00:23:21.720They're not effective at changing anyone's biology.
00:23:24.820They're not effective at changing males into females.
00:23:27.240So, this is totally wrong, but let's go back to that bit from the, from the, that the post-millennial quoted.
00:23:33.740Some transgender opponents invoke religion to support their position, just as some once invoked religion to support their racism and misogyny.
00:23:44.440Transgender opponents are, of course, free to hold their beliefs.
00:23:46.800To paraphrase a civil rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
00:23:51.060So, this is just full-on, undisguised, left-wing activism.
00:23:59.880Like, what you read there is indistinguishable from what you might read in an editorial on Pink News or something.
00:24:05.820Let's start with the fact that the transgender opponents, quote-unquote, meaning in this case, people who are, who are opposed to transitioning minors.
00:24:13.140Those people, us, we actually don't invoke religion as our primary argument.
00:31:23.780As Pride Month continues, several people have been charged with allegedly defacing Pride flags painted on streets with tire marks.
00:31:34.180And some critics have even accused them of a hate crime.
00:31:36.440In 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.
00:31:46.760The incident was caught on surveillance video, which police released.
00:31:50.160It 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.
00:31:57.700In that case, a 19-year-old named Dylan Brewer surrendered to authorities after they searched for him for a week.
00:32:07.040There was a manhunt for a week to track down the kid who took too sudden of a left turn on a Pride flag.
00:32:22.920Which maybe, look, there's a certain symbolism there.
00:32:26.240Maybe he was trying to make some kind of a point about, you know, hard left turn, Pride flag.
00:32:30.700I 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.
00:32:39.100And I think that some of these people that are being arrested for leaving creative designs on Pride flags, I think they should argue.
00:32:49.680Only if it's true, I would never encourage anyone to, you know, make false arguments.
00:32:54.300But they could argue that they, in fact, are just trying to add designs to the Pride flag.
00:33:02.160That, in fact, you know, the Pride flag, it's a democratic process.
00:33:06.500And every single year, there are more designs added to the Pride flag.
00:33:11.200It looks busier and busier and more chaotic every single year.
00:33:14.880And so, these might be people that are just trying to add their own designs.
00:36:33.060And also keep in mind that these are the same people who otherwise want to have the police less involved in things.
00:36:42.580We 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.
00:36:51.240And we know the left has been talking about that for years now, threatening to do that.
00:36:56.400And in some jurisdictions, they are actually doing that now.
00:39:08.660In November of last year, I covered the ongoing years-long crusade by the birdwatching community to decolonize their hobby and renounce slavery and racism.
00:39:17.500This 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.
00:39:32.320In fact, many people assume that they must be for those things.
00:39:34.760If you saw someone staring through binoculars at a sparrow or whatever, you, you would think to yourself, I bet that person supports slavery.
00:39:41.740In fact, I bet he actually owns slaves.
00:39:45.880But inside the world of ornithology, everything changed on May 25th, 2020.
00:39:50.620That was infamously the date of George Floyd's overdose.
00:39:53.560More 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.
00:40:04.540As you may remember, Christian demanded that Amy Cooper leash her dog.
00:40:13.180One thing led to another, and birdwatching had its very own ready-made George Floyd moment.
00:40:17.780The need for equity and unlearning in the name of racial justice was instantly clear to everybody in the hobby.
00:40:24.460To that end, as I covered last year, the birdwatching community began doing the work, as they say.
00:40:29.000They changed the names of dozens of birds, including, for example, the Scots Oriole and the McCown's Longspur.
00:40:34.620Apparently, 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.
00:40:43.700As one birdwatcher commented unironically at the time, quote,
00:40:46.500the tendrils of all social justice have reached to the point of bird names.
00:40:50.800I know that when I heard that they were changing the name of the McCown's Longspur,
00:40:54.560I thought to myself, thank God, now I can rest at night.
00:42:44.440No longer is it the name that shall not be mentioned.
00:42:48.900Yes, this is a great thing to do because the old name created barriers.
00:42:53.740Well, see, and that's just, I remember when you were sitting on the couch when we just started talking about this
00:42:58.860and 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.
00:43:48.880Audubon will be completely airbrushed out of history books and scientific journals in short order as well.
00:43:53.420And somehow that hard-hitting interview still left a basic question unanswered, which is, why exactly can't you use the guy's name?
00:43:58.960Even 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?
00:44:06.400Well, in another interview, the leader of Portland Audubon, now known as the Bird Alliance of Oregon, attempted to provide an explanation.
00:44:12.780These people are, you know, at least they're capable of saying Audubon's name out loud.
00:44:39.340And 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.
00:44:48.840Well, yes, it's a good point, because sometimes a barrier is only visible to the folks that it impacts.
00:44:54.840And 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.
00:45:07.220It 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.
00:45:17.760Well, no, actually, you can, that's, you can come to the opposite conclusion.
00:45:21.560Like, 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.
00:45:33.300So your point, you're saying, I want to do this, but look, I can't because of this barrier.
00:45:37.500And everybody else is just, like, walking through and saying, what do you mean there's no barrier?
00:45:45.400That's a really good indication that, in fact, it's all in your imagination.
00:45:49.460But 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.
00:45:54.540But then they saw that it was named after the single most important birdwatcher to ever live.
00:45:58.780Some would say probably the only important one.
00:46:01.020And then they decided that they just couldn't be a part of that.
00:46:03.060And instead of celebrating the fact that complete lunatics like this had decided to self-select out of the organization,
00:46:07.780the Portland Audubon Society decided to change their name to accommodate these people
00:46:11.160while retaining all the other benefits of their association with the National Audubon Society, of course.
00:46:15.320But there are other reasons for changing the name of these chapters.
00:46:17.700In my extensive research, I came across the John Wesley Palaces chapter of the Audubon Society,
00:47:06.080I think for us, in a more pragmatic, and maybe this is sort of a Midwestern perspective,
00:47:12.260we were already struggling with Audubon, with a D, with Autobon, T, and the Speedway in Germany.
00:47:18.360So I think the way in which natural history, conservation history, biology, a lot of facts,
00:47:27.260that I'm a 47-year-old woman walking around with a college degree and a master's,
00:47:31.860I probably couldn't tell you that much about Audubon or his origins.
00:47:34.880And so we were already struggling with, and this is what's happening at the national level, relevance.
00:47:40.260Now, first of all, I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I made here.
00:47:42.900I had to sit and listen to multiple interviews with birdwatchers in order to do this monologue.
00:47:46.340Now, you might say that I didn't have to do that.
00:47:48.040In fact, I don't have to be talking about this at all.
00:47:50.240That's true enough, but stop changing the subject.
00:47:53.420Anyway, this woman isn't really upset about racism or slavery.
00:47:56.240She's bothered by the fact that Audubon's name sounds like the highway system in Germany called the Autobahn.
00:48:02.040This is a big problem in the community.
00:48:03.200They kept confusing their local Audubon society with a German highway.
00:48:06.880Therefore, we now have the Grand Prairie Bird Alliance.
00:48:10.900Racism 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.
00:48:18.100These are small victories, but victories nonetheless.
00:48:20.580Yet these victories have not come without a cost.
00:48:22.540All of these sudden name changes are also causing quite a bit of discord within the birdwatching community.
00:49:02.240This is Derek and Ryan from Badgerland Birding.
00:49:04.500We want to start off by saying we really did not want to make this video.
00:49:08.600We'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.
00:49:15.560But 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.
00:49:24.880They 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.
00:49:38.600Apparently, 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.
00:49:45.800And so lawyers are getting called and feelings are getting hurt.
00:49:49.040The worst part is no one's watching the birds.
00:49:50.780It's total mayhem in the Wisconsin birding community.
00:49:52.960And this is the state of anti-racist efforts in the birdwatching world just about seven months after I last checked in on them.
00:49:59.260At this rate, it won't be long until the various birdwatching groups have descended into gang violence.
00:50:05.020Now, I know a lot of you think that this story doesn't matter.
00:50:07.840You're saying, Matt, why are you still talking about this?