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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a host of topics including Florida's passing of the Parental Rights in Education bill, which is hellbent on going back to an era when homosexuality was treated as a disease. They also discuss the right wing embrace of American funded bio weapons labs in Ukraine, allowing them to justify Putin's incursion.
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It's time for The Weekender, and I'm here with my friend, my co-host, my partner, Nick Hausman.
Nick, how's this week treated you?
It was my anniversary yesterday.
Congrats!
Thank you.
That's wonderful.
So you had a little slice of heaven while the rest of us had a slice of hell.
Oh, you know, let me put it this way.
My daughter, who's a senior in high school, made us a four-course dinner consisting of some incredible salad, incredible soup, and beef wellington.
Wow, that's an impressive try there.
Have you ever had Beef Wellington?
No, but I hear it's wonderful.
She should be a chef in a restaurant.
I'm telling you, she from scratch put the dough around the meat and cooked it all together.
I had some leftovers today.
That was the best meal I've had in a long time.
Incredible.
Well, I'm glad you had a good week because America and liberal democracy had a terrible week.
You know, this is how we get through this is we have to find the little things.
To celebrate.
I walked in the store and got a Coke.
The sun was out and I kind of walked around the corner and drank a Coke on the way back.
And it was, for a minute there, all was good.
It felt normal for a minute.
Well, that's nice.
Well, let's talk about how the world is collapsing around us.
Don't worry, all.
We have to get to the worsening tragedy in Ukraine.
but we're going to start today for the weekender talking about the good old United States of America where good old governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis is, Nick, he's having himself a time.
He really, really is.
I think he's enjoying it.
I think he is too.
I think he is a real sicko.
And so we have a lot that's going down in Florida where DeSantis is definitely staking his claim to leadership of this repugnant Republican Party.
We've had a couple things pass in the past couple of days that are moving America closer and closer to this neo-fascistic illiberalism that We have to address if we're going to get away from this crisis.
We, of course, are looking at the now infamous Don't Say Gay Bill, the Parental Rights and Education Bill, which is about demonizing gay people and trans people and allowing the parents of Florida to sue school systems and teachers that they find offensive.
And also further stigmatizing people who are already marginalized, harassed, and completely demeaned on a regular basis.
Well, you know, full disclosure, I taught in the public school system for several years.
You know, the youngest I did, I think, was seventh grade at some point, but mostly high school.
But, you know, here's my, the first reaction I did have was, it's unclear to me how the, what they're so upset about even gets kind of brought up in kindergarten through third grade.
In a way that, like, it doesn't, it's almost like the CRT thing.
CRT isn't happening, but they want to legislate it out anyway.
The boogeyman has to be removed legislatively.
But I have a feeling that if we dig a little bit deeper we can kind of realize how this bill could actually affect day-to-day life even at that young age.
What do you think?
Well, you know, it's a lot like this, um, another thing that DeSantis has pushed, which is very neo-fascistic, which is this elections police force, right?
Which is supposedly, and it answers directly to him because, wonderful.
And it's going out and it's looking at what you and I have talked about, uh, repeatedly, which is a completely made up problem.
The idea that there's just voter fraud everywhere that, that needs taken in and elections are being stolen.
It's not true.
It's using the illusion of an issue to create a solution that benefits the people creating the solution.
In this case, it's not just Republicans winning cultural wars, but of course it's also these very, very wealthy people using think tanks to create these bills.
Not a surprise that these bills are being pushed in red states and leaning red states, including Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
These are being pushed to continue to attack public education.
Oh, rub some of these schools.
They're really hoping for that in the process.
But it also takes something which is really disgusting.
And it turns it into this sort of weaponized attack.
So, as you undoubtedly were in public school at some point, right, and you were in these grades or whatever, it says that you're not allowed to create a curriculum, you're not allowed to teach lessons that bring in sexual identity, right?
That bring in who kids are.
And they're like, well, you know, this is only to protect young children.
Well, I don't know if you remember this, but kids figure themselves out pretty quickly.
And kids get targeted.
Kids get bullied.
And the reason why that happens is because they have been marginalized.
They've been made to not be able to express themselves, know what's going on.
This takes away any ability whatsoever for a teacher or an educator or an administrator to, I don't know, tell a kid, you know what, like, we're going to protect you.
We're going to make sure you're not going to get bullied.
You're not going to get marginalized or stigmatized.
Which, by the way, you have to spend the rest of your life in therapy dealing with.
It leads to addiction.
It leads to suicide.
It leads to God knows how many terrible things.
And it continues to tell kids at their youngest age that there's something wrong with these people, that they need to be targeted, that they're not like you.
And what it's doing is it's creating this really pressurized, violent environment that puts these kids at risk and also puts the educators at risk.
It's almost a Trojan horse of a situation that creates a solution that is in itself a weapon.
Fair enough.
And even more specifically, you know, I'm sure between K through 3, there will be plenty of opportunities where they'll say, well, you know, draw a picture of your family and then identify the people.
And it could very well be that you might have two dads or two moms and all of a sudden you have to then send that kid out of the room or throw away his paper, her paper, their paper.
It's it's a that that alone becomes an interesting issue already That will come up a lot I think and you know, that's a very important developmental part of the educational process is is that kind of assignment?
Well, and I got to tell you places like Texas have already shown us where all of this is going You know and and I want to point out before we talk about what Texas is doing and what's what's taking shape in all these red states This is a group And we know this, Nick.
They have spent the God knows how many decades now telling us that what are they against?
Tyrannical government.
Overreaching government.
They want to be in your house.
They want to take your guns.
They want to tell you what to do and how to feel and how to worship and all this stuff.
And all that was bullshit.
It was just a simple lie to try and take on Democrats and take over power because what do Republicans like to do with government?
They like to get in your lives.
They like to tell you what to do, how to live, where to go, what to eat, everything.
They love it.
They can't get enough of it.
In Texas, they've already floated this idea of investigating parents, investigating families, going into these places because the thing that's getting ready to take place here And we'll get more into this in just a moment, but I want to go ahead and put the marker down.
They're turning this into, if your kid is gay, if your kid is trans, if they come from a family that has gay people in it, trans people in it, they're going to start saying this is sexual abuse.
They're going to start saying that these are markers of mental illness.
And it hasn't been so long since, you know, gay people were considered mentally ill and treated that way by psychologists.
This is trying to roll back the clock, trying to get state into the business of the family, and all of this is a precursor.
It says, something's wrong with you.
Something is wrong here, and as a result, because it's wrong, there's a danger.
And these authoritarian reactionary regimes have, for years, gone in and taken kids away from their families, put them with other families, they've gone in and arrested people.
This is just a precursor to a lot of really bad stuff.
Let's take a step back for one second because there's something about public schools that triggers conservatives.
And it's been that way for a long, long time.
So whether it's CRT, whether it's masks, whether it's this.
Whether it's black students studying with white students.
I mean, you know, let's call it what it is.
Exactly.
And so I did a little, not a deep dive, but a little dive into the history of public education in America, in the United States, because I was curious exactly what, where this comes from and what the evolution is.
And are you aware of what the Founding Fathers' view of public education was when they were constructing this democracy?
They actually thought it was going to be a really good thing because it was a way to educate the masses so they could be part of a democracy.
Can real fast, and I love that you brought this up, because this is the thing that people have to understand.
The founding fathers were liberals, and they're liberals in the sense of like an ideology, not in terms of liberals, you know, conservatives as we think of it now.
They believed that they alone were smart enough to make decisions in government.
They believed that the rest of us were just a bunch of, you know, idiots who couldn't figure it out.
But they believed that public education, over time, would prepare us for the rigors of liberal democracy.
This is part of the reason why they look down on certain groups, say this group deserves to vote, this group doesn't.
But you're exactly right.
Their entire plan for the longest time, like Plato's cave, And meanwhile, no one actually got all the way through high school up until recently.
from the cave of ignorance.
That's exactly what public education was supposed to be. - And meanwhile, no one actually got all the way through high school up until recently, right?
I think the numbers I found were up until like 1970, only 70% of the population would even finish high school.
Now it's like 90 some percent.
It's a lot higher.
People actually are expected to do that, but imagine that.
And also, the Founding Fathers didn't feel like, I don't think reading, writing, and arithmetic were the big three R's.
They also wanted to make sure that there was ethics, and government understanding, and rhetoric, whatever that even means from back then.
So, they definitely had this notion, we're going to plant some seeds, and it's going to grow, and it will make the democracy stronger.
Doesn't that sort of play right into this narrative where the Republicans clearly aren't interested in democracy.
And so they don't want what was planted and what was growing to actually come to fruition.
It makes a lot of sense to me there.
And then you can reverse engineer from that perspective why so many of these things are triggering to them.
Health forms, by the way.
There's something about health forms they really don't like.
It's in this thing a couple times and I suspect that they're, and I was wondering what you think about this, is like what about these health screening forms are so triggering that they have to put them in there and basically the notion of the parents must be notified of whatever is on there at any time.
To me, just real quickly, it seems to me that there must be discussions that like even later, you know, in the high school level with, you know, counselors and students about things like sexuality or their identity and maybe there are times when those counselors are saying you can talk to me I can help you this is a private conversation and these parents can't handle that and they need to somehow have some legal you know compulsion for these counselors to have to tell them everything that they heard Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I think a lot about, I don't know if you ever watch Mad Men, but it's a lot like, you know, where Don Draper back in the 1960s would call up his wife's psychologist in order to get, you know, the report on what she said in her meetings, because it's about dominion, right?
It's about who has control over who.
And in all of this, there's actually a lot that's playing out which is psychological.
For those of you in our audience who are around my age, you probably remember the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, right?
This time period where, like, a bunch of kids were going into daycare, and they were talking about, like, oh my god, they're being sexually abused left and right, and oh my god, there are Satanists in there, and they're doing rituals, and we had even in, even on, like, MSNBC, even on NBC, there were stories about witch covens, and Flying through the air and mystical arts and all of this.
Well, all that was was fear that other people were taking care of your kids.
You didn't have control over them, right?
Because at that point, everybody was starting to have to have a job.
You couldn't just have a one-wage household at that point.
What Republicans are trying to do is they're trying to roll back the power of public education, first of all, so they can open it up to privatization, right?
They want to go ahead and make probably a trillion dollars off of this thing.
That's what their funders want more than anything.
But it's also about white supremacy.
They do want to go back to a segregated type of schooling.
And part of that is, you have the upper crust who deserve to learn things, right?
And meanwhile, you have everyone down here.
They don't need to learn.
They just need to go into the factories and they can use their little hands to, you know, go into the gears and stuff before they die at the age of 10, which is part of what's happened here.
Liberalism said that public education should come in and lift everybody up and educate them, right?
And actually get them ready for what happens in life.
The conservatives didn't want that.
They wanted the kids in factories.
And I gotta tell you that national conservativism with their push right now in terms of how they want families to work, industry to work, they want to roll that back.
That's why I tell everyone who will listen, you're going to see these bans on child labor go away.
And when you're in these conferences and stuff and you're hearing these speeches by everybody from Newt Gingrich down, They're constantly telling you they want to put your kids to work.
They want to get rid of childhood.
They want to get rid of any freedom that the individual could possibly have and put it back within the family.
Where?
Who's king, Nick?
It's the man.
But wait a minute.
Is it so insane to take a position that the parents should have a role in what their kids are learning?
It isn't insane to think that parents should have some sort of a knowledge of what their kids are learning, but that's what you find out at dinner after school.
You ask what's going on, and if suddenly you start hearing some weird, like, insane stuff, maybe you ask more questions.
But I have to tell you, it's not the next generation that's asking about this.
They know about it.
They're on the internet, which by the way is another reason why they want to go after these tech companies.
They want to make sure that kids aren't looking at TikTok and learning what transgenderism actually is and what these disorders in terms of anxiety.
That's a big thing they don't want.
They don't want kids learning about anxiety.
They don't want kids learning about neurodiversity.
They don't want any of that, right?
They want to take their kids and make them go and get an experience that they control.
But that generation doesn't want this.
They know what's going on.
This is the same conservative bullshit we always see, which is pushing back against the tide.
It just so happens.
Now they've got control of the levers of power.
And they're going for it, right?
It's not just talking.
It's not just whatever.
Like, we're seeing an actual crossroads moment where they're going to push back and they're going to try and make this happen.
Right.
Now, the interesting thing about this is your kid goes to public school for free and you discover they're teaching something you don't like.
Well, the reasonable response would be like, fine, I'm taking my kid out of the school.
Or go meet with the teacher.
One or the other.
Or go have a conversation with the teacher.
Yeah.
Because now what this bill wants to do is you have to file a formal complaint and if they don't deal with it within 30 days, someone has to come in who's a lawyer and basically you're going to be awarded reparations by the court out of this.
This becomes very quickly a legal proceeding versus any kind of discussion about what's happening here.
I think the other triggering thing... By the way, I want to point out real fast while you're talking about that legal proceeding.
What it's doing, Nick, is it's creating a road, right?
It opens a road, and what happens when you open a road?
People use it, right?
All of a sudden now, you have parents suing school districts and teachers, and guess what?
Some of this stuff, it's either going to be answered by a committee that's going to be put together by the same Republican politicians who passed this in the first place, or judges.
And by the way, Nick, How, what side of the spectrum do most judges fall on, really?
Oh, pretty conservative.
They're usually pretty conservative.
So what you're going to see here is it's going to be yet another weaponized path that the right can use to try and stem back progress.
So it's about opening that road that people will undoubtedly drive down.
Right.
And it's interesting because when I was in college, I remember the gay society was called the 10% society because 10% of the student body were gay.
We can say that.
So the point being that I think that that number has grown and I think the reason why it's grown is because the stigma has been wearing away over time.
It's always been more than that.
Right.
So, fair enough.
It's been more than that, but you're right.
So, as a result, I think you start to realize and you're looking around that this is what's happening.
Kids today, at least in the big cities, and by the way, again, this is all if you live in a big city.
If you don't, you're still going to have the same problems we've had for hundreds of years about being gay, I think.
But, the point being that overall, what I feel like they're trying to do, both in Texas and in Florida, Is the threat of these states becoming blue is so great to them that they are doing anything they possibly can to get as many, you know, Democrats out of their state.
They want to get Democrat voters.
And I think people kind of took me to task on Twitter a few weeks ago when I brought this up, but I can't help but think this is what they're trying to do.
Certainly in Texas, where it's a purple state and it looks like it's going to turn blue and it's almost inevitable, like these are the desperate times that these governors will do.
Who would want to live there if you're progressive?
If you have a kid who's gay and you are facing possible, you know, your kid being taken away from you, you wouldn't want to live in that state.
And that's what they're trying to do.
They have set a line of demarcation.
And one of the things you've actually seen, no state has leaned into this more than Texas.
Texas right now has made a concentrated effort to steal people from California.
Basically to bring conservatives over from California and then basically move out any sort of, you know, liberals or leftists who are within.
Because I have to tell you, as somebody who lives in a red state, it's really hard living in a red state right now.
They basically come after you in every single way, shape, and form that you could ever imagine.
Now, they are absolutely trying to rearrange the populations, but they are also preparing us for a larger situation and a larger movement.
And I want to go ahead and I want to shift this very, very quickly over to one of my favorites and yours, Nick, Laura Ingram.
How did you know?
So, speaking of Laura Ingram, You know, who, by the way, is just a real thinker, a really genuine, good person, thoughtful, caring.
And Laura Ingraham, of course, has been handling this issue with just such wonderful grace, aplomb, and empathy.
You know, recently has started using chyrons that read, liberals are sexually grooming elementary students.
And so let's just, let's see what old Laura is saying about this right now.
When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?
As a mom, I think it's appalling, it's frightening, it's disgusting, it's despicable.
Florida just passed a bill to keep this type of sexual brainwashing out of schools.
Democrats, though, claim the bill is bigoted, branding it as the Don't Say Gay Bill.
Nice try.
The real controversy, though, isn't this bill.
It's that schools are peddling gender ideology when our international rankings in math, science, and reading are down across the board.
So, what Laura Ingraham is doing here is what the Republican Party is doing.
They're taking an actual issue.
Like, we should have a cultural and political conversation, which is, how do you navigate these things, right?
So, like, over here you have somebody who, I don't know, they're Christian or whatever, and they're like, man, I don't think this is right.
Well, guess what?
This person over here who is gay, who is transgender, they have a right too.
How do you navigate society and how do you live in the same society?
That's a hard question.
Instead, what Ingram and other people like her are doing is they're now turning this into a battle between good and evil.
And it's not a coincidence, Nick.
I don't know if you're noticing right now.
This is based on QAnon principles.
It's based on conspiracy theories.
Also, I don't know.
It's also the kind of shit that Vladimir Putin likes to talk about, which is that the West and George Soros is going to come in and make your kids gay.
They're gonna make them transgender.
They're gonna come after them.
They're going to sexually assault them.
It's turning into a thing where give us all of the power.
Or else your family is endangered.
So it's not just about rolling back progress.
It's not just about ensuring states are able to do this.
This is the foundation that's being built right now in order to say we have laws which have to hold back the threat, right?
Which says we're on the side of good, they're on the side of evil.
As a result, we have to have laws against them.
So what we're doing right now is we're erecting a framework that is not just going to marginalize and target these people, but it's also going to create laws which can be used as weapons to install like illiberal democracy as opposed to liberal democracy.
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