Ep. 1322 - The Secret History Of The Evil Organization That Pushed Gender Madness Into The Mainstream
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, there is one single organization most responsible for pushing transgenderism into the mainstream. Most people don't know anything about this organization, or even that it exists. Today we'll change that. Also, White House staffers are getting increasingly frustrated when people point out that the president is senile. Oregon officially recriminalizes drugs after their decriminalization experiment epically failed. And the drag queen Ru Paul plans to send a rainbow bus around the country giving out inappropriate books to children. This story only gets more bizarre from there.
Ep.1322
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, there is one single organization most responsible for pushing transgenderism into the mainstream.
Most people don't know anything about this organization or even that it exists, and today we'll try to change that.
Also, White House staffers are getting increasingly frustrated when people point out that the president is senile, Oregon officially re-criminalizes drugs after their decriminalization experiment epically failed, and the drag queen RuPaul plans to send a rainbow bus around the country giving out inappropriate books to children.
This story only gets more bizarre from there.
All of that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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When the Sixth Circuit upheld Tennessee's ban on the chemical castration of children
last year, they singled out the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.
This is the organization that major hospitals and gender clinics cite as the all-important authority on so-called trans healthcare.
In fact, in court, the ACLU argued that WPATH's professional opinions are so important that they should overturn the will
over the overwhelming majority of voters in the state of Tennessee,
but the court was not convinced.
In its opinion, it pointed out that WPATH, by its own admission, has presented, quote,
"limited data on the long-term physical, psychological, "and neurodevelopmental outcomes that result
"from administering puberty blockers "and cross-sex hormones to children,"
in part because WPATH's data and the documentation wasn't exactly comprehensive.
The court allowed the ban on these so-called treatments to take effect.
Six months later, we now have a window into what data and documentation WPATH actually does have
in its possession, and it's not limited, as they previously said.
Instead, this internal documentation at WPATH is comprehensive evidence that so-called
gender-affirming care, quote, unquote, is an unscientific scam that ruins the lives of children
and permanently damages their bodies.
And crucially, the documents prove that WPATH knows it.
These leaked WPATH files come to us from a think tank called Environmental Progress and the independent journalist Michael Schellenberger.
Among the files is this internal communication at WPATH from a doctor concerning a 16-year-old girl who developed liver tumors, large ones, after she was given drugs to suppress menstruation as well as testosterone.
"The patient found to have two liver masses, and the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated
that the likely offending agents are the hormones."
That's a quote.
In response to that report, another doctor on the WPATH discussion forum said that one of his colleagues had developed liver cancer and died after taking testosterone for about a decade.
Quote, to the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment, the doctor wrote.
Quote, it was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later.
Now at no point in these documents does WPATH suggest that they should go public.
With these concerns, they don't immediately run to the media with their determination that cross-sex hormones could contribute to fatal liver cancer.
They don't warn anybody, as far as I can tell.
Instead, they press on with a plan to mutilate the 16-year-old girl with liver tumors and the tumors that they have apparently caused.
"We're prepared to support the patient in any way we can, e.g.
top surgery when medically stable."
Now, Goulish doesn't even begin to describe this. After concluding that they've possibly
caused tumors in a teenage girl's liver, their only concern apparently is how quickly they can
remove her breasts.
In fact, from the documents, it appears that WPATH tries to rush these procedures in general before patients can reach adulthood.
One surgeon, Christine N. McGinn, boasts that she's performed more than a dozen vaginoplasties on patients under the age of 18.
And in this context, vaginoplasty means that they are removing a child's penis and testicles and scrotum and replacing them with a non-functioning open wound.
And they're doing this to children.
The surgeon writes, quote, I feel the best time for surgery in the U.S.
is the summer before their last year of high school.
She also says many other surgeons in this community agree with her.
What makes this even more egregious, if that's even possible, is that WPATH knows that children can't provide informed consent to any of this butchery.
They admit that in these files.
Schellenberger obtained this footage showing WPATH members discussing how little patients understand about these procedures.
And parts of this video were made public last year, but Schellenberger obtained the full thing.
Here are a couple of parts of it.
Watch.
I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we're often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven't even had biology in high school yet.
And I know I've heard others in this kind of a setting say, well, we think adults are like really slick biologically.
In fact, lots of people have very little medical understanding of stuff, like that we just
put medical professionals and mental health professionals take for granted.
But I don't know still what to do for the 14 year olds.
The parents have it on their minds, but the 14 year old, you just, it's like talking with
diabetic complications with a 14 year old.
They don't care.
They're not going to die.
They're going to live forever.
Right?
So I think, I think when we're doing informed consent, I know that that's still a big lacuna.
We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to
really, really, really talk about it in a serious way.
That's always bothered me, but, you know, we still want the kids to be happier in the moment, right?
We want them to be happier in the moment.
He says, we try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of brain space to really, really, really talk about it seriously.
That's just one of the many quotes like this from WPATH members.
Here's another one, quote, it's out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.
They'll say they understand, but then they'll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn't really understand that, and they didn't really understand that they're going to have facial hair.
So these are the doctors doing this stuff, admitting that the patients they're doing it to cannot really consent to it.
Elsewhere in the files, there's a confession from a therapist that in 15 years, she's only turned down one patient for gender treatment.
And that's only because that patient was in active psychosis and was hallucinating during their interview.
There's also discussions about boys who began transitioning when they were four years old.
To understand the extent of the barbarism, you need to read the WPATH files for yourself.
I'm not going to summarize them all here, only because it would be redundant.
For now, it's important to emphasize that None of these findings are surprising.
They're unbelievably disturbing.
But there's nothing in here that would surprise anyone who's done even a cursory look into WPATH.
There's no excuse for any hospital or medical association to listen to a word WPATH says.
And that's been clear for a very long time.
Redux has done extensive work exposing the various perverts who are connected with WPath, including eunuch fetishists who post their fantasies anonymously on the internet.
These are academics who have lectured at WPath and spoken at conferences, and they're apparently sexually aroused by the idea of castrating themselves.
Imagine entrusting the care of your child to an organization that promotes people like that.
They want to castrate themselves, and they want to do the same to your child.
It's unbelievable, but the truth is that even before these kinds of people became affiliated with WPATH, the organization had no credibility.
WPATH, the organization that major hospitals and medical organizations hold up as the gold standard for trans healthcare standards, was a radical cult from the very beginning.
That's what you have to understand.
So, I'm going to recount WPATH's sordid history, because to my knowledge, no one has done it before, and you need to understand what this organization is, and to know that, you need to know where it came from.
So, the history of WPATH starts with a gender-confused, new-age, drug-addicted, lesbian rich kid named Rita Erickson, her prolific nudist friend Zelda Supley, and something called the Erickson Educational Foundation, or EEF.
Rita Erickson was born in Texas in 1917 to successful business owners named Robert and Ruth Erickson.
And with immense privilege and educational opportunities, ironically, at an all-girls school, Rita grew up to become an engineer and contributed to the continued success of her family's lead smelting business, ultimately inheriting and selling it for millions of dollars.
In 1963, after her father had passed away, Rita sought to transition into a he under the care of a quack doctor named Harry Benjamin.
Rita changed her name to Reed Erickson and became the ultimate financial force in the push for mainstream acceptance of transgenderism.
Then, in 1964, Erickson launched the EEF to, quote, provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental, or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial, or imaginative to receive traditionally-oriented support.
Well, that's one way to put it.
But despite Rita's plans to advance human potential for everybody, supposedly, her own life was falling apart.
Following the mutilation that Erickson received under the care of Dr. Benjamin, she had four failed marriages.
She developed a drug addiction and ultimately fled from California to Mexico to avoid drug charges.
had to take on a conservatorship of her estate due to her mental and physical decline.
And still, beginning around the time of Erickson's transition, and all through her decline,
the EEF pushed transgenderism and mutilation-based care of gender-confused people under the
leadership of its director, Zelda R. Supley, who was the right-hand woman to Erickson.
Now, Supley, her claim to fame was her obsession with nudity, mostly.
She owned multiple nudist camps and became the first woman to pose fully nude on the cover of Playboy.
She also did psychic research and dabbled in past-life New Age beliefs.
Under Suplee, the EEF sponsored symposiums to bring fringe doctors together.
The organization paid these doctors to travel and spread gender ideologies.
They also sponsored programs at colleges to inject transgenderism into academia.
They handed out propaganda to doctors and lawyers and police departments and social workers.
The EF even provided grants to doctors who wanted to pursue gender mutilation, contributing heavily to today's more mainstream acceptance of this butchery.
The EEF helped to bankroll the first major gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University, where Dr. John Money, an EEF board member, worked at the time.
The clinic received a reported $85,000 from the EF and that's approximately $750,000 in today's dollars.
Now the EF revered John Money, calling him a leading scholar and researcher of our time in a newsletter in 1972.
Now, what was John Money doing in 1972 to be celebrated and financed by the E.E.F.?
Well, according to Arizona State University, he became infamous for directing twin boys to, quote, inspect one another's genitals and engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse.
He also attempted to change one of the boys into a girl, a story you know if you watched What Is A Woman.
Ultimately, one of the boys shot himself in the head and the other died of a drug overdose.
The E.E.F.
suspended its operations in 1977, but not before helping fund the Janus Information Facility, or J.I.F., which overtook much of the E.E.F.' 's work.
The J.I.F.
also absorbed the nudist director of the E.E.F., Zelda Supley.
The J.I.F.
served as a referral service for gender-confused people to find fringe doctors willing to sterilize and mutilate them.
Along with Supley, it was run by the University of Texas' Dr. Paul Walker, a former Johns Hopkins colleague of Dr. John Money.
And through the late 1970s, bankrolled by the EF, the Janus Information Facility and Dr. Paul Walker led the continued push to mainstream these extreme surgeries, which were increasingly marked by patient regret, high complication rates.
In 1982, researchers at Yale and the University of Kentucky found that post-operative complications included, quote, Breast Cancer in Hormonally Treated Males, The Need for Surgical Reduction of Bloated Limbs Resulting from Hormones, Repeated Construction of Vaginal Openings, Infections of the Urinary System and Rectum, Hemorrhaging, Loss of Skin Grafts, Post-Operative Suicides and Suicide Attempts, and Patient Demands to Reverse Surgery.
Some sex change patients, the researchers reported, quote, threatened to shoot the genitals of the surgeon with a shotgun.
Now, Those are pretty bad results of this new form of surgery.
Did any of this make Erickson, Supley, Paul Walker, John Money, Harry Benjamin, or any of their other unhinged counterparts stop?
Did it give them a moment of hesitation?
No, they doubled down.
In 1979, the EF-funded symposia led to the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which took over from the JIF.
And it was chaired by Dr. Walker, who left the University of Texas thanks to some financial backing from Erickson.
Dr. Harry Benjamin, the new organization's namesake, had long been bankrolled by his former patient and funder extraordinaire, Erickson.
Benjamin received $18,000 per year from Erickson, which is worth about $176,000 today.
In the early years of the Harry Benjamin Association, at the urging of Benjamin, Erickson allowed the EF to be revived for a year to fund newsletters to get its message out to the masses.
But what was it about Benjamin that made him so beloved?
Well, in 1966, Dr. Harry Benjamin had authored the Transsexual Phenomenon, which inspired this community of fringe doctors.
In it, Benjamin acknowledges that fake vaginas are, quote, wounds.
And says that these fake vaginas can degrade to the point of being, quote, obliterated and useless for sexual relations.
So this is him admitting that they're creating open wounds in patients and calling it vaginas.
Benjamin also outlines the social motivation behind some transitions.
In one case, Benjamin writes that a mother was embarrassed to be seen with her son in public, but when her son began identifying as a girl, the mother suddenly became proud of him.
And even found him to be, quote, attractive.
In an especially creepy passage, Benjamin writes that he could also verify the attractiveness of the supposed young lady.
The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, led by Paul Walker, fully recognized its roots in Dr. Harry Benjamin, Reed Erickson, Zelda Supley, presenting them with Lifetime Achievement Awards.
And the newly formed Harry Benjamin Association wasted no time creating their first standards of care in 1979.
Despite the ample history of failure and suffering they'd inflicted on people who often had comorbid mental illnesses, they declared themselves arbiters of authority.
Their only mild redeeming quality was that they seemed to agree that this sadistic quackery shouldn't be inflicted upon minors, who were obviously incapable of consent.
That's what they said back then.
In 2000, one of the earliest iterations of the website for the Harry Benjamin Association linked to another website called Transsexual Women's Resources, run by one of their early members, Dr. Anne Lawrence, who sat on the Standards of Care Committee for the Association.
And he was, and still is, an admitted autogynephile, which is a paraphilia where a man is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female.
And in a paper, Dr. Lawrence refers to autogynephilia as an underappreciated paraphilia.
Now, few have been as honest about this paraphilia as Dr. Anne Lawrence.
In a 1999 version of his website, which the Harry Benjamin Association linked to, he wrote about his personal experience with genital mutilation, saying that he very badly wanted to be a, quote, receptacle.
And that's why he wanted to get the mutilation.
In 1997, Lawrence resigned from a hospital after Admitting to a serious lapse in judgment, quote unquote, involving a patient.
And the lapse of judgment was that, according to an incident report, a hospital gynecologist repeatedly told Lawrence that a patient, an Ethiopian woman, had not experienced female circumcision, but when the gynecologist left the room, Lawrence performed a non-consensual genital exam on the woman who was unconscious.
That was his lapse of judgment, otherwise known as sexual abuse of a woman.
Now, how many, quote-unquote, trans women are just men with a paraphilic sexual arousal of themselves as women?
And more concerningly, how many of them who view themselves, view women simply as genital receptacles, quote-unquote, are being allowed in the restrooms and locker rooms of actual girls and women?
Despite having published this garbage, Dr. Anne Lawrence remained involved in the standards of care for the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.
He was a co-author on the sixth version of the standards, which were published in 2001.
And that was the last version published before the organization changed its name in 2007 to WPATH, or the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Despite this new branding, WPATH continued promoting the same radical gender ideology and sexual paraphilia of its predecessors.
The seventh version of the Standards of Care, released under the new WPATH name in 2012 and valid all the way through 2022, continued to reference the work of Dr. John Money, whose victims killed themselves.
WPATH also cited the receptacle autogynophile Dr. Anne Lawrence, As recently as last year, the WPATH website fully acknowledged, almost proudly, their origin with the EEF and how its suspending of operations in 1977 directly led to this pack of fringe doctors forming the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which is now WPATH.
But despite its sordid history, WPATH is somehow now taken seriously as the standard setter in the field by major hospitals and medical associations.
And this is maybe the single greatest scam in modern medicine.
It's one of the greatest scams in the history of medicine.
It's destroying the lives of children across the country.
That much is clear.
What's less clear is why anyone who knows the truth about WPATH's origin would ever listen to a word they have to say.
The WPATH of today is the proud product of decades of quackery and sexual experimentation.
It's a threat to public health, and in particular to children.
Now, the good news is that there's a simple solution.
The fact that radical activists at WPATH provide standards of care doesn't mean doctors, hospitals, medical schools, insurance companies have to follow them or use them for any purpose at all.
Medical professionals have the capacity, the capability, of rejecting barbarism and doing what's right.
They can exercise some level of common sense and restraint It's happened before.
Physicians used to engage in a wide range of practices that we now recognize are gruesome and unethical, like lobotomies, using heroin as cough syrup, treating asthma with chloroform.
In time, WPATH's standards of care and the procedures they endorse will meet the same fate.
WPATH exists because, for years, most people didn't know about its history or how its standards of care are used.
Most people didn't know that hospitals will perform double mastectomies and other life-altering operations on children.
Well, that's all changing now.
WPATH and everything it stands for hasn't been exposed.
And now it's time for the medical profession to do what it should have done a long time ago and shut down these con artists once and for all.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Super Tuesday was yesterday.
Not much to talk about there.
Obviously, Trump won basically everything.
Nikki Haley is dropping out, although Haley did win the Vermont primary, I believe.
So, by my count, Haley won exactly two primaries.
She won Vermont and Washington, D.C.
So, she wins the swamp, and then she wins the kookiest Left-wing state in the union outside of maybe Oregon.
So it's a very fitting result for her, also very expected, no surprises with any of this.
Trump is the nominee, has been for a while now.
The guy he's running against, Joe Biden, continues to decay in front of us, of course.
And the funny thing, though, is that his staff is getting pretty defensive about it.
So I want you to watch this moment from the White House press briefing yesterday.
And here's Karen Jean Payer just fed up.
She's had enough of all the questions.
Let's watch that.
If I may, the President, I noticed, had note cards at the border when he was doing his briefing there.
He also had note cards last Friday with the Italian Prime Minister.
Why does the President rely so heavily on note cards?
You're upset because the President has note cards?
You're asking me a question about the President having note cards?
I'm asking why does he rely so heavily?
Probably one of the most successful first three years of an administration than any modern-day president.
He's done more in the first three years than most presidents who had two terms.
You're asking me about notecards?
I don't think that's... I don't think... Wait!
I'm not speaking to you right now, James.
I'm talking to... I'm talking to your friend over here, Ed.
So thank you so much.
But thank you so much for interjecting.
Go ahead, Ed.
I was just asking why he relies so heavily on notecards.
I think what's important here and what the American people care about is how this president is delivering for them.
And that's what he's doing.
And that's what's the most important thing here.
That's good.
It's like Karen Jean Paris Iverson moment.
We're talking about practice?
We're talking about note cards?
We're really out here talking about note cards.
Yeah, well, we are talking about note cards because this is what you call overcompensation on Karen Jean Paris' part.
It's embarrassing to watch, second-hand embarrassment, but it's also sort of infuriating, because it's insulting to our intelligence.
I mean, it's one thing for her to do the usual song and dance about how Joe Biden is a firecracker, he's full of energy, you know, he's doing great, everything's fantastic, he's, you know, you should see him behind the scenes.
And that's one thing, but here, Karen Jean-Pierre is pretending like she doesn't understand why people are concerned about the notecards or what that represents to people.
And that's insulting to our intelligence.
She's pretending like she doesn't understand at all why anyone might be worried about the fact that the president has dementia.
That's just, that's an unreasonable, it's like, she's pretending it's such an unreasonable concern that it's not even worth...
Answering the question.
The question itself is silly.
It's ridiculous.
So this is not just explaining away the concerns.
That's what we expect her to do.
That's her job.
Her job is to lie on behalf of the cucumber in the Oval Office.
We get that.
But instead she's going way overboard and pretending to be personally insulted.
Even confused by questions relating to the President's senility.
Like the question of whether the President of the United States can Can speak, you know, for two minutes at a time without reading off a note card?
That's a pretty good question.
It's one of those basic skills that you want the president to have.
The skill of being able to speak and think.
But it's not even worth talking about, Karen Jean Baird tells us.
Here's a story we've been following for a while and reading now from the post-millennial As we get sort of the final word on it, for now anyway.
Oregon lawmakers voted on Friday to make minor drug possession a criminal misdemeanor offense following the state's disastrous attempts at decriminalization.
It was voted for ballot measure 110, which decriminalized personal possession of drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and LSD.
Oregon became the first state in the Union to approve such a measure, turning possession of hard drugs from a criminal misdemeanor into a Class E misdemeanor, which warrants a citation of up to $100 instead of criminal punishment.
The state's decriminalization effort resulted in heavy open-air drug use and a significant surge in overdose deaths.
Oregon lawmakers hailed the measure as an approach to addiction, but in return, decriminalization was a hard lesson learned.
In a 21-8 vote, the Oregon Senate voted on Friday to re-criminalize hard drugs as a misdemeanor criminal offense.
The Oregon House of Representatives also voted to roll back decriminalization in a 51-7 vote on Thursday.
The bill now heads to Democrat Governor Tina Kotek's desk, where it's expected to be signed into law.
According to federal data, Oregon recorded 1,387 drug overdose fatalities in 2022, an increase of nearly 160% from the previous five years.
So this is a story that should be getting a lot more attention.
What we're seeing here is a dramatic repudiation of one of the most pervasive and increasingly popular left-wing policy ideas.
And of course, left-wing policy ideas are repudiated by reality all the time, but rarely do you see it so clearly and so starkly and so quickly that it only took two years and they said, never mind, this was a terrible idea.
It, you know, it's a very simple process to follow.
The left says we should decriminalize drugs.
Oregon said, okay, let's do it.
Total unmitigated disaster follows, and now they're recriminalizing.
And that should be just the end of the decriminalization movement.
It's a movement that never should have begun to begin with, but this should be the end of it.
It was put into practice.
Every bad thing that critics warned about happened.
Like, everything that the critics said would happen, did happen.
And so what else is there to talk about?
This should just be... I know we can never end any conversation in this country, we can never come to a conclusion on any debate, but this should be one where the debate's just over.
Like, you said, you know, you wanted this policy, you said it would have a certain result.
The exact opposite happened.
And so that's it.
That's it.
It's over.
You lost the argument.
If you go around talking about drug decriminalization, it's not even a valid argument anymore.
There's nothing to talk about.
You've already lost the argument.
You might as well not even talk.
Because you lost the argument.
It's done.
Keep in mind, too, that this Oregon law was presented initially as a model for the nation.
So it wasn't just something they were doing, it was when it happened, the media celebrated it, and they said this is a model for everybody, everybody could do the same thing.
In fact, just for fun, I want to go back two years ago, just pulling one example, and this is a news report from PBS, and here's the headline.
Could Oregon's decision to decriminalize hard drugs provide a model for the country?
Well, we've already spoiled the answer to that question, but let's just watch a bit of this.
The report was published on April 5th, 2021, and lots of hope, lots of optimism, and let's watch.
Well, the times, they are a-changing, with New York state's recent legalization of recreational cannabis.
More than 40 percent of Americans now live in states that have embraced marijuana legalization.
Oregon has been on the leading edge of drug law reform, and, in November, became the first to decriminalize possession of hard drugs.
As other states eye similar moves, Stephanie Sy reports on Oregon's early rollout and the obstacles ahead.
37-year-old Sabrina Brandt has been an IV drug user since she was 16.
I had mental health issues and since age 12 have been on multiple antidepressants and have multiple diagnoses and so I think My IV drug use with heroin and cocaine was a way to self-medicate.
She describes her relationship with drugs as a love-hate thing.
I felt like if I quit using drugs like right now, it'd be like losing my closest confidant, like my best friend, who's been with me for so many years.
If Sabrina were caught with, say, less than a gram of heroin or two grams of meth in Oregon today, she'd receive no more than the equivalent of a parking ticket with a maximum fine of $100.
She could avoid paying that by making a phone call with a counselor for a health assessment.
Now, this is not totally on topic, but I do want to make one point here, and not to get back on my anti-psychotropics hobby horse, but I do have to point this out that this woman, Sabrina, has been on multiple antidepressants since she was 12.
And, you know, she's a junkie, a heroin addict.
She's also addicted to, you know, the psychiatric drugs.
But, you know, you can tell just by looking at her that her life is in shambles.
I mean, by definition, if you're a heroin addict, then your life is in shambles.
And yet, they have her on antidepressants to deal with her depression.
Because her depression is due to a mental illness, apparently, and not due to the fact that she's a junkie.
Not due to the fact that she leads an absolutely miserable, awful life, governed by her addiction to a poison.
Even though anybody with a brain can look at this woman, listen to her speak for five seconds, and immediately identify the source of her despair.
It's not that hard to figure out.
We don't need to talk about chemical imbalance and everything else.
Obviously, she's depressed.
Anybody living that life would be depressed.
It would be strange if you weren't.
And still, they have her on multiple antidepressants, which obviously are doing nothing for her.
Like, you would think if doctors were responsible at all, at a minimum, they would say, okay, stop doing heroin first, and then we'll talk about, like, stop doing heroin, and stop doing it for a while.
And if you're still depressed, maybe then we can talk about antidepressants.
We're certainly not going to talk about them while you're currently doing heroin, because that is a thousand percent the reason why you're depressed.
But there are very few doctors anymore that are responsible, and so that's how she ends up on it.
Anyway, I want to get to the... we'll just kind of skip ahead to the end of this video.
Let's watch.
Like Brandt, not everyone will choose the path of sobriety.
But Christina Avery did.
She hasn't done drugs for more than three years.
Once I tapped into the support, once I accepted what it is that I had to do or was required to do, my life changed dramatically.
Oh my God.
Everything.
Other states trying to find a way out of the failed war on drugs have their eyes on Oregon.
It's an experiment where the stakes could hardly be higher.
So what will the other states learn?
What lessons will they learn from this experiment?
That's what PBS is asking.
And, I mean, we can only hope that they learn lessons from the experiment.
And, you know, the right lessons, though.
Now, you know, when we've talked about this in the past, I've pointed out the obvious, which should be obvious, which is that when you want less of a certain behavior, you punish it.
And if you punish that behavior less, you get more of it.
Punish it more, you get less of it.
That's the inverse relationship here, pretty basic.
It's a fundamental fact of human nature.
People are driven by incentives and disincentives.
Everything we do, we're either, you know, you're doing it to get something you want, or you're doing it because you want to avoid something you don't want, or, you know, if you're not doing something, it's because doing that thing would give you something that you don't want.
Like, that's how people work.
It's just, there's no point in disputing it.
We don't need to see any study on whether or not these sorts of measures discourage people from committing crimes.
Of course they do.
Of course they do.
To deny that is to deny the most obvious facts of human nature.
But the other point is that there's a false distinction drawn in these conversations between compassion and punishment.
It's always like, well, we shouldn't punish drug users, we should have compassion.
Well, what I don't understand is why are those two distinct options?
Why are we acting like those are two different things?
They're not.
In fact, to punish is to have compassion in many cases.
Punishment is compassionate to the person you're punishing.
Parents know this.
Hopefully your kid is not a drug addict or a drug dealer, but he hasn't done anything nearly that bad.
But as a parent, of course, if you're a responsible parent, then you utilize punishments.
And you do it not in spite of your love for your child, but because you love your child.
In fact, you do it through that love for your child.
Now, it's possible Obviously to punish a child in an unjust and cruel and unloving way, that's abusive, that's evil.
But a punishment meted out proportionally and fairly with the objective of helping your child to be a better person, with the objective of incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior, that again is not in spite of your love for your child, it is because of your love for your child.
And, you know, you always kind of know that you're punishing fairly and lovingly because you don't want to.
Right?
Like, I had this experience with my son a little while ago.
He was misbehaving to what I thought was an inordinate extent.
You know, he was testing the boundaries, as kids will do.
So I sent him to bed early.
We were going to sit down as a family and watch a show together, you know, as we do sometimes at night.
But he had to go to bed.
He was not going to be a part of that.
And for him, that's a major, like, that's a major punishment.
That's like, that's like the, that's life imprisonment, basically.
For him, that's, it's that level.
It's like, that's, you know, it gets hard for kids in general.
Go to bed early, an early bedtime, it's just, it's unthinkable.
This is just, from his perspective, it's cruel and unusual punishment.
So he's very distraught and very upset.
And the thing is, you know, I was upset, too.
I mean, not, like, distraught like he was, but I wasn't happy about it.
I didn't want to have to do it.
You know, I wanted to hang out with my—I like my kids.
I like being around them.
I wanted to hang out with them.
I wanted to be part of the family.
But it's a punishment.
And, you know, so you talk to my kid.
Said, hey, look, I'm sad about this too, buddy, but there are consequences to your actions, and these are the consequences.
But I don't like it.
Well, yeah, I know you don't like it.
But if you don't like the consequences, then don't do the thing that carries those consequences.
That's the message that you want to get across as a parent.
It's a very basic message.
If you don't get that message across, your kid is destined to become a dysfunctional and probably ultimately very bad person.
If they don't come to understand that.
It's your job as a parent to make them understand that.
And the same goes on a wider and much more serious societal scale with criminal justice.
It's compassionate to have drug laws and to enforce them.
And that goes for the drug dealers.
You know the punishments I would like to see inflicted on drug dealers.
But that's sort of the easy, or that should be the easy one.
It's like, well, of course, drug dealers Should be, in my mind, should get the worst punishments.
And I think any rational person would agree, at least, that they should be severely punished.
When you get to the drug users, that's where even otherwise rational people start to get a little squeamish, and they say, well, we don't want to punish the drug users.
And this is what Oregon tried to do.
They tried to do this.
They said, well, you know, we saw this story about Sabrina Brandt, or whatever her name was, and, you know, we don't want to have to punish her.
She's obviously a broken person.
But no, they should be punished too.
Not as severely as the drug dealers should be, but they should be punished.
Why?
Well, because punishment is just.
It's right.
It's compassionate, both to the punished person and to society as a whole.
Also, drug addicts are not above the law.
Addiction should not be considered an excuse to break the law.
So we have laws and we say, this kind of stuff is poison.
It's not going to be allowed in our community.
And then if somebody says, but I'm addicted to it.
Well, okay.
So what, the law?
We're going to change the law now because you're addicted to it?
Why would we do that?
That's all the more reason to not change the law.
Like the fact that it's addictive is one of the reasons why this stuff is illegal.
I mean, the idea that we're going to make it legal because of that is, it's exactly backwards.
And certainly don't tell me that addicts are only hurting themselves.
I mean, again, this is the kind of libertarian nonsense That should be done now.
If you're a thinking person, if you've said that in the past, you should stop saying it now.
Because you've been proven wrong.
So stop it.
But you should have known that.
You should have needed this experiment in Oregon to know that.
Of course drug addicts aren't only hurting themselves.
You can ask Oregon about it if you don't believe me.
No.
Drug addicts, they hurt their communities, they hurt everybody.
How many people are killed every year by drug addicts?
Either because an addict is driving under the influence, or because they're robbing someone for drug money, or whatever.
And that's just the direct harm.
Now sure, one drug addict, in isolation, alone, in his apartment, shooting heroin, isn't, in that moment, hurting anyone but himself.
But a city full of drug addicts, Uh, you know, is a city in a state of decay.
It's a city that is unlivable for everybody else.
So that's harm, too.
And by the way, also, the drug addicts, they don't just go off somewhere by themselves to do the drugs.
As we heard, the whole city becomes an open-air drug den.
And so everybody's surrounded by it.
So yeah, when you're living in a city where you've got drug addicts all over the place, yeah, that hurts everybody.
You have made the community, like, I can't even live it.
If I'm a normal person and I have a family, I can't live here anymore because of you people.
Does that hurt me?
Yeah, of course it does.
You've made my community unlivable.
You have no right to do that.
I don't care if you're addicted.
You don't have a right.
You have no right to that.
You should be punished for it.
And so what we should be doing is obvious when it comes to hard drugs, especially heroin, fentanyl, meth, and so on.
We should be rounding everybody up who's involved.
Dealer, distributor, buyer.
Throw them all in prison for lengthy terms.
Not the same length, but lengthy terms.
And, oh, we don't have enough room in prison.
Okay, we'll build more prisons.
Build as many as you need.
Build a hundred more prisons if you need.
Well, however many prisons you need to round up all of the people that are on the street making, turning our cities into cesspools, however many prisons you need to round them all up and throw them there.
You know, we also heard, I don't know if it was in that clip, but one of the, I think it was one of the drug addicts said, well, you can't force people to stop doing drugs.
Well, you can.
Actually, you can.
You know, prison can be one way to do it.
Now, they do get drugs into prison, obviously.
But, like, you could do it.
If you have somebody in solitary confinement, if you have them in isolation, they have no contact with the outside world, yeah, you force them to stop doing drugs.
Now, I'm not saying we do that with every drug addict, but like, actually you can.
You know, actually we can force people to do whatever we want as a society.
If the incentive is high, if it's an action that we have decided is Harmful enough to society, we can force people to stop doing it.
If we have the stomach for it.
Or at a minimum, we can strongly, strongly, strongly disincentivize it.
And if that's still not enough for somebody, then you can take them and you get them off the street, you get them out of the community.
You say you're not fit to live out in your community.
You're making this an unlivable place for everybody else.
And you have no right to do that.
You have no right to be lying out on the street, strung out on drugs.
You have no right to it.
People are trying to live here.
They're walking by with their kids.
You just have no right to do this.
Oh, but I'm addicted.
Okay, well, I feel bad about that.
But you still have no right to do this.
It's against the law.
It's a crime.
There's punishments.
This is another one of those conversations that it's just, sometimes I try to imagine, I like to imagine going back, you know, 80 years and explaining to people that this is even like a conversation to be had.
You know, should we allow, should we allow our cities to be totally overrun by drug addicts laying out on the sidewalk, you know, with needles in their arm?
Should we allow that?
You don't have to go back that far in history where if you ask that question, people are going to look at you like, what?
Why are you even?
How is this a conversation?
Of course you shouldn't allow it.
Is that going to make life any better for anybody?
Is it going to make your community any better?
Does it make society better?
Does it improve anything at all for anyone?
No?
Okay, well then don't allow it.
Simple equation there.
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You know, Russia has been in the headlines for weeks due to the actions of Vladimir Putin.
To comprehend Putin's motivations, we must examine the historical context that shaped his behaviors.
In the new season of What We Saw, an empire of terror hosts Bill Whittle unmask communism by taking a close look at the history of the Soviet Union with the use of deep cut photographs and film.
Journal entries and other primary sources, this tale of terror offers a compelling presentation of the horrors that plagued the Soviet Union and the viciousness of its leaders.
Modern day Russia has been centuries in the making and this series will give you a better understanding of its history as well as the communism that threatens our own homeland.
Watch episode one streaming now on DailyWirePlus.
If you're not a DailyWirePlus member, well go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member today.
Now let's get to our Daily Cancellation.
He's famous, he's wealthy, he's worth millions of dollars, and yet he has no talent.
He has no skill of any kind.
He's not especially intelligent or creative or innovative.
Now, that fact alone isn't very interesting.
Lots of rich, famous people are untalented and dull, but usually the untalented, dull, rich and famous people are rich and famous for performing a certain craft, even if they perform it badly, like they're singers, actors, etc.
RuPaul, on the other hand, has no craft.
He doesn't create anything.
He doesn't do anything.
He just dresses up like a woman, and he walks around, and that's his craft.
His craft is putting on a dress.
That's it.
And for that, he has been made a millionaire, because that's the kind of world we live in.
But RuPaul wants to be seen as a more serious and important cultural figure, which is why, this week, the nation's preeminent cross-dresser announced that he would be joining the fight against banned books.
Not to skip ahead, but of course, the banned books are much like RuPaul's talent.
They don't exist.
Nobody is banning books, and yet RuPaul wants to make sure that these non-existent banned books, which are already available everywhere, are available everywhere.
The website dnyuz.com has more details.
RuPaul is the co-founder of a new online bookstore that will be sending a rainbow school bus from the West Coast to the South to distribute the books targeted by bans.
He announced on Monday that he was one of the three business partners behind the book AllStora, which will promote underrepresented authors and provide writers with a greater share of profits than other online booksellers do.
RuPaul said that this sort of book website would fill an important gap, especially in these strange days we're living in, to support the ideas of people who are willing to push the conversation forward.
As part of Alstora's kickoff, the Rainbow Book Bus will be traveling in March from Los Angeles to the South to fight book bans in these cities, which will include Birmingham, Tallahassee, Baton Rouge.
Alstora will team up with local LGBT organizations to distribute thousands of books.
The goal is to give away 10,000 books by the end of the year out of the brightly colored 22-foot former school bus.
RuPaul will be going around in a rainbow bus giving books away to children.
Luckily, there's nothing creepy about that at all.
And here he is on Stephen Colbert the other night talking about this initiative.
Watch.
I love this.
Tell us about the Rainbow Book Bus.
Yeah.
Alstora is a bookstore that I'm involved with that is bringing books to people who need to read them and in areas where they've banned books.
Because, you know, I've said this before, and I'm one of the first to say it, but knowledge is power.
Knowledge is power.
True.
I didn't come up with it.
Just the truth.
If somebody is trying to take away your power, they are trying to render you powerless.
So, read a book.
Read a book.
Get some knowledge.
Yeah, I'd like for him to name three books he's read.
Just on the spot.
I'm gonna put him on the spot.
Name three books you've read.
Right now.
Yeah, I guarantee you couldn't do it.
I guarantee this guy's never finished a book his entire life.
Really, I'd put a lot of money on that.
But knowledge is power, he says.
He didn't come up with that phrase, he clarifies, which of course, you know, we know he didn't.
We know he didn't come up with it because, for one thing, it's one of the most overused clichés in the English language.
And also, as already established, the guy has never come up with an original idea in his entire life.
His whole public persona is based around the appropriation of womanhood.
He's never experienced a unique thought as long as he has lived.
You'll notice something, and I've now read an article about the banned book bus, and we've heard RuPaul talking about it on a late night talk show, and yet, interestingly enough, nobody has explained which banned books he plans to distribute.
That's because, again, there are no banned books.
If there were, you wouldn't be able to drive around in a giant rainbow bus and hand them out.
Okay, people like RuPaul like to claim that we're living in a new era of Nazi-style book bans, and yet, as a point of historical clarity, I must mention that if the Nazis were really in charge and were banning books, you would not be able to announce on national television that you're going to be driving from coast to coast in a rainbow bus and giving away the very books that the fascist overlords have banned.
That's not the way that it would work.
This is a good general rule.
If you can announce on television that you plan to do something, and then you can go around the country in a big, bright-colored bus doing that thing, that means that you are, by definition, not banned from doing it.
The only thing RuPaul is not able to do is give out certain books in schools.
That's because all schools, in the entire history of schools, in every country that has schools, have always included certain books in their curriculum while not including other books.
In fact, they don't include most books.
And I made this point before, but just to highlight, I looked this up, and there was some study that was recently done, and I don't know if this number is accurate or not, but this is what they're saying.
There have been something like 130 million books published since the invention of the printing press.
130 million.
Sounds like a good, probably logical ballpark.
Now, let's just say there are 130 million books that have been published.
It's safe to say that easily 129 million of them have never been made available in any school library anywhere.
Now, does that mean that schools have banned 129 million books?
If there are 129 million books of the 130 million that have never been available in a single school, does that mean that, can we say that schools have banned 129 million books?
No, obviously not.
It just means that only a very tiny fraction of books in existence can be included in schools, and schools are, or should be, very selective and thoughtful about which books they include.
Historically, many books have been excluded because they are not relevant, or they are not educational, or they are not appropriate for kids.
That's not a ban.
That's just common sense.
And yet, again, neither RuPaul nor Stephen Colbert, nor anyone in the media, wants to talk about the small selection of specific books that have been recently removed from schools in some states because they have been judged not relevant, not educational, and or not appropriate.
They don't want to get into specifics because those books are essentially gay pornography.
They obviously can't defend pornographic books in schools, so instead they recast the whole issue as book bans and never mention any of the actual titles that have allegedly been banned.
RuPaul isn't going to pull out the book Genderqueer in front of Colbert's audience and show the pages that depict graphic sexual acts.
He's not going to say, look at this, this is what they don't want in schools, those Nazis.
He knows that 99.9% of the audience would see that and say, oh, oh, that's what they're taking out of schools?
Well, of course we don't want that in schools.
Like, obviously not that.
Instead, they talk about book bans in a broad sense to give uninformed and ignorant people the impression that hundreds of substantive, intelligent, worthwhile books have been prohibited from general distribution.
Of course, there are people who do want to stop regular non-pornographic books from being distributed in schools and outside of schools.
In fact, RuPaul, with his new online bookstore, has run afoul of those people.
So, a controversy has started because of his all-store-a-book store, where people are upset that there are certain books that are being made available on the website at all, for anybody, even adults.
It's just that, as RuPaul has discovered, the people who are upset about this are all on the left.
And that's where this story gets pretty hilarious.
So as mentioned in the article we just read, the Rainbow Bus is being set out by the new online bookstore Allstora, which RuPaul co-founded.
And the online bookstore is supposed to stand against these imaginary book bans and be a haven for free expression.
And so leftists applauded the idea when it was first announced, but now All-Star is experiencing major backlash from the left when leftists discovered that books by conservative authors would also be made available on the site.
So the very people who pretend to care about book bans are now demanding that RuPaul ban dozens of titles from his anti-book banning site.
So it's like the levels of irony here are impossible to keep track of.
The website Vulture explains, quote, according to AllStore's website, it offers 10 million titles.
And as it turns out, that includes controversial books with right-wing and anti-LGBTQ plus messages.
As a publication time, for example, you can purchase copies of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf Matt Walsh's What is a Woman and a children's book by Chaya Wrightchick, aka Libs of TikTok, on Alstora.
Riley Gaines, Robbie Starbuck, and Kirk Cameron are among other authors known for anti-LGBTQ stances whose work is available on the site.
Critics feel this means Alstora is not actually committed to inclusivity.
For example, Lady Bunny took to Instagram to describe the new venture as an example of rainbow capitalism, while a TikToker who Runs a lesbian bookstore.
Criticized AllStora as a dropshipping operation with a kind of veneer of progressivity over it.
Okay, now there's a lot going on here, and there are plenty of other examples from other outlets explaining why this new online bookstore is problematic for refusing to ban books written by people like me.
The left only wants to ensure that gay porn for children isn't banned, but, you know, a perfectly wholesome, age-appropriate book from Chaya Reichick or Kirk Cameron?
Well, obviously they want that banned.
And we could go on and read through other examples of leftists revealing their insane hypocrisy on the subject of book bans, but I don't think we need to move past just the two paragraphs I just read.
Because for one thing, Vulture has put Mein Kampf and my book What Is A Woman in the same category, because obviously a book by Adolf Hitler and a book that argues for the existence of women are morally comparable.
And for another, we're told that the inclusion of books by me, Chaya, Robbie Starbuck, and other conservatives means that Alstora is not actually committed to inclusivity.
So, the website has become less inclusive by including.
It's funny how that works.
By the way, as it stands right now, after all the backlash, you can still buy a copy of What Is A Woman, or Chaya's book, or Kirk Cameron's book, or probably Starbucks' book.
You can still buy that on the site, but if you go to the page, you'll find this note written in urgent red letters.
I'll store a note.
With the help of our community, we flagged this book as contrary to our core values.
All proceeds from this title will go towards protecting diverse literature and marginalized communities from book bans through the Rainbow Book Bus.
Ah, yes.
Flagging books as contrary to your core values because they were written by people you disagree with politically, that's what you do when you really believe in free expression, right?
The best ways to stand against book bans is to slap scary warning labels on any book that wasn't written by a far-left radical.
Knowledge is power, to use a phrase coined by RuPaul.
And what we've learned here, the knowledge we've gained, which we already knew, is that the left is much more likely to complain that a book has not been banned than to complain that books are banned.
And that is why RuPaul and the left's whole fake anti-book banning crusade is today cancelled.
