Ep. 1385 - We Have Some Of The Covenant Shooter's Writings. Here's What They Say.
Episode Stats
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172.35811
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Misogyny
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Hate speech
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Summary
As more and more information about the shooter, her mindset, and her potential motivations comes out, the reason for all the secrecy becomes clear. Also, an activist judge strikes down Florida's law banning gender transitions for minors using the flimsiest reasoning imaginable. Joe Biden gives a gun control speech where he lies three times and babbles incoherently. And the birdwatching community has been engaged in a years-long quest to confront the history of racism and slavery among birdwatchers. We ll have an update on that and much more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
Transcript
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Daily Wire has obtained several pages of the Covenant
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There has been an effort up to the highest levels of government to hide this information
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from us, and as more and more information about the shooter, her mindset, and her potential
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motivations comes out, the reason for all the secrecy becomes clear.
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Also, an activist judge strikes down Florida's law banning gender transitions for minors
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Joe Biden gives a gun control speech where he lies three times and babbles incoherently,
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and that is all in just one minute of the speech.
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And the birdwatching community has been engaged in a years-long quest to confront the history
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We'll have an update on that very important story and much more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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Over the past year, Joe Biden's FBI has offered two separate justifications for refusing to release
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the writings of the trans-identifying mass shooter who killed three nine-year-old children
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and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville.
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The FBI's first justification, the one that they used in court, was that releasing the documents
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might interfere with a pending law enforcement investigation.
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Now, that justification never made any sense because the shooter is dead, and to this day,
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the FBI hasn't named any additional suspects in the shooting.
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At the same time, in private communications with authorities in Tennessee, the FBI outlined
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They warned that releasing the shooter's writings would lead to conspiracy theories and false
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Never mind the fact that the FBI's job isn't to police false narratives, and if it were,
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the FBI would have raided every corporate media office and arrested nearly every mainstream
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journalist and news anchor in the country by now, the point is that, according to Biden's
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government, for one reason or another, you're not supposed to see what this shooter wrote.
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If she had been a white supremacist, of course, you'd see it instantly.
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But in this case, you're not allowed to see it at all.
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At least that's the way that they would like to have it.
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Meanwhile, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which reportedly treated the shooter for psychological
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problems for more than 20 years, has refused to answer basic questions about what drugs
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the shooter may have been taking, what kind of treatment she may have been receiving.
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What this means is that, from the health establishment to the federal government, the privacy interests
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The safety of the public is being ignored, and the truth, the full story, whatever it is,
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Now, wherever you fall on the political spectrum, this is a national scandal.
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The point of transparency is not to demonize anyone who may be suffering from mental illness
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or to, quote unquote, marginalize any particular group of people.
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The point of transparency in this case is to give the public the information it has a right
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to know and to likely save people's lives in the process.
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It's to identify what's not working in the mental health treatment pipeline and to fix it.
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This is a matter of national importance, urgent importance.
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As it would seem that when it comes to the medical establishment's approach to mental health,
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And contrary to what the FBI said, it's the absence of transparency, the absence of it,
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that leads to false narratives like the ones we've seen in the last year about the Covenant shooting.
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I'm going to exclusively show you several pages from the writings of the Covenant school shooter.
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The Daily Wire obtained these documents, and now I will go through them for the first time
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The documents reveal, obviously, newsworthy information about the shooter's possible motivation,
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information that the government had no good faith basis for hiding from the public.
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But before I show you the documents, I want to make a few things clear.
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First of all, for people viewing this podcast on YouTube, you should know that on YouTube,
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more than other major platforms, it's difficult, if not basically impossible,
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to discuss sensitive and important topics like this.
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The censors on YouTube are, as you may have heard, extremely overzealous,
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especially when it comes to any story relating to trans ideology,
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and especially when it comes to this story in particular.
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If you saw my previous coverage of the Tennessee Stars reporting on the shooter's writings,
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you know that we had to cut the monologue from the YouTube broadcast last week entirely.
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We're going to try to avoid cutting as much of it this time, but there's no way around it.
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If you want my unredacted full monologue, you'll probably have to go elsewhere.
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We post the podcast on Spotify, Apple, Twitter, Rumble, and of course,
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This is a situation completely outside of our control, but the good news is that
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you can still get the full monologue and all of the important information
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You just can't get it here if you're watching right now on YouTube.
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And finally, I wanted to note that some of the victim's families have made it clear
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that they don't want to see the shooter's writings or have them published.
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Nobody can unimagine what they're going through,
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and there are real concerns about glorifying or amplifying the words of a mass murderer.
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If I was in their shoes, I would probably feel as they do.
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Now, it's my personal opinion that there is a conspiracy to cover up the truth about this
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shooting and what led to it, but the families, obviously, are not a part of any conspiracy.
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They have their own totally understandable reasons for not wanting this stuff made public.
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Certainly don't want to contribute in any way to their suffering.
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The reason I'm going to show you these documents is that I honestly believe
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I'm not claiming to have the full truth right now, but we can get closer to it.
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Ultimately, as one court in Tennessee has already ruled, and as I'll explain shortly,
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the public interest in this case is clear and overwhelming.
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And with that in mind, we're going to go ahead with the story.
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I will note that we won't be monetizing this episode.
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So the first entry that we've obtained in the shooter's handwritten writings reads as follows.
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We don't know who that is, but in context, it may refer to a Nashville radio host who
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previously played basketball with the shooter in eighth grade and who reportedly called the
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authorities because the shooter messaged her on the day of the attack.
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It's total ignorance when parents step in and try to change their child's environment,
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make them go to youth group and force Christian friends in their life
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Parents actually believe religion can change nature.
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That could explain why I don't practice religion anymore.
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Listening to parents does no damn good but to mold their premature minds into a preformatted program
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like clones do, the very manipulative forms teams hate.
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My ultimate plan, thought from no one else but me.
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Now, you might remember that when this shooting took place, there were some reports that the
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shooter may have had a personal motivation for attacking the Covenant School.
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Some people suggested without any evidence that the shooter might have been abused by
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But from these writings, that doesn't appear to be the case.
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And there's been no evidence to come out to support that theory.
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But it wasn't the kind of false narrative that the FBI cared about.
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It's the kind of false narrative that could have been dispelled by releasing the documents.
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But once again, they kept them, which creates the false narratives.
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Instead, these documents are evidence that the shooter harbored a more general anti-Christian
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Parents actually believe religion can change nature.
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That could explain why I don't practice religion anymore.
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Now, immediately you can understand why the media, along with the highest levels of the
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FBI and the White House, saw this document as radioactive.
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This is pretty much a verbatim recounting of what every major media outlet and mainstream
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politician on the left has been saying for the past decade or more.
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And this is in addition to the writings from the shooter that Stephen Crowder released last
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year, in which she describes her own anti-white sentiments, referring to white people as little
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crackers with, quote, unquote, white privileges.
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Of course, that's a popular sentiment on the left these days.
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So is the idea that children can consent to hormones that cause sterilization, puberty blockers
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that stunt bone development, even physical castration and other permanently disfiguring
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So is the idea championed by BLM that children don't need a stable nuclear family to thrive.
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And so is the idea that it's a felony to leave skid marks on a pride mural stenciled
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on the street, even as it's completely fine for arsonists to torch Christian churches just
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Now, you can call these beliefs what you want, anarcho-tyranny, Marxism, something else.
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And it's the ideology that, based on these writings, seems to have driven a very
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That was her support system, which she obviously needed.
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The rest of the shooter's writings that we've obtained only reinforce that point.
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Fragments of these writings have been reported already by the Tennessee Star, but we can publish
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This is from an entry dated March 11th, 2023, just a few weeks before the shooting.
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And in these documents, the shooter makes it very clear that she suffered severely
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But on most platforms, you can see the document on your screen right now.
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For podcast listeners, it suffices to say that the shooter says that she swears to God that
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She goes into great detail about her sexual fantasies, including having sexual relations
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This is a long and distressing description of her gender dysphoria.
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And then she says something extremely revealing, quote, having a brain like mine has its godliness,
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but also prone to making poor ass decisions.
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Now, in that one quote, you can see the direct contrast between the teachings of Christianity
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Christians believe that people are made in the image and likeness of God.
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They also believe that God, not man, has divine power.
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But gender ideology proclaims the opposite.
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It teaches that man is capable of changing his nature at the snap of a finger, that people
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can be born in the wrong bodies, and that gender clinics and prescription drugs can fix
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This is an ideology that is, at its core, antithetical to Christianity.
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Was it one of the reasons this shooter was motivated to kill Christians?
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And by the same token, why the White House and the FBI tried to cover up the shooters
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These are questions people have been asking since the shooting first happened.
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People asking these questions, though, were condemned by the media and the government, and
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now we have the documents, and now there's all the more reason to be asking those questions.
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Remember, in the wake of the shooting, corporate media outlets and the White House press secretary
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both told you that the so-called trans community was the real victim here, even as Christian
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They didn't want you to realize that, in her own words, the shooter described her disdain
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for religion very clearly just before the shooting.
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There are other grievances in these documents along these lines.
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For example, in the document, that shooter writes that she's upset that her new masculine identity
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apparently wasn't accepted on a job form at Instacart.
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She also says that she resents that she was never given puberty blockers.
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But this answer, as the shooter refers to it, apparently wasn't much of a solution.
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If anything, it apparently emboldened this lifelong psychiatric patient into committing
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As the answer continues, the shooter also lashes out at her mother, saying, quote,
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What she believes, how she grew up conservatively, and that LGBTQ, especially transgender in her
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Just like any rest of the parents with that mindset, how could they not ever think of their
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That they hate their gender so bad they cut and want to kill themselves.
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F parents like them who think of themselves first, and their preference of conservative religion,
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Gay S make them believe that the child they're given should stay that way.
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Even if transgender treatment was discovered and tested during my time,
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I know how the situation would have turned out.
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Children who were able to successfully take puberty blockers and never enter a tortured puberty,
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those little Fs don't know how good they effing have it.
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I'd kill to have parents who would let their child be happy,
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no matter how different it is to their viewpoint, or don't agree or are scared of it.
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They're willing to listen to their children, not the other way around.
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2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming
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The shooter then goes on to graphically describe how she made a stuffed male doll have simulated
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intercourse with a stuffed girl doll who represented the dream girl, quote unquote,
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It's very graphic, but the image is on the screen for those watching on a platform where
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Now, this very disturbing entry ends with the shooter saying that she was sexually aroused
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by what she did with the dolls, concluding that she's a, quote unquote, pervert who wastes
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And just a few days ago, the Tennessee Star reported on what those fantasies may have entailed,
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Quote, retired Metro Nashville Police Department Lieutenant Garrett Davidson told Michael Patrick
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Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Tennessee Star, that the Covenant School killer received
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treatment from the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital, where professionals failed to report her violent
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Now, Davidson wasn't involved in the shooting investigation in his official capacity, but
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he's seen more documents as part of the probe due to a leak than we have.
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of hindsight, that maybe these firearms could have been seized.
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Now, we reached out to Vanderbilt University Medical Center about this report.
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We wanted to know if there was any truth to the claim that they failed to notify law enforcement
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We also wanted to know whether the shooter, who had been in their care for a very long time,
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since she was the only child, was receiving any kind of talk therapy or hormone therapy
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The exact drug she was taking when she lashed out violently would seem to be a detail that is
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very important to the public, especially to any parents who may have their kids on the same drugs.
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So wherever you stand on the issue of trans ideology,
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They've also refused to respond to the Tennessee Star.
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Even if Vanderbilt had to respect HIPAA laws here, even if they were barred by law from disclosing any details
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about their treatment of the shooter, even if those regulations still remain in place after a patient dies,
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even if we accept that for the sake of argument, you'd think they at least would say as much.
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They could put out a statement explaining that a law passed by Congress prevents them from sharing
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this obviously relevant information, information that other medical providers and the public
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could use to help prevent future attacks like this.
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This woman was reportedly a patient of Vanderbilt's for many years.
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What treatments did, if any, did they fail to give her?
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The answers to those questions could save lives, but Vanderbilt remains quiet.
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For whatever reason, they're refusing to say anything at all.
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All we know is that, as the Tennessee Star reported based on the police search warrant,
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Now, you'd hate to think that there might be ideological reasons for this response or lack thereof,
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You might remember that it was just a couple of years ago that I exposed a Vanderbilt physician on camera
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saying that she was proud of her new gender clinic at Vanderbilt because it made the hospital a lot of money.
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And that revelation led to the closure of Vanderbilt's gender clinic for kids,
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as well as legislation in Tennessee and all over the country.
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But Vanderbilt, as far as I can tell, never fired the physician who made those remarks.
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And now they're ignoring the media completely after a trans-identifying individual,
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someone who had been in their care for more than two decades, committed mass murder.
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Now, in response to this story, a lot of people will probably say,
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well, so what if this person identified as transgender?
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She was clearly mentally ill, and mentally ill people come in all shapes and sizes.
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But it still raises the question of whether this shooter's transgender status
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We all know that institutions like Vanderbilt generally affirm patients' quote-unquote gender identities.
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And so this brings what is, to my mind, perhaps the biggest question of the most urgent importance.
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Did Vanderbilt's commitment to quote-unquote affirmation
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in any way interfere with their ability to give this person the treatment that she needed?
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Is that why she apparently wasn't referred for involuntary commitment?
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Is that why she wasn't barred from buying and possessing firearms?
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Unfortunately, we might have more answers soon.
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This cannot be the end of this story, and we have reason to believe that it won't be.
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There's a very real possibility that within a matter of days,
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we could receive more excerpts of the shooters' writings.
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And the court fight to release the entire manifesto in the meantime continues.
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Whatever that manifesto contains, there's no chance at this point that any mainstream institution,
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not Vanderbilt, not the FBI, certainly not the White House, will tell the truth about it.
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And that's why the only solution, the only way forward, is transparency.
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It's well past time that we stopped treating these writings as a state secret
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to prevent more loss of life based on everything we've seen,
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The Post Millennial reports, on Tuesday, a federal judge struck down a law from Florida
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that bars minors from getting puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones
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for sex treatment interventions if a parent consents to treatment.
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Again, he compared the law to discrimination against minorities and women.
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Senior Judge Robert Hinkle stated in his opinion that Florida went too far
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by barring trans-identified minors from being prescribed puberty blockers
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and cross-sex hormones if they have parental consent.
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Hinkle, who was nominated by Democratic President Bill Clinton,
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and compared getting the treatment as a minor to women and minorities fighting for civil rights.
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some transgender opponents invoke religion to support their position,
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just as some once invoked religion to support their racism or misogyny.
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Transgender opponents are, of course, free to hold their beliefs,
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but they're not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender.
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In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish
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To paraphrase a civil rights advocate from an earlier time,
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the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
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Governor Ron DeSantis blasted the ruling saying,
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through their elected representatives, the people of Florida acted to protect children in the state.
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The court was wrong to override their wishes, as we've seen here in Florida,
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There's no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children.
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These procedures do permanent life-altering damage to children,
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and history will look back on this fad in horror.
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I have to tell you that I sort of appreciate this ruling.
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By disagree, I think it's totally deranged, both morally and intellectually,
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it just brings us closer to the Supreme Court ruling on this issue.
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And I feel very confident that—and maybe I don't want to jinx it—
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but I feel very confident that the current makeup of the Supreme Court will come to the right conclusion on this.
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I don't see the Supreme Court, when the time comes, and it will eventually—
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I don't see the Supreme Court ruling that parents have a constitutional right to have their children sterilized.
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But I appreciate the ruling also because it's so flimsy, so weak, so clearly ideologically motivated
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that it will not only be easily overturned, but it just continues to expose the gender ideologues for who they are.
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It's hard to even know where to begin, and this article only gives a brief snippet of the judge's ruling.
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The New York Times article on this ruling has other snippets just as absurd like this.
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The state of Florida can regulate as needed, but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment,
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treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state's full approval,
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so long as the purpose is not to support the patient's transgender identity.
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You know, there's a reason, as Governor DeSantis alluded to,
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there's a reason these treatments are being banned across the world,
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often by governments that are otherwise very sympathetic to the leftist cause and the LGBT cause more broadly.
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That's because there is no reliable evidence that these drugs, when given to minors for this purpose,
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are safe or effective, and lots of evidence to the contrary.
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Not to mention just basic common sense that would, should already, you know, reveal the truth of this.
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What are the drugs supposed to be effectively doing?
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They're not effective at changing anyone's biology.
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They're not effective at changing males into females.
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So, this is totally wrong, but let's go back to that bit from the, from the, that the post-millennial quoted.
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Some transgender opponents invoke religion to support their position, just as some once invoked religion to support their racism and misogyny.
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Transgender opponents are, of course, free to hold their beliefs.
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To paraphrase a civil rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
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So, this is just full-on, undisguised, left-wing activism.
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Like, what you read there is indistinguishable from what you might read in an editorial on Pink News or something.
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Let's start with the fact that the transgender opponents, quote-unquote, meaning in this case, people who are, who are opposed to transitioning minors.
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Those people, us, we actually don't invoke religion as our primary argument.
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I rarely hear anyone on our side of this debate do that.
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Um, when two people are arguing about whether it's a good idea to give, quote-unquote, puberty blockers to minors,
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or whether it's a good idea to perform cosmetic double mastectomies of minors,
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I rarely hear the person on the right side of that debate.
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I rarely hear them, hear them say, well, you shouldn't do that because God says it's bad.
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Now, it's true that God does say that it's bad.
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But, I don't, we don't need to invoke religion at that point of the discussion
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for the same reason that we don't need to invoke religion to explain that three times three equals nine.
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Um, now, I mean, you could, but it's, it's, it's, that doesn't need to be your first argument.
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In fact, it's usually the other side that brings religion into the conversation.
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Uh, this judge is, this judge does it right here.
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He, he has no evidence-based argument, no scientific argument.
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He has only a moral argument, and it's, it's a completely unhinged moral argument, but that's, that's all he has.
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Um, and so, and he is the one, which we find so often with the left, that, uh, when they are,
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when they're arguing against the so-called social conservatives on, on one of the so-called social issues,
00:25:53.460
uh, they will always accuse us of, you know, bringing the Bible into it.
00:26:00.240
Not that, not that it's wrong to bring the Bible into a conversation, but the point is that
00:26:05.060
they will do it much quicker, actually, generally, than we will in these conversations.
00:26:10.580
Um, and, and in this case, we also get the, the quote from Martin Luther King Jr.
00:26:21.180
Um, by the way, how do you think that any of the civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century,
00:26:30.740
or before, how do you think any of them would feel about puberty blockers for children?
00:26:38.360
Like, what, what, is there any indication that, that any of them believed that gender was fluid?
00:26:45.500
If Martin Luther King Jr. was around today, and you asked him, is gender fluid?
00:26:53.520
And if there was that belief among the civil rights leaders of the, of the, of, of, of history,
00:26:59.420
uh, then why didn't, why didn't they ever say it?
00:27:09.160
All right, Biden, uh, gave a gun control speech yesterday,
00:27:11.940
and as Greg Price on Twitter documents, he told three lies,
00:27:15.420
and then babbled incoherently, all in the span of one minute.
00:27:18.360
The speech was longer than one minute, but it took only one minute to include all of that.
00:27:26.460
We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby, gun manufacturers,
00:27:31.560
so many politicians, when they oppose common-sense gun legislation.
00:27:35.840
I used to be a law, when I was no longer the vice president,
00:27:39.080
I became a professor at the University of, of, um, Pennsylvania.
00:27:43.200
Before that, I taught a constitutional law class, and so I taught the Second Amendment.
00:27:48.080
There's never been a time that says you can own anything you want.
00:27:52.340
And never, you couldn't own a cannon during the Civil War.
00:28:10.600
And by the way, if they want to think to take on government if we get out of line,
00:28:15.440
which they're talking again about, well, guess what?
00:28:19.380
So I just want to give you the transcript of that last piece.
00:28:22.800
He said, I think he said, how much have you heard this phrase?
00:28:33.200
And by the way, if they want to think they, this, to take on government if we get out of line,
00:28:44.420
The only way that we even know what this vegetable is trying to say there is that we've heard him say something similar
00:28:57.300
So what he's trying to say, as far as we can decipher, is that the Second Amendment supporters are idiots
00:29:02.740
who think that they can overthrow the government, but they can't because they don't have F-15s.
00:29:11.900
And, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that argument is both false and irrelevant.
00:29:18.580
But let's just, if that's true, if all these Second Amendment supporters are just like wannabe revolutionaries
00:29:32.800
who talk a big game, but like they're just silly, you can laugh at them, they don't have F-15s.
00:29:39.080
Well, then what's with all the panicking over January 6th?
00:29:42.720
I mean, I thought you said that democracy, our very way of life, our system of government
00:29:49.880
was hanging in the balance when a group of unarmed, largely out of shape, middle-aged Trump supporters
00:30:04.480
So they almost overthrew the government with no weapons at all.
00:30:18.420
But you can't ask this guy for coherence, of course.
00:30:21.520
And before he descended into unintelligible gibberish, he, of course, lied.
00:30:31.420
He lied about teaching a constitutional law class.
00:30:34.400
He lied and said that you couldn't own canons when the Second Amendment was written.
00:30:42.640
And not only that, but you can actually, I believe you can own canons now.
00:30:52.380
It's not a very practical method of self-defense.
00:30:55.680
Like, I wouldn't use it if it was a home intruder or something.
00:31:02.360
I wouldn't use it for any, like, practical application.
00:31:04.720
But I think it would be really cool to have one anyway.
00:31:15.280
It's like the only thing you could understand that he was saying was a lie.
00:31:17.900
And then the rest of it was totally incoherent.
00:31:23.780
As Pride Month continues, several people have been charged with allegedly defacing Pride flags painted on streets with tire marks.
00:31:34.180
And some critics have even accused them of a hate crime.
00:31:36.440
In early February, a Florida man was accused of deliberately doing multiple burnouts with his pickup truck in a Delray Beach intersection that was painted in rainbow colors.
00:31:46.760
The incident was caught on surveillance video, which police released.
00:31:50.160
It was a pickup truck with LED underbody lights and an American flag attached to the back, leaving tire marks on the intersection's Pride paint while making a hard left after dark.
00:31:57.700
In that case, a 19-year-old named Dylan Brewer surrendered to authorities after they searched for him for a week.
00:32:07.040
There was a manhunt for a week to track down the kid who took too sudden of a left turn on a Pride flag.
00:32:22.920
Which maybe, look, there's a certain symbolism there.
00:32:26.240
Maybe he was trying to make some kind of a point about, you know, hard left turn, Pride flag.
00:32:30.700
I think there's, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but you might have been making, and I made the point before, too, that you could argue.
00:32:39.100
And I think that some of these people that are being arrested for leaving creative designs on Pride flags, I think they should argue.
00:32:49.680
Only if it's true, I would never encourage anyone to, you know, make false arguments.
00:32:54.300
But they could argue that they, in fact, are just trying to add designs to the Pride flag.
00:33:02.160
That, in fact, you know, the Pride flag, it's a democratic process.
00:33:06.500
And every single year, there are more designs added to the Pride flag.
00:33:11.200
It looks busier and busier and more chaotic every single year.
00:33:14.880
And so, these might be people that are just trying to add their own designs.
00:33:31.000
The Palm Beach County Human Rights Council declared Brewer's Action should be considered a hate crime.
00:33:34.560
Then earlier this month, three teenagers were arrested and charged with a felony
00:33:37.580
for leaving scooter marks on the Pride flag painted on a street in Washington
00:33:44.880
Prosecutors demanded a $15,000 bond for the teens.
00:33:48.840
Police used surveillance footage from the intersection to find the suspects.
00:33:52.640
The 19-year-old suspect was charged with malicious mischief with a hate crime bias.
00:33:56.800
He was accused of shouting, F you, and then a gay slur at a passerby.
00:34:05.460
People don't just go out and do that without intention.
00:34:08.020
You don't destroy symbols without intention behind it.
00:34:11.240
Lime scooters, which rents the scooters the teens were using,
00:34:13.800
said it would be taking immediate action against the perpetrators.
00:34:17.140
Now they've got Lime scooters coming after them.
1.00
00:34:18.840
All of us at Lime condemn these vile acts in no uncertain terms.
00:34:24.220
A new Washington state law makes it a hate crime to deface public installations
00:34:31.160
with the intent of intimidating a protected group.
00:34:33.480
Okay, so that's the important stipulation there.
00:34:37.400
Because there's a lot of defacing and vandalizing of public installations
00:34:43.220
and monuments and statues and that sort of thing.
00:34:53.980
No, because the goal in those cases is not to intimidate a protected group.
00:35:02.280
Now, I think it's obvious to most intelligent people what's happening here.
00:35:05.620
They keep making these pride flag crosswalks and the crosswalks keep ending up with tire marks on them
00:35:26.900
And then they hunt down the perpetrators and charge them with hate crimes.
00:35:30.200
And it's kind of rinse and repeat over and over again.
00:35:32.660
And so it's obvious that the point of the crosswalk is exactly this.
00:35:41.740
It's like an LGBT version of a Venus flytrap.
1.00
00:35:45.620
And they put it down there and they wait for someone to drive across it aggressively, whether they're intentionally or not.
00:35:55.320
And then they get to, you know, root out some more hate.
00:35:59.200
Punish more backwards bigoted people, even teenagers, especially teenagers.
0.95
00:36:04.560
So, you know, as always, I think some people on the right kind of miss the point with these things.
00:36:12.140
And you hear some people on the right say, well, how could you be so sensitive or offended by tire marks on a crosswalk?
00:36:20.560
Come on, don't you know that when you put something on the street, it's going to end up with tire marks on it?
00:36:33.060
And also keep in mind that these are the same people who otherwise want to have the police less involved in things.
00:36:42.580
We just had a story about a town, I think it was in Massachusetts, if I remember correctly, where they are replacing cops with social workers for some 911 calls.
00:36:51.240
And we know the left has been talking about that for years now, threatening to do that.
00:36:56.400
And in some jurisdictions, they are actually doing that now.
00:37:06.980
They want, you know, they want to get the police less involved.
00:37:12.260
You know, in a case where they are here deliberately setting up situations for the cops to get involved.
00:37:18.520
Get involved with, by the way, nonviolent offenders who have committed a victimless crime.
00:37:26.660
And it's easy for it to be a victimless crime because it's not a crime at all.
00:37:32.280
So in this case, they want to send the cops out.
00:37:35.080
And, you know, once again, if we're missing the point, it's easy to call that, to make the mistake of calling that a double standard.
00:37:43.900
But it's not a double standard, as I'm always reminding you.
00:37:48.240
It's, this is, this is, the standard is very clear.
00:37:53.820
It's a very clear standard that they do apply very consistently.
00:37:58.500
And the standard is that they matter and you don't.
00:38:09.280
I mean, we heard it in that, that law in, uh, in Washington.
00:38:11.820
The, the, you know, you can't deface public installations if you're doing it in a way that is going to be offensive to protected groups.
00:38:25.880
Because you hear that and you think, what, are there groups that aren't protected?
00:38:30.920
Are you saying that there are, what do you mean protected?
00:38:33.160
Aren't all groups of humans who are citizens of the country?
00:38:43.440
Actually, all groups are not, certainly not protected equally.
00:38:49.320
Um, and so they, they, they could not be more clear about what the actual standard is.
00:39:08.660
In November of last year, I covered the ongoing years-long crusade by the birdwatching community to decolonize their hobby and renounce slavery and racism.
00:39:17.500
This is very important because until the birdwatcher community embarked on this quest, the general public wasn't sure where birdwatchers stood on the issue of slavery and racism.
00:39:32.320
In fact, many people assume that they must be for those things.
00:39:34.760
If you saw someone staring through binoculars at a sparrow or whatever, you, you would think to yourself, I bet that person supports slavery.
00:39:45.880
But inside the world of ornithology, everything changed on May 25th, 2020.
00:39:50.620
That was infamously the date of George Floyd's overdose.
00:39:53.560
More importantly for the birdwatching community, though, May 25th, 2020 was also the date of Amy Cooper's mildly unpleasant interaction with a black birdwatcher named Christian in New York Central Park.
0.64
00:40:04.540
As you may remember, Christian demanded that Amy Cooper leash her dog.
00:40:08.860
Then he tried to coax her dog away with treats, freaked her out.
00:40:13.180
One thing led to another, and birdwatching had its very own ready-made George Floyd moment.
00:40:17.780
The need for equity and unlearning in the name of racial justice was instantly clear to everybody in the hobby.
00:40:24.460
To that end, as I covered last year, the birdwatching community began doing the work, as they say.
00:40:29.000
They changed the names of dozens of birds, including, for example, the Scots Oriole and the McCown's Longspur.
00:40:34.620
Apparently, no one could even look at a Scots Oriole or McCown's Longspur and think of anything other than white supremacy and, you know, the Trail of Tears.
0.57
00:40:43.700
As one birdwatcher commented unironically at the time, quote,
00:40:46.500
the tendrils of all social justice have reached to the point of bird names.
00:40:50.800
I know that when I heard that they were changing the name of the McCown's Longspur,
00:40:54.560
I thought to myself, thank God, now I can rest at night.
00:41:03.060
But it turns out that this was just the beginning of the hobby's quest for inclusion.
00:41:07.380
That brings us to the latest update in this story that the whole world is closely following.
00:41:12.920
And by the whole world, I mean really just me for some reason.
00:41:16.020
Now various chapters of the National Autobahn Society all over the country
00:41:19.220
have embarked on a new frontier of social justice and anti-racism.
00:41:23.460
They're not just changing the names of birds anymore.
00:41:25.080
Instead, they're also changing the names of their own organizations.
00:41:27.860
That's because although John James Audubon contributed more to the study of birds than anyone who's ever lived,
00:41:33.400
he apparently owned slaves at some point or something.
00:41:39.300
To be clear, the National Autobahn Society itself isn't changing the name,
00:41:42.620
but the local chapters are doing so while still taking the National Autobahn Society's money and resources,
00:41:47.260
which is a convenient trick, not a particularly original one as it turns out.
00:41:51.220
But in virtually every case, each of these local chapters is currently rebranding from the Autobahn Society to a bird alliance.
00:41:59.020
In the name of diversity and anti-racism, they're going from Autobahn Societies to bird alliances,
00:42:05.380
which of course sounds like the lamest imaginable version of the Justice League in some alternate universe
00:42:10.520
populated exclusively by nerds, but that's what they're going with, bird alliances.
00:42:17.560
The leaders of these ex-Autobahn Society chapters have spent the last few months
00:42:20.760
appearing on local news channels, making the case for the name change.
00:42:24.120
For example, here's the leader of the now defunct Tahoma Audubon Society
00:42:27.900
explaining why their new name is the Tahoma Bird Alliance.
00:42:33.360
Stuart, you are the executive director of Tahoma Bird Alliance.
00:42:44.440
No longer is it the name that shall not be mentioned.
00:42:48.900
Yes, this is a great thing to do because the old name created barriers.
00:42:53.740
Well, see, and that's just, I remember when you were sitting on the couch when we just started talking about this
00:42:58.860
and the forbearance of people of color and what the person who founded that organization, the activities and the thoughts and the philosophies and the language was really, in its infancy, hate and racism.
00:43:48.880
Audubon will be completely airbrushed out of history books and scientific journals in short order as well.
00:43:53.420
And somehow that hard-hitting interview still left a basic question unanswered, which is, why exactly can't you use the guy's name?
00:43:58.960
Even if he was a horrible, bad, racist person, which I don't think he was, what exactly does changing the name of a birdwatching society accomplish in practical terms?
00:44:06.400
Well, in another interview, the leader of Portland Audubon, now known as the Bird Alliance of Oregon, attempted to provide an explanation.
00:44:12.780
These people are, you know, at least they're capable of saying Audubon's name out loud.
00:44:18.080
And one of the things we noticed is, as a barrier to some of the inviting folks in, was right in our name, Audubon.
00:44:28.820
Well, there's nothing wrong with the Audubon name in particular.
00:44:39.340
And you say, because of the name, because of what it represented to so many people of color, you weren't getting them to be interested or excited in what you did.
00:44:48.840
Well, yes, it's a good point, because sometimes a barrier is only visible to the folks that it impacts.
00:44:54.840
And in that regard, when we know that that name was presenting a barrier, when we want to have more people involved in the environmental movement, the more voices that are there, it's much more effective.
00:45:07.220
It was actually a really important thing you just said, unintentionally, but a barrier is only, sometimes a barrier is only visible to those it impacts.
00:45:17.760
Well, no, actually, you can, that's, you can come to the opposite conclusion.
00:45:21.560
Like, if you want to do something, and you're complaining that there's a barrier preventing you from doing it, but that barrier is not visible to anyone else.
00:45:33.300
So your point, you're saying, I want to do this, but look, I can't because of this barrier.
00:45:37.500
And everybody else is just, like, walking through and saying, what do you mean there's no barrier?
00:45:45.400
That's a really good indication that, in fact, it's all in your imagination.
00:45:49.460
But anyway, he's basically suggesting that there were a lot of people out there in Portland who really wanted to join their local birdwatching group.
00:45:54.540
But then they saw that it was named after the single most important birdwatcher to ever live.
00:45:58.780
Some would say probably the only important one.
00:46:01.020
And then they decided that they just couldn't be a part of that.
00:46:03.060
And instead of celebrating the fact that complete lunatics like this had decided to self-select out of the organization,
00:46:07.780
the Portland Audubon Society decided to change their name to accommodate these people
00:46:11.160
while retaining all the other benefits of their association with the National Audubon Society, of course.
00:46:15.320
But there are other reasons for changing the name of these chapters.
00:46:17.700
In my extensive research, I came across the John Wesley Palaces chapter of the Audubon Society,
00:46:25.120
And they're now the Grand Prairie Bird Alliance.
00:46:30.620
How much of a barrier was the John James Audubon name to inclusion?
00:46:40.200
Yes, he killed birds that he then arranged and painted.
00:46:45.120
So that's not a terribly great message for today's audiences.
00:46:54.460
It's interesting because I think thanks to the information age, you can do some deep research on origins.
00:47:06.080
I think for us, in a more pragmatic, and maybe this is sort of a Midwestern perspective,
00:47:12.260
we were already struggling with Audubon, with a D, with Autobon, T, and the Speedway in Germany.
00:47:18.360
So I think the way in which natural history, conservation history, biology, a lot of facts,
00:47:27.260
that I'm a 47-year-old woman walking around with a college degree and a master's,
00:47:31.860
I probably couldn't tell you that much about Audubon or his origins.
00:47:34.880
And so we were already struggling with, and this is what's happening at the national level, relevance.
00:47:40.260
Now, first of all, I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I made here.
00:47:42.900
I had to sit and listen to multiple interviews with birdwatchers in order to do this monologue.
00:47:46.340
Now, you might say that I didn't have to do that.
00:47:48.040
In fact, I don't have to be talking about this at all.
00:47:50.240
That's true enough, but stop changing the subject.
00:47:53.420
Anyway, this woman isn't really upset about racism or slavery.
00:47:56.240
She's bothered by the fact that Audubon's name sounds like the highway system in Germany called the Autobahn.
00:48:03.200
They kept confusing their local Audubon society with a German highway.
00:48:06.880
Therefore, we now have the Grand Prairie Bird Alliance.
00:48:10.900
Racism may not be solved, but at least no more Illinois residents will fly to Germany and drive on the highway when they really just wanted to see some birds.
00:48:18.100
These are small victories, but victories nonetheless.
00:48:20.580
Yet these victories have not come without a cost.
00:48:22.540
All of these sudden name changes are also causing quite a bit of discord within the birdwatching community.
00:48:29.500
And that's especially evident in the state of Wisconsin, where recently there was major drama between two birdwatching groups.
00:48:35.520
On one side of the dispute, you have a group called Badgerland Birding, which, as you know, has operated for several years.
00:48:42.060
On the other hand, you have the Madison Audubon Society.
00:48:44.640
The problem started with the Madison Audubon Society in the name of anti-racism changed its name abruptly to the Badgerland Bird Alliance.
00:48:50.740
Now you have the Badgerland Birding Group and the Badgerland Bird Alliance Group each competing for the same turf.
00:49:02.240
This is Derek and Ryan from Badgerland Birding.
00:49:04.500
We want to start off by saying we really did not want to make this video.
00:49:08.600
We've been holding off for a while in hopes that we could come to some kind of agreement based on some things that have happened.
00:49:15.560
But basically, another organization, formerly Madison Audubon, we feel that they're trying to steal our name or at least step on our toes with our name.
00:49:24.880
They have changed from Madison Audubon to the Badgerland Bird Alliance, which, if you've been following us, sounds super similar to our name and what we've done.
00:49:38.600
Apparently, now there are people signing up for the Badgerland Bird Alliance who thought they were signing up for the Badgerland Birding Group and vice versa.
00:49:45.800
And so lawyers are getting called and feelings are getting hurt.
00:49:50.780
It's total mayhem in the Wisconsin birding community.
00:49:52.960
And this is the state of anti-racist efforts in the birdwatching world just about seven months after I last checked in on them.
00:49:59.260
At this rate, it won't be long until the various birdwatching groups have descended into gang violence.
00:50:05.020
Now, I know a lot of you think that this story doesn't matter.
00:50:07.840
You're saying, Matt, why are you still talking about this?
00:50:11.520
Well, how will you feel when birdwatchers are at war?
00:50:15.120
Think of all the birds that might get caught in the crossfire.
00:50:17.220
And that's why I'll continue to monitor the ongoing crusade to decolonize ornithology.
00:50:22.980
Maybe we'll have an update in another seven months.
00:50:27.560
Until then, because of its increasingly neurotic and doomed quest to engage in some of the weirdest virtue signaling we've ever seen,
00:50:34.080
the entire birdwatching community is today, once again, canceled.