Trump Revokes Student Visas for Chinese Nationals, Transgender Athlete Policy Shift in CA, Take It Down Act Targeting Deepfakes Signed & ABA Barred from Judicial Nominations
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
18
sentences flagged
Hate speech
11
sentences flagged
Summary
Ted Cruz and Ben Fergusons talk about Trump revoking Chinese student visas, the devastating flooding in the Hill Country, and California's new ban on transgender athletes in sports. They also talk about how to help the thousands of people affected by the devastating Hill Country floods.
Transcript
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It is Verdict with Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
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And we did a show that had some really important topics in it a couple weeks ago.
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Unfortunately, that show was replaced as we were covering the catastrophic flooding that
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And we want to make sure that we gave you all the info on that and the relief efforts
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and how you could help the people in Kerrville and the surrounding areas that were affected.
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And we were talking about that show, and it's an important one because it dealt with a lot
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Number one, Trump revoking Chinese student visas.
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Also, California reverses policies on transgender in sports.
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It was important to protect people from revenge and people putting fake pictures of them online
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And finally, the ABA won't have any role in judicial selections.
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So we decided we're going to let you hear that show that we never got to put out.
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So let's dive into this big first topic, Senator.
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And it deals with what you mentioned earlier, China and Chinese student visas.
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There was an interesting number that was thrown out earlier in the day on TV, and I'm going
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I'm not sure if it's exactly accurate, but it is.
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And that's why I said it was I saw it earlier today.
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But it said that there are about 500 American students that have visas in China and more than
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Why are we doing so much for Chinese students, many of them, by the way, that come in here
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that spy and rob us of our intellectual property?
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And the administration, Trump administration, is basically saying we're trying to put a stop
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Well, what the Trump administration has announced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that
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that they will begin aggressively revoking the visas of Chinese students in the United States.
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China engages in extensive propaganda and espionage, and they're going to begin vetting
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and vetting aggressively whether a particular student seeking a visa to come to this country
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I think this is long overdue, and it's part of a broader effort.
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They're also engaged with foreign students that are coming to the United States, examining
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their social media history, examining if they have a history of radicalism.
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So if you are seeking a student visa to come to America and you've been public saying, I
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hate America, I want to destroy America, which sadly we've seen some of these radical students
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And nonetheless, Joe Biden and the Democrats said, welcome to America.
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We need more people who hate our nation and want to destroy it.
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Well, I think the president's exactly right to stand up and say, we're not going to welcome
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people to this country who are trying to undermine and destroy this country.
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With respect to China, you know, the question of espionage and intellectual property theft,
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Look, when the first caveman invented the wheel, I suspect somebody stole his idea and made another
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What is not ever before existed is a nation state with massive economic resources like
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like China, making it a state policy to engage in the theft of resources.
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And so I am very I think it's exactly right that we're going to vigorously scrutinize those
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students coming in to make sure that they are not operating as agents of the Chinese Communist
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Now, let me say at the same time, look, part of the reason you don't get that many Americans
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going to China to study is you don't have a whole lot of folks that want to go to Chinese
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universities, whereas people from all over the world want to come to American universities.
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And I will say if you have people who are not agents of the Communist government, we want
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the best and brightest in the world coming to America.
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We end up having inventions coming here because because the best and brightest students across
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the country come and come and study science and engineering and they make inventions and
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those inventions in turn fuel American companies and they create great jobs.
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And so I think the administration is cutting the right balance here, which is saying we're
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But at the same time, that doesn't mean that we want to close our doors entirely to
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brilliant physicists and engineers from around the world being able to come to America and
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You know, there's one thing that we mentioned, gosh, it was probably a little over a year
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I tell people this is why you should download Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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We talked back when under the Biden-Harris administration, there was even warnings coming from their administration
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that the number one threat to this country was China and Chinese espionage and influence
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operations. That is now a kumbaya moment with the Trump administration, where in essence,
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two administrations that saw nothing eye to eye both agreed on China and what they were
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trying to do in stealing intellectual property and sending an incredible number of spies
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And many of them come through our university system.
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Yeah, but the Biden administration did next to nothing to stop it.
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But at the same time, they were complicit in it.
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And I'll tell you, I have for over a decade been leading the fight to stop Chinese espionage,
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to stop Chinese propaganda, to stop China's malign efforts.
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I think we need a comprehensive effort to take on communist China, much like we had under
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Ronald Reagan, to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
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And I'll tell you, Ben, one of the very first pieces of legislation that I authored and passed
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And it dealt with what are called Confucius Institutes.
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So Confucius Institutes were started at U.S. universities all across America, where there
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They were paid for by communist China, by the government, and they were used to engage
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I authored legislation and said, if you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you will not
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get funding from the federal government, from the Department of Defense.
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And I'll tell you, that simple piece of legislation resulted in over 100 Confucius Institutes shutting
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down at universities across the country, shutting down their espionage, shutting down their
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I think the Trump administration's announcement is the next step in that very important fight.
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And there has been a fight since the president came in with his executive order on trying to
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protect women from men being in their locker rooms, being in their sports, beating them up.
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We've seen countless women who their achievements have been taken away from them on the podium
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because of men claiming they're women, which is impossible in reality.
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And California decided they were going to stand up to Donald Trump.
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Well, listen, we've seen the Democrat Party getting more and more radical ever since Donald
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They hate Trump and they've gotten more and more extreme on a host of issues.
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And one of the poster children for their extreme issues is embracing boys and girls sports, men
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And it also deprives both girls and women of athletic victories they should have and they've
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That did not used to be a controversial proposition.
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It is only in today's Looney Tune left that they can't tell the difference between men and
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But I got to tell you, even though in the Senate, Senate Democrats, all of them continue to defend
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men and women's sports and boys and girls sports.
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We're seeing the Democrats beginning to retreat.
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We're seeing Gavin Newsom, the governor, who's been a far left radical governor.
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And he's decided, OK, we're on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue.
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And so California announced this is a big deal.
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They're changing their policy for track and field so that if you're a biological girl
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and you missed out on making it to the state championship because you were beaten by a
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biological male who claims to be a transgender woman, then the girl, you will still get your
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You still get invited to the state championship.
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Look, that's a significant step in the right direction.
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And I've got to say, this really illustrates that at least some Democrats realize, wow,
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we are on the wrong side of an issue that America wants to protect girls' sports and
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We want to protect our daughters, and we don't want to see them hurt or competing unfairly.
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And so the crazy thing is, that means in track and field in California now, they may give
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three gold medals, one to the boy, one to the girl, and one to the transgender athlete.
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But for bright blue California to make this concession, it shows that at least some Democrats
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realize they are way on the wrong side of this issue.
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This also, I think, is an issue that it's worth fighting for.
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And I think many that are listening are saying, we don't want to give in and we don't want
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And the pendulum went so far to the radical left for so many years that this is the fight
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And showing California having to change girls' track and field championship rules after the
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Trump threatens funding over the trans athletes is just an example of, hey, we are, many times,
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the silent majority, and we need to start acting like it, especially on these types of issues.
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Well, I'll tell you, Ben, this issue is a powerful issue.
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And as you know, I ran for re-election in Texas last year in 2024.
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And my campaign was the first campaign in the country last year to put real time and
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energy behind this issue of, we're going to protect girls' sports from boys competing,
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and we put tens of millions of dollars behind this issue.
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What's fascinating is the media completely misunderstood the issue.
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So one of the things that my campaign did is we did focus groups in Houston and Dallas
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of undecided moderate women to understand what issues moved them, and we tested 30, 35 different
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The number one issue that moved undecided moderate women in Texas was boys' and girls' sports.
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And when I started campaigning on it, it was very funny.
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The reporters are like, oh, Cruz is trying to appeal to the crazy right wing.
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This is soccer moms who love their daughters.
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And then you saw Senate races all across the country pick up the same message because they
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We saw President Trump lean in hard on this message.
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And by the way, some of those women that you were talking to, let's be very clear, had
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moved from California because how many people from California moved to Texas over the last
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We have over 1,000 people a day moving to the state of Texas.
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And California is overwhelmingly the heaviest, the largest state that is sending people to
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But this issue, what's fascinating, Ben, is, you know, four years ago, this issue did not
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You saw campaigns try to raise it four years ago.
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And I think people thought then that it was jumping the shark, that it didn't feel real
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I think people said, oh, come on, that's not a real threat.
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We've now seen Leah Thomas, the swimmer who is a biological man and looks like Michael
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friggin Phelps, who we've also seen, and I think this was really a seminal moment in
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the Olympics, the two dudes competing in women's boxing and beating the hell out of women.
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And I think a whole lot of people said, wait, this is not theoretical.
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This is happening over and over and over again.
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And I think this is another milestone, that California is retreating on this issue, shows
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And now the question becomes, how much are they going to be able to fight back through
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And is this going to be something that's going to be, unfortunately, an issue for probably
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And to be honest, California hasn't conceded altogether.
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They're still having biological males compete against women, which is unfair.
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You know, if you're playing volleyball, we've seen women who have a biological man spike the
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But the fact that even the lefty government of California is saying, we've gone too far,
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More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
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And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:14:11.280
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
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entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of
00:14:20.780
So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:14:24.020
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Senator, let's talk about this other incredible moment.
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Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law.
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And remind people what this law is intent and why it is such an important piece of legislation
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to protect not only young people and minors, but really anyone from just evil and hateful
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Well, this is legislation that I authored, that President Trump signed into law this week.
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Actually, he signed it into law in the Rose Garden, at a big ceremony in the Rose Garden.
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I've done a lot of bill signing ceremonies in the Oval Office.
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This is the first time I've been in the Rose Garden because you had victim groups and victim
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advocates and people who have been victims of non-consensual explicit imagery.
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So if you have a boyfriend and girlfriend and they're in a relationship and they take
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explicit pictures or videos, and then they have a breakup, and one or the other is mad,
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and they say, okay, I'm going to stick it to you.
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I'm going to put this out for the whole world to see.
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And it is an utterly grotesque violation of privacy.
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Nobody has the right to do that to somebody else, and it's something we're seeing happening
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There's a second manifestation that is new, and it has to deal with technology, which is
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more and more we are seeing people use AI, artificial intelligence, to create deep fakes,
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and deep fakes where they appear to be either a picture or a video of a real person, but it's
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utterly fake, and so they make a naked or explicit image of someone and put it out.
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And the incidence of deep fakes last year increased 3,000%, and over 90% of the victims of deep
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fake explicit imagery are women or teenage girls.
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And so the Take It Down Act is legislation that I introduced that makes it a crime, a federal
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felony, to post non-consensual intimate images, either real pictures or deep fakes.
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And secondly, it puts a federal statutory obligation on tech platforms to take the pictures down,
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to take the videos down, because the platforms have been horrible responding to victims.
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And so the victim ends up being victimized over and over and over again by the images
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And so the Take It Down Act puts a legal obligation that when the victim notifies them,
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hey, that's me, that's an explicit image of me, and you don't have my consent to put it
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This legislation I introduced with Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, and we passed it through
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And then the House took it up and passed it with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, and
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And give a listen to what President Trump said this week in the Rose Garden as he signed the
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Today it's my honor to officially sign the Take It Down Act into law.
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It's a big thing, very important, so horrible what takes place.
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This would be the first ever federal law to combat the distribution of explicit, imaginary,
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They take horrible pictures, and I guess sometimes even make up the pictures, and they post it
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And very importantly, this includes for forgeries generated by artificial intelligence known as
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I have them all the time, but nobody does anything.
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With the rise of AI image generation, countless women have been harassed with deep fakes and
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other explicit images distributed against their will.
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This is the wrong, and it's just so horribly wrong.
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And it's a very abusive situation, like in some cases people have never seen before.
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Senator, one of the things I just I love about this legislation is the fact that not only is
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it bipartisan, but you had the First Lady who really got involved in this as well.
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It was important to her, and that made it, I think, even easier to bridge the gap.
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The First Lady became very active in pushing this bill.
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She reached out to me and said she wanted to help get it over the finish line.
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So last year, we passed it out of the Senate 100 to nothing, and the House failed to take
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And so we got to this year, to the new Congress.
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I passed it through the Senate again 100 to nothing, and the real battle was to get it
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to rise up the priority list of House leadership.
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And so when the First Lady called my office and said she wanted to help, what I did is
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I invited her to come to Capitol Hill for a roundtable where she could hear from the victims.
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And also at that roundtable was the Speaker of the House and Steve Scalise, the majority
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leader, and Brett Guthrie, who's the committee chairman in the House.
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And when the First Lady asked them, will you please pass this into law, they committed to
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And this was the day before the State of the Union address.
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And you may remember at the State of the Union address, Melania was sitting with a teenage
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girl from Texas, Elliston Berry, and President Trump told her story in the State of the Union
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And I'll tell you, it's actually, it's a fascinating story of how this bill came to pass because
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it originates with one teenage girl in Texas, Elliston Berry.
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And a year ago, she was 14, and she was in ninth grade.
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And she woke up one morning, and her phone was blowing up with texts from her friends
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because a classmate of hers had taken a perfectly innocent picture of her from social media and
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had used an app online that he had found to create a deep fake and then sent what appeared
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to be naked pictures of Elliston to all of her ninth grade classmates.
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It's much harder to be a teenager today than when you and I were teenagers, Ben.
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Well, what happened is her mom, Anna, look, Elliston and Anna are constituents.
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So Anna picked up the phone and called my office and said, hey, look, you're my senator.
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And my staff, to their credit, they elevated this to me, and they told me what had happened
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And this is happening more and more all over the country.
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And so I said, look, let's draft legislation to fix this, to address the problem.
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And it was because of Elliston that we drafted it.
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But as I said, it's happening all over the country.
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Well, Elliston came to D.C. the day we announced the bill last year for the press conference.
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And in the course of the meeting, I asked, I said, hey, what happened to the pictures?
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And her mom said, it's the most frustrating thing in the world.
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She said, I had been calling and emailing Snapchat over and over and over again.
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I said, I want you to get the CEO of Snapchat on the phone today.
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Now, it should not take a sitting senator making a phone call to get those pictures taken down.
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And now, as a result of the legislation Trump has signed, every victim has a statutory right to insist that it be taken down as a matter of law automatically.
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In fact, Ellison Berry got to go on Fox News Channel with our good friend Kayleigh McEnany and talk about this moment.
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You decided to go and talk to your local congressman.
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You get connected with a senator, and then you manage, there you are, standing behind the president of the United States, changing the laws for other young women like you.
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I never would have thought that this could ever be my reality.
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My mom, she's really an amazing person, and she's the one that's been pushing for this, and she's the one that's encouraged me.
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So I wouldn't be able to do this without her help and her support, and she really just has encouraged me to the point where I feel encouraged about this.
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So having the opportunity to speak about this and to bring awareness really just means so much, especially it's so much growth seeing how scared I was at first and seeing how confident I am able in this situation.
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Well, other young women now have recourse.
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It's finally a happy ending to a really hard and sad subject.
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Well, and Ben, at the signing ceremony, I was able to introduce Elliston to the president.
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I introduced also Francesca Mani, who's another 15-year-old girl who was in New Jersey, and the exact same thing happened to her as happened to Elliston.
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Brandon Guffey is a state rep from South Carolina, and tragically, his oldest son got what we thought was a direct message.
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He's from a cute girl, and she convinced him to send naked pictures to her.
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And the con man began extorting him and threatening, I'm going to send these naked pictures to your friends and family.
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So I introduced Brandon and his family, the president, too.
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And this law is a victory for everyone that is a target of this kind of exploitation.
00:24:42.400
All right, Senator, so let's dive into this other issue that really is an interesting one.
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You've got a lot to say about the Trump Justice Department telling the American Bar Association that it will no longer comply with ratings for judicial nominees.
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The ABA has had a lot of power, and they're basically now saying, we're not going to let you guys have that power because there's been a lot of bias coming out of the American Bar Association.
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Well, the American Bar Association, it's a national organization of lawyers, and it is a left-wing advocacy group.
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It is a radical left organization, and the ABA has had a formal role in judicial selection for 75 years.
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It started rating judicial nominees in 1953, and until 2001, the ABA actually had a formal role evaluating judicial nominees before they were nominated.
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So a president, a department of justice and administration would share with the ABA, hey, we're thinking of nominating Ben Ferguson to be a federal judge.
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And they'd go and research and interview former clients, and at some point people would say, wait, Ben's not even a lawyer.
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How the hell is he going to be a judge like he probably should go to law school first?
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And by the way, that point is not crazy, but they engaged that they would do a formal role, and they would rate the qualifications of judicial nominees.
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For decades, the ABA's qualification measures were wildly biased.
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Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.
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Robert Bork was by any measure one of the most qualified federal judicial nominees in the history of this country.
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Robert Bork had been the Solicitor General of the United States, the Chief Lawyer for the United States in front of the Supreme Court of the United States.
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Robert Bork had been one of the most renowned and respected law professors for decades.
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Robert Bork had been a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and so a remarkable career.
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And yet the ABA, when they evaluated Robert Bork, they concluded he was, quote, not qualified to be a judge.
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They also concluded the same thing for Frank Easterbrook.
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Again, brilliant, brilliant judge, brilliant professor, one of the greatest judges to have ever served on the Court of Appeals, Frank Easterbrook.
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Edith Jones is a judge on the Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals down in Texas.
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She's a phenomenal jurist, one of the best and most conservative judges in the entire country.
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Well, the breaking news is this week the Trump Justice Department announced the ABA will no longer have a role in judicial selection.
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And the Department of Justice said, you know what, they can chime in like any other left-wing advocacy group, but they don't have a role in this process.
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This is going to have, I think, a big impact on the quality.
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Pam Bondi informing the ABA that they'll no longer enjoy the special access to judicial nominees.
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And the left, by the way, when that news came out, they totally freaked out.
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And I think that also shows just how much they were depending on the ABA to get rid of good candidates that were maybe more conservative.
00:28:28.520
Yeah, and so Pam Bondi sent a letter to the president of the ABA, and she said, quote,
00:28:35.840
While the ABA is free to comment on judicial nominations along with other activist organizations,
00:28:41.100
there is no justification for treating the ABA differently from such other activist organizations,
00:28:50.060
And so previously, the Office of Legal Policy, which is the office within the Department of Justice that handles judicial selections,
00:28:59.460
they changed – they had previously directed judicial nominees to provide a waiver to the ABA to let the ABA access non-public information, including bar records.
00:29:12.140
And so no longer is the Department of Justice going to tell judicial nominees, give the ABA special access.
00:29:18.160
As that is over, and moreover, Pam Bondi says, quote,
00:29:23.800
Nominees will also not respond to questionnaires prepared by the ABA and will not sit for interviews with the ABA.
00:29:30.740
In other words, you can be like every other whack job organization on the left, but you're not going to have any special access whatsoever.
00:29:42.300
I have for years, for more than a decade, advocated that the ABA is wildly biased, and it should not have a special role in the process,
00:29:51.580
and I want to commend President Trump and Pam Bondi.
00:29:55.740
Senator, we hear a lot about bias and bias against conservatives, but my other question is, were they also biased in advocating for liberals?
00:30:04.520
Absolutely. They are a hard-left advocacy organization masquerading as a non-partisan professional organization.
00:30:13.760
And Joe Biden, over the last four years, nominated over and over again radicals and zealots, many of whom were wildly unqualified.
00:30:21.840
And the ABA was more than happy to stamp them with a rating of qualified.
00:30:26.180
And one example is Charnel Bajelkingren, who was wildly unqualified, and yet the ABA happily deemed her qualified.
00:30:37.420
And rather than me lay out how bad she was, I want you to listen to this cross-examination from my colleague John Kennedy to this judicial nominee in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:30:48.820
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and congratulations to all of you.
00:30:53.420
Judge, on the far end, tell me what Article 5 of the Constitution does.
00:31:15.800
In my 12 years as an assistant attorney general and my nine years serving as a judge, I was not faced with that precise question.
00:31:27.800
We are the highest trial court in Washington State, so I'm frequently faced with issues that I'm not familiar with,
00:31:35.680
and I thoroughly review the law, research, and apply the law to the facts presented to me.
00:31:41.740
Well, you're going to be faced with it if you're confirmed.
00:31:55.880
Well, and let me underscore how simple the first two questions are that he asked.
00:32:08.080
Article 5 is the article that lays out the process for amending the Constitution.
00:32:20.960
So, the first three articles of the Constitution, Article 1 creates the Congress,
00:32:25.260
Article 2 creates the President and the Executive Branch,
00:32:34.600
To give you a sense, you will flunk constitutional law
00:32:37.900
and not graduate law school if you don't know what Article 2 is.
00:32:41.920
She was being nominated to be what is called an Article 3 judge.
00:32:50.540
And nevertheless, the ABA said she's qualified to be an Article 3 judge,
00:32:56.680
Because I'm very glad the ABA no longer has a role in making those determinations.
00:33:01.360
As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:33:07.060
Don't forget to download my podcast, and you can listen to my podcast every other day
00:33:10.660
you're not listening to Verdict, or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:33:14.080
I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast.
00:33:17.820
And we will see you back here on Monday morning.