after October 7th, the October 7th attack.
It was only Republicans wanting to ban it by claiming that the Chinese were using it as a national security threat or to spy on Americans.
Arguments that we've dispensed with many times.
It'd be very easy, much easier for the Chinese to spy on Americans by buying data on the open market, bundled by Facebook and Google and a whole bunch of other We're already being spied on by a whole variety of other government agencies and large corporations.
But most of all, the reality is that before sale is designed to take the extremely influential TikTok app out of the hands of a company that the American government has trouble controlling...
And transfer it, put it in the hands of a company like the one that owns Facebook or Google that is extremely amenable to following the censorship orders of the United States government.
It would essentially take the one social media company where some degree of free speech can thrive outside of the reach of the United States government.
And either put it within the purview of the United States government to control or ban it entirely.
If you believe in free speech on the internet, no matter what you think of TikTok, no matter how much you hate it, no matter what you think of China, this is a law that ought to deeply concern you.
So in the first level of TikTok's Legal challenge, which was in a federal district court, the district court judge decided in favor of the United States, decided that although there are serious free speech implications from banning TikTok, the free speech implications are outweighed by the government's national security concerns.
That was the ruling of the lower court.
TikTok appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals in Washington, which is generally considered the second most important court right after the Supreme Court.
It wasn't the entire court that decided, but simply a three-judge panel.
but this three-judge panel ruled rather emphatically in favor of the United States and against TikTok, arguing that the United States government does have the right, despite the First Amendment concerns, to ban TikTok.
Now, we covered the oral argument at the time and told you that it was extremely likely that these three judges would almost certainly rule in favor of this law, that TikTok can be banned consistent with the Constitution.
There are two other alternatives, or three, really, that TikTok has to avoid this forced sale, which will never happen by the date that the law indicates or acquires, which is late January, I believe January 25th.
They can appeal it to the full court of the Court of Appeals, which is 11 or 14 judges.
And that's optional whether the full court will hear an appeal from this three-court panel.
They can also appeal it directly to the Supreme Court, which, given the stakes, likely would hear it.
And in both instances they could ask for a stay of the law so that they have time to get the outcome of their appeal before they're forced to try and sell TikTok or face a potentially permanent ban in the United States.
And then given that Donald Trump, for reasons we will tell you about, has said he is committed to undoing this ban and to protecting TikTok, he too might have executive powers that could save TikTok from this ban or he could use his influence with the Republican Party in Congress and in the Senate to try and reverse this law, though that seems unlikely.
So we're nearing a point where A ban on TikTok is starting to seem more plausible.
And yes, the for sale is the first step, but given the difficulty of selling an app of this kind, given the difficulty of parting with the algorithm and the code that runs TikTok and the unwillingness of ByteDance to do that for a variety of reasons, The idea that there's going to be some sale effectuated by the date required by the statue is extremely unlikely.
So we're facing the very real prospect of one of the most popular social media apps in the United States, the most popular social media app among young Americans by far, can just disappear from the United States because the government decided it didn't like it.
The court decision here you see at the United States Court of Appeals, the case is entitled TikTok Inc.
and ByteDance, that's obviously the company that owns TikTok, as well as the parent company, suing Merrick Garland in his official capacity as the Attorney General of the United States.
It's a fairly complex decision, but the core of what the court said is that the court acknowledged that There definitely are harms to the First Amendment rights of Americans who use TikTok, who want to use TikTok, who want to express their opinions on TikTok, who want to hear other people's views on TikTok.
But the court said that despite the fact that the First Amendment is being infringed, the First Amendment is being burdened.
If TikTok just disappears or if it's going to control of a company that will censor more at the behest of the United States, despite all of that, said the court, the national security concerns raised by the government outweigh the First Amendment free speech rights of American citizens that have been raised in the case.
That's the essence of the ruling.
And as is often the case, we saw this, for example, when the Supreme Court overturned the two decisions that had ruled that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to ban or delete dissent.
And the Supreme Court, it got to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court basically said, we give the government a lot of leeway, the executive branch a lot of leeway to decide what's best for the United States.
And although they ended up dismissing that case on...
Technical grounds of standing the real essence, the ethos that emerged from the oral argument in the Supreme Court.
On that case, the Biden administration violating the First Amendment by coercing big tech companies to censor that we also reported on when we covered the oral argument.
The big ethos was, look, when the government says these things are necessary for the security of the American people, we have to defer to their judgment.
And that's basically what the court did here.
The Biden Justice Department claimed that the ban of TikTok is necessary to protect American national security from the Chinese.
And rather than delve into whether that's true or not, And the reality is it's not for a variety of reasons.
The court more or less simply accepted the arguments of the lower court, of the U.S. government rather, and said when the government invokes national security, we're going to defer that even in these cases such as this one where we acknowledge that the First Amendment interests of American citizens are being limited and infringed even in a serious way.
Anytime the government invokes national security, essentially the government will win in court.
It did throughout the war on terror when people tried to challenge warrantless eavesdropping or any other number of blatantly unconstitutional acts.
The United States government simply said this is important for our national security.
You, the court, shouldn't even be deciding this.
There's too many secrets that we would be required to show you in order for you to make a decision, and the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary, generally just defers to the U.S. government in a way that I think is extremely dangerous and healthy, and that's more or less, despite all the pages of legalistic ruling, more or less is, in fact, what happened here.
Now, the ACLU, which does occasionally still defend free speech as long as doing so doesn't offend the Democratic Party, And I don't want to be too glib about this, since in this case, many, many Democrats, after October 7th at least, ended up joining Republicans to supporting this TikTok ban.
And it was the Biden administration that pushed for this TikTok ban.
And Joe Biden, who signed it into law, so it's not like this is just a Republican bill.
This is, in fact, a bill that, as of the moment, Joe Biden supports and Donald Trump opposes.
And nonetheless, the ACLU issued a statement slamming the appeals court ruling for upholding the TikTok ban.
And this is what the ACLU said, quote, TikTok may appeal today's ruling to the Supreme Court before the ban goes into effect.
President-elect Donald Trump has also indicated that he may refuse to enforce the ban when his administration takes office.
The ACLU urges the new administration to work with Congress to repeal or amend the 21st Century Peace Through Security Act, that's the name of the TikTok ban, to ensure that any regulation of social media platforms does not infringe our free speech rights and protect our right to share and access information to ensure that any regulation of social media platforms does not infringe our free speech rights It also went on to condemn the court ruling as a grave assault on free speech and First Amendment values, which certainly I think it is as well.
all.
Now, as I said, Donald Trump began as a proponent of, a supporter of this bill back in 2019-2020 when the idea first started to emerge, although it never got nearly enough votes in Congress to enact it.
But in the last year or two, he's changed his mind.
And we can talk about the reasons why and we'll do so, but I don't really generally care about a politician's motives as long as they're taking a position that I believe is in defense of people's constitutional freedoms or in some other way is good.
There's all kinds of motives that human beings have.
It's very difficult to know what the real motive is of somebody.
I don't think we should care that much about motives when it comes to politicians.
Are they doing something good for attention?
To satisfy their voting base?
To attract more donations?
Out of ego?
Out of genuine conviction, it's very impossible to know our own motives, let alone other people's.
But here's what Donald Trump, the sort of thing he was saying during the campaign.
Here he is in September of 2024, just a couple months before the election, in a video that he posted to his true social site.
For all of those that want to save TikTok in America...
For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump.
The other side's closing it up.
But I'm now a big star on TikTok.
We even have TikTok Jack and we're setting records.
We're not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side is going to close it up.
So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.
If you don't care about TikTok and other things like safety, security and prosperity, then you can vote for a Marxist who's going to destroy our country.
Thank you very much.
All right, so you can make the case that that was just kind of a condescending appeal to young voters on whom Trump was relying.
And as I said, there are tens of millions of young people who use TikTok, who presumably are against the ban of the social media platform they most love to use.
But he nonetheless did, in fact, make this statement.
Here he is in June of 2024 with Dana White, the founder and CEO of, what is that called?
The MMA? The UFC. The UFC. United Fighting Championship.
And here he is in a video that he posted to True Social as well about TikTok.
The president is now on TikTok.
It's my honor.
And that is something that happened is during the election, Trump actually started using TikTok, obviously exploded on TikTok in a way that the Kamala Trump actually started using TikTok, obviously exploded on TikTok in a way that the Kamala
And he ended up clearly liking TikTok and deciding that it was something that he wanted to support.
Now, one of the reasons a lot of people believe Trump ended up changing his mind and opposing a ban on TikTok is because of somebody named Jeff Yass.
Yes.
Who is a billionaire donor with very significant investments in TikTok's parent company.
Here's NBC News basically telling that story in March of 2024. Who is Jeff Yass?
He's the billionaire donor with investments in TikTok's parent company.
Critics accuse Yass of bankrolling an army of lobbyists and orchestrating a bare-knuckle pressure campaign to protect TikTok, including by leveraging his nascent relationship with former President Donald Trump.
So in addition to recognizing the campaign value of defending TikTok, of opposing the TikTok ban...
And in addition to the fact that Trump found TikTok to be a very valuable instrument for him to communicate with huge numbers of young people that he knew his campaign needed to reach, he also had this very influential donor, Jeff Yass, this billionaire who ended up being a Trump mega-donor.
Who obviously talked to Trump about the TikTok ban and, according to many accounts, changed Trump's mind.
And again, you can be cynical about it and say he changed Trump's mind because he wanted to become a megadonor.
Maybe he made good arguments that changed Trump's mind along with Trump's success on TikTok.
But whatever it is, the fact remains that over the last year and right now, The TikTok ban that Joe Biden signed into law with very bipartisan support is one that the Biden administration continues to support, but Donald Trump ran on a campaign of uprooting and saving TikTok.
As I referenced earlier, here's Elon Musk in April of 2024, right when the bill was either about to pass or had passed.
And if there's anybody who would benefit from a TikTok ban, it's the other social media platforms like Facebook and Google and Instagram and X. And yet, Elon Musk said the following, quote, In my opinion, TikTok should not be banned in the United States, even though such a ban may benefit the X platform.
Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression.
It's not what America stands for.
I am kind of amazed I have to say that a lot of people on the right who have raised the banner of free speech and in particular of opposing government control over content online have been so blithe or actively supportive of handing the power to the government not just to ban TikTok Obviously,
if you're using a rationale that let the government ban TikTok, it's going to justify the banning of other social media sites in the future that the government similarly claims due to foreign ownership or foreign investment, which is true for a lot of companies like X. It's not foreign owned, but it has foreign investment and always has.
The second largest stockholder of Fox News has long been a Saudi billionaire.
There's a lot of foreign investment, a lot of foreign influence in a lot of different companies that operate inside the United States.
There's obviously a lot of American influence in companies that operate outside the United States, too.
That's just the nature of our global economy.
So if you're someone willing to endorse this rationale and hand the government this power because you have something against TikTok in particular, don't think for one second that that power will be confined only to TikTok.
As I said, when this issue first arose, the Trump White House was in favor of a TikTok ban.
Here on August 6, 2020, Trump actually issued an executive order addressing the threat posed by TikTok, where he essentially ordered that action be taken to deal with what he called the national emergency with respect to TikTok.
And right after that, TikTok ran into a federal court based on this executive order, based on this threat, to have the federal government ban it.
And the federal court actually ended up siding with TikTok.
Here from the Washington Post, TikTok sues the Trump administration to fight an impending ban.
This is from 2020. Quote, the services legal challenge calls out the president's executive order, saying it is, quote, not rooted in bona fide national security concerns.
And then just a couple of months later, a couple of weeks later, actually in September, as Law.com, this article illustrates, in the 11th hour, a D.C. judge sides with TikTok against Trump.
Quote, in an 18-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols found that TikTok, represented by a team from Covington-Burling, was likely to prevail in arguing that the Trump administration had overstepped in pushing to prevent future downloads of the app.
Now, just to be clear, the way this ban would operate is that it would prohibit Google and Apple from allowing any further downloads of TikTok in its Play Store or any updates.
The very similar tactic to the A weapon that was used to destroy Parler right at the time that Parler was becoming an alternative free speech app, had become the number one downloaded app in the country right after Facebook and Twitter and others conspired to ban President Trump, even though he was the sitting president.
Parler was offering itself as a free speech app, and there was a gigantic demand for it.
Huge numbers of people downloading Parler in order to find a social media app that wouldn't censor the way the rest of them were doing.
And then a bunch of Democrats, including AOC, began demanding that Google and Apple take action to ban Parler.
This was right after January 6th.
And so Google and Apple immediately announced that it would no longer allow downloads of Parler in its store, nor would it allow any updates, which renders the site unusable for people who already have it if you can't get updates, but also prevents any new users from joining.
Right at the time that Parler was the most popular app, and then a day later, Amazon, in response to similar demands from Democrats, announced that it would no longer host on its hosting services, Parler, on its website.
So Parler was basically crippled.
It was destroyed, and it tried to come back and never quite could.
So we saw the danger of being able to force Google and Apple to ban apps and platforms that the government dislikes from their stores.
It was the model, the framework that was used to ban Parler at the time it had become the most popular social media platform on the grounds that it was allowing free speech and therefore needed to be destroyed.
Now, as I said, the justification originally offered For why TikTok has to be banned back in 2020, when the Trump administration was on board, when Republicans were on board, and the justification offered by the Biden administration to the federal court to justify the banning is a very different argument for the real reason TikTok ended up being banned,
real reason why this bill finally got enough votes in Congress to actually pass.
The argument that was used originally, the original impetus for this bill, the one that was presented to the court was because it's owned by the Chinese, it poses a threat to our national security because the Chinese can use this to collect data on American users or to influence the content that Americans it poses a threat to our national security because the Chinese can
TikTok has offered a thousand different assurances and ways to prevent that from happening, but that's the very clinical, legalistically clean rationale used by the Biden administration to tell the court why this was necessary.
But that's not really why the TikTok ban succeeded.
As I just showed you, it was around since at least 2020. It only got enough votes to Especially attracted enough Democratic Party votes in the Congress six or seven months after the October 7th attack.
And the reason it got enough Democratic votes, and this is not my speculation, this is something that the leaders of the Republican sponsors of the bill said, this is what the Democrats have said, the only reason why the TikTok ban finally passed is because the Democrats became convinced that That a primary reason why there was so much anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sentiment among young Americans,
the reasons why polls showed that they viewed the Israeli war in Gaza as unjust, the reason why polls showed that young people were in favor of the Palestinian cause, the reason why young people were organizing and protesting and marching as is their constitutional right to do, It was all blamed on TikTok.
Oh, TikTok allows too much free speech.
TikTok allows too much criticism of Israel.
TikTok allows too much pro-Palestinian speech.
And while I know a lot of people on the right are often told that the Democratic Party is anti-Israel, it's a complete lie.
There's about four people in the Democratic Party who are opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
And then the two that got removed by AIPAC, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, maybe on a good day you can throw AOC and a couple other people like Pramila Jayapal in there, the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
But the overwhelming vast majority of the Democratic Party in terms of the power structure, the vast majority of the Democratic Party is as vehemently pro-Israel as the Republican Party is.
It's why Joe Biden funded and armed the Israeli war without any conditions, why the United States stood up every day and defended it, both at the UN and the State Department briefings.
And a huge number of Democrats in Congress are as vehemently and vocally pro-Israel as a lot of Republicans are.
They come from very pro-Israel, heavily Jewish districts, just like a lot of Republicans come from heavily evangelical districts where pro-Israel sentiment is very high.
And there's simply no political benefit to standing up and being an advocate of the Palestinian movement unless you represent districts like Ilhan Omar Rashid Tlaib does.
But there are massive benefits to standing up and defending Israel.
And that's why pro-Israel resolutions passed the House and the Senate with tiny numbers of dissent, even in a very polarized environment where very few bills can.
It's why Israel is by far the biggest recipient of American aid over the last five to six decades.
No other country even comes close.
It's because there's bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel.
And it's very, very strong in the Democratic Party.
And the Democrats looked at young voters being so anti-Israel, so proud Palestinians.
They wanted to know why.
And the people who wanted to ban TikTok, and that basically was led by the U.S. security state, that felt like they couldn't control TikTok and its censorship orders and its moderation decisions the way that they could control Facebook and Google.
They convinced Democrats that the reason to ban Facebook was because there was too much free speech being allowed on the platform.
There was too much anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content specifically.
You hear from the New York Times in March 11th trying to explain why finally after four years there's suddenly a bipartisan majority to ban TikTok.
House set to move ahead.
House is to move ahead with a bill targeting TikTok as Trump flips to oppose it.
So even before the vote Trump announced his opposition.
With both parties eager to demonstrate a willingness to be tough on China, bipartisan legislation to force the Chinese owners of the platform to divest or face a ban was moving forward.
So that is, again, the rationale.
Now we're going to show you the real reasons why this majority ended up finally emerging.
In the Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley said, Spoke for about 30 seconds, one of the primaries, and tried notoriously to claim some sort of convoluted statistic or data about why TikTok is making Americans more anti-Semitic.
We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all.
And let me tell you why.
For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, Every day, they become 17% more anti-Semitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.
We now know that 50% of adults, 18 to 25, think that Hamas was warranted in what they did with Israel.
That's a problem.
So, she's not pretending, you'll have noticed, that the reason we need to ban TikTok, which is what she started off by saying, has anything to do with the Chinese.
She said the reason we need to ban TikTok is because there's too much anti-Israel content or anti-Israel criticism in the United States is known as anti-Semitism.
She's saying there's just too much racism allowed on this platform.
I mean, imagine if she had said that about any other form of bigotry or any other social media platform.
We need to ban Facebook.
We need to ban Instagram.
We need to ban YouTube.
We need to ban Twitter.
Because there's too much anti-black racism on there.
There's too much transphobia on there.
There's too much misogyny permitted.
There's too much Islamophobia.
There's too much misogyny being fostered on these sites.
There are left-wing groups that say that and believe that.
But if you said any of that on the right, you would be mauled as an enemy of free speech.
Trying to ban free speech in the name of stopping racism.
But for this one particular kind of bigotry, on the right, it's not just acceptable, but virtually obligatory.
Here's Lindsey Graham on C-SPAN in January of 2024, trying to blame TikTok for the destruction of the Jewish state.
But TikTok, your representative in Israel, quit the company because TikTok is being used in a way to basically destroy the Jewish state.
So here you have it just explicitly being stated by these members of Congress that the reason we need to ban TikTok has nothing to do with Chinese spying or any of these other absurd claims.
It's specifically because we don't like the views that are spreading on TikTok.
That's why we need to ban TikTok.
We don't like the views, the political views, the political expression that's being permitted there.
Once the Congress actually passed the TikTok ban with a huge amount of Democratic support that prior to October 7th did not exist...
They actually told the real reason why the TikTok ban passed.
From the New York Times on April 24th, headline, Thunder Run, behind the lawmakers' secretive push to pass the TikTok bill.
A tiny group of lawmakers huddled in private about a year ago, aiming to keep the discussion away from TikTok lobbyists, while bulletproofing a bill that could ban the app.
Quote, the effort around a TikTok ban began with Congressman Steve Scalise, who met with Congresswoman Kathy McMorris-Rogers, a Republican from Washington, in March of last year about their desire to see a measure that took on the app.
They began talking with other Republican lawmakers and aides across several committees about a new bill.
The bipartisan committee swiftly embraced the effort.
Quote, what we recognized was that there were now so many different approaches and the technical issues were so complex.
So the committee hatched a strategy with the support of the Democrats, the Biden White House, and the Biden Justice Department for a new bill.
Well, Its efforts got a lift after lawmakers, including Republican Mike Gallagher, accused TikTok of intentionally pushing pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content to its users last year.
Mr. Krishma Morthy said, and others said, that the Israeli-Gaza conflict stoked lawmakers' appetites to regulate the app.
So you have the leaders of this bill for a long time, people like Mike Gallagher and others, saying the reason why they were able to get enough votes finally to pass this bill is because people finally got convinced that there was far too much free speech allowed.
The ADL as well, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, went on warning Joe two months before TikTok was banned in Congress and said on behalf of the ADL, we demand the banning of TikTok.
Obviously that it didn't pretend to care about China.
They said the reason was is because there's just simply too much anti-Israel speech allowed on that platform.
So what you have here is Is the eradication of a major social media app in the United States that is the preferred social media platform for young Americans by far, for 100 million Americans of all ages or more, that the government is banning based on the pretext that it's harmful for national security, but in reality is about the fact that they can't control the speech, the free speech that's being allowed on the app.
That's why people as disparate as Elon Musk on the one hand and the ACLU on the other are sounding the alarm about the threat to free speech posed by this ban.
And the court today did not deny that there's a threat to free speech posed by the ban.
They said there is a threat to free speech posed by the ban.
But the claims of national security from the government justify the infringements of free speech that tens of millions of Americans are about to suffer if...
The ADL, if the ADL's demands, if the demands of the Congress are honored and either force a sale of TikTok to a company that will censor more in accordance with the U.S. government or failing that, to ban the app altogether.
There's a lot of interest in free speech and online censorship and there has been over the last eight, nine years.
It's a major reason why a part of my audience watches this show, follows my journalism.
But even in those cases where you feel like the speech is harmful or the platform allowing the free speech is in some way making you uncomfortable, We'll
see if Donald Trump follows through on his campaign pledge It's odd, I think, that we're at the point where the Democrats are now wanting to ban TikTok and Trump himself is saying he wants to save it.
But unless the Supreme Court intervenes in a way federal courts haven't thus far, and I'd be surprised if the court does, there aren't many options left to avoid this extremely damaging precedent.
All right.
So as I mentioned at the top of the show, we had our after show last night on locals and we take questions there.
And by far the most common question was from people who were wanting us to address the Supreme Court case that came to the court this week where oral argument was held that discussed the constitutionality of a law in Tennessee that banned all minors, all
all people under the age of 18 from getting what is called gender-affirming medications, particularly cross-sex hormones.
So giving, for example, estrogen to boys when they claim that they're trans women or trans girls or giving testosterone to young girls who claim that they're actually trans men.
Tennessee has banned the issuance of medication of that site for that purpose.
And the federal government, the Biden administration, and the ACLU both sued the state of Tennessee on behalf of three trans teenagers, young teenagers, who had been using cross-sex hormones to treat their gender dysphoria, claiming that it violates their constitutional rights.
The question is, for a lot of people, how can it possibly be the case?
That there's anything in the Constitution that requires states to allow minors to use cross-sex hormones for gender reassignment.
How could there possibly be anything in the Constitution that allows that, that applies to that one way or the other?
Tennessee's argument is half the states in the country permit this medication and this medical treatment, half the states don't in a democracy.
Every state should be allowed to decide for itself whether to allow it or not.
That was the argument that led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v.
Wade and Dobbs.
They didn't ban abortion in the United States.
They didn't require abortion in the United States.
They said each state has the right democratically to decide for themselves what they believe.
It's a pro-democracy decision on the grounds that there's nothing in the Constitution that limits what majorities can do.
Obviously, the point of the Constitution is to limit what majorities can do.
Even if majorities want to ban criticism of Joe Biden, even if 80% of the people are in favor of that and legislatures vote in favor of that, the Constitution doesn't let them do that because there's a free speech clause in the Constitution.
But the argument of Tennessee is we democratically decided that we think these treatments are dangerous even if the parents support them.
And there's then again the Constitution that bans us.
And the argument from the United States government and from the ACLU about why the Constitution doesn't allow this is the following.
Under the Equal Protection Clause, the government, federal government, state governments, are banned from discriminating against people on the basis of certain immutable characteristics, one of which is sex.
Now, there are permissible uses where these same medications, estrogen and testosterone and other hormonal medications, can be administered to minors.
There are medical disorders where boys have a deficiency of testosterone or girls a deficiency of estrogen or some other conditions where estrogen for girls or testosterone for boys will improve or enable them to treat various medical conditions.
So the argument of the ACLU and the US government was this is discrimination based on sex.
Because only boys are allowed to take estrogen, but girls aren't.
Only girls are allowed to take estrogen, but boys aren't.
And so it's the kind of sex discrimination that the Constitution was designed to prohibit.
And of course, Tennessee's argument was, boys and girls are treated exactly equally.
You're allowed to use these hormones for other medical conditions.
What you're not allowed to use them for is gender reassignment or dysmorphia or for gender-affirming care.
You're not allowed, whether you're boy or girl, to take the opposing, the opposite-sex hormone.
That was the argument of Tennessee.
It seemed very much like the sixth...
Justices on that Supreme Court were going to rule in favor of Tennessee.
They don't think there's anything in the Constitution that bars Tennessee from doing this.
Sounds like the three liberal judges based on oral argument are going to rule against Tennessee and say that this is sex discrimination.
It's often difficult to know from oral argument, even when you think you're so clear, other things could happen.
So it's not 100% the guarantee, but it seems like that's the likely outcome.
So that's the case.
The question, though, is how did we get to the point where a gay and lesbian movement that began being called the gay and lesbian movement at some point took on the B for bisexual and then at some point later on took on the T and became the LGBT movement and now the LGBT AI plus Q movement, whatever.
Mix of those that you prefer.
How did it get to the point where, for decades, the basis and principle of this movement was adults have the right to make decisions about their own life, and whatever...
In the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s, when this was being actively debated, opponents of gay rights or same-sex marriage would raise the issue of children.
The argument was immediately the same from advocates of this movement, which is we have nothing to do with children.
It's not about children.
We're not talking about children.
We're talking about adults.
Adults who have the right to love who they want, to spend their lives who they want, to conduct their own private lives how they want without the government making it illegal or telling them with whom and with whom they cannot share their life, with whom they can and cannot enjoy equal legal rights.
And that was always the basis for the argument was adult autonomy.
I remember this movement.
I participated in it from the time that I was politically active.
Obviously, it was an important part of my life, and that was always the central animating principle.
And suddenly, over the last few years, we've gotten to the point where this movement that had always denied it had any interest in children and only had interest in adults didn't just switch from Same-sex couples and the equality of same-sex marriages to trans issues providing housing and employment rights to trans people to make sure they're not discriminated
against, that they have the right as adults to be treated with dignity and Respect, as all American adults do, who aren't breaking the law.
It wasn't even that they switched to that.
They specifically went to an area that was very obviously going to produce an enormous amount of backlash.
And for which there was very little popular support, which is the right of quote-unquote trans kids.
Beginning at first with...
Post-pubescent teenagers, 16, 17, moving back to early post-pubescent teenagers, 13, 14, now going to pre-pubescent children, talking about therapies of gender reassignment for kids who are 8 or 7 or 6. And the question is, how did we get here?
So, I want to look at this question from a different perspective for the moment than looking at the LGBT movement.
I want to look at something the Anti-Defamation League did today because, for me, it is extremely similar in terms of the institutional dynamics that cause these kinds of advocacy groups to engage in this sort of advocacy, seemingly designed to always insist That they're facing bigotry and discrimination, almost generating it on their own by taking the most extreme and unpopular positions.
The ADL on December 4th, just a couple of days ago, issued a press release that claimed the following.
Jewish Americans and Israeli Americans face discrimination in the job market.
So they're claiming that Jewish Americans are systematically discriminated against when it comes to employment in the United States, as are Israeli Americans.
3,000 email inquiries were sent to job postings between the United States between May and October of 2024. All inquiries were sent from applicants whose names were chosen to be, quote, female-sounding, specifically Kristen Miller, Western European, Rebecca Cohen, Jewish, and Leah Avram, Israeli.
Each posting was sent a single inquiry from a single applicant, which is randomly assigned.
This random assignment resulted in observation counts of 1,036, 1,002, and 962 for the controlled Jewish and Israeli treatments respectively.
All applicants had identical resumes that were tailored for the city in which they were applying by changing the name of the institution from which they received their degree to the name of a nearby public university of solid academic reputation.
Across specifications, we see that both the Jewish and the Israelis treatments experienced a decrease in positive response rates relative to the control.
These differences are statistically significant across all three models from For example, in the baseline model, we see that relative to control, the Jewish treatment experiences a 3.4 percentage point lower positive response rate, while the Israeli treatment receives a 4.9 percent point lower.
And it essentially goes on to say that this means that both American Jews and Americans with Israeli names are being discriminated against in the marketplace.
Now, you can obviously easily see a similar study Being conducted by, say, an African American group, the NAACP, that sends out Applications and claims that they're using white names for one and then very recognizable black names for another and claiming that the response rate was different.
You could see it for Latino groups.
You could see it for LGBT groups that are indicating in some way on the application.
Some people are heterosexual.
Some people are gay or bisexual or transgender.
You can basically Manufacturer narratives of discrimination using any sort of thing that you want.
But just using common sense for the moment.
For anybody who lives in the United States, do you actually believe, based on your own experience, your own observations, that American Jews have difficulty getting jobs, that American Jews are actually being systemically excluded from the job market, that American Jews have difficulty accessing jobs, sectors of elite ruling class institutions.
American Jews can't get jobs on Wall Street or in law firms or in Hollywood or in the music industry or in media or in academia.
Is that something that resonates with you?
Is that a belief that you...
Can really embrace?
Do you actually believe that?
That to be an American Jew means that you have some sort of huge or significant systemic impediment to getting hired?
It's laughable.
The idea that, oh yes, we need to create a movement.
We need to finally combat the discrimination that American Jews face that prevent them from getting jobs in institutions of power centers.
It was true in American history that Jews, like an endless number of groups, black people, the Irish, Italians, Latinos, Muslims, have had Experiences before where there were certain industries that they could not get hired.
And I think I told this story before, but when I got out of law school, there were a lot of law firms, the leading law firms with very WASP-y names, very kind of blue-blood, white-shoe firms, they were called.
And then there were law firms with almost entirely Jewish names, and that was a byproduct of the fact that in the 40s and 50s, and even into the 60s, Jewish law students graduating from law school, even the top of their class, couldn't get hired by these WASP firms.
There was a discriminatory barrier that prevented them, and as a result, a lot of leading firms now have all Jewish names.
This problem no longer exists.
You see an enormous number of Jews at these white shoe law firms and vice versa, but it was a byproduct of that.
So it is true that it existed before.
But anybody who lives in the United States understands, and certainly American Jews understand, that the idea that there's some systemic discriminatory barrier to American Jews entering the workforce, especially compared to other minority groups,
like Muslims or Latinos or black people, and go down the line, Haitians, Mexicans, That somehow this is an actual problem, but if you're the ADL,
the Anti-Defamation League, a group that exists to combat discrimination against Jewish people, what you need to constantly find, even if it means creating it yourself, is anti-Semitism, is discrimination against Jewish people, because if you admit that there's no longer discrimination against Jewish people in the United States, what is the purpose any longer of your organization?
Why should people continue to donate tens of millions of dollars?
Why should you as the executive director continue to get five or six or seven hundred thousand dollars a year in salary on top of the influence that it bestows on you, all these offices and these groups and these projects?
They require a narrative that says we are facing systemic hostility that's unfair and discriminatory in nature, racist in nature essentially.
And it's why you see every other group doing the same.
That represents a straight minority group.
They have to continuously insist that they're facing great resistance.
And if they're not, they better develop an agenda that provokes resistance because otherwise they'll have no more purpose.
They can just close up shop and everyone can go home.
We covered at the time one of the most ridiculous examples of this, which was back in January, where the ADL actually issued a statement claiming that Jews were insufficiently represented, were underrepresented in Hollywood, that Jews are underrepresented in Hollywood, that diversity efforts That had been created in Hollywood don't include enough Jews.
And the ADL was demanding more opportunities for Jewish people in Hollywood.
That's how far these groups are willing to go to ensure that they have some cause.
We covered this at the time because I honestly couldn't believe it.
The New York Times, January 9th, Jewish group assails Film Academy's diversity efforts.
Quote, an open letter signed by notable actors and producers criticized the organization for not including Jews as an underrepresented group as part of a new initiative.
Thankfully, we're finally at the point in the United States.
Where the decades-long problem that American Jews are excluded from Hollywood and the entertainment industry is finally being addressed thanks to the ADL. Make sure to go online and give them a big donation for combating the plague, the American plague, the notorious American plague that Jews are excluded from the entertainment industry.
This is the sort of institutional dynamic that I'm talking about.
Now, the ACLU has largely gone from a free speech organization to one that is overwhelmingly focused on these kinds of left liberal social issues, particularly trans issues.
They have a gigantic trans program at the ACLU. They can't have that gay and lesbian project anymore.
They used to, but they can't anymore because those issues were all one.
But you still want checks from Gay Americans, many of whom are quite rich.
The Treasury Secretary that Donald Trump just nominated is a gay man married to another man who is a billionaire.
There are a lot of those.
And it's a reason why the Democratic Party has become so focused on LGBT advocacy because it has become a major source of fundraising.
There's a lot of discretionary money among gay Americans in the United States and they use that money to ensure that their agenda is served.
And the ACLU has made a lot of money converting itself into a trans rights organization.
And so here was their press release when they went before the Supreme Court in that case I just referenced in Tennessee, challenging Tennessee's right to ban cross-sex hormones for minors.
The Supreme Court adjourns oral argument in historic transgender rights hearing.
Families, advocates, faith leaders, members of Congress, and more rally outside the court in support of transgender people's freedoms to be ourselves.
Back in 2023, the NAACP, which obviously has a similar institutional mandate, compulsion, To insist that black people face systemic racism in the United States actually issued a travel advisory warning We're good to
and issues a travel advisory saying it's unsafe to go to that country, like there's probably a travel advisory right now from the State Department about traveling to Syria or to Lebanon.
The NAACP actually issued a travel advisory trying to convince black Americans that it would be unsafe for them to visit the state of Florida.
No going to Miami, no going to Orlando, no taking your kids to Disney World.
Too dangerous.
Ron DeSantis is the governor.
And he has somehow put black Americans into danger.
For the longest time, the leading D.C. advocate groups representing, purporting to represent gay Americans, LGBTs, were focused overwhelmingly on the cause of gay and lesbian rights, same-sex couples.
And that was an issue that was won when the Supreme Court in 2015, in the Oberfeld case, Ruled that it was unconstitutional to deny same sex couples the same exact right as all other as opposite sex couples have.
That was the culmination of the what had already been the Successful trend of winning the decades-old culture war argument about gay and lesbian Americans.
Hear from the Human Rights Campaign, which is one of the largest, in fact, the largest and most lucrative LGBT group, advocacy group, from June of 2023. Quote, for the first time ever, Human Rights Campaign officially declares a state of an emergency.
For LGBTQ plus Americans, issues a national warning and guidebook to ensure the safety for LGBTQ plus residents and travelers.
Today, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbian, gay, and bisexual, and transgender and queer LGBTQ plus civil rights organization, officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ plus people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ plus legislative assault sweeping state houses this year.
A new report released by HRC Today Does this align or comport with any of your experiences?
That it has become increasingly dangerous?
To be an LGBT citizen in the United States to the point where you now need travel advisories and warnings about traveling within the United States because your physical safety might be in danger.
All that has happened over the last 30 or 40 years is a rapid increase in the number of Americans Who are fully accepting of and supportive of full-scale legal rights not just for gay and lesbian couples but LGBTs in particular in general including trans adults.
But if you're the human rights campaign and you need to keep manipulating and encouraging and scaring your donors to donate more and more money to you And there's been all kinds of financial scandals about the people at these organizations spending enormous sums on completely unnecessary luxury travel to Europe and a whole bunch of other things.
They're awash in money.
And the reason is because they somehow have to, every year, stand up and say, no, things have gotten worse.
You're more unsafe.
You need us more than ever to protect you.
It's what the NAACP does.
It's what the ACLU does.
And it's what the Anti-Defamation League does.
It's what all of these organizations institutionally are compelled to do.
The issue of trans rights really was not controversial or debated at all until very recently.
And it's not because trans people suddenly emerged.
Trans people have been in the United States for a long time.
And in fact, there are a lot of cases of adult trans people fighting for their rights, fighting to participate in even professional sports leagues.
Trans people have been very visible for a long time.
Very few people were bothered by it because, in general, the ethos in the United States is, I have enough to worry about in my own life.
I'm really not that interested in controlling or punishing what other adults do with their lives.
Obviously, not everybody shares that sentiment, but that is a live-and-let-live libertarian sentiment that, especially in the last 20 to 30 years, has really prevailed, especially on these kind of questions.
The problem for LGBT groups is that in 2015 they won.
They won their agenda.
From the New York Times, Supreme Court ruling makes same-sex marriage a right nationwide.
And then on top of that you have poll numbers showing huge acceptance of Gay men and lesbians, LGBTs in general, not just from the leftist or liberals, but from young conservatives overwhelmingly who were in favor of same-sex marriage.
Probably worth remembering that the first national politician in the United States to ever explicitly advocate in favor of the rights of same-sex couples was Dick Cheney when he was running for vice president.
Back in 2000, when in the debate that he had with the Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, 12 years before Obama and Hillary did it, came out and advocated for the rights of same-sex couples based on this libertarian principle that we have no business controlling the adult lives of other people.
Very little pushback.
They won that election.
At least they tied it.
Dick Cheney became vice president.
Probably said that because he had a daughter, has a daughter, who is a lesbian and is in a same-sex relationship, but whatever.
It shows how much progress has been made, how little people really care about what adults do.
There has been not just trans adults in the United States, but controversies over trans rights for a long time.
Here, all the way back in 1977, in the New York Times, Renee Richards was a trans woman, She previously was a ophthalmological surgeon prior to her transition,
the father of two children, a quarterback, a military veteran, and also an amateur tennis player who never really advanced in the professional ranks, maybe got to number four or five hundred.
At the age of around 35, she transitioned, became Renee Richards, and she wanted to play on the women's tour.
And she sued in court and the court ruled in her favor and she became a woman's professional player.
She was actually able to get up to number 20 in the world, even at this advanced age.
And then ultimately Renee Richards became very famous because she was hired as the coach of the tennis star Martina Navratilova.
And Martina Navratilova would end up in the finals of every major tournament on every major network.
Every weekend, and they would say, oh, and there in her box is her coach, Dr. Renee Richards, formerly Richard Raskin.
Nobody cared.
It just wasn't an issue.
Why would people care?
There's probably some judgment.
I'm sure there was, but in general, this was not a big deal.
It really didn't become a big deal, trans issues, until...
These LGBT groups, even when they pivoted to trans issues after they won everything with gay and lesbian rights, started advocating for trans adults, polls showed that people were generally supportive.
If you advocate for the right of trans adults to live their lives, to access medication, to have surgeries, To be protected in employment and housing, you'll get overwhelming support from Americans.
So that was a problem for these LGBT groups.
You can't win.
You have to make sure that you're losing.
You have to be able to say, look at this bigotry we're confronting.
And so they pushed into the exact areas that provoke the most amount of resistance.
Which mostly involves the issue of whether Children can socially transform in schools without their parents' knowledge and whether they can access experimental medication.
I just want to quickly add that a lot of these medications were pioneered by very left-wing progressive countries such as Sweden and Denmark and Norway and Holland.
And those are the countries that first started giving puberty blockers to people questioning their gender identity and they've since reversed themselves based on the conclusion that these medications don't have any long-term data about safety.
There's serious questions about damage that it might do.
You can't accuse these countries of being transphobic.
They were the pioneers in the attempt to give access even to adolescents and minors to gender-affirming care that have now reversed themselves.
So why is it that these advocacy groups ended up prioritizing children?
The one issue that LGBT groups always said that they were not interested in, not focused on, not involved with...
It's the same reason that the NAACP issues a travel advisory warning to Florida absurdly claiming that black Americans are endangered if they travel to Florida or the ADL tries to claim that they're combating underrepresentation of Jews in the entertainment industry or that Jews face some sort of problem with systemic discrimination worse than other groups when it comes to job opportunities in the United States.
It's because these groups have to constantly find a victimhood narrative Or else they cease to exist.
And if they can't find a victimhood narrative they will provoke it.
By doing exactly the sorts of things that they know that will provoke what otherwise would be public support for their agenda so that they continue to claim that there's a rationale, a cause for their organization, for their salaries, for their donors, for their offices and so much of advocacy by these advocacy groups is about exactly that.
All right, last week we talked about the debut of our new series System Pup Date, which is mostly designed to end our week, the last day of our show, which is typically Friday. the last day of our show, which is typically Friday.
The last episode, the last segment of our show.
a few minutes.
In a more uplifting way, but also the idea of it is that, as you probably know, we have a...
Rescuing dogs is a very important part of my family's life.
We've been doing it for a long time.
We have a huge number of rescue dogs in our house, more than two dozen.
And then finally, just to avoid becoming completely a crazy hoarder family, we opened up a...
Shelter for dogs.
So there's about another 150 or 60 dogs there.
We've talked about that before.
It employs homeless people who live on the streets with their dogs.
One of the things that I've learned over the years is that every time you rescue a dog, it's a completely different experience.
The dog is different.
The dog reacts differently.
The trajectory of the dog is different.
The personality of the dog is different, but also how it affects you is so different.
The effect that it has on you, the relationship that it creates between you and your dog is different.
And so what we decided to do was highlight each week a different dog, either a rescue dog, at Our house or one at the shelter that and sort of tell narrate their rescue history and what their story is.
So last week we started with Sylvester who's known to a lot of people at our after show since we always have dogs who sort of serve as co-hosts for our after show and Sylvester did until he passed away just a couple months ago.
And this second dog the star of this new episode is Toby also known to The viewers of our after show since he appears there quite frequently.
He has a very intense and quite an amazing rescue story and here it is.
Toby has one of the more interesting rescue stories of almost any dog that we have.
It was probably 12 or 13 years ago.
My husband David, we lived near the woods at the time, near this forest.
And it was not uncommon to find dogs in the middle of the forest because a lot of people who didn't want dogs or who had a relative who died and they didn't want to take care of their dog would drop them off in the middle of the forest.
Even though that's the worst place for a dog to be because they It can't be found by humans.
It's hard for them to eat, especially if they're domesticated.
But a lot of people do it for the most ignoble reason, which is they think they can do it without anyone seeing them.
And so there's a lot of dogs that get dropped off there, abandoned.
And when David found Toby and brought him home, I honestly never seen a dog.
Maybe we had one other dog in the many years that we rescued.
More emaciated and closer to death than Toby was.
I didn't think it was possible for a dog to be as emaciated as he was and still be alive.
I mean, you could see his spine protruding.
You could see every single one of his ribs.
I mean, to say that he had no fight on his body is an extreme understatement.
He really couldn't walk.
He was full of every single blood disease, every anemia, every Tick and flea disease that's known.
I mean, he was very close to death, maybe like two days or a day away from dying.
And right when David brought him home, I mean, that was our big worry was he wasn't going to survive because he was immediately So affectionate, so friendly.
He had obviously been around humans before.
Also, he's kind of a weird mixed poodle, so he's a very intelligent dog.
They're among the most intelligent breeds, and he knew what was going on.
He was oriented.
He just was so sick.
And it was very sad to watch.
We had to take him to the vet for all kinds of treatments that were very long-term treatments.
And I would say it took about six months for him to get anywhere near to be a healthy dog, where he could run around, where he could Play, where he, you know, just was eating a normal diet, where he was off medication.
And what's amazing is he wasn't even a puppy when we picked him up.
He was already an adult dog.
Maybe, like, I consider a puppy to be anything from just born to about a year and a half.
And he might have been about a year and a half or two years.
He was definitely a young adult dog, maybe like an adolescent dog, but he was not a puppy at all.
So we don't know exactly how old he was.
This was, I guess, 13 years now.
So he's at least 13, probably 14, and he's an incredibly healthy dog.
And the thing about Toby is that there's, and this is true of a lot of dogs that you rescue who are in the worst conditions possible, It's often times when you rescue them and they're in the worst possible situation, as he was.
He couldn't find any food, obviously.
Even if he did eat something, his body couldn't process it.
They become the most loyal dogs, like the most emotionally connected dogs, the most devoted dogs.
I mean, look at him.
Just feel affection.
He doesn't immediately love every new human, but for the humans that he loves, that he knows, he's about as affectionate of a dog as you can possibly get.
He is kind of bullied by the other dogs.
He's not a fighter, and the other dogs know that, so it's not uncommon to see him having to hide in a corner or to get on his back and show his stomach.
To pretty much every dog, even the weaker ones here, I don't think I've ever seen him bully a dog.
He only gets bullied.
But every dog here is very accustomed to him because he's one of the older dogs.
Dogs kind of respect age.
He's one of those dogs who's just very domestic.
He just wants to sleep with you.
He just wants to sit with you.
And the weird thing about him is, I'm going to try and show you this, he has one of the most human faces.
Everybody says this.
Not just me, not just our family.
The minute people see him, they're like, wow, he has very human eyes.
I think this shows two important things.
Number one is that A lot of times when you rescue dogs who are actually in not good shape and you nurse them back to health and you give them the things they need, they know that and they pay back in extra amounts of love and loyalty and affection.
The other issue is because he wasn't a puppy, people think, oh, if you get a dog when they're already adults, the connection won't be as strong because they're not with you since puppyhood.
This is a complete fiction.
And one of the problems is that a lot of shelters have older dogs.
A lot of times it's very difficult to get them adopted.
That's true in our shelter as well because people usually want puppies.
The thing is, not everybody is equipped to have a puppy.
Puppies are a lot of work.
You have to train them.
They are very destructive.
Obviously they're adorable, but they will...
They'll eat anything that is in their way.
They'll destroy expensive carpets and furniture.
We have a new puppy here and I can't even express how much he's destroyed in his short time here.
And that's true of every puppy.
So a lot of people who want like the companionship of a dog but don't really want to have to deal with a lot of problems would be actually be way better served by getting an adult dog.
And there's this myth That if you get an adult dog, they're not gonna love you as much or they're somehow not gonna be as much a part of your life or your story.
They're gonna have a part of their story that you're never gonna know.
That may be true, but adult dogs, for a lot of people, I would actually recommend that they get adult dogs if they're older, if they don't have a ton of energy to take care of puppies, to train puppies, if they don't know how to train puppies, if they don't want to deal with all the destruction.
Toby is the perfect example of that.
I mean, we got him when he was an adult, albeit a young adult.
We've had other dogs we've gotten as older adults where we don't even know nearly how old they are, and it's the same thing.
It's very gratifying to get a dog that was in the shape that he was in, nurse them back to health, And then watch them live this incredibly long and fulfilled life.
