In this episode, Alex Blumberg talks about the arrest of a suspected leaker, and how the media covered it up to make sure that the leaker was a Russian spy. Alex also talks about how the leaks were handled by the media and how they handled the situation, and why the media should have been more concerned about the leaks than they were about finding out who the actual leaker is. Alex also discusses the media's handling of leaks and how it handled the case, and what they should have done in the case of this particular leaker. And Alex takes a look at the role of the media in covering up the identity of the person who leaked the documents, and the way that the media handled the leak itself. Finally, Alex talks about who the real leaker might be and why it s a good thing that it s not a member of the Russian intelligence service. Alex's full show is streaming on the new streaming service, The FiveThirtyEight, wherever you get your favorite streaming service. Please don't miss it! Subscribe to FiveThirtyeight to get notified when we deconstruct the latest breaking news in tech, culture, politics, entertainment, and social media! and Alex's newest book, "The Dark Side of the Internet," out on Amazon Prime and Vimeo! The Dark Side Of The Internet, out now! Learn more about your ad choices. and become a supporter of the show by becoming a supporter! Thanks for listening and rating and reviewing our podcast! If you have a review, rating and review in Apple Podcasts, we'll be listening to our new episodes and reviewing your thoughts on your favorite podcast episodes! We'll be looking out for you in the next episode of FiveThirtyfour and other podcast recommendations! and we'll send you a review and reviews on the next one out on the newest episode of the podcast Good Mythical Podcasts and other links to our social media platforms! You can also subscribe to our podcast on the podcast on Apple Podcast, too! , and other places we're listening to us on your comments and more! on the pod, too, too? Good vibes, too good reviews, too bad you'll get a chance to review the podcast, too much good reviews and more on this podcast, good vibes everywhere else, good reviews there's more of your comments, great reviews, and more? Thank you, Alex, and much more.
00:00:00.000Well, after the media speculated for a couple of weeks here that all of these documents that had been released from America's national security classified documents cache all about what was going on in Ukraine, and these documents contain some pretty vital national security secrets about how the United States monitors other countries, what exactly was going on in Ukraine, and all the rest, the media speculated For a while here, that this was Russia, because this is the way that the media do their business.
00:00:23.000They basically do the bidding of whatever administration is in power, so long as it is a Democrat.
00:00:27.000And this has been the case for quite a while.
00:00:29.000If you go back, and we will, in the history of leaked documents, whenever a Democratic administration is at the helm, and there is somebody who leaks, that person becomes persona non grata for about the next 10 minutes.
00:00:42.000And then, if that person, say, transitions, like Chelsea Manning transitions, then that person becomes hero of the republic.
00:00:47.000If, however, the leak is against something right-wing, then the generalized perception is that the leaker is super bad and must be punished, or we must never identify the leaker.
00:00:57.000The media's treatment of leaks when it comes to national security questions is very questionable.
00:01:01.000But the big story of the day is, of course, the arrest of the actual leaker.
00:01:04.000Who, it turns out, was not a member of the Russian National Security Force in any way, shape, or form.
00:01:09.000Again, Reuters had reported on April 7th, as just last week, quote, So, it's always fun and games.
00:01:32.000So, just to get the timeline correct, about a week and a half ago, all these documents get leaked.
00:01:36.000It's a major national security crisis for the United States.
00:01:39.000And the media immediately run to the narrative that it must be the Russians who are doing it because this ties in with their broader narrative that everything bad in the universe must be blamed on the Russians because, of course, the Russians are to blame for Donald Trump.
00:01:49.000So, the person who actually was arrested yesterday is a Massachusetts-era national guardsman named Jack Teixeira.
00:01:55.000This particular situation is kind of weird in the sense that the leaker did not actually go to members of the media in order to disclose this information.
00:02:01.000So typically when you look at large-scale leaks, those large-scale leaks happen to members of the media.
00:02:04.000to video games and guns, the biggest national security breach in at least 10 years. This particular situation is kind of weird in the sense that the leaker did not actually go to members of the media in order to disclose this information. So typically when you look at large-scale leaks, those large-scale leaks happen to members of the media. So for example, when it came to Chelsea Manning, Chelsea Manning was working And we'll see you next time.
00:02:27.000I was working with Julian Assange to get those documents out.
00:02:30.000Edward Snowden was working with people like Glenn Greenwald to get those documents out.
00:02:33.000This guy apparently was just on a Reddit board, basically, and started releasing national security documents for the bleeps and giggles of it to all of his friends.
00:02:40.000According to the New York Post, law enforcement officers swarmed the home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, about 20 miles east of Providence, Rhode Island, hours after multiple reports sketched out to share his key role in a Discord channel called Thugs Shaker Central, where the files first popped up earlier this year.
00:02:55.000So one of the things that was unique about this situation is here the media actually helped track down the leaker.
00:02:59.000The media actually started putting out very detailed reports about the entire investigation into who the leaker was.
00:03:05.000They started actually leaking out who the guy could be by name before the actual arrest happened.
00:03:11.000So this is a media that instead of, you know, focusing in on the On the actual content of the leaks, which is what the media usually do when there's a national security breach.
00:03:18.000First, they focus in on the content of the leaks, and then afterward, they start to focus in on who the person was.
00:03:24.000And all of that is sort of backdropped by which administration it helps or harms.
00:03:28.000In this particular case, it was obvious that these leaks harmed the Biden administration.
00:03:30.000They harmed the Biden administration's agenda, so the media immediately went to, okay, who is this person, and how do we go after this human being?
00:03:38.000The footage has now been released of the arrest of this leaker.
00:03:43.000The guy, who's 21, is wearing like gym shorts and a t-shirt and being taken out of mommy's house.
00:03:47.000So obviously a life success story here.
00:03:54.000But, you know, they managed to narrow it down pretty quickly over the course of days.
00:04:00.000They spent the weekend doing interviews with people who are associated with this group that was online on Discord.
00:04:07.000And so they narrowed, they honed in on Teixeira very, very quickly.
00:04:13.000Okay, the reason that Teixeira himself has become, again, the focus as opposed to the actual classified documents themselves, right?
00:04:19.000Remember when Edward Snowden released NSA documents detailing surveillance of American citizens through metadata and all the rest, that was like the blanket coverage.
00:04:28.000When it came to Chelsea Manning's leaks of Iraq and Afghanistan, that was the blanket coverage.
00:05:06.000And eventually, of course, President Obama would commute the sentence for Chelsea Manning based solely on the fact that Chelsea Manning says that he is a chick.
00:05:14.000Again, politics is inevitably imbued into all of these particular issues.
00:05:19.000When it came to Edward Snowden, Snowden is more controversial, even though the truth is that of all the leaks, the major leaks that we've seen in the last 20 years, Snowden's leaks are at least arguably for the benefit of American citizens.
00:05:29.000Very difficult to claim that Chelsea Manning's leaks were for the benefit of American citizens.
00:05:33.000You can claim that at least some of the stuff that Snowden was releasing into the public view dealt with things that affected American citizens. This particular leak has nothing to do with American citizens.
00:05:42.000I mean it has to do with our foreign policy interests, but it doesn't have to do with the government targeting American citizens the way the NSA was apparently targeting American citizens through metadata.
00:05:50.000We'll get in just one second into the character of the leaker, which again, this all ties into how this this particular leak is covered.
00:05:59.000One thing is for certain, there are people out there who are watching everything you do, whether it is the government or whether it is leakers.
00:06:04.000There are all these people out there who are looking for your data.
00:06:10.000Are you aware that your browsing data is constantly being tracked and monitored?
00:06:13.000Have you ever stopped to think about who has access to that information and what they might be doing with it?
00:06:17.000If you're like most people, you probably haven't given it tons of thought, but the truth is your browsing data can reveal a lot about you, your interests, habits, locations, even your identity.
00:06:24.000Every time you visit a website, click on a link, or make a purchase online, you're leaving a digital trail that can be monetized by advertisers and data brokers.
00:06:30.000They use that information to target you with ads and promotions that are tailored specifically to you, and the more data they have, the more accurately they can actually target you.
00:06:36.000With ExpressVPN, you can encrypt your internet traffic and hide your browsing data from prying eyes, which makes it much, much more difficult for anyone to intercept your data or track your online activity.
00:06:45.000With lightning-fast speeds, unlimited bandwidth, easy-to-use software, ExpressVPN is the perfect choice for anyone looking to protect their online privacy and security.
00:07:07.000Okay, so, again, the media are focusing in on the identity of this person.
00:07:11.000Here is Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, announcing the arrest of Jack Teixeira yesterday.
00:07:16.000Today the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.
00:07:29.000Teixeira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard.
00:07:34.000FBI agents took Tashira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident.
00:07:39.000He will have an initial appearance at the U.S.
00:07:41.000District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
00:07:43.000I want to thank the FBI, Justice Department prosecutors, and our colleagues at the Department of Defense for their diligent work on this case.
00:07:52.000Okay, so who exactly is Jack Teixeira?
00:07:55.000According to the Washington Post, patriotic zeal appeared common around Airman First Class Shaq Tishera 21, who had followed in the footsteps of numerous family members to join the military.
00:08:03.000Tishera, slim and boyish, and photographs taken in his blue dress uniform, had been assigned to manage and troubleshoot computers and communications systems for the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, according to the Air Force. Now, it should be clear at this point that classified information is available to way too many people.
00:08:18.000I mean, this is like a low-level 21-year-old serving in the Air National Guard and suddenly he can release these extremely detailed national security documents talking about what exactly we are doing in Ukraine.
00:08:29.000And again, some of the revelations about what we're doing in Ukraine are kind of fascinating.
00:08:32.000It turns out that we actually do have people on the ground in Ukraine.
00:08:40.000But what the documents also show is that a lot of the talk about how well Ukraine is doing in the war seems to be somewhat exaggerated.
00:08:45.000They're apparently Estimates that say up to 130,000 Ukrainians have been killed in this war and about 230,000 Russians have been killed in this war.
00:08:52.000It is also clear that the United States has been leveraging other allies, particularly allies in the Middle East, in order to do their bidding.
00:08:58.000So the United States was pressuring Jordan over supporting Ukraine and Jordan was worried about ticking off the Chinese.
00:09:05.000They're pressuring Israel apparently behind the scenes to give Iron Dome technology to Ukraine.
00:09:08.000They're trying to blackmail Israel with essentially saying that we won't support a strike on Iran if Iran develops nuclear weapons unless you do stuff like this.
00:09:17.000The U.S.' 's hopes for a future Ukrainian total victory are apparently pretty slim.
00:09:22.000This is some of the stuff that's just in the documents.
00:09:23.000One of the more interesting parts of the documents suggests that Egypt was secretly planning to supply rockets to Russia because everybody in the Middle East is now triangulating because of the absence of Joe Biden in the Middle East.
00:09:33.000Because the U.S.' 's presence in the Middle East went from facilitating agreements between American allies in the Middle East to let's pull completely out and then just pretend that everything's going to be fine.
00:09:43.000China filling that gap means that places like Egypt, which is an erstwhile American ally we give a lot of aid to, was actively considering sending tens of thousands of rockets to Russia.
00:09:52.000South Korea was torn on delivering weapons to Ukraine as well.
00:09:57.000But again, the focus has turned from what was in the documents to the person who leaked the documents.
00:10:02.000And that is specifically because of the identity of the person who leaked the documents, as we'll get into right now.
00:10:06.000So the Washington Post says, investigators think there's more troubling reckless sides to Shara and the fallout is only beginning.
00:10:12.000Tashara has been identified as the suspected leaker of hundreds of photographs of highly classified military documents that have proliferated across the internet in the past week.
00:10:19.000The leak, probably the military's largest in at least a decade, has revealed secrets about everything from gaps in Ukrainian air defenses to the specifics of how the United States spies on its allies and partners.
00:10:29.000Tashara used online handles including JackTheDripper and ExcaliburEffect, posted the images to Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers.
00:10:36.000Which, again, actually follows a pattern.
00:10:39.000Chelsea Manning apparently did some of the same sort of stuff.
00:10:40.000Chelsea Manning was very active in sort of gamer circles.
00:10:48.000Like some others interviewed for the story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
00:10:54.000So they've already started with, the reason this guy is doing this is because he is an anti-Semitic racist.
00:10:59.000So the rule is that if you are a person who leaks information that is damaging to Republicans, we treat you as an absolute hero.
00:11:05.000If you leak information that's damaging to Democrats, we uncover every single thing about you, and then we hold your feet to the fire until such time as you come out as a trans person like Chelsea Manning.
00:11:13.000Apparently, one friend described Teixeira in an interview as patriotic and about Catholic and a libertarian with an interest in guns and doubts about America's future.
00:11:20.000The friend said he met Teixeira before 2020 on a Discord server mainly focused on guns and libertarian politics and bonded over their shared interest in Glock handguns and Catholicism.
00:11:29.000Apparently, he started sharing classified documents on the Discord server around February 2022 at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which he saw as an oppressing battle between the two countries that should have more in common than keeping them apart.
00:11:38.000Again, this is a pretty common view on some parts of the right, which believe that the Russian state, for some odd reason, is standing up for Christianity, despite Russia's actual crackdown on Christianity inside its own borders.
00:11:49.000Sharing the classified documents was meant to, quote, educate people who he thought were his friends and could be trusted.
00:11:54.000Free from the propaganda swirling outside, according to the friend, the men and boys on the server agreed never to share the documents outside the server because they might harm US interests.
00:12:03.000This kid, apparently, was putting out material to people he thought were his friends.
00:12:09.000This is not quite the same thing as Snowden, who is actively coordinating a leak, or Chelsea Manning actively coordinating a leak.
00:12:16.000And I keep coming back to the fact that the differential treatment by the media of particular leaks is what leads to the generalized belief in the American public that pretty much all leaks are okay.
00:12:27.000We do have to have national security secrets in the United States so we can actually pursue a successful foreign policy.
00:12:33.000In times of conflict, in times of war, it is very important that the enemy not have access to intelligence about what exactly the United States is doing.
00:12:39.000Now, there's a couple of problems with that.
00:12:41.000One is that you can have a government that keeps way too many secrets, and there's no question that the United States government is in the constant process of over-classification.
00:12:51.000So much of the stuff that is considered classified really ought not be classified.
00:12:54.000This is one of the things that Donald Trump has said about the classified documents in his home.
00:12:57.000Joe Biden, by the way, has basically admitted this about the classified documents in his home.
00:13:01.000government classifies stuff for like 50 years for no apparent reason.
00:13:04.000But it is also true that there are a lot of things the U.S.
00:13:07.000government does that ought not be in the public view because they actually affect how we do, for example, foreign policy.
00:13:13.000Again, the best case that can be made with regard to intelligence leaks are ones that affect American citizens' rights.
00:13:19.000But the idea that intelligence leaks should target what the United States is doing vis-a-vis spying on other countries, and that the American citizen is supposed to know that, and that foreign countries are supposed to know that, that is a real problem.
00:13:30.000But, as I say, the media's treatment of leaks is incredibly disparate depending on the target and source of the leaks.
00:13:38.000We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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00:14:38.000All right, so as I say, the disparate treatment is kind of amazing. So for example, it is now coming out that the US government actually was leaking out, for example, all sorts of secrets on Chinese spy balloons.
00:14:58.000According to the Washington Free Beacon, Pentagon official Colin Kahl leaked classified information about the Chinese spy balloon to deflect blame about the Biden administration's mishandling of the situation, according to two Republican senators.
00:15:08.000I mean, that's classified national security information.
00:15:11.000Like whether Chinese spy balloons crossed into American airspace, how we dealt with all of that, whether we should have shot at it.
00:15:15.000Like, that's all classified information.
00:15:17.000But Colin Call isn't being prosecuted, so far as I'm aware.
00:15:21.000Joe Biden appointed Kahl his Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and he actually provided reporters with classified information disclosing that Chinese spy balloons may have infiltrated the United States during the Trump administration, according to two senators, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida.
00:15:35.000Kahl's been named as the source of these leaks for the first time.
00:15:38.000The leaks were provided to reporters and appeared in news stories at CNN, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post.
00:15:42.000All of that was an attempt to shift blame away from the Biden administration for allowing a Chinese spy balloon to cross Unmolested across the entirety of the continental United States.
00:15:52.000Is Colin Call going to be prosecuted by the DOJ?
00:15:54.000I have serious questions about whether that is in fact the case.
00:15:57.000Has anybody been prosecuted over the massive IRS leaks that we saw over the course of the last couple of years targeting rich people and Donald Trump?
00:16:04.000By tax records that were just revealed from the IRS.
00:16:07.000That investigation has come to no conclusion.
00:16:08.000No one knows how they got out there, which is weird since we should be able to track that down.
00:16:12.000Or is it possible that no one's focusing on that because they don't care because it damages all of their political opponents?
00:16:19.000How about the fact that you had a member of the Supreme Court cadre who actively leaked the outcome of the case overruling Roe v. Wade months in advance of the actual decision being released, leading to not only protests, but an actual assassination attempt at Justice Kavanaugh's home.
00:16:34.000And apparently, there's just no way to uncover who did this.
00:16:37.000It's kind of amazing how we delegate which resources we are going to use to track down leakers.
00:16:41.000Now, I'm fine with the idea that we should track down all the leakers.
00:16:43.000If you have a law, you enforce the law.
00:16:45.000It's the selective tracking down of leakers that I have some worries about, and it's also, again, the disparate media treatment of who is doing the leaking.
00:16:51.000I mean, Chelsea Manning, Leaked documents that were highly damaging to America's national security in both Afghanistan and Iraq and then ended up being commuted.
00:17:01.000Their sentence was his sentence was commuted.
00:17:03.000Chelsea Manning's by Barack Obama, an administration under whom he leaked.
00:17:08.000He ended up having his sentence commuted and he ran for Congress as a Democrat.
00:17:13.000Daniel Ellsberg has been a hero for decades for revealing the Pentagon Papers going back to the 1970s, which completely undermined U.S.
00:17:19.000national security and the war in Vietnam, leading in large part to the surrender of the war in Vietnam and the subsequent slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, as well as the takeover of Cambodia by Pol Pot.
00:17:30.000I mean, there are real consequences to this sort of stuff, but who is a hero and who is a villain almost entirely depends on the politics of what is being leaked in the first place.
00:17:39.000Meanwhile, the Biden administration, they've decided that the outcome of this is, we need more feds.
00:17:43.000We need more feds on the web, is the answer to all of this.
00:17:46.000According to NBC News, the Biden administration is now looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chat rooms after U.S.
00:17:52.000intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks.
00:17:59.000The possible change in the intelligence gathering process is just one potential shift as officials scramble to determine not only how the documents leaked, but also how to prevent another damaging incident.
00:18:06.000Well, it turns out that their prior strategy of blaming the Russians is a giant failure.
00:18:11.000President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were briefed about the disclosure last week, according to administration officials, but the secret documents appeared online in early March on the Discord social media app.
00:18:20.000According to Bellingcat, the open source investigative group, some documents may have appeared as early as January.
00:18:25.000Senior administration officials leaked to the media about how unhappy they were.
00:18:29.000Nobody is happy about this, said a senior administration official.
00:18:32.000The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.
00:18:38.000And they're looking, presumably, for new authorities in order to monitor what everyone does online.
00:18:44.000Watching a public chatroom is fair game.
00:18:45.000Law enforcement agencies do not currently have legal authority to monitor a private online chatroom without probable cause, according to former officials.
00:18:52.000But you can see the Biden administration attempting to go back and change all of that.
00:19:00.000Naturally, the worst available outcome will be the one that is pursued.
00:19:02.000Meanwhile, chaos continues to reign in Tennessee, where Democrat Justin Pearson, our newest fake racial hero, has been reinstated to the Tennessee legislature.
00:19:13.000Pearson and fellow Democrat Justin Jones were expelled last week.
00:19:17.000You remember they were expelled because they decided to take part in a storming of the Tennessee state capitol, in which they ended up in the well of the state legislature, shouting on bullhorns and holding up signs.
00:19:27.000And then it turns out the process for being unexpelled is you just go back to basically the city council, and the city council just reappoints you, and then they come back in triumph.
00:19:43.000And we all want Happy to be as healthy as possible, which is the reason I'm very excited about Rough Greens.
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00:19:56.000It doesn't have all that much nutritional value.
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00:20:26.000Naturopathic doctor, Dennis Black, is so confident rough greens will improve your dog's health, he's offering my listeners a free Jumpstart trial bag so your dog can try it.
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00:20:45.000The Memphis area officials who were able to reinstate Justin Pearson to the Tennessee legislature did so on Wednesday.
00:20:52.000The seven members of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners present for the vote unanimously approved reinstating Pearson at a special meeting in Memphis.
00:20:59.000And of course, Pearson then went out and addressed the crowd.
00:21:03.000And I gotta say, this dude, the civil rights hero cosplay on this guy is so strong.
00:21:10.000And he's getting more wild with each camera that is put upon him.
00:21:13.000So when it started with one camera and he was just in college, he's just like a normal guy, you know, like a normal person.
00:21:19.000And then there were two cameras and he started getting a little wilder.
00:21:21.000And then there were like five cameras and he went crazy.
00:21:24.000And there was pictures of him and video of him that we played a little bit earlier on in the week, preaching at a church, talking about mother God and going like totally wild.
00:21:33.000Well, that was nothing in comparison to what he did over the course of the last 24 hours.
00:22:39.000It's so crazily over the top that it is wildly off-putting.
00:22:42.000By the way, he's not the only person who is cosplaying.
00:22:45.000Meanwhile, Representative Justin Jones, who's the other guy who got reinstated, he's also cosplaying.
00:22:49.000So he got up in the General Assembly over in Tennessee to decry another bill that was being pushed. These guys are the new civil rights heroes and then we're gonna it turns out that um yeah they are they're both fakes. Here we go.
00:23:02.000Representative Reagan, do you believe that it is it is racist to prohibit concepts on systemic racism in the history of America?
00:23:58.000Just surreal to hear that, to hear the commentary and to realize that for them they really are reenacting the Civil War.
00:24:04.000You heard Representative Sopicke say, you know, we need to come hard against them, you know, because if we don't, Tennessee will fall and the Southeast will fall and the left will take over.
00:24:13.000And he said, you know, I hate that I have to see, you know, Jones in these sacred halls with the greats of Tennessee still.
00:24:20.000And so you hear this mentality that is very extreme and very alarming.
00:24:24.000I mean, we're dealing with people who want to reenact the Civil War, who don't believe someone of, you know, like me or Representative Pearson, young black lawmakers even deserve to be in the legislature.
00:24:38.000I noticed that that was not really about what the black people could be in a state legislature.
00:24:41.000It was about whether they would be slaves.
00:24:43.000That's not even the... If you want to say reenacting the civil rights, the pre-civil rights movement, that's a bad argument.
00:24:48.000Reenacting the Civil War is just completely... Okay, but when I say cosplaying, I just want to bring you the past of Justin Jones.
00:24:53.000Like, we don't have to go back that far.
00:24:54.000So it turns out that in 2020, Justin Jones was actually caught in the middle of Black Lives Matter riots stopping cars and assaulting drivers.
00:25:55.000It required Additional emergency drills in both public and private schools.
00:25:58.000Increasing security collaboration with state and local law enforcement.
00:26:02.000It would require every public school to lock exterior doors while students are present subject to penalties for repeat violations.
00:26:07.000Conduct annual incident command and bus safety drills in addition to already require armed intruder drills.
00:26:11.000Requires all new built public school facilities to install classroom door locks and secure visitor entry vestibules.
00:26:17.000It would require school districts to annually share safety plans, floor plans, and security systems with state and local law enforcement, require every district to have a threat assessment team, require active annual shooter training for private security guards, require such training to be completed before being posted in the school.
00:26:30.000It would require private schools to develop safety plans, conduct annual armed intruder incident command and bus safety drills, lock exterior doors, and all of the rest.
00:26:38.000And both chambers are still considering the governor's separate budget amendment proposal, including a $140 million grant to place armed school resource officers in every single public school.
00:26:47.000So that particular bill passed in the Tennessee House 95-4, which means bipartisan legislation.
00:26:58.000Three of those four, no votes, were Gloria Johnson, the white lady from Knoxville, the Karen from Knoxville who didn't end up being expelled but gets to trot around with her two young friends and pretend that she's a civil rights hero, Representative Justin Jones, who until five minutes ago was attempting to allegedly assault drivers during quasi-riots and protests, and Justin Pearson of Memphis, who has rediscovered his acting chops, but not particularly well.
00:27:22.000And that is the way that all of this works.
00:27:24.000The media narrative is race above all.
00:27:33.000Which presumably is why, over in California, Dianne Feinstein is now coming under fire.
00:27:38.000She doesn't know she's coming under fire because Dianne Feinstein is senile.
00:27:40.000Everyone understands that Dianne Feinstein is senile, right, left, everyone knows that the senator from California is past her sell-by date, that she should not be sitting in the United States Senate at this point.
00:27:51.000Ro Khanna, Democrat from California, he's been saying that she should step down.
00:27:54.000She actually put out a statement yesterday talking about how she had shingles and she wasn't going to be showing up for the Senate for quite a while.
00:28:01.000The person who could push her out, theoretically, is the governor of California.
00:28:05.000He could theoretically take action against her, but he's not going to.
00:28:08.000But assuming that she eventually steps down here, Politico is already something for the Kamala Harris treatment.
00:28:13.000Quote, Governor Gavin Newsom provoked fury When he didn't appoint a Black woman to fill the Senate seat held by Kamala Harris, opting to choose longtime friend Alex Padilla instead.
00:28:23.000Democrats keep trotting him out as a presidential candidate.
00:28:25.000Was there, like, wide-scale fury that he didn't appoint a Black woman to fill Kamala Harris's seat?
00:28:29.000But now, according to Politico, he's facing similar pressure as the state's senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, recovers at her San Francisco home from shingles and could be forced to step down early if her health worsens.
00:28:39.000Black political leaders are making it clear they remember the governor's public pledge to appoint a black woman to the Senate if Feinstein resigned.
00:28:45.000And there are floating names, including Representative Barbara Lee, who is already running for the seat.
00:28:49.000So they don't want her to have to run for the seat.
00:28:50.000They want her to just be appointed to the seat, apparently.
00:30:45.000I don't care what they tell you in school, it's a really, really good summary of this.
00:30:47.000Okay, for people who don't know anything, like literally anything about world history, let me explain that Cleopatra was probably of Greek extraction.
00:30:54.000The reason that we say this is because she was almost undoubtedly of Greek extraction.
00:31:00.000After Alexander the Great conquered vast parts of North Africa and the Middle East and then died, this would be in the 4th century BCE, There was a giant sort of conflict that broke out among his chief generals.
00:31:26.000The notion that Cleopatra was black is silly.
00:31:28.000Again, you're allowed to do this in Hollywood because, of course, the only thing that matters is our weird Parochially American perception of what race matters?
00:31:58.000The entire Hollywood crowd went totally nuts when it turned out they were trying to cast Gal Gadot as Cleopatra.
00:32:03.000Gal Gadot undoubtedly looked a lot more like Cleopatra than anybody who's being cast in this particular production.
00:32:09.000Now, again, you can cast however you want, but I've noticed a certain pattern in Hollywood, which is that people who clearly are not black are now being cast as black, but if you ever did the reverse, then no way, right?
00:32:20.000That would be racism of the highest order.
00:32:23.000In fact, you'll recall that there's this Shonda Rhimes show, Bridgerton, which is Queen Victoria, is it?
00:32:32.000I don't watch Bridgerton because I'm a dude and I have testicles.
00:32:39.000And also a racially strange show in which a bunch of white people are cast as black people, sort of like Hamilton, a bunch of white people are cast as people of color, and all the rest.
00:32:47.000And again, if we're just gonna do race-neutral casting on everything, I'm here for it, fine, alright, that's cool.
00:32:52.000But that also means that Ryan Gosling needs to be up for Martin Luther King.
00:32:57.000That we're gonna need Christian Bale as, like, Booker T. Washington.
00:33:01.000Like, either you do it or you don't, okay?
00:33:03.000You don't get to make up— In this particular case, it's even worse, because they're actively trying to claim a thing that was not true for purposes, presumably, of suggesting that there was a whitewashing of Cleopatra's history.
00:33:14.000That there was an attempt to whitewash Cleopatra by turning her into a white lady, but actually, she was probably a black lady.
00:33:21.000Now, again, she had particularly distinctive facial features.
00:33:25.000There are paintings of her at the time.
00:33:28.000There are sculptures of her at the time.
00:33:30.000But the point that I'm making here is that we view everything now from the peculiarly intersectional lens of what exactly would black people want, presumably, like the most radical black activists want to say about a historical incident, and then we just like put it out there.
00:34:01.000Again, just a little bit of accuracy would go a long way.
00:34:04.000But intersectionality, above all, that's the only thing that matters.
00:34:06.000We'll get to more intersectional insanity in just one second.
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00:35:38.000In the latest episode of Exodus, we talked about this concept.
00:35:40.000Yeah, I've kind of revamped my earlier view about taking the Lord's name in vain.
00:35:45.000You know, I thought, well, it definitely meant, do not take to yourself what is religious to justify your own tyrannical presuppositions.
00:35:53.000But I also think there is likely an injunction against In addition to Jordan, I sat alongside a group of esteemed scholars, theologians, and artists to discuss one of the most seminal books in the Bible.
00:36:03.000New episodes are coming online every single week exclusively for DailyWire Plus members.
00:36:06.000of practice. So I think we said if I modify my speech to take that into account.
00:36:11.000In addition to Jordan, I sat alongside a group of esteemed scholars, theologians, and artists to discuss one of the most seminal books in the Bible. New episodes are coming online every single week exclusively for DailyWirePlus members.
00:36:16.000Join now at dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch Exodus. Meanwhile, intersectionality is doing enormous damage to people.
00:36:26.000The highest form of intersectionality is, of course, trans women.
00:36:29.000Trans women and trans men, these are the highest form of intersectionality because they violate all prescribed rules and boundaries and are victims on all sides, right?
00:36:37.000This is the way that all of this works.
00:36:40.000So there's a clip that has now been Making the rounds on Twitter of a gay man who has now detransitioned after having all sorts of surgeries and all sorts of hormone treatments.
00:37:00.000This is what I sound like as an almost 30-year-old man.
00:37:02.000And I feel like everyone is ignoring the pain because they are afraid that it threatens their choices and their narrative.
00:37:11.000But the active pressuring of people to transition so they can preserve their femininity, which is what happened with me, I was told that if I allowed myself to age, that I would become masculine and that it would never be possible and that I would do it anyway, and that I would be a more masculine transgender person like them.
00:37:31.000I take accountability for all of my choices, but when is the trans community going to take accountability for theirs?
00:37:42.000Legislators are instead going to do precisely what they want to do, including in Washington state, they've now passed just an insanely abusive law.
00:37:52.000So according to Axios, while other states are working to limit gender-affirming care, which of course is one of the most euphemistic euphemisms in the history of euphemisms, for transgender young people, Washington's state legislature is going in the opposite direction.
00:38:03.000This year, Washington lawmakers are trying to protect trans patients, as well as doctors who practice here, from the reach of other state laws that restrict gender-affirming health care for minors.
00:38:11.000A measure has now passed the Washington House that would block courts and law enforcement in the state from aiding other states' investigations into patients who travel to Washington for gender-affirming care.
00:38:20.000So in other words, if mommy and daddy disagree on transing the 11-year-old, and mommy simply absconds with the child and goes to Washington State and starts transing the 11-year-old, Washington State will not allow any sort of investigation into that.
00:38:34.000Not only that, the law apparently goes even further than that.
00:38:38.000Apparently, under state law, elective surgeries on minors still require parental consent.
00:38:43.000However, Washington state is now promoting law that would effectively suggest that parents don't have that power if a child seeking a gender transition runs away from home.
00:38:54.000And if the state knows their whereabouts, the state actually does not have to tell the parents where the kid is if the kid runs away from home because they are seeking quote-unquote transgender care.
00:39:08.000The fact that this is what has now become sort of the rote democratic position is beyond contempt, obviously.
00:39:14.000You know who's noting this is Elon Musk, who actually has a kid who's trying this sort of nonsense right now.
00:39:18.000now he tweeted out any parents or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are consenting adult should go to prison for life. Elon Musk is correct on that for Meanwhile, Washington State has lost the thread completely.
00:39:29.000James O'Keefe put out one, I believe this is his first investigation, with his new group, OMG Media, in which he actually talked to female prisoners in the Washington State prison system who talk about what it's like to be housed with males who are pretending that they are female and suggesting that they are in fact trans.
00:39:48.000Have you heard of the Washington State Correctional Center for Women, which has been in the news for its policy to place men who identify as women in the same prison, sometimes even the same cell, as biological women?
00:40:02.000Imagine coming to your room one day and you're in close custody and you turn around and there's a man standing up peeing in the toilet because you have the bathroom in your room.
00:40:15.000What you just heard and what you're about to hear are multiple inmates describing their experiences with transgendered women, formerly known as men, within the women's prison.
00:40:26.000WCCW has been the tip of the spear with inclusivity in the prison system.
00:40:31.000To protect the at-risk individuals involved, we've taken steps to conceal the identities of the sources and the inmates.
00:40:43.000You should go check it out over at okifmediagroup.com.
00:40:45.000But the simple fact that Washington state has decided that it's top priority right now is ensuring that males can be in female prisons, where presumably they will commit further sexual assault.
00:40:54.000Some of the inmates in this tape actually allege that that's what's been happening in the prisons, but people are afraid to speak about it.
00:40:59.000And also Washington state is pursuing the idea that parents do not have to be notified if their kids run away from home and claim that their parents are being mean to them on their on their trans identity.
00:41:09.000Now you would imagine that some of this might have some blowback for the Biden administration considering the Biden administration backs all this kind of stuff.
00:41:16.000You might also consider the fact that the Biden administration is presiding over an inflationary spiral that still has not ended.
00:41:21.000There's a lot of triumphalism a little bit earlier this week while I was off for the holiday from Democrats claiming that inflation was now coming down at a radical rate and we were going to soon be out of the woods.
00:41:31.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden is right that inflation has fallen from its monthly 1.2% peak last June and it's more than 9% peak on a 12-month basis.
00:41:38.000But prices are still rising at a 5% 12-month rate.
00:41:41.000That is 2.5 times what it is supposed to be.
00:41:51.000The Wall Street Journal says this is what economists mean when they say inflation is sticky.
00:41:57.000Biden is boasting that wages are now higher than they were nine months ago after accounting for inflation.
00:42:01.000But real wages are still down 0.7% from March 2022, and they are still down since Biden took office.
00:42:08.000Which is why there was a bit of a price spike in terms of the stock market immediately after the report happened, and then there was a sell-off immediately after that.
00:42:17.000Meanwhile, the Biden administration is presiding over the death of the United States dollar as the world's reserve currency.
00:42:23.000Lula da Silva, over in Brazil, is now calling on the BRICS nations to come up with an alternative to replace the dollar in foreign trade.
00:42:31.000Okay, so the BRICS nations, which represent 41% of the world's population, they are now talking pretty openly about essentially selling off their dollars and instead reinvesting in a sort of collective currency for themselves.
00:42:42.000Now, listen, that may be weaker than the dollar, it may be an objectively bad economic move to invest in the BRICS currency as opposed to anywhere else, but if the world is starting to break down into a Multipolar world in which you have to show allegiance to both sides or neither side or one side.
00:42:59.000You're going to see people divesting from the United States dollar in major ways.
00:43:02.000When that happens, it makes it much more expensive to raise debt.
00:43:06.000When it gets expensive to raise debt, the United States can't afford all of the massive social spending that we've been doing, considering we're well over 100% of debt to GDP ratio here in the United States.
00:43:16.000By the way, the entire left, which was centralizing on the idea that Jair Bolsonaro was an enemy of freedom and he was truly scary.
00:43:23.000It's Lula da Silva, the one who's making nice with the Russians and the Chinese.
00:43:26.000It's Lula da Silva who's openly calling for the divestment from the United States dollar.
00:43:30.000He said, why can't an institution like the BRICS Bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China?
00:43:35.000Between Brazil and the other BRICS countries?
00:43:36.000Who decided the dollar was the trade currency after the end of gold parity?
00:43:40.000I mean, the answer is the dollar is still the best bet on the market.
00:43:42.000But what he's saying is, who cares what the best bet on the market is?
00:44:02.000Unemployment continues to be a serious problem.
00:44:05.000Employers right now, the unemployment rate is low, but employers are having trouble finding people to actually fill those roles.
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00:46:42.000Together we've worked to become more peaceful, more equal, more diverse, more unified, and I think more hopeful.
00:46:51.000So today, wherever there is a yearning for freedom, a struggle for change, a cry for justice, people around the world know they can count on Ireland.
00:47:03.000And I believe they can count on the United States with notable exceptions once in a while.
00:47:10.000With notable exceptions once in a while, what is it you do for a living, sir?
00:47:14.000I believe people can count on the United States except for, you know, the people we betray and stab directly between the shoulder blades and leave for dead.
00:47:21.000Those people, they can't count on, but everybody else, they can count on us.
00:47:25.000And not Afghanistan, or Egypt, or Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, maybe Ukraine, we'll see, Taiwan, I don't know.
00:48:13.000Also, that's a story that never happened.
00:48:15.000His grandfather, again, the dead giveaway is anytime Joe Biden says, and my granddad said, Joey, Joey, and then he leans into the microphone and says, Joey, I'm Superman.
00:48:25.000And you're like, that never happened, Joe.
00:48:30.000You all know my favorite example of this.
00:49:14.000That does not matter, because again, if the Republicans cannot get it together, then they will not be able to get it together to beat him.
00:49:20.000Right now, he has been climbing a little bit in the public approval ratings.
00:49:24.000The Economist YouGov has him at four points underwater.
00:49:26.000Rasmussen has him at two points underwater.
00:49:28.000IBDTIPP has him at dead, even at 45, 45.
00:49:31.000The only recent poll that shows him severely underweight, this is a new kind of wave of quasi-pro-Biden polling.
00:49:38.000The spread remains at about 8%, but that's the lowest it's been in about a year.
00:49:44.000So, he's on a bit of an upswing right here, and you would imagine that now would be a good time for Republicans to start to centralize around candidates who can win, right?
00:49:50.000I mean, because Republicans presumably want to win.
00:49:53.000Maybe that's a priority for them, would be winning.
00:49:55.000I know, I know, this is a weird idea, that you don't actually vote because you do it out of ardent love for a person, and that voting isn't actually about the wonderful personal relationship you wish to have with a candidate, and that no matter how many times you vote for Doug Mastriano in a primary, he's not going to win a general election in Pennsylvania.
00:50:10.000I know that I know these are hard things to say, but as someone who would like to see Joe Biden not be in office, you know what I would love is to see Joe Biden be defeated.
00:50:17.000That would be a really, really good thing.
00:50:19.000The reason I point this out at this point is something occurred to me over the last couple of days.
00:50:22.000You know, President Trump, who is the most likely nominee right now by the polling data in the Republican Party, he says that he won the 2020 election and that he was robbed out of it.
00:50:33.000So I have really one question, because I really care about Republicans not losing, and that is, what is your plan to correct this?
00:50:59.000Was the election actually actively stolen in the sense that like ballot boxes were being stuffed and votes were being thrown in rivers and that sort of thing?
00:51:05.000No, I don't think that the evidence is there for that, nor does pretty much anyone else who has actually examined a huge variety of that, including Donald Trump's own legal team.
00:51:12.000Okay, but let's assume that I'm wrong.
00:51:14.000Let's assume that Trump is totally right, that what actually happened in 2020 was nefarious people in the dead of night bringing trucks filled with ballots down to the Fulton County Courthouse and just stuffing those ballots, or In Arizona, Maricopa County, just a bunch of illegal immigrants voting and no one bothering to check the votes, or whatever is the theory of the day.
00:51:30.000Let's assume that all of that is right.
00:51:31.000What is Donald Trump's plan to correct this?
00:51:35.000Because if not, that means he is, by his own theory, going to lose again.
00:51:39.000It seems like this would make a difference, and this is why it would actually matter to hear a plan for that.
00:51:43.000You know, when he talks about his positions, all of that is well and good.
00:51:46.000But none of those positions get made into policy if he doesn't win.
00:51:49.000So just to give an example of somebody who doesn't really understand, this is one of the problems for Trump when he was the actual president, is he doesn't understand how the system works.
00:51:55.000So Donald Trump was talking about progressive DAs, and he was saying that he was promising to fire what he called Soros district attorneys.
00:52:22.000attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros district attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States.
00:52:33.000Very unfair to our population, very unfair to our country.
00:52:37.000They will be the 100 most ferocious legal warriors against crime and communist corruption that this country has ever seen.
00:52:47.000Okay, so I agree with all that inside the federal DOJ, but you may have noticed that Soros-funded district attorneys are all state-level employees.
00:52:55.000You can't actually fund a federal-level district attorney.
00:53:34.000Donald Trump, as president, could not do anything about all of that.
00:53:38.000As far as the victimization of Donald Trump, it now turns out that this is amazing.
00:53:41.000So the way that it works is that if you are a Republican and you mention George Soros, like Donald Trump just did, this means that you are some sort of crazed anti-Semite.
00:53:48.000If you point out that George Soros is actually an extremely left-wing guy who does not particularly love Judaism and has funded a bunch of progressive causes, this makes you a villain.
00:53:57.000You're not allowed to mention George Soros.
00:53:58.000Meanwhile, Reid Hoffman, who is one of the so-called PayPal Mafia, is actually providing direct legal funding for writer E. Jean Carroll's sexual assault lawsuit against Donald Trump.
00:54:10.000According to Trump's attorneys, they wrote a letter to U.S.
00:54:12.000District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday saying that Carroll failed to disclose she actually received legal funding from Reid Hoffman, billionaire and donor to the Democratic Party.
00:54:20.000A lawyer for Carroll dismissed the allegations as baseless.
00:54:23.000But if that's the case, then obviously it's not a particularly good look when you have billionaire left-wingers like Reid funding Reid Hoffman, funding this, funding private lawsuits against the President of the United States.
00:54:37.000Now meanwhile, you know, if you wish to talk about all of these things, which are very unlikely to win elections, that's one thing.
00:54:42.000If you wish to actually get things done, this is the nice thing about getting things done.
00:54:44.000When you get things done and you win, you actually get to do things.
00:54:46.000So over in Florida, they've now passed a six-week abortion ban.
00:54:50.000This has led to the normal puerile behavior by Democrats.
00:54:53.000When Democrats do puerile behavior, by the way, this is fighting in favor of democracy.
00:54:57.000When Republicans do puerile behavior, it's a threat to the Republic.
00:55:00.000The Democrats and their activist base, they decided to apparently flood the building at the Florida Capitol on Thursday as the statehouse prepared to vote on a six-week abortion ban.
00:55:10.000And then they proceeded to drop objects onto the floor of the house, throwing stickers and small pieces of paper on lawmakers as they entered the House chamber.
00:55:32.000Okay, all of this was um you can see a bunch of people who are in the middle of the uh of the rotunda there and they are they're standing and they are singing and then as lawmakers were entering they were showered with objects from above and then they were cleared from from that particular area.
00:55:53.000Would you like to get things done, or would you like to feel good about yourself as you have a higher chance of losing moving forward?
00:55:58.000That really is the big question right here.
00:56:00.000DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, according to the New York Times.
00:56:05.000He said on Thursday night that he had signed the new ban and he put out a signing statement in which he explicitly pointed out that the Democratic Party is in favor in major states of abortion up until point of birth, which is in fact the way to approach this issue.
00:56:20.000So a lot of people who are wary of these sorts of bans in states like Florida.
00:56:25.000I will admit that this is a politically risky move for Governor DeSantis.
00:56:28.000It is a riskier move than, for example, going for a 12-week ban or a 10-week abortion ban.
00:56:32.000But the way that DeSantis has typically governed is that he stakes out a position and then he tries to move the public along to that position, which is actually what leadership very typically looks like.
00:56:40.000He did not take a middle road during COVID.
00:56:42.000He took a very strong stand during COVID, and then he tried to educate the public about that, and the public ended up with him.
00:56:47.000That's not always going to work, but it is, in fact, a demonstration of leadership.
00:56:50.000So signing a six-week abortion ban, at political risk to himself, right?
00:56:55.000The easiest thing to do would be to sign, like, a 12-week abortion ban, and then, when asked about it on a presidential stage, he can say, we took a moderate position.
00:57:01.000It's what a vast majority of the voters wanted, not just in my state, but countrywide.
00:57:05.000These are the same sorts of restrictions as in Europe.
00:57:06.000Instead, he went for a full pro-life position, a six-week abortion ban.
00:57:11.000And pointed out that the dichotomy is between people, that there are exceptions for rape, incest, and for fatal fetal abnormalities in the Florida restriction ban.
00:57:21.000And he pointed out again in his signing statement that the alternative is California and New York.
00:57:28.000So, this is what happens when you win.
00:57:31.000When you win, you get to make the rules.
00:57:34.000Or you could lose, theoretically, and you could continue to not make the rules.
00:57:36.000Those are really the choices that are available to the Republican Party in 2024.
00:57:40.000Because otherwise, you are looking at another four years of an 85-year-old man wandering around and slipping upstairs.
00:57:46.000That is the actual possibility right here.
00:57:49.000Again, when I look at the polling data here, and I look at election 2024, What you see is that Joe Biden has consistently held a fairly solid lead over Donald Trump.
00:58:02.000The RealClearPolitics polling average right now is showing that Trump is in spitting distance, but that's because Trump is restricted.
00:58:49.000There is a man who has decided, and I kind of like this, that he is a big Jack Daniels fan, and he discovered that back in 2021, they had done like a full campaign with RuPaul, and he's like, yeah, you know what?
00:59:31.000The point is that when you signal disapproval of a product, it is bad press for the product.
00:59:34.000That's the reason why he is doing this.
00:59:38.000He's gonna set all this stuff on fire.
00:59:40.000A lot of drinkers right now are like, noooo.
00:59:43.000But, again, the wages of wokeness are people disliking the wokeness.
00:59:48.000There's a piece by Gregory Angelo in the Wall Street Journal today that's kind of fascinating.
00:59:53.000It's called, I Helped Make Corporations Woke and I Regret It.
00:59:57.000This person was an activist for the Log Cabin Republicans who went to a bunch of different corporations back in 2010 or so and tried to cudgel corporations into making public statements about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
01:00:14.000He said, My work was completely unnecessary.
01:00:16.000Market forces organically shaped a culture in which almost every American now believes in equal job opportunities for gay people.
01:00:21.000We'd have same-sex marriage in all 50 states today, with or without 379 major corporations filing friend of the court briefs with the Supreme Court.
01:00:27.000The trend I helped begin, I now realize, was a disaster.
01:00:31.000corporations have weighed in on everything from abortion and Black Lives Matter to election laws, even as the American public overwhelmingly wishes they wouldn't.
01:00:38.000This of course is exactly right, and good for Angelo for actually writing this piece.
01:00:54.000Sophie Rebecca is apparently a ballet dancer who back in 2017 became the first person, who is a dude, awarded a female scholarship at the Royal Ballet, at the Royal Academy of Dance.
01:01:08.000Circa 2017, quote, a former male racing driver has become one of the first openly transgender ballet students to pass a Royal Academy of Dance exam.
01:01:15.000Sophie Rebecca, 35, was a racing driver for nearly a decade before leaving motorsport to chase her childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer.
01:01:21.000Uh, this would be a very, very large dude, by the way.
01:01:25.000She originally began learning ballet as James at 17, but was dropped from class after a teacher found out about her gender struggles.
01:01:32.000Apparently, the Royal Academy of Dance abandoned rules that only people born as women should be allowed to take its female dance courses in 2013.
01:01:53.000So, apparently, RAD is a ballet style which fuses features of the French, Italian, Russian, and Danish traditions.
01:02:00.000The RAD is also a credentialing organization, according to National Review, and Sophie Rebecca claims to have passed five levels of the dance exams.
01:02:05.000They merit in grade 7 and a distinction in grade 8.
01:02:09.000Apparently, that just means that you have studied the style.
01:02:18.000Here is some of the tape of Sophie Rebecca dancing.
01:02:21.000This is a person who, again, was granted some sort of benefit from the Royal Academy of Dance.
01:02:26.000Um, it's not great. Um, now what's kind of funny is that look at the camera shake every time. It's like Jurassic Park with shaking water glass. This is, this is not good, folks. This is very awkward.
01:03:11.000This is not what ballet is supposed to look like.
01:03:12.000Men who pretend that they are dancing female ballet and are treated by society as though they are dancing female ballet are destroying the standard.
01:03:22.000The attempt to pretend that this is what great ballet looks like, because men can actually dance in the same way as women, is simply silly.
01:03:33.000And yet this is precisely what has now been promoted, culminating with a performance in which actual women studying ballet who have trained their whole lives to, you know, look graceful while they dance, end up carrying flowers over to a middle-aged man in a dress.
01:03:49.000A special bow for the very large male wearing a dress.
01:04:01.000And here are all the women who actually trained for years and are graceful and actually know how to dance ballet.
01:04:06.000And they're going to actually pick up flowers from the floor and pay homage to the large gentleman.