Speaker 1: Just when you think Hollywood can't sink any lower, one
Speaker 1: of the biggest studios in town pushes pedophilia, and another
Speaker 1: huge Hollywood studio sucks up to one of the worst
Speaker 1: regimes on Earth. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles, joined
Speaker 1: as ever by the Senator. I do want to get
Speaker 1: to Cutie's. I do want to get to Mulan, But
Speaker 1: first there is some breaking legal news, and I guess
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about the legality of everything. Actually,
Speaker 1: two bits of news that involve you, Senator. One is
Speaker 1: your new book, your upcoming book, One Vote Away, How
Speaker 1: a single Supreme Court Seat can Change History, that is
Speaker 1: coming out in about three weeks. And then related to that,
Speaker 1: you have been added to the shortlist to the President's
Speaker 1: shortlist for the Supreme Court. So I have to ask you,
Speaker 1: will you be that one seat that can change history? No,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be. I'm very happy where I am.
Speaker 1: Come on, you're not gonna do it, but it matters immensely.
Speaker 1: I don't want the job, but but but I do
Speaker 1: care a great deal about who gets it. And and
Speaker 1: that book that's a book I've been working on really
Speaker 1: since this spring. I spent the spring and summer during
Speaker 1: Lockdown writing it. And actually the copy you're holding is
Speaker 1: the first hard copy I've actually seen that it is
Speaker 1: like a physical, real book. We literally just got that
Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. October sixth is when it's going
Speaker 1: to be released, although it's on Amazon now for pre order.
Speaker 1: It's also if you go to one votaway dot com
Speaker 1: that'll connect you to Amazon, you can pre order it there.
Speaker 1: And what the book does is it really goes through
Speaker 1: all of the fundamental constitutional liberties that are hanging in
Speaker 1: the balance at the court. And each chapter in the
Speaker 1: book is a different constitutional liberty. So there's a chapter
Speaker 1: on free speech, there's a chapter on religious liberty. There's
Speaker 1: a chapter on the Second Amendment. There's a chapter on
Speaker 1: US sovereignty. There's a chapter on politics and elections that
Speaker 1: talks in depth about Bush versus Gore, something that could
Speaker 1: well be highly relevant in another two months as we
Speaker 1: see Democrats in all likelihood litigating the results of this election.
Speaker 1: Could you could have Bush versus score at times fifty
Speaker 1: all over the place and multiple jurisdictions, And what the
Speaker 1: book tries to do is just It tells the inside
Speaker 1: stories of the major landmark cases, many of which I
Speaker 1: helped litigate it. So I was I was in the
Speaker 1: middle of a lot of these cases, and so Bush
Speaker 1: versus Gore. I was a young lawyer as part of
Speaker 1: George W. Bush's legal team. So I tell the inside stories.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's designed to be interesting, to be accessible.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be a lawyer to read it.
Speaker 1: It's designed to really tell you, all right, what's what's
Speaker 1: going on in these cases, what's going on at the court.
Speaker 1: Why do I as an American care about Supreme Court nominations?
Speaker 1: And what stunning and most people don't realize is just
Speaker 1: how many of our fundamental liberties are hanging by a
Speaker 1: single vote, either positive or negative. In some cases, one
Speaker 1: additional conservative vote would make a really positive difference. In
Speaker 1: a whole lot of other instances, one additional liberal vote.
Speaker 1: We have four radical leftist justices on the Court. One more,
Speaker 1: I think would be devastating, And I don't think it's
Speaker 1: too much of an overstatement to say that that may
Speaker 1: well be the single most important issue in this twenty
Speaker 1: twenty election. This is the problem, and it's why I
Speaker 1: like the idea of you senator on the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: because you know, we've had a lot of conservatives go
Speaker 1: squishy once they get onto the Court. But of course
Speaker 1: we also need you in the Senate. We all should
Speaker 1: need you in the political fights. I like being in
Speaker 1: the political fight. Yeah, I like being and the court's
Speaker 1: the wrong place to do that. If I were a justice,
Speaker 1: i'd stay out of political fights. I'd stay out of
Speaker 1: policy fights. A principal judge doesn't engage in that. You
Speaker 1: simply follow the law. That's what I do if I
Speaker 1: were a justice, I don't want to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to be right in the middle of the fight.
Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you, I look at the Senate,
Speaker 1: I look at the political scene. We need fighters right now.
Speaker 1: I think what we're doing on this podcast, I hope
Speaker 1: makes a difference, engaging on issues that matter. And so
Speaker 1: I hope to be part of nominating and confirming two, three, four,
Speaker 1: five great principled constitutionalist justices. But I don't want to
Speaker 1: be one of them myself, all right, So I will
Speaker 1: stop for now pressuring you to accept a potential Supreme
Speaker 1: Court nomination. I do want to get to one of
Speaker 1: those fights that you're involved in now, which is this
Speaker 1: issue of Cuties. Cuties is this French movie that sexualizes
Speaker 1: eleven year old girls and it's now on Netflix. Netflix
Speaker 1: is promoting this thing like crazy. The poster is nauseating,
Speaker 1: the movie is nauseating. You came out very strongly and
Speaker 1: called for a Justice Apartment investigation into whether this is
Speaker 1: what child pornography or exploitation. Can you can you lay
Speaker 1: down the legal aspect of this? So last week I
Speaker 1: wrote a letter to Attorney General Barr into the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice, asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether
Speaker 1: Netflix has violated any of the criminal laws prohibiting the
Speaker 1: distribution of child pornography. And you know, it's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: So this movie is all about eleven year old girls
Speaker 1: and the actresses, as I understand it, are eleven year
Speaker 1: old girls who are dancing suggestively, dancing like strippers, engaged
Speaker 1: in sexually explicit conduct on screen, and Netflix, a US company,
Speaker 1: is promoting it and pushing it. And that's not okay.
Speaker 1: Sexually exploiting. Look, I'm the dad of two little girls.
Speaker 1: Abusing kids is not okay. And just because net Flix
Speaker 1: is now one of the Hollywood elite. Everyone treats it
Speaker 1: as perfectly fine to take out to produce a movie
Speaker 1: and distribute a movie where kids are being sexually exploited,
Speaker 1: and that is a federal crime to sexually exploit children. Well,
Speaker 1: here's what Netflix is saying. Netflix says this is completely misunderstood.
Speaker 1: A lot of prominent left wingers are saying this too.
Speaker 1: That's completely being misunderstood by right wingers who haven't seen
Speaker 1: the movie. And this puts conservatives in a terrible box
Speaker 1: because from everything we know about the movie, we don't
Speaker 1: want to watch it, right, But then you're told that, well,
Speaker 1: if you haven't watched it, and you can't have an
Speaker 1: opinion on it. I had no intention of watching this movie,
Speaker 1: but you know, I work for a news outlet. I
Speaker 1: was told by my editor that I had to watch
Speaker 1: the movie. I had said, I don't want to watch
Speaker 1: this as disgusting. I don't want to. They said, no,
Speaker 1: you have to watch it to give a review of it.
Speaker 1: So I was on vacation for a week. I was
Speaker 1: there with my wife and two of our friends. So
Speaker 1: we say, okay, put the movie on. It is as
Speaker 1: bad as they say. It is true that one of
Speaker 1: the messages of the movie, perhaps is that it's bad
Speaker 1: to sexually exploit kids. The problem is in conveying possibly
Speaker 1: that message the movie sexually exploits kids. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are moments you have to look away. My friends fiance
Speaker 1: when we were watching this, stormed out of the room
Speaker 1: in tears. It was that nauseating. How do we fight that? So, look,
Speaker 1: I haven't watched the movie. I'm not I don't bring
Speaker 1: much the movie, and I get and it's an odd
Speaker 1: thing that the sort of twitter world of the blue
Speaker 1: check bark journalists that are all defending kitty porn. Yea,
Speaker 1: you know, the law matters, and there actually is. So
Speaker 1: my letter to Attorney General bar explicitly cites the federal statue.
Speaker 1: And let me tell you what the federal statute provides.
Speaker 1: So it's eighteen USC. Section twenty two fifty two, and
Speaker 1: it says that any person who knowingly transports or ships
Speaker 1: using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce,
Speaker 1: any visual piction, if the producing of such visual depiction
Speaker 1: involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit content.
Speaker 1: So this is the question, because when I watch it,
Speaker 1: I mean, the one good thing I can say about
Speaker 1: the movie is they're not nude, right, but it is
Speaker 1: licentious if there is no question, it is exploitative. So,
Speaker 1: and the statute doesn't require that they may nude. It
Speaker 1: prohibits distributing materials that have children engaging in sexually explicit content.
Speaker 1: Is the language of the statute, and the punishment under
Speaker 1: the statute for violating it is that you'll be fine
Speaker 1: under this titled and imprisoned not less than five years
Speaker 1: and not more than twenty years. But here's something interesting, Michael.
Speaker 1: There's actually an aggravator in the statute that says if
Speaker 1: the child or children in question have not attained twelve
Speaker 1: years of age, that the punishment is actually increased to
Speaker 1: a minimum of ten years in a maximum of twenty years.
Speaker 1: So in this case, we know there are eleven year
Speaker 1: old children. There's no dispute about that. I haven't seen
Speaker 1: the movie. I don't know if the depictions satisfy the
Speaker 1: requirements of the statute for sexually explicit conduct. But you
Speaker 1: know what, it's not my job as a US senator
Speaker 1: to investigate that. It is the Department of Justice's job.
Speaker 1: So I asked them, look, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: violates the law or not, there's certainly a prima facial case.
Speaker 1: We know their children. The ads they're putting out are
Speaker 1: explicitly sexual on the face of it. And you know,
Speaker 1: there was one one professor who tweeted back at me
Speaker 1: and said, well, you know, Cruz doesn't understand this is
Speaker 1: a French film. And definitely, well it was kind of
Speaker 1: interesting a because my letter explicitly references that it's a
Speaker 1: French film. So the professor, and this says something about
Speaker 1: the state of our academy hadn't bothered to read my
Speaker 1: letter but instead was happy to criticize it. Of course.
Speaker 1: But number two, it actually the child pornography laws in
Speaker 1: the US don't give you a blank pass if it
Speaker 1: happens to be produced overseas. It doesn't matter where child
Speaker 1: porn is produced. If you're distributing it, it is a felony.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Netflix is a multi billion dollar corporation.
Speaker 1: These guys are getting rich. This is a major for
Speaker 1: profit endeavor. And you know, one of the people who
Speaker 1: has been completely silenced on this is Barack Obama, and
Speaker 1: who has a deal with Netflix, and not a small deal,
Speaker 1: I mean, according to the public reporting, he's been paid
Speaker 1: what fifty million dollars from Netflix, So he is literally
Speaker 1: making tens of millions of dollars and is completely silent
Speaker 1: on is he okay with a company that is distributing
Speaker 1: at a minimum sexual exploitation of children. That's kind of
Speaker 1: the bare minimum. And there are a couple of reasons. Look,
Speaker 1: it is a reasonable question to say, all right, what
Speaker 1: is permissible? What is art? What is free speech? What
Speaker 1: is pornography? That those can be complicated questions, but and
Speaker 1: listen on the question of free speech and sexual conduct.
Speaker 1: What consenting adults do is their business. You know, consenting
Speaker 1: adults want to do something, knock yourself out. You got
Speaker 1: a right to do whatever you want. Well, on this
Speaker 1: issue of consenting adults. Actually, this ties in with another
Speaker 1: very very creepy thing that's going on now being pushed
Speaker 1: by Democrats in California. It's called Spey five. We have
Speaker 1: an newsom just signed it into law. This basically says
Speaker 1: that if a twenty four year old man has sex
Speaker 1: with a fourteen year old boy, he does not have
Speaker 1: to register as a sex offender. What is going on,
Speaker 1: I mean, what is that about? And how is that legal?
Speaker 1: I guess because obviously the fourteen year old is not
Speaker 1: a consenting adult. Well, today's Democratic Party, and this was
Speaker 1: pushed by the Democratic supermajorities and the californ on your legislature.
Speaker 1: It was signed by the Democratic governor of California. To
Speaker 1: the best of my knowledge, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
Speaker 1: have been utterly silent on it. If they said anything
Speaker 1: on it, I certainly haven't seen it. But but it
Speaker 1: it is normalizing child abuse. And what it's saying. Listen,
Speaker 1: a twenty four year old having sex with a fourteen
Speaker 1: year old is not okay. And under the law, fourteen
Speaker 1: year olds young children are not permissibly allowed to consent.
Speaker 1: You have two adults, they can consent to whatever they want,
Speaker 1: but children don't by definition, don't have the legal ability
Speaker 1: to consent. And the problem is the Left that they're normalizing.
Speaker 1: It's why you see the media. They don't want to
Speaker 1: be critical of this Netflix movie because it suggests there
Speaker 1: are any standards or lines that can't be crossed. But
Speaker 1: when you produce a movie like like this Cuties movie
Speaker 1: number one, it okay, you gotta think repedophile in America, Yes,
Speaker 1: he is going to watch this movie, that this is titilation,
Speaker 1: that that will encourage and drive more pedophilia. But it
Speaker 1: also we know of at least some children who were
Speaker 1: directly harmed by this movie. And those are the child actresses,
Speaker 1: the eleven year olds who are being asked by their producer,
Speaker 1: asked by the director to engage in sexually explicit conduct.
Speaker 1: And and under the law there is no First Amendment
Speaker 1: right to film kitty porn, to distribute kitty porn. That
Speaker 1: when you're abusing a child, the usual responses is that
Speaker 1: you're prosecuted and locked up in jail, and that's designed
Speaker 1: to protect kids. But here's what they say, right, They'll say, well,
Speaker 1: it's not pornography. It might be sexually explicit, it might
Speaker 1: be exploitative, but it's not. It doesn't rise to the
Speaker 1: level of pornography. And the federal statute is not a
Speaker 1: pornography statute. So so so in actually this is not
Speaker 1: something I talk about in the book One Vote Away.
Speaker 1: But look, the Supreme Court for years engaged in the
Speaker 1: world of what is pornography, what is obscene, and what
Speaker 1: is not. I can't define it, but I know it
Speaker 1: when I see it. That was Potter Stewart's famous test
Speaker 1: for it, which which is I can't define it, but
Speaker 1: I know it when I see it, um, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're great stories. I think Bob Woodward
Speaker 1: talks about it in The Brethren, where where they used
Speaker 1: to have in the seventies they would have airings of
Speaker 1: of porn movies that had been challenged on whether they
Speaker 1: were obscene or not, and the court would have to
Speaker 1: watch it to figure out and it would be I
Speaker 1: think in a basement, um they would they would air them.
Speaker 1: But but the I think it's Woodward tells the story
Speaker 1: of like the clerks would be sitting in the back
Speaker 1: going I see it. Yep, that's it, I say, I
Speaker 1: know it, I know it, and that's definitely it. As
Speaker 1: I recalled, I don't I hope I'm not telling tales
Speaker 1: at a school here. Did did you watch a porn
Speaker 1: movie once with Sandra day O'Connor. I did. It's It's
Speaker 1: one of the things I talk about it in the
Speaker 1: book the book as well, and it says awkward. You know, look,
Speaker 1: you're twenty six years old and you're with a woman
Speaker 1: in her seventies watching like graphic depicting. You're like, wow, okay,
Speaker 1: this is really awkward, but you know it was even
Speaker 1: I'm sure weirder and more awkward. William Renquest and Sandra
Speaker 1: Day O'Connor dated, that's right, in law school. They were
Speaker 1: They were classmates at Stanford. He was number one in
Speaker 1: the class, she was number three. I've always said, you know,
Speaker 1: I wonder what happened to the poor, poor Schelove who
Speaker 1: was number two. He's got to feel like a total loser,
Speaker 1: gotten by history. But not only did they date, so
Speaker 1: Renquist actually proposed marriage to O'Connor in law school. Now
Speaker 1: she turned him down. She married, She was Sandra Day.
Speaker 1: She married John O'Connor, and it ended up for fifty years.
Speaker 1: Justice O'Connor and her husband and the Chief and his
Speaker 1: wife were good friends. They socialized together. But imagine for
Speaker 1: a second you're in your seventies and your eighties and
Speaker 1: you're standing in a room with a woman you dated
Speaker 1: fifty years earlier, and there's porn on the screen. That
Speaker 1: was a weird and awkward moment, and you know it
Speaker 1: when you see it, And I think this is this
Speaker 1: is the key here because regardless, and by the way,
Speaker 1: I'm glad the Supreme Court is out of the business
Speaker 1: of assessing whether a particular film is or is an
Speaker 1: obscene that that that sort of amorphous judgment, Uh, didn't
Speaker 1: make any sense for the court to be in And
Speaker 1: I think this the First Amendment protects a lot of speech,
Speaker 1: but what it doesn't protect is abusing kids. That that
Speaker 1: that kids are aligned, that that is just qualitatively different
Speaker 1: from adults. Right, and and even even if even if
Speaker 1: the Netflix argument is right, that this doesn't rise to
Speaker 1: the level of pornography. Actually, frankly, I mean, who know
Speaker 1: the parts that I shut my eyes to. Who knows?
Speaker 1: But it doesn't seem that it does. It's it's degenerate filth.
Speaker 1: It is exploitative, and I think it meets the criteria
Speaker 1: that the test of the statute is whether it's a
Speaker 1: visual depiction that involves the use of a minor engaging
Speaker 1: and sexually explicit conduct. Yeah. So, look, they could do
Speaker 1: a documentary on child abuse, on child trafficking that would
Speaker 1: actually be quite valuable a lot of kids. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the many problems with child porn is many
Speaker 1: of the kids are trafficked. They they're kept against their wishes.
Speaker 1: Not only can they not consent, but but in far
Speaker 1: too many instances, These are kids who are kidnapped and
Speaker 1: trafficked and forced to engage in these acts. And I
Speaker 1: think the Department of Justice should investigate whether this violates
Speaker 1: the law. But I think it speaks volumes that Hollywood
Speaker 1: thinks it's it's immune from the law, that that that
Speaker 1: that the standards that applied everyone else Hollywood is exempt from.
Speaker 1: There is something going on here, you know, there is
Speaker 1: something in common with the promotion of this movie Cuties
Speaker 1: with SP one forty five. I remember when when and
Speaker 1: let me stop for a second on SPE one forty five. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the argument that the California Democrats give in the legislature,
Speaker 1: as they say, this is a gay rights issue, and
Speaker 1: because it's already the case that if it's a heterosexual
Speaker 1: relationship twenty four to fourteen, then the offender doesn't need
Speaker 1: to register. It's whether someone registers as a sex offender.
Speaker 1: And as I understand at California law, if it's heterosexual
Speaker 1: says they don't have when this law said if it
Speaker 1: is homosexual, they don't have to. My view is, okay,
Speaker 1: the first law is a little bit crazy. Well, if
Speaker 1: you want to address that and have have parody, Okay,
Speaker 1: how about if you abuse a child, you register. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this did remind me of an issue that hit Bernie Sanders,
Speaker 1: your colleague in the Senate, back in twenty sixteen and
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, which is he wrote some very odd essays
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, he wrote an essay called the Revolution is
Speaker 1: Life Versus Death something to that effect, in which he
Speaker 1: implies that we should normalize child sexual behavior. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Bernie who said this. This goes all the
Speaker 1: way back to a strange figure named Wilhelm Reich on
Speaker 1: the left who in the nineteen thirties he developed this
Speaker 1: theory of the universe that the whole life force is
Speaker 1: something called an orgon and war cancer disease, it's all caused.
Speaker 1: I feel embarrassing in saying this in front of us senator,
Speaker 1: It's caused by people not having enough orgasms. Seriously, this
Speaker 1: is what he said, and basically you needed something called
Speaker 1: an organ accumulator. Woody Allen later parodied this as the orgasmatron.
Speaker 1: Very prominent leftists owned these weird boxes that Norman Mailer
Speaker 1: had one, JD. Salinger had one, and this very kookie
Speaker 1: theory pervaded some leftist thought, radical thought all the way
Speaker 1: up through the nineteen seventies, and that's what Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: was writing about. And frankly, I think it's what we're
Speaker 1: seeing today. Can I ask you a question, Michael here,
Speaker 1: what the hell do you guys study at Yale? But like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I don't know this mandatory curriculum. Who this
Speaker 1: schmuck Schmidt whatever his name is. I'm not familiar with
Speaker 1: his writing professor. Yeah, well, okay, whatever it? Uh, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that's weird stuff, yam. In the remaining couple of minutes
Speaker 1: we have, we we've touched on Hollywood and the left
Speaker 1: broadly in all this kind of creepy sex issue. But
Speaker 1: let's not forget about the creepy a totalitarian issue. Because
Speaker 1: while you've got Netflix, you know, not just hosting this
Speaker 1: this creepy movie, but but promoting it, you've simultaneously got
Speaker 1: Disney coming out and thanking the Chinese government, groveling to
Speaker 1: the Chinese government even as they say that they might
Speaker 1: not be able to work in Georgia because Georgia passes
Speaker 1: a pro life law. Yeah. So this is the movie Mulan,
Speaker 1: which which Disney filmed and did a live action version
Speaker 1: of the animated film, and they filmed it in the
Speaker 1: region in China where the Wagers are are held in
Speaker 1: concentration camps, where they're being tortured, where where they're being murdered,
Speaker 1: and we're talking most estimates are more than a million weekers.
Speaker 1: Wagers are are an ethnic and religious minority in China.
Speaker 1: They're Muslims, and the Chinese government viciously persecutes the um.
Speaker 1: So Disney goes in films presumably right next to the
Speaker 1: concentration camps and the police agency the and when I
Speaker 1: say police agency, I mean the Communist Party stormtroopers, police
Speaker 1: state who are abusing and torturing the weakers. Disney thanks them.
Speaker 1: I mean it truly is so. I just joined a
Speaker 1: group of I think it's twenty other senators, bipartisan group,
Speaker 1: in writing a letter to the CEO of Disney asking
Speaker 1: a whole series of questions about why they were filming
Speaker 1: in China, what concessions they had to make to make
Speaker 1: to the Chinese government, what they knew about about the
Speaker 1: torture and murder of the Wagers, and why they are
Speaker 1: thanking the Titalitarian government engaged in that torture and murder,
Speaker 1: and we also asked for what communications they had about them.
Speaker 1: And look, we'll see how does he responds. But it's
Speaker 1: not complicated. The answer is because of money. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: we saw a similar story with the NBA that had
Speaker 1: a basketball camp in this same region and they actually
Speaker 1: had weager teenagers, fourteen and fifteen year old boys being
Speaker 1: physically abused. NBA coaches knew about it, the NBA knew
Speaker 1: about it, and they were just fine. And whether it's
Speaker 1: Disney or the NBA, you've got a lot of American
Speaker 1: companies that, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, are more
Speaker 1: than happy to kiss up to jack booted thugs in
Speaker 1: the Communist Party in China. Well, then, just to play
Speaker 1: Devil's advocate one more time in the last minute or
Speaker 1: so that we have left, what the left is doing
Speaker 1: right now is saying, on the issue of cuties and
Speaker 1: on the issue of Mulan, that conservatives or hypocrites, because
Speaker 1: conservatives we talk a good game on free speech, but
Speaker 1: then you know, we don't like the sexually explicit movie,
Speaker 1: and we don't like Disney, a private company, doing what
Speaker 1: it wants to do in the pursuit of the dollar.
Speaker 1: So are we hypocrites or not? Well, no, the laws
Speaker 1: should apply and the standards should apply fairly and even
Speaker 1: lead everyone. So in the world of child exploitation and
Speaker 1: porn should be that is a uniform standard. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter where your politics are, you're not allowed to engage
Speaker 1: in child exploitation and porn um. When it comes to
Speaker 1: doing business with China, look, I mean there are number one,
Speaker 1: their US sanctions against certain Chinese entities that Disney needs
Speaker 1: to be sure it hasn't violated US sanctions law because
Speaker 1: that can have real and crushing financial implications. But look,
Speaker 1: there is an element. There are lots of people in
Speaker 1: the media, There are lots of people in the academy
Speaker 1: that will be apologists for the Chinese communists. You know what,
Speaker 1: they got a First Amendment right to do it. I
Speaker 1: will happily defend their right to speak out. But you
Speaker 1: know what I will also would do happily condemned the
Speaker 1: garbage they're saying. Free speech doesn't mean you're immunized from
Speaker 1: being criticized for what you say. I means you still
Speaker 1: get to say things. You're going to say things, and
Speaker 1: the rest of us get to say, why are you
Speaker 1: supporting and praising and apologizing for and condoning jackbooted thugs,
Speaker 1: and why are you making money on it? By the way,
Speaker 1: it's the same point I've raised about Barack Obama. Why
Speaker 1: is Barack Obama making fifty million dollars for Netflix when
Speaker 1: they are distributing materials that are exploiting children? And now
Speaker 1: that he can make the money from Netflix, But people
Speaker 1: are entitled to ask that question about what you're choosing
Speaker 1: to support, and in particular whether it violates the federal
Speaker 1: criminal laws, as in this instance it may well have.
Speaker 1: At the same time that these studios are removing Gone
Speaker 1: with the Wind, one of the most celebrated movies in
Speaker 1: American history, removing cop shows because it's politically incorrect. Now
Speaker 1: from streaming platforms, they're promoting cuties and they're promoting peons
Speaker 1: to the Chinese government. That is a major cultural problem.
Speaker 1: And I don't think there's anything hypocritical about about raising it.
Speaker 1: But but you know that they do have new standards
Speaker 1: for the Academy Awards now and they have explicit racial
Speaker 1: quotas now that you have to have um a percentage
Speaker 1: of disadvantaged populations to be eligible for Best Pictures. So
Speaker 1: so I don't know if if if like they're going
Speaker 1: to have to go back and and remake the Godfather movies.
Speaker 1: Apparently too many Italians. You and I are both you
Speaker 1: have more Italian blood than I have, but we both
Speaker 1: have some Italian Apparently too any Italians and the Godfather,
Speaker 1: so you need to, like, I'm not even sure what
Speaker 1: they're going to do to make it comply. Are we
Speaker 1: sufficiently persecuted? I mean that's a question too. Can we
Speaker 1: maybe win an Oscar? I I mean, these are this
Speaker 1: brave new political world is really raising a lot of questions,
Speaker 1: and maybe, Senator, and one of these episodes we can
Speaker 1: do it live from the Academy Awards hopefully, UM, as
Speaker 1: long as you promised never never to pose as as
Speaker 1: as Oscar that I can promise you. I think that
Speaker 1: would be exploitative, an explicit. Nobody wants to see that either. Indeed,
Speaker 1: that is our show, Senator, Thank you very much. On
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