Ted Cruz speaks to Mulan about his new book, One Vote Away, How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History, and why he s been added to President Trump s shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination process.
00:01:46.040And what the book does is it really goes through all of the fundamental constitutional liberties that are hanging in the balance at the court.
00:01:54.660And each chapter in the book is a different constitutional liberty.
00:02:00.760There's a chapter on religious liberty.
00:02:02.200There's a chapter on the Second Amendment.
00:02:04.340There's a chapter on U.S. sovereignty.
00:02:06.840There's a chapter on politics and elections that talks in depth about Bush versus Gore, something that could well be highly relevant in another two months as we see Democrats in all likelihood litigating the results of this election.
00:02:22.860You could have Bush versus Gore times 50, right?
00:02:25.800All over the place in multiple jurisdictions.
00:02:28.100And what the book tries to do is just – it tells the inside stories of the major landmark cases, many of which I helped litigate.
00:02:39.680And so I was in the middle of a lot of these cases.
00:02:42.000And so Bush versus Gore, I was a young lawyer as part of George W. Bush's legal team.
00:02:46.400So I tell the inside stories, and it's designed to be interesting, to be accessible.
00:02:53.600You don't have to be a lawyer to read it.
00:02:54.880It's designed to really tell you, all right, what's going on in these cases?
00:03:00.380Why do I as an American care about Supreme Court nominations?
00:03:05.680And what's stunning and most people don't realize is just how many of our fundamental liberties are hanging by a single vote, either positive or negative.
00:03:15.600In some cases, one additional conservative vote would make a really positive difference.
00:03:21.400In a whole lot of other instances, one additional liberal vote.
00:03:24.880We have four radical leftist justices on the court.
00:03:28.320One more I think would be devastating, and I don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say that that may well be the single most important issue in this 2020 election.
00:03:39.880This is the problem, and it's why I like the idea of you, Senator, on the Supreme Court because we've had a lot of conservatives go squishy once they get onto the court.
00:03:48.980But, of course, we also need you in the Senate.
00:03:51.600We also need you in the political fights.
00:05:01.680You came out very strongly and called for a Justice Department investigation into whether this is, what, child pornography or exploitation?
00:05:09.160Can you lay down the legal aspect of this?
00:05:12.060So last week I wrote a letter to Attorney General Barr and the Department of Justice asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Netflix has violated any of the criminal laws prohibiting the distribution of child pornography.
00:05:25.880And, you know, it's an interesting thing.
00:05:28.000So this movie is all about 11-year-old girls and the actresses, as I understand it, are 11-year-old girls who are dancing suggestively, dancing like strippers engaged in sexually explicit conduct on screen.
00:05:45.820And Netflix, a U.S. company, is promoting it and pushing it.
00:06:02.620And just because Netflix is now one of the Hollywood elite, everyone treats it as perfectly fine to take out – to produce a movie and distribute a movie where kids are being sexually exploited.
00:06:15.300And that is a federal crime to sexually exploit children.
00:06:21.240Netflix says this is completely misunderstood.
00:06:24.280A lot of prominent left-wingers are saying this, too.
00:06:26.220This is completely being misunderstood by right-wingers who haven't seen the movie.
00:06:29.380And this puts conservatives in a terrible box because from everything we know about the movie, we don't want to watch it, right?
00:06:36.900But then you're told that, well, if you haven't watched it and you can't have an opinion on it – I had no intention of watching this movie.
00:06:43.340But, you know, I work for a news outlet.
00:06:44.940I was told by my editor that I had to watch the movie.
00:07:54.500And it says that any person who knowingly transports or ships using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce, any visual depiction, if the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit content.
00:08:14.320So this is the question because when I watch it, I mean the one good thing I can say about the movie is they're not nude, right?
00:08:24.420There is no question it is exploitative.
00:08:26.440So – and the statute doesn't require that they be nude.
00:08:29.120It prohibits distributing materials that have children engaging in sexually explicit content is the language of the statute.
00:08:37.680And the punishment under the statute for violating it is that you'll be fined under this title and in prison not less than five years and not more than 20 years.
00:08:49.740There's actually an aggravator in the statute that says if the child or children in question have not attained 12 years of age, that the punishment is actually increased to a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 20 years.
00:09:06.680So in this case, we know they're 11-year-old children.
00:09:52.520Well, it was kind of interesting, A, because my letter explicitly references that it's a French film.
00:09:56.720So the professor – and this says something about the state of our academy – hadn't bothered to read my letter but instead was happy to criticize it.
00:11:13.460But – and listen, on the question of free speech and sexual conduct, what consenting adults do is their business.
00:11:23.520You know, consenting adults want to do something, knock yourself out.
00:11:27.740You got a right to do whatever you want.
00:11:29.860Well, on this issue of consenting adults, actually, this ties in with another very, very creepy thing that's going on now being pushed by Democrats in California.
00:12:34.920They can consent to whatever they want, but children don't have the legal ability to consent.
00:12:41.300And the problem is the left, they're normalizing.
00:12:45.980It's why you see the media, they don't want to be critical of this Netflix movie because it suggests there are any standards or lines that can't be crossed.
00:12:54.420But when you produce a movie like this Cuties movie, number one, it – look, you got to think every pedophile in America is going to watch this movie.
00:13:07.760That this is titillation that will encourage and drive more pedophilia.
00:13:13.560But it also – we know of at least some children who were directly harmed by this movie, and those are the child actresses, the 11-year-olds who are being asked by their producer, asked by the director to engage in sexually explicit conduct.
00:13:31.280And under the law, there is no First Amendment right to film kiddie porn, to distribute kiddie porn, that when you're abusing a child, the usual response is that you're prosecuted and locked up in jail.
00:14:25.440I think Bob Woodward talks about it in The Brethren where they used to have in the 70s – they would have airings of porn movies that had been challenged on whether they were obscene or not.
00:14:34.880And the court would have to watch it to figure out, and it would be, I think, in a basement.
00:14:39.560They would air them, but I think it's Woodward tells the story of, like, the clerks would be sitting in the back going, I see it.
00:15:53.580But imagine for a second you're in your 70s and your 80s and you're standing in a room with a woman you dated 50 years earlier and there's porn on the screen.
00:16:02.900And that was a weird and awkward moment.
00:16:37.040And even if the Netflix argument is right that this doesn't rise to the level of pornography – actually, frankly, I mean who – the parts that I shut my eyes to, who knows?
00:17:16.780Not only can they not consent, but in far too many instances, these are kids who are kidnapped and trafficked and forced to engage in these acts.
00:17:27.000And I think the Department of Justice should investigate whether this violates the law.
00:17:33.220But I think it speaks volumes that Hollywood thinks it's immune from the law, that the standards that apply to everyone else, Hollywood is exempt from.
00:18:01.040Because it's already the case that if it's a heterosexual relationship 24 to 14, then the offender doesn't need to register as a sex offender.
00:18:09.800It's whether someone registers as a sex offender.
00:18:11.940And as I understand it, California law, if it's heterosexual, says they don't have to.
00:18:16.940And this law said if it is homosexual, they don't have to.
00:18:20.940My view is, okay, the first law is a little bit crazy.
00:18:23.460Well, if you want to address that and have parity, okay, how about if you abuse a child, you register?
00:18:31.520This did remind me of an issue that hit Bernie Sanders, your colleague, in the Senate back in 2016 and 2020, which is he wrote some very odd essays in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
00:18:43.640In 1969, he wrote an essay called The Revolution is Life Versus Death, something to that effect, in which he implies that we should normalize child sexual behavior.
00:18:54.160And it wasn't just Bernie who said this.
00:18:56.780This goes all the way back to a strange figure named Wilhelm Reich on the left, who in the 1930s, he developed this theory of the universe that the whole life force is something called an orgone.
00:19:09.600And war, cancer, disease, it's all caused – I feel embarrassed even saying this in front of a U.S. senator.
00:19:17.120It's caused by people not having enough orgasms.
00:20:04.060Well, in the remaining couple minutes we have, we've touched on Hollywood and the left broadly in all this kind of creepy sex issue.
00:20:11.520But let's not forget about the creepy totalitarian issue because while you've got Netflix, you know, not just hosting this creepy movie but promoting it, you've simultaneously got Disney coming out and thanking the Chinese government, groveling to the Chinese government even as they say that they might not be able to work in Georgia because Georgia passes a pro-life law.
00:20:33.300Yeah, so this is the movie Mulan, which Disney filmed and did a live-action version of the animated film, and they filmed it in the region in China where the Uyghurs are held in concentration camps where they're being tortured, where they're being murdered.
00:20:51.760And we're talking – most estimates are more than a million Uyghurs.
00:20:56.480Because Uyghurs are an ethnic and religious minority in China.
00:21:27.940So I just joined a group of I think it's 20 other senators, a bipartisan group, in writing a letter to the CEO of Disney asking a whole series of questions about why they were filming in China, what concessions they had to make to the Chinese government,
00:21:48.620what they knew about the torture and murder of the Uyghurs, and why they were thanking the totalitarian government engaged in that torture and murder.
00:22:27.840And whether it's Disney or the NBA, you've got a lot of American companies that in pursuit of the almighty dollar are more than happy to kiss up to jackbooted thugs in the Communist Party in China.
00:22:42.360Well, then just to play devil's advocate one more time in the last minute or so that we have left, what the left is doing right now is saying on the issue of cuties and on the issue of Mulan that conservatives are hypocrites.
00:22:54.960Because conservatives, we talk a good game on free speech, but then we don't like the sexually explicit movie and we don't like Disney, a private company, doing what it wants to do in the pursuit of the dollar.
00:23:07.280Well, no, the laws should apply and the standards should apply fairly and evenly to everyone.
00:23:12.880So in the world of child exploitation and porn, that is a uniform standard.
00:23:19.180It doesn't matter what your politics are.
00:23:21.200You're not allowed to engage in child exploitation and porn.
00:23:25.780When it comes to doing business with China, look, I mean, there are, number one, there are U.S. sanctions against certain Chinese entities.
00:23:33.200That Disney needs to be sure it hasn't violated U.S. sanctions law because that can have real and crushing financial implications.
00:23:44.240But look, there is an element, there are lots of people in the media, there are lots of people in the academy that will be apologists for the Chinese communists.
00:24:43.740And and in particular, whether it violates the federal criminal laws, as in this instance, it may well have.
00:24:49.620At the same time that these studios are removing Gone with the Wind, one of the most celebrated movies in American history, removing cop shows because it's politically incorrect now from streaming platforms.
00:24:59.500They're promoting cuties and they're promoting peons to the Chinese government.
00:26:14.860This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs Freedom and Security Pack,
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