Verdict with Ted Cruz - June 23, 2022


Go Woke, Go Broke

Topics
GenuCell ultra retinol serum Red Flags laws Toy Story censorship and politics Yesli Vega campaign
Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Michael Knowles Bohemian Rhapsody Peter Singer Yesli Vega Lightyear John Roberts Elton John Tim Allen Maverick MS-13 Abigail Spanberger Thomas Jefferson Hillary Clinton Barry White Liz Wheeler Tom Cruise McConnell Murkowski Squishes Cassidy and 12 more
To Absurdity and Beyond! Roe and Casey Are Overruled

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

172.35

Word count

5,640

Sentence count

424

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Toxicity

30

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz delivers a verdict on the Supreme Court, the box office, and the Second Amendment. He also talks about the new inflation numbers out of the Federal Reserve, and why you should be worried about inflation. Ted Cruz is a conservative firebrand who is on a mission to make America safe, secure, and strong.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.520 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.320 I've got good news and good news and bad news.
00:00:07.600 The good news is there's a big win for conservatives at the Supreme Court.
00:00:11.660 The other good news, there's a big win for conservatives in the culture at the box office.
00:00:17.020 But the bad news is squish Republicans are caving to Democrats up on Capitol Hill on the Second Amendment.
00:00:24.940 Well, the co-host of this show has just come from voting on that legislation.
00:00:30.540 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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00:04:17.120 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:04:19.060 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:04:20.460 Senator, you have just come from Capitol Hill, just voting on this big gun control legislation.
00:04:27.900 There seems to be a compromise between a bunch of Republicans and the Democrats.
00:04:33.280 What happened?
00:04:34.020 Well, I just voted about an hour ago on the initial vote, the motion to proceed to take
00:04:40.280 up the legislation.
00:04:41.440 Now, the statutory text they rolled out just a couple of hours ago, so we're still in the
00:04:46.480 process of studying the details of what they laid out.
00:04:50.340 But all the Democrats voted for it, and 14 Republicans voted for it.
00:04:54.880 So the vote was 64 to 34.
00:04:57.060 They needed 60 to proceed, so they got there with 14 Republicans.
00:05:01.800 And that's going to consume this week, the debate on that bill.
00:05:07.380 I think it is safe to say you are not one of the 14 Republicans who voted to proceed with
00:05:11.920 this legislation.
00:05:12.840 That is safe.
00:05:14.200 And actually, I printed out the 14 who are.
00:05:17.660 So if you want to know the 14 who are, it is Blunt, Burr, Capito, Cassidy, Collins,
00:05:23.400 Cornyn, Ernst, Graham, McConnell, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Tillis, and Young.
00:05:29.320 Those were the 14 Republicans who voted yes.
00:05:31.800 Wish I could say that I were surprised, Senator, but I'm not.
00:05:36.920 You know, obviously, you've named a lot of the moderates and the people who often do go
00:05:41.680 over with the Democrats here.
00:05:43.300 But that's a big number.
00:05:44.080 14 is a big number.
00:05:45.860 Well, it's a combination of the moderate to liberal Republicans combined with Republican
00:05:52.480 leadership combined with the Republicans who are retiring.
00:05:56.360 And that's sort of the ace in the hole for leadership is the folks who are retiring are
00:06:00.180 never going to face the voters again.
00:06:01.900 They're likely going to go be lobbyists in town.
00:06:05.280 And so suddenly they have all sorts of votes that the people who elected them would prefer
00:06:11.880 they wouldn't take.
00:06:12.860 But since they're not on the ballot anymore, they vote differently than they would otherwise.
00:06:17.140 You know, it's actually a it's a similar manifestation in the Senate.
00:06:22.260 You've got six year terms and it's a common phenomenon where two out of every six years.
00:06:28.200 People grow a backbone or a conservative and those happen to be the two years they're on
00:06:32.500 the ballot.
00:06:33.520 And then the other four years they're not on the ballot.
00:06:35.820 They transmogrify into very, very different senators until the last two years when they're
00:06:42.620 back on the ballot, when suddenly they become conservative again.
00:06:45.700 And unfortunately, it's kind of a merry-go-round of who are the chunk of Republicans on the
00:06:52.040 ballot that will stand steady.
00:06:55.640 The retiring Republicans, it's an even worse problem because then they feel little to no
00:07:00.980 accountability to the voters who sent them there.
00:07:02.940 So this is still being worked out right now, just in in broad strokes.
00:07:09.320 How bad is it?
00:07:11.120 You know, I don't know the full details.
00:07:13.140 As I said, they just rolled out the statutory text right before we voted on it, which is
00:07:17.320 a typical Capitol Hill strategy.
00:07:19.520 So I'll study the details more and know it.
00:07:21.640 There are some elements that are fairly unobjectionable in terms of funding for things like school
00:07:26.360 safety that that everyone agrees with.
00:07:28.580 The most problematic elements, I think, concern red flag laws, red flag laws that there's funding
00:07:36.420 to incentivize states to pass red flag laws.
00:07:39.920 Red flag laws are proceedings whereby you can strip guns from law abiding citizens. 0.93
00:07:44.860 And in a number of states, particularly blue Democrat states, there are very, very low thresholds
00:07:50.920 for doing so.
00:07:51.740 There's very little protection of due process.
00:07:53.840 And, you know, it poses a real problem if somebody is unhappy with you, Michael.
00:08:00.420 If you have a, you know, someone who's mad at you, a disgruntled co-worker, a jilted ex-girlfriend,
00:08:10.580 what have you.
00:08:12.680 Red flag laws, particularly without serious due process protections, can provide an avenue 1.00
00:08:18.520 for that person unhappy with you to go behind your back and take away your Second Amendment
00:08:23.440 rights to protect yourself.
00:08:24.780 Because in that case, the red flag is not, you know, some raving lunatic who's making 0.99
00:08:30.320 direct threats, who says, I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you. 0.99
00:08:32.700 The red flag simply could be, you are a conservative. 1.00
00:08:37.240 You are a Republican.
00:08:38.680 You voted for someone that I don't, you've said something that I disagree with.
00:08:41.980 The red flag could be you.
00:08:43.840 And in that case, to deprive someone of a constitutional civil right would seem to be
00:08:49.020 a huge overreach.
00:08:50.440 Well, and I will say this, look, they were negotiating back and forth between the Republicans
00:08:54.300 and Democrats on the exact language.
00:08:56.040 And so I haven't read the statutory language yet.
00:08:58.260 I will read it this week before we vote on the final bill.
00:09:00.860 This was the initial vote just to take it up.
00:09:04.060 So I'll study the details, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of variance in the details.
00:09:11.040 The devil is in the detail on this.
00:09:12.540 And so, for example, some of the formulations they were talking about keyed off of whether
00:09:17.840 someone was a, quote, mental defective.
00:09:20.140 That's some language that actually is in federal law right now.
00:09:24.140 It's sort of a different era.
00:09:25.700 We don't tend to speak much in terms of things like mental defective.
00:09:30.560 But if the threshold is low, look, there are estimates that something like 20% of Americans
00:09:38.500 have some form of mental illness.
00:09:40.160 Um, you know, I, I joked at lunch last week that it seems to me serving in the United States 0.95
00:09:45.540 Congress should be prima facie evidence of mental illness.
00:09:49.120 Um, you know, you think about schools, how, how many kids are, uh, diagnosed with ADHD?
00:09:55.460 How many kids are medicated on, on Prozac or Ritalin or something else?
00:10:00.060 And, and if the threshold is low that there's a hyperactive 15 year old who gets a diagnosis
00:10:05.520 and gets medicated and you have a gun grabbing blue state that says, okay, well, guess what?
00:10:10.940 You've just lost your right to keep and bear arms for the rest of your life.
00:10:14.060 Um, I think that's obviously unconstitutional and would be strike struck down by any court
00:10:20.940 following the law, but in the meantime, it's a real problem.
00:10:24.260 And so my view on, on guns and crime generally is there's a right approach and a wrong approach.
00:10:32.760 You know, there's an interesting story.
00:10:34.260 Are you familiar with Project Exile?
00:10:35.600 No, no, I'm not.
00:10:37.740 Okay.
00:10:38.220 So Project Exile was something that was created during the Bill Clinton Justice Department.
00:10:43.740 And it was created, uh, in Richmond, Virginia, in the Eastern District of Virginia.
00:10:50.040 And it was the U.S. attorney there laid out and said, we are going to prosecute anyone who
00:10:55.440 commits a violent crime with a gun.
00:10:57.540 We're going to go after them under federal law.
00:10:59.420 We're going to lock them up in jail with a mandatory minimum sentence.
00:11:02.240 And we're going to let people know.
00:11:04.200 We're going to let people know.
00:11:05.340 If you knock over a liquor store and you're a felon, if you're a felon in possession of
00:11:11.320 a firearm that carries a mandatory minimum sentence under federal law, but typically the
00:11:15.640 feds don't prosecute.
00:11:17.240 Project Exile says you commit a crime with a firearm, you're going to jail.
00:11:21.540 You're doing hard time.
00:11:22.480 And they advertise it.
00:11:23.420 They put up billboards in Richmond, Virginia, carry a gun, do hard time.
00:11:28.120 And Richmond had one of the highest murder rates in the country.
00:11:31.100 And the feds started anytime you brought a gun to a crime, boom, you got prosecuted.
00:11:36.040 And the murder rates plummeted.
00:11:37.500 And you started seeing criminals that would literally go knock over a liquor store, go
00:11:42.780 do a home invasion, and they'd leave their gun at home because they'd say, if I take a
00:11:46.960 gun, I'm doing serious federal time.
00:11:50.080 If you want to stop crimes, that's the sort of program that works.
00:11:53.520 That's a great point.
00:11:54.420 Obviously, we all agree that we should take guns away from criminals and people who have
00:12:02.360 in some objective way been deemed to be too dangerous to have a gun.
00:12:06.680 We shouldn't just go along with some program to exploit a shooting or a tragedy as a way
00:12:13.960 to advance generally unrelated gun control measures that Democrats have been pushing
00:12:18.600 for a while.
00:12:19.300 Not too late to stop this kind of thing.
00:12:22.340 Let's hope that the squishes toughen up a little bit here and back off of this and listen 1.00
00:12:28.220 to this podcast.
00:12:29.440 That's the bad news that the squishes are going along with the Dems here.
00:12:33.160 There is quite a lot of good news in the culture, though.
00:12:35.900 I really want to get to the Supreme Court case, which the left has lost their mind over.
00:12:41.180 They've now said that this is a nearly fatal blow to the separation of church and state.
00:12:45.500 Before that, though, I do have to do a little bit of gloating on the culture front.
00:12:50.220 There was a big cultural win here.
00:12:51.560 We sort of predicted it on this show.
00:12:54.540 It's the get woke, go broke prediction.
00:12:58.860 We talked last time about how people don't want to see toys and cartoon characters engaging
00:13:05.100 in all sorts of eccentric sexual activities and kissing and pushing the woke sexual revolutionary
00:13:11.060 agenda. 0.98
00:13:12.120 And then over the weekend, Lightyear, which made a big show of having a lesbian toy kiss in 1.00
00:13:17.760 it, Lightyear bombed at the box office.
00:13:20.040 They were expecting a global box office of one hundred thirty five million dollars.
00:13:25.880 What did it come to?
00:13:26.700 I think it was 80, 80 something million.
00:13:29.820 And then the domestic box office was way below predictions at fifty one million dollars. 0.62
00:13:34.920 Did you, Senator, did you take the air out of the gay toys? 1.00
00:13:39.560 That's a question I've never gotten. 0.66
00:13:42.800 Listen, I will say this.
00:13:44.800 I do think it's amazing how the verdict podcast seems to be driving Hollywood.
00:13:48.640 At our campus live tour in Alabama, we talked about how Disney wanted Mickey and Pluto to
00:13:55.820 go at it and liberals brains exploded. 0.98
00:13:58.560 And apparently the showrunners for Lightyear said, hey, what a great idea. 0.99
00:14:03.360 Let's let's have lesbian toys. 1.00
00:14:05.380 Get it on. 0.94
00:14:06.060 And, you know, they got a little Barry White with his deep voice.
00:14:08.920 Let's get it on.
00:14:09.740 And then last week on Verdict, we said this is terrible.
00:14:15.120 Leave the kids alone. 0.97
00:14:16.580 You said we don't want to see eccentric sex with with with kids or toys. 0.99
00:14:24.620 Let me take out the word eccentric. 0.92
00:14:26.520 How about no sex? 0.59
00:14:27.600 Like kids and toys. 0.85
00:14:29.520 And by the way, I will say leftists really lost their minds because last week we talked
00:14:34.260 about do we really need lesbian toys and cartoons and leftists like the phrase lesbian toys that 1.00
00:14:40.520 I really think they're tiny little walnut size brains broke that apparently. 0.98
00:14:47.620 They're supposed to go on these these cultural rampages and we're not supposed to notice.
00:14:55.140 Yeah.
00:14:55.220 And not only that, we're all supposed to quietly shut up and take our kids.
00:15:00.440 Well, you know what?
00:15:01.920 There were very few kids movies at the box office this past weekend.
00:15:05.260 It was Father's Day.
00:15:06.600 You want to talk about a good time to take your kids to the movies.
00:15:09.780 And I think there were a whole bunch of Americans that said, you know what?
00:15:13.560 I can think of something better to do than listen to Hollywood lecture my six year old
00:15:18.660 on their views of sexuality.
00:15:21.320 How about just have a fun like the Toy Story films are awesome. 0.99
00:15:25.220 But it speaks volumes that while Lightyear was getting his ass kicked, the kicker was Tom 0.92
00:15:35.520 Cruise and Maverick and Top Gun, a straight up patriotic, conservative, we love Americans, 0.99
00:15:43.000 beat the bad guys.
00:15:45.060 Like the contrast is night and day and Hollywood is is so knuckleheaded that they seem unable
00:15:53.200 to get the message.
00:15:54.040 Maybe they will, because look, there's tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars delta
00:15:59.440 between those two.
00:16:02.060 Maverick's been out for several weeks and it's still obliterated Lightyear.
00:16:06.460 Somebody depositing the checks ought to notice that.
00:16:09.260 They certainly should.
00:16:10.360 This is what the left does to so many institutions is, as you say, Toy Story is a great movie.
00:16:16.580 It's a great film.
00:16:17.020 I love Toy Story 1.
00:16:18.380 I liked Toy Story 2.
00:16:19.760 I don't really remember Toy Story 3 or if there was a 4, but they were good movies.
00:16:24.080 And by the way, Tim Allen was fantastic.
00:16:25.980 Tim Allen was fantastic.
00:16:27.060 Then they yanked him out of this movie.
00:16:28.660 And so people look at it and they say, well, we like these movies.
00:16:31.740 And then the radicals go in and they say, oh, look, we've got these really popular movies
00:16:35.880 and institutions, let's go in and in a really heavy-handed way, in a very didactic and obvious
00:16:43.980 way, let's go in and use the things that people love to push our radical political agenda,
00:16:49.540 which is completely superfluous and irrelevant to the story.
00:16:54.380 And I'm really pleased to see that the American parents and moviegoers said, oh, no, thank
00:17:01.840 you.
00:17:02.240 Yeah, we like Toy Story.
00:17:03.560 We don't like you using the things that we love to push your radical agendas.
00:17:07.300 So no, thanks.
00:17:08.720 And let me make a point also, Michael, this is also not about, so the left likes saying
00:17:13.600 things like the Florida law was don't say gay.
00:17:15.880 You're right.
00:17:16.520 It's actually not about that.
00:17:18.720 And I'll give an example on the counter.
00:17:21.360 So Hollywood usually is so willing to chase the dollar that they're craven when it comes
00:17:27.440 to China, and they're willing to censor movies because China wants them to.
00:17:31.940 And one great example of that is Bohemian Rhapsody.
00:17:35.300 Bohemian Rhapsody, I think, was a fantastic movie.
00:17:38.020 I really enjoyed that.
00:17:39.380 It was very well done.
00:17:41.260 China insisted that they edit Bohemian Rhapsody to cut out the scene showing Freddie Mercury 0.83
00:17:46.400 was gay, which, by the way, is insane. 1.00
00:17:48.740 How do you tell Freddie Mercury's life story and leave out that he's gay? 0.99
00:17:51.780 It was a big damn part of his life. 0.98
00:17:53.600 And you know what? 0.96
00:17:55.140 Bohemian Rhapsody is not being marketed to six-year-olds.
00:17:59.040 Yeah.
00:18:00.220 Bohemian Rhapsody was an R-rated movie.
00:18:02.280 It was for adults.
00:18:03.300 It was the story of an incredible artist.
00:18:06.760 That was entirely appropriate.
00:18:08.980 You know, Rocket Man about Elton John.
00:18:10.720 You wouldn't tell Elton John's life story and leave out that he's gay.
00:18:13.840 It's an integral part of who he is.
00:18:16.700 What made the Lightyear antics so dismaying is it was entirely gratuitous.
00:18:23.340 It was meant, it was targeted at kids, and it was meant to say, this is what we want to
00:18:29.840 convey to you, little children.
00:18:32.540 And I think a lot of the parents are saying, leave our kids alone and let us discuss sex
00:18:38.760 and sexuality with our kids at a time and age that is appropriate, not what you, if we can't
00:18:45.680 even take them to Disney movies, what can we take them to?
00:18:49.780 Right.
00:18:50.480 Stop forcing this.
00:18:53.020 I love that point.
00:18:54.040 It was so gratuitous, superfluous, irrelevant to the plot of Toy Story.
00:18:59.820 It was so heavy-handed and on the nose.
00:19:01.840 And I like that the gamble from the left didn't pay off, that the moviegoers are not so infatuated
00:19:11.040 with Toy Story that they were willing to go to the movies and just allow the left to go
00:19:18.340 in and hollow out their stories to push their own radical agenda.
00:19:22.780 So there was a big win at the box office.
00:19:24.480 There was also apparently a big win for conservatives at the Supreme Court.
00:19:28.400 This is in the case at Carson versus Macon.
00:19:31.620 This is a case up in Maine on religious liberty that would seem to be, what's the case about?
00:19:39.400 So it's a terrific, terrific victory for religious liberty.
00:19:42.380 So the state of Maine has a tuition assistance program.
00:19:45.580 And then there's some parts of Maine that are very rural where they don't actually have
00:19:50.200 public schools up and running.
00:19:51.960 And so the state provides tuition assistance for you to send your kids to whatever schools
00:19:57.100 are there, to whatever private schools are there, particularly in smaller communities
00:20:00.920 where you don't have the resources of a big public school.
00:20:04.340 But Maine excluded religious schools, said you can send your kids somewhere.
00:20:08.800 But if it's a religious school or as they called it, a sectarian school, which means they actually
00:20:13.500 believe in faith, believe in God and teach something about God, then you're not eligible.
00:20:19.320 And so the plaintiffs in this case challenged that and said, look, you're discriminating against
00:20:23.880 my free exercise of religion.
00:20:25.820 And I want to choose to send my kid to a religious school and you're discriminating against faith
00:20:32.260 and religion.
00:20:32.880 And the Supreme Court 6-3, so Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion and concluded that
00:20:37.660 it violated the Constitution to discriminate against religious schools when otherwise they
00:20:42.720 would qualify.
00:20:43.340 They met all the other criteria.
00:20:45.560 If they just stopped those pesky references to God, they would get the state money.
00:20:51.400 But if they insist, you say, God, nope, no money.
00:20:54.760 And the Supreme Court said, sorry, you can't, if it's an equally applicable program that everyone
00:21:00.720 else can get, you can't discriminate against people of faith and schools of faith just because
00:21:06.080 they're exercising their First Amendment rights and their religious liberty rights.
00:21:10.180 I think it is a great victory for religious liberty for everyone, but it's also a great victory
00:21:15.500 for school choice.
00:21:16.600 And both of those, I think, are incredibly important.
00:21:19.660 Now, what are conservatives supposed to say when they hear the liberal justices on the
00:21:25.060 court and a lot of people in the liberal media complaining that this is an outrageous attack
00:21:33.660 on the American tradition of the separation between church and state?
00:21:38.860 Well, there are a lot of things they should say.
00:21:40.440 First of all, the words separation of church and state are found nowhere in the Constitution.
00:21:45.960 They're not in the Constitution.
00:21:46.900 They're not in the Bill of Rights.
00:21:48.260 They're not in the Declaration of Independence.
00:21:50.180 That's not there.
00:21:51.620 The phrase, a wall of separation between church and state, comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson
00:21:58.120 wrote to the Danbury Baptists.
00:22:00.500 So it's a private correspondence is where that phrase is taken from, but it's not actually the
00:22:06.240 law.
00:22:07.660 And what is the law is the First Amendment.
00:22:10.720 And the First Amendment has two religious liberty clauses.
00:22:15.420 It has the Establishment Clause that prevents Congress from establishing a religion.
00:22:20.700 And it has the Free Exercise Clause that prevents Congress and prevents government from restricting
00:22:25.980 the free exercise of religion.
00:22:28.800 And there are two different interpretations of what the Establishment Clause mean.
00:22:32.660 Liberals interpret it as saying that essentially government must be hostile to religion, that
00:22:40.460 government must treat religion as something bad. 0.99
00:22:42.700 That's where you get the phrase, wall of separation of church and state, is church bad.
00:22:48.620 I think that's a complete misreading of what the Establishment Clause is about.
00:22:53.060 The Establishment Clause was about preventing government from controlling churches, preventing government
00:22:59.880 from controlling faith, both the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause work hand in
00:23:04.920 hand.
00:23:05.760 Well, this actually leads into one of the mailbag questions that we got.
00:23:08.940 We've been extremely derelict on taking mailbag questions, so I do want to get through a few
00:23:12.700 of them before we go.
00:23:14.520 And this was on this case and on the question of religious liberty.
00:23:18.740 This is from Zachary who says, if the satanic temple starts private schools that your tax
00:23:25.600 dollars will pay for, will you conservatives regret the Supreme Court decision?
00:23:31.760 So we're happy about it now.
00:23:33.640 I think this is a great ruling.
00:23:35.480 And obviously, I don't think that the Christian schools should be discriminated against.
00:23:40.020 And I'm very in favor of school choice.
00:23:42.000 But what happens if the satanic temple, which is a great, it's a little different than the
00:23:48.320 outright Satanists down on their knees.
00:23:50.980 They're kind of ironic Satanists.
00:23:53.760 And we could debate further whether one can be an ironic Satanist or if you end up kind
00:24:00.660 of being a sincere one either way.
00:24:02.160 But what if they start a school and they say, OK, we've got the Satan school and your tax
00:24:06.020 dollars are going to go for that is one, would that follow from the court case?
00:24:10.620 And two, should we support it?
00:24:12.440 So, yes, it would follow.
00:24:14.780 And should we support it?
00:24:16.160 Well, let me answer it by making an observation.
00:24:18.360 I don't maintain today that federal student loans, federal Pell grants should be disallowed
00:24:27.460 from going to Yale University.
00:24:29.540 So why should I say they shouldn't go to the satanic temple? 1.00
00:24:32.720 They're teaching as much garbage at Yale. 1.00
00:24:35.220 Right. 0.99
00:24:35.420 And for that matter, my alma mater is Princeton and Harvard.
00:24:38.020 So I don't particularly mean to single out Yale.
00:24:40.960 It's a really good point on, I'm sorry to say, on my alma mater and yours too.
00:24:45.960 And probably most schools at this point in the country is if you had a school that was
00:24:52.880 teaching the tenets of Satanism and then you had any old run of the mill public or otherwise
00:25:00.500 name brand school, what would the difference be?
00:25:04.320 I'm not sure that if it were a blind test, I'm not sure you could identify them.
00:25:08.300 So, Michael, let me give you an example.
00:25:09.800 A tenured professor at Princeton is a guy named Peter Singer.
00:25:12.520 Peter Singer is a very left-wing ethicist who, among other things, has argued not only is
00:25:17.280 he in favor of abortion on demand, which a lot of people on the left are, he's argued
00:25:21.560 in favor of infanticide up until age six.
00:25:24.960 Right.
00:25:25.160 It's a fair bet that Professor Singer could make some of the more moderate Satanists blush.
00:25:31.580 That's a very important point.
00:25:32.900 And there's a phrase you rarely hear, more moderate Satanists.
00:25:36.000 So, I got a lot of questions this week with lots of salty language, but this is a family
00:25:43.620 show, so I'm going to clean it up a little bit.
00:25:45.020 This was one of the more eloquently written ones.
00:25:47.200 Gets back to what we were talking about at the top of the show.
00:25:50.840 This is from Josh. 0.95
00:25:52.080 Why are there so many worthless rhino Republicans currently? 1.00
00:25:56.640 And it's not, obviously, this guy and other people are complaining about this, but it is 0.82
00:26:02.800 a real tactical Republican question, which is, why are there so many rhinos?
00:26:10.500 Why are there so many people when it seems that there is so much wind at the backs of the
00:26:15.460 conservatives?
00:26:16.160 Because we don't do a good enough job in primaries on insisting on and finding strong conservatives
00:26:21.900 with proven records.
00:26:22.820 Listen, I'm on the road nonstop between now and election day.
00:26:26.940 I'll probably be on the road 30, 40 days between now and the November election, campaigning
00:26:32.600 for candidates for the Senate, campaigning for candidates for the House.
00:26:36.100 Look, I'll give you an example.
00:26:37.220 So, we had primary elections tonight in multiple races.
00:26:43.760 Yesterday, I campaigned for a candidate in Northern Virginia, Yesli Vega.
00:26:48.720 Yesli Vega is, and she won tonight. 1.00
00:26:51.120 I did two rallies for her yesterday.
00:26:53.500 She won tonight.
00:26:54.820 So, Yesli Vega is, I think, a fantastic candidate.
00:26:57.260 She's running in a Democrat district. 0.65
00:26:59.040 You have Abigail Spanberger, who's the incumbent.
00:27:03.280 Yesli is the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador.
00:27:09.800 Her brother was nearly killed by MS-13.
00:27:13.380 He was badly wounded by MS-13.
00:27:15.200 She knows firsthand the perils of illegal immigration.
00:27:20.620 She's a cop.
00:27:21.540 In fact, she's a three-time cop.
00:27:23.160 She's been a member of two police forces, and she's now a deputy sheriff.
00:27:27.880 She is the wife of an army soldier.
00:27:31.400 She is the daughter of a pastor.
00:27:34.080 Her dad is a pastor right now in Maryland.
00:27:37.660 She is the mom of two teenage kids, and she is a fantastic candidate. 0.99
00:27:42.880 Now, when she jumped in this race, no one thought she had a prayer.
00:27:45.900 All the money was on the other side.
00:27:48.040 I sat down.
00:27:49.260 I met with her.
00:27:50.000 I said, you're a star.
00:27:52.820 Endorsed her.
00:27:53.600 Campaigned for her.
00:27:54.460 She was trailing yesterday.
00:27:55.980 She just won today. 0.57
00:27:58.060 That's encouraging.
00:27:59.880 We don't do that enough.
00:28:01.440 And there's a structural problem.
00:28:05.900 Listen, Republican leadership in both the Senate and House, they want members.
00:28:11.460 Their number one criterion is a member who will be obedient, who will just do what leadership says.
00:28:17.800 And the dirty little secret is if you have someone who's going to rock the boat, who's going to be a rebel,
00:28:23.900 leadership would rather a Democrat get elected than a pain-in-the-neck conservative who will buck leadership.
00:28:34.160 If you're a middle-of-the-road squishy mod, they'll flood you with cash because you'll be obedient.
00:28:40.680 You'll do what leadership wants. 0.99
00:28:42.440 If you're a pain-in-the-neck conservative, they'll do everything they can to kill you.
00:28:47.600 And so, listen, if you want stronger conservatives, then you've got to get involved in the primary process 0.88
00:28:54.500 and get behind people who will follow through on what they say.
00:28:58.360 Not only are you hanging around trying to gum things up on Capitol Hill while the Squishes are trying to give away our Second Amendment rights, 1.00
00:29:06.100 not only are you going around the country raising lots of money for the good conservative candidates,
00:29:10.820 but not only are you doing this show, coming straight and doing this,
00:29:14.680 but, Senator, we can't let you go because you are sticking around for the Verdict Plus community
00:29:19.760 to discuss even more on The Cloak Room with Liz Wheeler.
00:29:23.860 Liz, what are you going to talk about?
00:29:25.360 Hi, Michael. Hi, Senator.
00:29:26.740 We are going to get into some really nitty-gritty legal stuff.
00:29:30.100 So we're all waiting with bated breath for the Dobbs decision, right?
00:29:34.060 Is Roe v. Wade going to be overturned?
00:29:35.460 Did Chief Justice John Roberts convince somebody else to join him in not overturning Roe v. Wade?
00:29:41.040 We're waiting for this. It seems like it's going to be at the last minute.
00:29:43.420 But the Democrats, meanwhile, are preparing their arsenal of what they're going to do
00:29:48.800 in response to Roe v. Wade being overturned, what tactics they're going to use.
00:29:52.700 And so we're going to dive into some of the legalities of some of their ideas
00:29:55.880 because a couple of their suggestions, I'm pretty sure, are against the law.
00:29:59.600 So if you'd like to join us for this conversation, it's going to be great.
00:30:01.980 Head on over to Verdict Plus. It's verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus.
00:30:06.900 If you use my promo code cloakroom, then you can watch for free for one month on your annual subscription.
00:30:11.920 It's verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus, and the promo code is cloakroom.
00:30:16.880 It's really going to be a great discussion. I'm very excited about it.
00:30:19.760 And Michael, let me jump in for a second and take people behind the curtain
00:30:25.360 and get in a little bit of the sausage making of how we do cloakroom.
00:30:28.740 So before we do the podcast every week, Michael, you and I get in a conversation with our producer
00:30:35.120 and we talk about what topics we want to have and sort of roughly lay out,
00:30:39.440 okay, tonight we're going to talk about the gun stuff and we're going to talk about light year
00:30:43.780 and we're going to talk about the Supreme Court case.
00:30:45.520 This just happened on Capitol Hill. We got to hit this.
00:30:47.960 Yeah. Right.
00:30:49.080 So we do a prep call and it's a loose prep call.
00:30:52.040 We kind of just roughly have topics and then get into it.
00:30:54.580 But it's interesting, cloakroom, the way we've done it, it's just sort of arisen organically.
00:31:01.120 Every episode, when you turn to Liz and say, Liz, what are we going to discuss on cloakroom?
00:31:05.620 If you cut to me and ask me, I have utterly no idea.
00:31:09.540 So when Liz comes on, she's coming up with these topics and she sort of has a mandate of find
00:31:15.840 interesting, esoteric, deep dive legal topics.
00:31:19.980 And I got to say, she's phenomenal at coming up. 0.97
00:31:21.500 She's come up with some really good topics.
00:31:22.940 But I'm sitting here every week going, I don't know, let's hear.
00:31:27.440 And sometimes if it's really esoteric, Liz and I will have a brief, like she'll forward me some.
00:31:33.040 If she wants to talk about a particular case that I haven't read recently,
00:31:36.340 she'll forward it to me and I'll reread it quickly.
00:31:38.980 But it is an interesting process because we've had some really good deep dives on cloakroom
00:31:44.180 of ideas that Liz has that she springs on me out of nowhere and we jump into them.
00:31:52.740 This week on Cloakroom, we'll be discussing the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
00:31:57.940 Well, I can't wait.
00:31:58.840 I can't wait to hear the topic.
00:32:00.240 And so I don't have to do any preparation at all.
00:32:03.480 It's you're in the hot seat, Senator.
00:32:04.980 Liz, you've got all the prep.
00:32:06.680 We will see you next time.
00:32:07.560 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:32:17.380 This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security
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00:32:29.940 In 2022, Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running
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