Protesters flooded the New York City subway system this past weekend, demanding answers for the death of criminal vagrant Jordan Neely. Meanwhile, a panel in California has officially approved reparations payments of up to $1.2 million for Black residents. Also, some new polling looks brutal for Biden, and ABC has obtained exclusive footage of a Ron DeSantis debate prep session. Plus, there were two mass killing attacks over the weekend, but neither fit neatly into the left-wing media narrative. In our daily cancellation, the woke mob attempts to cancel the children s cartoon Bluey for the sin of body shaming.
00:12:55.200And as for the transatlantic slave trade, you know, it was African nations and tribes that caught and captured and sold the slaves into the transatlantic slave trade.
00:13:06.540So a black person in America today may be the descendant of slaves.
00:13:12.000He may also be the descendant of slave traders.
00:13:22.160Well, because one argument, you just heard it there from the Democratic lawmaker.
00:13:28.540One argument for reparations is based on the current condition of the black community.
00:13:33.820The longstanding inequalities, as we're told.
00:13:37.260As the argument goes, the black community is in worse shape than most other racial groups by nearly every metric.
00:13:43.600Because of this historical legacy of slavery.
00:13:45.880And these reparations would not only redress the wrong, but they would also help boost the community.
00:13:50.260And then, you know, in a practical way, repair the damage.
00:13:54.700But practically speaking, this is wrong.
00:13:57.160You cannot solve a person's problems by just handing them a million dollars.
00:14:00.980Look at the tragic history of mega millions lottery winners if you want to learn more about that.
00:14:06.960Besides, there is a better and more holistic way to help this community.
00:14:13.260In fact, I've got two, there's just two ideas off the top of my head.
00:14:19.980Instead of reparations, we could, first of all, stop lionizing and making role models out of the absolute worst members of the black community.
00:14:53.500But none of them are taken and turned into heroes.
00:14:56.240And on the right, we typically chalk that up to anti-white bias, and it is.
00:15:02.460But at the same time, as a white person, I don't, I wouldn't want mentally ill vagrants and drug-addicted career criminals presented as our martyrs and heroes.
00:15:13.760You know, you tend to become what you admire, and these are the black people that the left puts forward for admiration.
00:15:22.240Second, one of the best ways to help any community is to put the dangerous people in that community in prison.
00:15:31.660Better than, we talk about repairing damage, well, instead of repairing damage, how about we prevent damage in the first place?
00:15:40.220And one way that you could do that is by taking guys like Jordan Neely and locking them away.
00:15:46.400You cannot pretend that you're interested in helping the black community while you insist on making black neighborhoods more dangerous by refusing to prosecute criminals.
00:15:55.600Simply enforce the law, enact justice on criminals, and things will change for the better almost instantly.
00:17:34.860There's a limited time order and you must live within a Cinch service area to redeem it.
00:17:38.040Visit cinch.com slash offer for details.
00:17:40.280I'll start with a little bit of political news.
00:17:42.660You know, if you're like the average person, then your faith in polling probably depends largely on whether the poll says what you want it to say.
00:17:52.360That's how most people seem to operate.
00:18:25.260But you can glean something from them if you apply, you know, the grain of salt.
00:18:30.840So there's an element of fakeness to it.
00:18:33.820But you can still, you got to dig a little bit deeper sometimes, you can still find something in it that might tell you a little bit about the actual situation in the country.
00:18:43.900So even with a grain of salt, this poll does not look good for Biden.
00:19:51.920But the fact of the matter is, in modern politics, that is not the kind of number that a Democrat needs to be victorious.
00:19:57.920And then, of course, that does spill over into the head-to-head matchup, the hypothetical rematch, Trump versus Biden.
00:20:03.920Right now, a seven-point edge in our poll in Trump leading Biden.
00:20:08.920And in fact, it's an identical number with Ron DeSantis in a head-to-head that might happen next November.
00:20:14.920That tells us at this very early stage, George, that this race is shaping up a lot more about the incumbent president, Joe Biden, than it is about any of his challengers.
00:20:24.920That's one of the litmus tests for polls, at least political polls, I think.
00:20:29.920Look, what are the supporters of the guy who's losing in the poll saying about it?
00:20:34.920And if even they are admitting that it's bad, it's brutal, actually, as we're told, then it's probably pretty bad.
00:20:51.920These approval ratings, what was it, 36%.
00:20:55.920And that, you know, there's a little bit of a historical adjustment you have to make there because these days, like, I don't think it's possible at this point for a president to poll over, like, 50% in approval rating.
00:21:16.920People are, the economy's in shambles, crime running rampant.
00:21:21.920You can't even take the subway without having to worry about being assaulted by some crazy homeless person.
00:21:28.920And also, the guy running for reelection will be 82 years old, which I think is a major part of this.
00:21:37.920The fact that Joe Biden's presidency and his administration have made people's lives worse is the biggest part of it.
00:21:46.920But also, his age has to be a major factor in all this.
00:21:52.920You know, I would guess that if the situation was exactly the same economically in every other way, but Joe Biden was 10 years younger, his polling numbers are probably quite a bit better.
00:23:29.920And it makes them look all the better when you consider that since they have all this footage, they're going to put the worst possible stuff out.
00:24:05.920They got this footage of debate prep in 2018.
00:24:10.920The only way that I could see that they would have gotten this footage is the only way they could have gotten is someone that was at least at the time on Ron DeSantis' team gave it to ABC.
00:24:22.920We don't know who that was, but someone did.
00:24:25.920And anyway, here's the footage that we're told is supposed to be a big scandal for Ron DeSantis.
00:26:08.920They're making a lot of the fact that whoever was on, you know, off camera there was saying to write the word likable at the top of his sheet of notes as he goes into the debate.
00:26:20.920Which, the only thing surprising about that maybe is that it's such useless advice.
00:26:25.920The fact that a politician is being advised to come off as likable, I think every politician consciously tries to do that.
00:26:36.920Being told to write it on your sheet of paper is that's really bad advice.
00:27:17.920And again, we can assume that nothing like that exists, okay, on camera, because if it did, it would have come out by now.
00:27:26.920Especially if there are people on Ron DeSantis' team or that used to be on his team that are now willing to take footage like this and leak it to the left-wing press.
00:27:35.920If there was something really bad, if there were really terrible skeletons in his closet, we can be pretty sure we'd see them by now.
00:27:44.920All right, moving to this, you know, it was a pretty terrible weekend, two mass killings, which isn't to say mass shootings, but two mass killings, both in Texas.
00:27:51.920And in both cases, the alleged assailants are Hispanic, which is relevant only because in both cases, predictably, the media is trying to pin the blame on white supremacy.
00:28:00.920But neither of the alleged culprits are actually white.
00:28:06.920Law enforcement officials said the suspect who murdered at least eight people and injured half a dozen more at the Allen Premium Outlets in Texas was a 33-year-old Latino male who reportedly worked as a security guard.
00:28:17.920He was wearing a tactical vest, armed with a rifle, a handgun, and had other weapons in his car, according to officials.
00:28:23.920The FBI raided a home in the Northeast Patrol Division of Dallas on Saturday where the suspect reportedly lived with his parents.
00:28:29.920They reportedly needed a translator to speak with the family.
00:28:32.920There's footage of this, which I would not recommend watching, but the suspect drives up in a gray Dodge Charger and then gets out of the car and starts spraying bullets.
00:28:43.920We still don't, there's still no official information on his motive or anything else.
00:28:49.920He had no serious criminal record and was working as a security guard.
00:28:52.920Now, that was the shooting, but unfortunately, again, not the only mass killing to happen over the weekend.
00:29:01.920The other one reported by Fox, the number of people killed when a man crashed his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday has risen to eight, police say, and at least 11 have been injured.
00:29:12.920The Brownsville Police Department told Fox News that eight victims died at the scene.
00:29:16.920At least 11 others have been transported to area hospitals.
00:29:19.920The driver, who police confirmed is a Hispanic man, has been arrested and charged, but investigations are ongoing.
00:29:24.920They're doing a toxicology report, obviously, and the initial reports from authorities is that they, this appears to be an intentional attack.
00:29:33.920And this one too, there's a lot of video footage that was making rounds on social media.
00:29:38.920The kind of footage that if you were on Twitter over the weekend, you would have probably seen some of it, whether you wanted to or not.
00:29:43.920And I certainly didn't want to, but it was right there, you know, scrolling by and you see a car plow into a bunch of people and kill them.
00:29:50.920This is becoming extremely common on social media now was like, if you're, if you are a regular social media user and you have been over the last several years, you have certainly seen people die on camera.
00:30:05.920Like you, it's unavoidable that you'll see it at this point.
00:30:09.920It's becoming so ubiquitous, which I don't think helps anything.
00:30:14.920I know there are some people that say, well, we need to get this footage out there.
00:30:16.920People need to see it so they understand what's going on, but I don't think it helps anything.
00:30:22.920I think if, if any, if, if it does anything, it hurts because it desensitizes people.
00:30:27.920After a while, when you just see all of this death, I think if anything, it has the effect of desensitizing, which is exactly the opposite of what we want.
00:30:37.920We still don't know a lot about either of these incidents.
00:30:41.920The authorities again are saying that the car attack was likely intentional.
00:30:44.920It also seems at least certainly possible that he was high or drunk or something along those lines.
00:31:22.920Then shortly after that, we have eight people killed in a span of, you know, five seconds because someone plowed a car into them.
00:31:32.920Because it turns out that even if you don't have a gun, we, we all have access to these, you know, um, hundreds of these, these, these, uh, two ton, uh, metal vehicles that we all, that you can drive around 80 miles an hour.
00:31:49.920So we, we have, we have access to lots of technology that bad people can use to kill other people, which is why the fundamental question, as I'm always raising after things like this, the fundamental question is not how did they do it?
00:32:12.920Because again, unfortunately, there are many ways for a bad person to kill lots of people.
00:32:21.920A gun is only one of the ways they can do it.
00:32:23.920Um, so that's not the fundamental question.
00:32:28.920The fundamental question is why, why are people doing this?
00:32:33.920If it seems like this is happening more and more, you know, not a weekend goes by that we don't have stories like this.
00:32:39.920That's certainly how it seems to me, but that's not a reflection that people have more access to these tools of, of, of death.
00:32:49.920People have been driving cars for many decades.
00:32:54.920People have had guns for hundreds of years.
00:32:56.920So that, that can't be the, the answer.
00:33:00.920Um, and anyway, that only answers the how question.
00:33:07.920The, the, the other question is why, why would somebody want to do this?
00:33:11.920Most people, millions of Americans have guns and they, they're, they're not ever going to murder anybody.
00:33:18.920They have no inclination to no desire to.
00:33:21.920It's not even that they're not doing it because they're afraid they're going to go to jail.
00:33:23.920It's they don't get to that point in their mind because like most of us, I have guns.
00:33:28.920I never, I never have to say to myself, well, if I do this, I'll go to jail.
00:33:31.920I'll go to jail. It's, it's, you don't have the inclination.
00:33:35.920Thought would never even occur to you to do that.
00:33:38.920There's, there's a zero chance of it happening for most people.
00:33:42.920Just as most of us drive cars around every day.
00:33:46.920There, there's zero chance that we will intentionally plow into someone and kill them.
00:33:53.920So if, if simply having access to these tools is what causes it, then that doesn't explain why for the vast majority of people who have guns or have knives or have cars, have any weapon or tool that could be used to kill people.
00:34:11.920It doesn't explain why most of us would never do this, never, never do it.
00:34:15.920But then there are the people that do.
00:34:19.920And it seems like there are more people, the proportion of people who are inclined to engage in these murderous sprees has gone up.
00:34:27.920And if that's true, there's still the question of why.
00:34:30.920Um, and we're not, we're not, we're not getting to that question.
00:34:35.920We're not attempting to grapple with it at all.
00:34:40.920Because there you get to, uh, lots of things that the media has no interest in talking about, the left doesn't want to talk about.
00:34:49.920You get to things like the collapse of the family.
00:34:52.920Um, the spiritual decay in our culture.
00:34:59.920You know, the, the, uh, the crisis of meaning and purpose.
00:35:05.920People living these kind of empty lives.
00:35:08.920All of these things, these are all factors that lead to this.
00:35:14.920It's not like, you know, if you, you take this security guard, alleged security guard who committed the mass shooting.
00:35:25.920If you were to take the guns away from him ahead of time, would that, would that mean that we're safe now?
00:35:32.920Would it, would it be safe to be around this guy?
00:35:34.920Would, would you feel comfortable living next to him?
00:35:38.920Would you feel comfortable sitting next to him on a, on a, the subway?
00:35:42.920Even if he didn't have a gun, would you?
00:35:44.920Of course not. He's, he's, he's still a homicidal maniac.
00:35:47.920Still an evil person who has the desire to kill lots of people.
00:35:51.920Now he just has to be slightly more creative in how he figures out how to do it.
00:36:51.920Anthony declined to elaborate on the details of the shooting.
00:36:54.920According to a Thursday report from the San Francisco Standard, police said that Anthony tried to stop Brown from shoplifting.
00:37:01.920He was still standing inside the store when Brown walked out.
00:37:04.920Brown then turned around and allegedly spat on Anthony and raised a hand to him.
00:37:08.920It was at that point that Anthony drew his gun and fired.
00:37:10.920It was also at that point that as the DA, San Francisco DA said, it went from a shoplifting incident, shoplifting is where you just take the merchandise and walk out with it, shoplifting to robbery because now force is being used.
00:37:25.920Anthony pointed out that security guards like him are under immense pressure in confrontational situations like that and that it happened very fast.
00:37:31.920Quote, this is important for more people to be aware of, he said.
00:38:39.920They're whittling it down to the one single option that they want to leave open to you, which is to sit there and endure whatever a criminal scumbag wants to do.
00:38:56.920The only option they want to leave open to you is to surrender to that criminal's whims.
00:39:02.920How are they going to get rid of armed security, though?
00:39:07.920Well, they know that their efforts to abolish and defund the police have basically failed.
00:39:14.920They're not going to be able to pass a law prohibiting individuals from having armed security for their property or prohibiting businesses from having armed security on their premises.
00:39:26.920They would like to do that, but they're not going to be able to do it.
00:39:30.920Well, the way around it is to bring things to a point where nobody would want to be an armed security guard because it's not worth the risk.
00:39:44.920So, they can't prevent Walgreens from having armed security, but they can make it so that it's not worth it for anyone to take that job as a security guard.
00:39:55.920Which is also the end-run maneuver they've pulled when it comes to police.
00:40:02.920We can't abolish policing as much as we would like, but we can make it clear that if you take this job, we're going to ruin your life.
00:40:07.920We're going to put you in an impossible lose-lose situation.
00:40:09.920Every time you put on the badge and go outside and get in your patrol car, we are creating a series of lose-lose situations.
00:40:18.920Because if there's a crime happening and you don't do anything to stop it, well, then you're negligent and you haven't done your job.
00:40:25.920If you step in to try to stop it, you could get hurt yourself.
00:40:28.920Or if you do succeed in stopping it, then that means you're using some kind of force on the criminal and then we could ruin your life for that.
00:40:37.920No matter what happens, if you're a police officer, as soon as you encounter, as soon as you're actually face-to-face with a crime,
00:40:44.920which is the whole reason why your job exists, you lose.
00:40:49.920And they can do the same thing with armed security.
00:40:52.920Yeah, we can have you there kind of as a decorative feature, but the moment that something actually happens,
00:41:02.920like the reason why your job exists, the moment that happens and you encounter it, you lose.
00:41:09.920And it's going to be much easier to scare people away from these kind of armed security roles than it is even for police,
00:41:16.920because I imagine it pays a lot worse, benefits are a lot worse, and people are going to say, well, why would I do that?
00:41:25.920Would you take a job as an armed security guard at a Walgreens in San Francisco?
00:41:30.920As the security guard points out, no one has your back.
00:41:35.920It's like you're there to not just protect Walgreens, but as we talked about on Friday, you're also defending the community in a very real sense.
00:41:47.920Because people in the community need these products that Walgreens sells.
00:41:52.920And if you don't stop people from stealing them, then Walgreens shuts down and nobody can have access to them.
00:41:56.920So you are protecting the community's access to these necessary items.
00:42:02.920But the community is not going to have your back.
00:42:07.920The other thing is that, you know, he talks about the emotional impact it's had on him after killing this Banco Brown person.
00:42:15.920And that's a very real thing, and it shows you how he is the real victim here.
00:42:21.920Okay, when an armed security guard is forced to shoot somebody because they're trying to rob the place, the person who pulled the trigger is the victim of that death.
00:42:33.920Okay, Banco Brown is not the victim of Banco Brown's death.
00:42:37.920Banco Brown brought that on a biological female, I believe, right?
00:44:17.920Biden's plans to help struggling business owners in the wake of COVID lockdowns were to prioritize black, Latino, Native American, and women-owned businesses.
00:44:25.920It goes without saying that if the roles were reversed, if Biden had said that his plans were to prioritize white, male-owned businesses, there would have been outrage.
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00:45:33.920I should be more sensitive while I'm canceling people.
00:45:36.920Roland says, the term unhoused is meant to proclaim what society has done to a person, not a description of a person's state, thus removing personal responsibility.
00:45:45.920Yeah, I get that that's the, you know, intention behind changing the term to make it more passive.
00:45:55.920But it's still not clear to me how homeless didn't already accomplish that.
00:46:01.920And this also shows how the left's, their manipulation of language, why it's so effective.
00:46:09.920Because what ends up happening is that we end up defending what really is PC language when they come up with even more PC language.
00:46:19.920So they come up with a PC term to describe something.
00:46:22.920And maybe at first there's some pushback, but then eventually it just becomes part of the vernacular.
00:46:27.920And then they come up with a new terminology to replace that one.
00:46:32.920And then we defend the most recent PC, not realizing that even that is PC.
00:46:37.920So homeless as a term, you know, this is not how people used to describe this group of people.
00:46:44.920They would have used terms like vagrant, drifter, you know, these kinds of terms.
00:46:49.920Even terms that were much more directly insulting, like bum, you know, things like that.
00:46:55.920And then we came up with this idea of homeless.
00:46:58.920Because the concept is there's there's no judgment being passed.
00:47:03.920It already sounds pretty sort of passive and neutral, just homeless without a home, less homeless.
00:47:09.920And it sounds like it already sounds like something that happens to a person.
00:47:14.920Not not to it's not the result of any choices that they made.
00:47:18.920Even though in reality, vast majority of cases of homelessness, it is the result of choices that were made.
00:47:25.920Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to help these people.
00:47:28.920It just means that if you want to help people, you want to start by understanding why they're in the position that they're in.
00:47:35.920And it's important to understand that no, it's not simply victims of circumstance.
00:47:41.920It's not simply that, well, they tripped and fell one day and next thing you know, their house was gone and their house unhoused or homeless.
00:47:48.920Because if it was that, then yeah, you could solve the problem by building homes and giving them to the homeless population.
00:48:00.920And the only argument against that would be one of economics.
00:48:04.920But if that could actually solve the problem, okay, if that could solve it, okay, there's a 100% guarantee that you could solve the homeless problem by simply giving homes to all the homeless people.
00:48:27.920Let's build a bunch of homes, give homes to all the homeless.
00:48:31.920But that would not come close to solving the problem.
00:48:34.920Okay, because when you take someone who is on the street, they're addicted to drugs and they're Jordan Neely, mentally ill, violent, all this.
00:48:42.920And you put them in a home, they're going to be back out on the street in about 30 minutes.
00:48:48.920Okay, the home is going to be destroyed and they're going to be back out on the street.
00:48:53.920There's a reason why they ended up out there.
00:48:58.920There's a reason why, look, it's, if you're living out on the street corner, it would be better, like you could get a, you could go to some fleabag motel and rent a room for extremely cheap rate.
00:49:13.920And you would think that even if you had like a minimum wage job or something, you have enough to at least afford that.
00:49:20.920It's not a good life, but it's better than being out on the street.
00:49:23.920They're not going to make those kinds of choices.
00:49:25.920And in many cases, because they've, you know, if, if it's a drug addict, a drug addiction situation and everything goes into the drug, whatever you give them goes into the drug, you give them a house goes into the drug.
00:49:37.920They'll sell the house to buy drugs and they'll be dead.
00:49:53.920It makes it harder for us to understand the actual cause of this crisis, which means that we cannot solve it.
00:50:01.920Um, and by the way, if you want, we've talked before, but if you want real world examples of, uh, maybe not giving, just giving houses to the homeless, but there have been cities where they've said, well, let's, um, let's require hotels to house the homeless.
00:50:16.920That's so we could solve the problem there.
00:50:17.920Take the homeless, put them in a hotel room, problem solved.
00:50:22.920The, the hotel rooms are destroyed and the people you gave the hotel rooms to end up back on the street the next day.
00:50:31.920Um, another comment says, Matt, I w I would want to see you defend your idea of restricting transition procedures from adults aware of consequences of their decision and willing to incur them.
00:50:42.920I disagree with this and think you can't defend this beyond that.
00:52:42.920Yeah, that's a lot of what these false choices are all about.
00:52:45.920We heard we heard on on Friday the some on the right all all of a sudden have decided culture war doesn't matter anymore because we have to avoid World War Three.
00:52:54.920As if we have to make a choice between those two.
00:52:57.920And also as if the the conservatives who now have abandoned the culture war, they're dedicating themselves full time now to stopping World War Three.
00:53:06.920Which again, if you're a normal citizen, how exactly are you going to do that?
00:54:12.920I still can't even read it because I'm that stupid.
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00:54:46.920Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
00:54:48.920I have frequently discussed the trials and tribulations faced by parents who seek tolerable entertainment options for their children.
00:54:58.920Really, we would prefer something wholesome and enriching, but that very often proves to be too high a bar.
00:55:02.920So we'll settle for tolerable, which simply means that it's a children's show or film that doesn't engage in left wing brainwashing
00:55:08.920and isn't so loud, stupid and obnoxious that we can't stand to be in the room when it's on.
00:55:13.920This is a bar high enough that 99% of all modern children's entertainment cannot hope to clear it.
00:55:18.920And it whittles the options down considerably so that we can, you know, we can feel pretty safe with whatever few options are left.
00:55:25.920And one of the options left is a show that listeners of this podcast first alerted me to.
00:55:30.920It's not only it not only clears the not woke, not obnoxious bar, but even manages the extremely rare feat of hurtling the actively wholesome and enriching bar, which is way up here.
00:55:41.920Bluey is a cartoon originally out of Australia about a family of blue healer dogs.
00:55:46.920Bluey herself, the older daughter in the family, is the main character.
00:55:50.920But most episodes prominently feature her family members, her younger sister, her mom and her dad.
00:55:54.920And the dad is named a bandit in the show.
00:55:56.920Probably the show's most beloved character.
00:56:02.920And although the characters are anthropomorphic animals, the family dynamics are, you know, pretty realistic and also positive.
00:56:09.920The dad character especially is a source of comedy, which for most modern entertainment would mean that he's a stupid, bumbling oaf in the butt of all the jokes.
00:56:40.920And that's why the woke crowd is absolutely determined to ruin it.
00:56:44.920Back in, so let's trace this, the history of the woke crowd going after Bluey.
00:56:49.920It's been a long campaign, a long battle they've been waging.
00:56:53.920Back in 2021, there's a journalist named Beverly Wang wrote an article for ABC, which is the Australian broadcasting company in this case.
00:57:00.920And she applauded the show for being, as she says, tender, nuanced, and joyful.
00:57:05.920And yet at the same time, she criticized it for its lack of representation.
00:57:09.920In an article that I'm 99% sure isn't supposed to be satire, Wang wrote, quote,
00:57:16.920As a parent of color, I am always conscious of the presence or absence of diverse representation in kids' pop culture, what it means for children, the conversations we have around that.
00:57:25.920I sincerely believe you don't have to be other to think about this, too.
00:57:29.920We live in a world where the majority of main characters on children's television are white, where there are more animals than people of color protagonists populating the pages of children's books.
00:57:38.920Where are the disabled, queer, poor, gender diverse dogs of color and single parent dog families in Bluey's Brisbane?
00:57:45.920If they're in the background, well, let them come forward.
00:57:49.920Now, the most obvious answer here is that the show does feature dogs of color.
00:57:53.920The color is blue, hence the name of the show.
00:57:56.920Does it overrepresent the blue-colored community?
00:57:58.920Does it make blue people feel more welcome and included at the expense of otherizing those in the audience who might be, you know, pink or green or purple or some other color?
00:58:10.920Does the show fail to include queer and, quote, gender diverse dogs, whatever that means?
00:58:15.920Again, yes, but that's because the makers of Bluey, you know, made the provocative decision to not turn the show into a vehicle for sexual indoctrination.
00:58:28.920As to the lack of poor dogs and single parent family dogs and disabled dogs and dogs with hearing difficulties and dogs with ADHD and dogs with food allergies and illegal immigrant dogs, dogs with sleep apnea, dogs with eczema, etc.
00:58:43.920These boxes are not checked, but that's because the show is not trying to check boxes.
00:58:48.920It's just trying to tell a story, a very simple story to children.
00:58:52.920Given that none of the children in the audience are dogs and none of them have dog parents, none of them will feel represented in the extremely literal way that the left demands.
00:59:03.920But that's a good thing because worthwhile children's entertainment is supposed to activate a child's imagination.
00:59:11.920You don't want to put a child into a box and then give him a character tailor-made for that box and say, here you go, child, this is your character.
00:59:23.920This is the one assigned to you so you can relate to this character specifically.
00:59:27.920Instead, you want a child to use his imagination and use that to engage with and relate to the characters.
00:59:35.920For example, right now the fictional characters that resonate the most with my three-year-old daughter are Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen.
00:59:44.920And that doesn't mean she's gender-fluid, half boy and half girl.
00:59:48.920It means that she's an imaginative toddler.
00:59:51.920But that was only the first woke attack launched against Bluey.
00:59:54.920A year later, two Australian academics published an article taking aim at Bandit, the dad character.
01:00:00.920Noting a, quote, darker side to this lovable character, they claim that Bandit, quote, never strays far from reductive stereotypes.
01:00:07.920Bemoaning the fact that he is a, quote, likable roguish male stuck between childhood and adulthood whose disrespect of authority and rough and ready masculinity reflects Australia's emotional attachment to the working class underdog.
01:00:20.920The writers also take Bandit to task for incidents of alleged bullying because of the ways that he playfully teases his children in the show.
01:00:28.920And they scold the cartoon dog for being, quote, surprisingly conservative when it comes to gender values.
01:00:34.920In other words, as already established, the dad character is portrayed as normal, masculine, funny, which is why he's so popular and relatable with the audience and also why leftist weirdo academics are so concerned about him.
01:00:48.920Fast forward another year to this past week and we have the next woke assault on a family of fictional cartoon dogs.
01:00:55.920An episode in season three titled Exercise opens with Bandit stepping on a scale in the bathroom.
01:01:02.920And then he says, oh, man, I need to do some exercise.
01:01:41.920And kind of just looks at it and like goes to the scale, weighs himself and goes, oh, I need to do exercise.
01:01:48.920That in and of itself is a really problematic narrative to have on a children's television show.
01:01:54.920When we know that most girls, by the time they're nine, think about dieting, think they're overweight and really have a problem with body image already.
01:02:02.920There's a couple of ways to solve this problem.
01:02:04.920The first one is that we just not let the kids watch the episode, but that's not really going to work because kids are going to see this messaging in many places throughout their lives.
01:02:15.920So it's actually better to use this episode of a relatively safe children's television show to start the discussion about body image, about how we treat our body, about not body positivity or body negativity, but body neutrality.
01:02:29.920Because the truth is, it doesn't matter what your body looks like.
01:02:58.920Of course, telling society to be neutral about obesity, it's like telling lifeguards to practice drowning neutrality.
01:03:04.920Whether somebody is swimming or drowning, it's not up for us to judge.
01:03:07.920Drowning is just as valid an experience as swimming.
01:03:10.920Who are we to tell people whether they should be at the surface of the water or beneath it?
01:03:13.920Just as we should draw no distinctions between a physically fit person and a person who is morbidly obese.
01:03:19.920Sure, the obese person is literally dying in front of us.
01:03:23.920It's killing themselves, destroying their bodies, their skeletal structures, their internal organs.
01:03:27.920But that's just how they've chosen to live and express themselves and die.
01:03:31.920Certainly wouldn't want to send the problematic message that being healthy and living a long life is somehow better than being extremely fat and dying of a heart attack when you're 42.
01:03:40.920This, anyway, was the argument made by various leftists on TikTok.
01:03:45.920And in this case, the first two attacks fell flat.
01:03:47.920This one actually resonated, at least it resonated with the ABC, which decided to cut that scene from the episode.
01:04:21.920Now children who watch that episode of Bluey will not be exposed to any objectionable content encouraging them to engage in inappropriate behavior such as, you know, exercising.
01:04:31.920This is the left's rules for children's entertainment.