Florida has passed a bill that bans the use of the word "gay" in public schools, but it doesn't even mention the word gay. Democratic lawyer Ethan Behrman joins me to explain why this is a bad idea.
00:03:53.020Yeah, the big the big deal is this is we already have a minority group of LGBTQ families and students.
00:04:00.920So, for example, one of the things that one of the authors said, I can't remember which Republican in Florida said this,
00:04:07.280but basically you can't have an issue now under this law, a teacher in third grade giving a word problem in math class can't say Jimmy and his two moms have that's against the law under this law to say Jimmy and his two moms.
00:04:25.060The reality is there are same sex parents in this country.
00:04:29.800The reality is there are gay people in this country to deny a reality is to diminish their existence, which we know based on data that that actually has harmful mental health effects on LGBTQ individuals and families.
00:04:47.120So I want to make a distinction here or at least delve into this distinction.
00:04:51.840You're saying that this bill is unfair toward LGBT people.
00:04:56.320Are you referring to the LGBT three year olds to seven year olds that this bill would affect?
00:05:01.920Or are you referring to the three year olds and seven year olds who whose sexuality we are not talking about and are not interested in?
00:05:10.080And, you know, I think it's a little creepy even to talk about five year old sexuality, but maybe they've got their father is gay.
00:05:17.440And so they you know, it's Johnny has two daddies or their mother is a lesbian or something like that.
00:05:22.320And so it's it's disrespectful to them not to have the math teacher talk about the lesbian mothers when doing arithmetic.
00:05:29.820Yeah, well, first things first, this affects K through three.
00:05:34.580So I don't think kindergarten is three year olds.
00:05:42.620And then in third grade goes all the way up to you can be nine years old in third grade as well, potentially, depending on how well you do in second grade.
00:06:07.160You can't reject ideas that just because you disagree that.
00:06:11.400Look, you and I disagree all the time.
00:06:13.400Does that mean, Michael, that I reject that your idea should not even exist in the public sphere for fear that it's going to infect others?
00:06:24.080Look, I am 100 percent always have been against white nationalism, for example.
00:06:30.740Does that mean I think that it should never exist?
00:07:00.740And suddenly people forget their core values that they supposedly espouse and then say, now we can't say those words at all in a public space.
00:07:09.720Now, Ethan, are you on this topic of banning books, are you of the opinion that no books should be banned from the curriculum whatsoever?
00:07:18.320There's a difference between curriculum and what's available in a library.
00:07:24.940You know, the math teacher talks about how Jane has two mommies.
00:07:28.480We're talking about the books that are being taught, not necessarily in a health class and not just what's in a library, but the sort of ideas and books that are being brought into the classroom.
00:07:37.140Are you of the opinion that no books should be banned whatsoever?
00:07:40.580No, there are books that should be banned.
00:07:43.360And I would go back to the white nationalist example.
00:07:45.540I don't want any white nationalist book taught in my K through three school because but that should still be potentially available in a library somewhere.
00:07:53.700If somebody wants to read and argue that point.
00:08:07.440So that's where we are, though, in this circumstance is the government is decreeing that a teacher cannot do a word problem in third grade that says Jimmy and his two moms.
00:08:25.580By the way, Florida is also proposing putting cameras and microphones on teachers to this.
00:08:30.420This is where the slippery slope on the right seems to be wildly out of control.
00:08:35.020Now, Ethan, but what what if I were what if math teacher Michael, who is Catholic and conservative, what if I were teaching students and I said, OK, so we're going to do an arithmetic problem here.
00:08:48.300Marriage, as we all know, is a sacred union between one man and one woman.
00:08:51.500So you've got one man on one side and one woman on the other.
00:08:54.460What happens when you add them together?
00:09:03.660So if you think if you think that and you believe that you can disagree with it, the key here is, are you going to be preaching Catholicism in a public classroom?
00:09:22.520If it's espousing a specific religious belief and you don't allow a contradictory opinion, I think we have problems.
00:09:29.680By the way, OK, then on that on that, but that's a very good point on that point when the left, some leftist teacher espouses a very specific religious belief, namely that it's totally morally acceptable for men and men to be the same as men and women or that men can become women and women can become men.
00:10:44.280By the way, the Supreme Court just under 100 years ago affirmed your right, Michael, to send your kids to a private Catholic school.
00:10:52.380It was actually over Catholicism in 1925 that the Supreme Court ruled that you have the right to send your kid to a private school.
00:11:00.240But Ethan, but Ethan, my taxpayer dollars are going toward the public schools.
00:11:05.000And I think this is a pretty modest ask to suggest that people who are little kids who are three to seven or eight or even for your slow second grader, nine years old in these classrooms, that they not be exposed to radical theories about sex and gender, which have been held in moral opprobrium by virtually every civilization for all of human history.
00:11:27.260That they not be exposed to that before they're even hitting the age of reason.
00:11:31.760This seems like a relatively minor ask to me.
00:11:34.340It seems like a pretty radical political agenda on the other side that's seeking to imbue the math curriculum with transgenderism and novel notions of marriage.
00:11:44.100We've got we're already past time, but I want to give you the last word.
00:12:29.520Now, when you search for all this kind of weird stuff like, you know, gender and schools and all this guy, you don't want to see that on your browser history.
00:12:38.420You don't want the ISPs to know that you're doing that, which is why you've got to check out ExpressVPN.
00:12:44.580Head on over to ExpressVPN dot com slash Knowles.
00:12:48.680How did you choose your Internet service provider?
00:12:53.300For the vast majority of people, you didn't have a choice because the ISPs operate like monopolies in the regions they serve.
00:12:59.380And they use that monopoly power to take advantage of customers.
00:13:02.120And they log your Internet activity and they sell those data to other big tech companies and advertisers.
00:13:08.580All those data, even the stuff that you're searching for on your little incognito window, you know, things that maybe you shouldn't be looking at according to the powers that be, you know, saucy websites like, for instance, the Daily Wire.
00:13:22.200You don't want that stuff getting logged.
00:13:27.500Actually, yesterday when I was looking up some things that were a little bit critical of some of government's policies, it occurred to me as I was doing it, oh my gosh, I forgot to turn my VPN on at the top of this setting.
00:13:39.300I turned it off briefly just to kind of restart it.
00:15:33.120The Russians do know a thing or two about chemical and biological weapons.
00:15:37.220The Russians regularly use at least chemical weapons against their own people, against political dissidents.
00:15:43.140They did it to the main opposition leader.
00:15:44.860They've done it to a number of people who've fallen afoul of Putin's regime.
00:15:49.220Furthermore, for most of the history of the Cold War, the Soviets accused the United States of developing biological weapons, usually without any basis.
00:15:58.540There's actually a letter that was sent from the Soviet Central Committee in 1953, just after the death of Stalin, to the communist dictator Mao Zedong.
00:16:08.160They said for Mao Zedong, the Soviet government and Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were misled.
00:16:13.960The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information.
00:16:21.960The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.
00:16:25.360So we know from the Russians themselves that they have a very long history of making false accusations about the Americans and bioweapons.
00:16:40.600The Ukrainians came out and immediately denied that any of this was happening.
00:16:45.260In the Kiev Post, they wrote, recently, fake news about the alleged activities of American military biological laboratories in Ukraine has been spread in the media and social networks.
00:16:55.520No foreign biological laboratories operate in Ukraine.
00:16:58.820Statements recently made by individual politicians are not true and are a deliberate distortion of the facts.
00:17:04.980Okay, no foreign biological laboratories exist in Ukraine.
00:17:10.300This is BS, fake news, Russian propaganda.
00:17:16.900So you've got the official propagandists of the liberal regime here in America, PolitiFact, Snopes, the fact checkers, Big Tech, the mainstream media.
00:17:26.260They are saying this is totally fake news.
00:17:28.640There are no, right here at the sub-headline, there are no U.S.-run biolabs in Ukraine contrary to social media posts.
00:17:38.180And yet, just a couple days ago, we played this on the show yesterday, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, admitted that there are, in fact, biolabs in Ukraine.
00:17:51.780Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.
00:18:09.260So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.
00:18:21.900There are biological, and you can tell she didn't want to fully admit all of this, and then Rubio diverted the questioning after that.
00:18:30.980But she said pretty clearly, there are biolabs in Ukraine.
00:18:34.780The relationship of the U.S. to those biolabs she doesn't quite get into.
00:18:38.120And she says, we're very concerned that those biolabs might fall into the hands of the Russians as they invade Ukraine.
00:18:44.400Now, the U.S. embassy in Kiev, through a little video that was linked actually from one of these fact-checker websites,
00:18:52.900the U.S. embassy in Kiev admitted that the U.S. has a pretty tight connection with these laboratories.
00:19:00.720The work we do in the Biological Threat Reduction Program is complicated, and it's difficult to communicate it sometimes to outside audiences.
00:19:11.380And I think our adversaries, like Russia, can take advantage of that with some of the propaganda that they put out.
00:19:17.280The Biological Threat Reduction Program is working in 27 countries.
00:19:21.800We feel this disinformation and misinformation is done just to really exploit divisions.
00:19:28.180We've had accusations that some research projects were being used to create threats, not to identify threats and reduce them.
00:19:36.980Ulterior motives are being injected where none exist.
00:19:42.100We've built these capabilities for the partners, their central reference labs for research.
00:19:48.740They invite the international community into their laboratories.
00:19:52.800They're working on behalf and the benefit of the people of their respective countries.
00:19:58.180So these labs, look, they're just purely scientific research to prevent threats.
00:20:03.140And then the Russian disinformation, they've gone out and they've said this is some kind of military operation to create biological weapons.
00:20:10.580And that's just completely ridiculous.
00:20:12.260Okay, this is where it gets really, really weird.
00:20:14.100Because at the end of that video from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the presenter says, for more information, go to dtra.mil.military.
00:20:28.400So you've been telling me the whole time this is just purely a scientific public health-minded endeavor.
00:20:34.000And yet now you're directing me to a military website because this program is being run by the Pentagon.
00:20:38.940It's being run by the Department of Defense.
00:20:48.260I looked on archive.org, which will show you various screenshots of websites, when they were online, what the pages looked like, and when they go offline.
00:20:57.080The page had been up just a couple days prior.
00:20:59.180I asked other people, I said, here's, go to this website, what do you see?
00:21:08.240You can use different VPNs to make, have you coming through different, different ports of entry to look at the website.
00:21:14.000The website was down just one day after Victoria Nuland gave her testimony about this.
00:21:19.900Then a few hours later, it goes back up.
00:21:24.800Then you go over, I said, okay, I want more information about this program because the argument that is being made now by the Pentagon is this all dates back to a 2005 treaty that was signed under George W. Bush to dismantle old Soviet bioweapons laboratories.
00:21:40.660The Soviets had developed these bioweapons after the fall of the Soviet Union, about 14 years later, we go in there into Ukraine, into Georgia, into all these other Eastern Bloc countries, and we're going to very safely protect and dismantle these bioweapons programs.
00:21:57.400Then I went over to the State Department website where I could find links on the internet to the funding grants, but all the links had been deleted.
00:22:07.880You had to go to old versions of the details of these grants.
00:22:13.780You look, I mean, there were about 11 or 12 of these on the internet.
00:22:17.280You've got them for the Kharkiv Oblast Laboratory Center in Kharkiv.
00:22:20.480You've got the Lviv Oblast Laboratory Center, Lviv.
00:22:24.600You've got the, I'm mispronouncing all of these names, the State Regional Diagnostic Veterinary Laboratory.
00:22:30.440And all of the funding is coming from, not from the National Institutes of Health, not from the CDC, not from the World Health Organization, not from USAID.
00:22:39.480It's coming from Donor, the Department of Defense of the United States of America.
00:22:43.600Donor, the Department of Defense of the United States of America.
00:22:46.420Donor, the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency.