Some More News - Some More News: Veterans, Women, Victims of Crime, And Other People The GOP Pretend To Care About

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Hi. On today's episode of Some More News, we look at the GOP's use of political props and the specific ways they intentionally hurt the groups they pretend to care about.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by David Christopher BellProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by John Conway and Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #ErikaKirk #RileyGainesMomentous Fiber+ is built to support the entire gut health process, not just one piece of it.Head to https://livemomentous.com and use promo code MORENEWS for up to 35% off your first order.Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Props. We love them. You can give us props by liking and subscribing to this video and checking out our Patreon. But, silly idiot Cody, I'm not talking about the slang term for accolades, but physical props! The Ridler's cane from the movie Batman Forever, for example. Or there's little riddler bombs from the movie Batman Forever. Or that little bandit mask the riddler wears in the movie Batman Forever. And those are the only props I can think of. I don't even see these. But here's some news.

What if a prop wasn't used by the riddler in the movie Batman Forever? Alright? Well, it's hard to imagine. But sometimes props are used for political reasons. And sometimes those props are made of human flesh. For example, every state of the union, including that last and best one, often has a guest list of human props. As in, people being used by Democrats or Republicans to make a specific, political point, either in protest of the president or someone for the camera to cut away to when the president needs it.

Like Jack Nicholson at the Oscars. For you kids, Jack Nicholson was what Leonardo DiCaprio now is at the Oscars. Anyway, for example, this year we had Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. Her husband died. Give her a hand! My great friend, Charlie Kirk, a great guy, great man. Great friend of Trump, Charlie was. They were always hanging out, going to parties, writing special birthday notes with drawings of naked, one hopes, adult women. That was Charlie, right? Doesn't matter. I mean, it kinda matters, but not to this video.

Which is about human political props. Nothing cynical about that subject, I'm sure. The shitty man's guide to using human suffering for political points. Now, hey there, champ. Fair and balanced time. Politicians cynically using the suffering of others in order to push a political agenda is absolutely a bipartisan activity going back a very long time. Ever since Fag ran for council member of Cave District 1 by promising to stamp down on Sabretooth crime.

He didn't. He just got fat on slush funds, which at the time was literally slush made of bone and meat. Anyway, we're gonna focus on Trump's administration because he's the president. And also, we get Soros bucks every time we do it. If you rack up enough Soros bucks, you can pick a prize from the top shelf. The very top shelf. Okay, anyway, sort of stuff. Also, and maybe this is objective, but I'd argue that Republicans tend to have the largest discrepancy between their claims of concern for certain demographics and what they actually

do for those demographics, which is exactly what we're focusing on today. They may claim they're the party of the working class for example, but they also have a long history of voting against raising the minimum wage, you know, hypocrite stuff, who don't care about anybody and shouldn't be in power, one might say. Not me. I love those wacky Republicans, but some might say that. People like, me, actually, I do say that. But the reason they are in power is, in part, a handful of political props they absolutely love to use again and again, like Gallagher reaching for a doomed watermelon, and no better place to start than their favorite doomed watermelon.

We must stop crime by hurting the innocent. We've talked a lot on this show, and sometimes at bars about how America's obsession with crime is likely one of the main reasons we are in this ghastly situation to begin with. Crime is the magic word for Republicans in order to scapegoat, pretty much, whomever they hate at any given moment. Often, and currently, immigrants. It doesn't matter that crime has been steadily going down since the 90s, or that immigrants specifically are less likely to commit crimes, this isn't about factual information or statistics. It's about taking a single victim, preferably a white woman, and using her tragic death

to detain as many brown people as you can, like you're on a demonic version of supermarket sweep. Super Predator Sweep. Just watch as this ghoulish Republican president uses such a victim to fearmonger about illegals. Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That's right. But how many of thousands of people being killed by legal? Oh, oops, sorry, it's the other guy. Look, all old white dudes look the same to me, but I'm about 70% certain that's Biden, the Democrat guy, somehow doing work for Marjorie Taylor Green, who was using the murder of a woman named

Lakin Riley to heckle him during his state of the union address back in 2024. Literally, wearing props signifying her death. Really cool, she made merch. And got Biden to hold her merch and say exactly what she wanted him to say. Because the Democrats are bad at this. If you aren't aware, Lake and Riley was a young woman who was killed by an undocumented immigrant

with a history of minor charges, specifically for driving a scooter without a license and shoplifting. Her death was extremely messed up. She was out running at the University of Georgia, was approached by a man. who attempted to sexually assault her and then beat her to death when she fought back. That is obviously and absolutely awful. Yet somehow, the argument that grew from this tragedy focused on those previous offenses by the killer,

and that if we had put him into jail for those minor offenses, then he would have never killed Lake and Riley, which is technically true in a butterfly effect sort of way. In fact, if we jailed everyone for minor offenses in case they might hypothetically do murder someday, that would also reduce murders, I guess. You know who keeps doing crimes after being pardoned by specifically this president? A whole lot of January 6ers seems inconsistent, but whatever. We should have imprisoned and deported Winona Ryder all those years ago, lest she murders somebody. Look, the point is, if you're stupid, you might see how this would reduce crime technically.

This Rube Goldberg logic isn't new, mind you. Trump specifically has been using this since he first shoved his way into politics. Specifically, citing an event back in 2015 when an undocumented homeless man accidentally discharged a gun that he found under a public bench, which ricocheted off the ground and shot a white lady named Catherine Steinley or Kate. Quite literally, a Rube Goldberg event that Trump then used to demonize immigrants. During the campaign, then candidate Donald Trump seized on the case as proof that the U.S. needed his proposed border wall.

Kate in San Francisco, this magnificent young woman, shot in the back by a guy that was sent over here, probably pushed over, who knows? Can't stress enough that this event is tragic and also unique. It's a freak accident. The bullet that killed Kate was already flattened on one side, having hit the concrete and then traveled 78 feet. It is so very silly to hear that story and think, well, clearly the person. problem is immigration. And yet, Trump was able to do just that, pushing both his own party and the Democrats into constantly talking about immigration as a crime issue, wanting to build his

big, beautiful wall and so on. And soon after he became president, we got Kate's law. Named after Catherine Steinley, this was a law proposed to increase the maximum penalty for immigrants who repeatedly crossed the border, and also to pull resources from sanctuary cities. And you may notice that this doesn't really solve Kate's death? Like, I don't know, maybe Kate's law should be about harsher laws for people who leave guns in public places. Anyway, Kate's law never made it through the Senate, but is still apparently kicking thanks to Trump's second term. But of course, Kate's old news, they don't talk about Kate anymore. They talk about Lake and Riley.

Or rather, they did talk about Lake and Riley up until they passed the Lake and Riley Act. In short, that act requires DHS to detain every undocumented immigrant who has been arrested for pretty much any crime, including things like shoplifting. Mind you, I just said arrested, not charged or found guilty of, like accused of is the criteria, which kind of pisses right in the face of that whole innocent until proven guilty dilly we used to love here. It's a manifestation of that Rube Goldberg idea that anyone simply suspected of a crime, even without doing a crime, could be a future murderer, I guess, but only if they're immigrants. Can't stress enough that this is entirely hinged on creating impossible legal standards on immigrants, as well as holding every immigrant accountable for individual crimes, or just crimes people thought they did. If an undocumented immigrant hits someone while drunk driving, for example,

they will hold that up as proof that all immigrants are bad, despite not doing that for any other demographic. If you're wondering why it sounds designed to be impossible and unfair, that's because it is. It's using dystopian rules on a single demographic in order to justify mass incarceration and deportation. Anyway, in what I'd argue is an especially ghoulish detail, Lake and Riley's mother gave a big thank you statement

as part of Trump's signing of this act, which kind of makes you realize how messed up this entire situation was. This lady is very understandably demolished by her daughter's death, and instead of finding peace has been dragged through this political parade. She's thankful that someone is talking about Lakin, I'm sure,

but doesn't realize it is only to push forward a completely unrelated law. Meanwhile, Lakin Riley's father has expressed frustration over her name being used as a political tool and is continuing to seek justice with the school for their lack of security. Because there's no actual closure or catharsis here for them. People are murdered all the time

and don't get a special shout out at the state of the union, you know? So there's nothing healing about Marjorie Taylor Green holding up pictures of their daughter to push harsher punishments on brown people. It actually does the opposite for these families, especially since the Lake and Riley Act doesn't prevent what happened to Lake and Riley. She was attacked by a stranger who then tried to sexually assault her.

If they wanted to prevent that, they would look at the crime and not the race or legal status of the criminal. They would look at statistics around rape and how few rapes result in a felony conviction in this country, especially on college campuses, and they would work to change that. Maybe they'd see that, according to the US Sentencing Commission, a little over 70% of sexual abuse offense have no prior criminal history, meaning that a law designed to overly punish someone with any criminal history does not prevent the majority of sexual assaults. But they don't actually care, obviously.

It was never about stopping the type of crime that Lake and Riley was a victim of, but rather having a posthumous mascot to justify harsher punishments on immigrants. The result being way more criminal behavior disguised as law and order. Well, we know that ice raid ended with at least 37 people getting arrested, although still it's unclear at this point whether any of those people were charged or deported. Also getting insight into ice tactics nationwide. A newly revealed whistleblower complaint shows the agency authorized its officers to enter homes without obtaining a warrant in some cases.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings ruled that at least 32 people were arrested without a warrant, including two people detained during the South Shore raid. Department dismissed charges against two Venezuela men accused of assaulting an ICE officer in Minneapolis. The agent shot one of the men in the leg during the agency's surge in the city. Prosecutors say nearly newly discovered evidence does not match the original allegations. With my remaining time, I want to discuss the deaths in ICE custody. In just the last four months, we have seen at least seven deaths. And so on and so forth.

And Alex Pretti and Renee Good and Mar-Mar Martinez and on and on and on, this is isn't about crime, it's not about rape. If it was, they'd care that ICE agents are raping detainees. Hell, they aren't even targeting people with criminal histories anymore. Last year, the number of ICE arrests for people with no criminal background went up 1,271%. According to the Cato Institute, in June, DHS was arresting 4,000 immigrants per week who had no criminal convictions or charges. Only about a third of the convicted criminals whom it brought into custody were violent or property criminals, accounting for just less than 10% of all the immigrants it has detained. For reference, the Biden administration oversaw a far higher percentage of detaining immigrants with criminal convictions.

You might recognize Biden as the guy who they were heckling for being soft on immigrant crime. It's a big sham is my point. Even if immigrants committed a lot of crimes, which they don't, the Trump administration doesn't actually care about that. Just like they never cared about Catherine Steinley or Lake and Riley. Sham. It's a sham. Sorry if you thought they cared, they don't. I mean, again, as I mentioned, Trump, a criminal. Quite famously pardoned like 1,600 people who attempted to storm the Capitol, putting a bunch of criminals back on the streets who are now doing crime.

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That's a good idea. You can just have that one, guys. Free, on me. All yours. Serious ads. That was like the Chernobyl miniseries of ads. Previously on some more news. Ads. Okay, welcome back. We were talking about how the GOP's concern for crime is an obvious sham on account of all the crime they do and love.

And heck, let's move on to the next. next sham thing they clearly don't give a shit about. Support the troops, but not our veterans. Ah, yes, the troops. We love them. I mean, not enough to not have wars, but we love them still. And of course, our opponents hate them. Not like us, we love them.

It always kind of tickles me how both parties really want us to think that the other party is cartoonishly against our armed forces. It's like claiming that Republicans like to shoot puppies. Oh, wait, I just remembered. Gone too soon, Christy. What the hell is with Republicans and dogs, by the way? Remember Mitt? Remember Mitt sticking his dog on the roof of his car?

Just be nice to dogs, guys. Or at least don't confess to abusing dogs. This isn't about dogs, but it's kind of about dogs, in that one of the things that makes Trump unique is that he actually does seem to have a cartoonish level of disdain for our troops. Even when both parties try to unfairly paint each other as unpatriotic ghoul. rules, Trump actually embodies that caricature. He's a war hero.

He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. Seems like it should be political suicide to publicly insult prisoners of war, but I guess not. Trump has a weird and unnecessarily cruel history of disrespecting the armed forces that everyone seems to know about and accept.

But I guess it's not what you say, but what you do. And according to Trump during the last election, last election, that Biden guy did some pretty effed up stuff to our veterans by putting their lives below the lives of immigrants. He opened the borders. Nobody's ever seen anything like, and we have to get a lot of these people out or we have to get them out fast because they're going to destroy our country. Just take a look at where they're living. They're living in luxury hotels in New York City and other places. Our veterans are on the street. They're dying because he doesn't care about our veterans. He doesn't care. He doesn't like the military at all. So this is a little

but Biden should have perhaps made some kind of like facial expression to convey that he was upset that Trump was claiming he didn't care about veterans. Any facial movement really would have been good. That is Biden, right? Again, I struggle with old whites. Anyway, here is Trump making a classic claim that his opponent is cartoonishly bad to veterans with the added Trump spin of demonizing immigrants as he does. Nice little twofer for him there.

Three first since he gets to talk about hotels too. And so he really liked this talking point. Here he is, once more, articulating it in a previous campaign video. In many states, we're running out of hotel space because the rooms are all booked up with illegal aliens, living in a very large way on the American taxpayers' dime. Meanwhile, we have 33,000 veterans in this country who are homeless and living very poorly, I might add, and it's a shame. Now, if that sounds kind of bat-shit and wrong,

That's because it is. So what actually happened there is that if you recall a bunch of Republican governors did this publicity stunt where they bust a bunch of migrants to blue states to try and prove that liberals were as shitty as them and would complain or something. We actually did a video about how that backfired. What happened instead was that these blue states

simply tried to house these migrants, and in New York, they did that by temporarily using hotels that had a lot of vacancies. The GOP had, after all, created a over weird humanitarian crisis by suddenly sending these people across the country. And so the federal government kicked in some money to fix that. In other words, Republicans did something cruel to a bunch of migrants, so our government helped them by giving them housing.

And then those same Republicans got the point and go, ha ha ha ha, look at them giving these migrants preferential treatment. Trump turned this into a talking point about homeless veterans, something he definitely cares about. No, for real. Here he is during a state of the union from his first term talking about opportunity zones, lifting a veteran out of poverty. Opportunity zones are helping Americans like Army veteran Tony Rankins from Cincinnati, Ohio. After struggling with drug addiction, Tony lost his job, his house and his family. He was homeless. But then Tony found a construction company that invests an

Opportunity Zones. He is now a top tradesman, drug-free, reunited with his family, and he is here tonight. Tony, keep up the great work, Tony. Great work, Tony. You are tonight's political prop. Never mind that Tony actually got his life together before Trump's Opportunity Zone program was even available and the job he got didn't even qualify for the Opportunity Zone benefit. I'm still happy for him, even if Trump didn't help him and never would. And hey, that doesn't mean these opportunity zones aren't helping, right? They appear to be, as far as I can tell, kind of slightly helping a little bit.

According to one study, employment rose like 3% to 4%. That's something. It's the thought that counts. But what about housing specifically? Remember, Trump accused Biden of leaving veterans on the streets, which is odd because Trump and his administration are specific. fighting against a long successful tactic called Housing First. That's exactly what it sounds like. It is widely accepted and proven that giving homeless

people a home is good. Or to be a little more technical, it's objectively more effective to give them a home before treating their addiction or mental health problems. Trump is subscribing to this weird, tough bootstraps love approach where you first try to treat addiction or mental health issues before allowing them housing, which objectively doesn't work. Not just through studies, but basic logic and reason. It's harder to grapple with problems when you are constantly in need of shelter. It's the very basic hierarchy of needs that only a dummy would reject. So naturally, Trump is rejecting this. Housing first isn't just wildly effective, but is very

specifically effective for veterans when paired with other treatment programs. And yet, last year, Trump signed an executive order calling for, quote, ending support for housing first policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency. Odd to say, considering Housing First does also support treatment and recovery, but what's up there with that happening? Oh, hey, why? Well, probably because as we noted in our episode about it, this was specified in Project 2025.

Now, to be weirdly charitable, I don't think Trump is consciously trying to hurt veterans and has made other attempts to address homelessness. I'm not trying to hand it to him, I'm just saying that he's probably not wringing his hands and throwing darts at pictures of John McCain. Well, maybe he's doing that. You get what I'm saying,

I do think that Trump is only interested in helping veterans or appearing to help them to the extent that his ultra-right-wing agenda will allow. Like, we don't know how this axing of housing first will affect veteran programs. I mean, it'll probably hurt their chances of getting housing, but we do know that he's doing this while taking steps toward privatizing the VA, resulting in a massive loss of staffing. Not to mention, like everything he does in terms of cutting funding to agencies. which in turn directly harms veterans.

30% of federal workers, for example, are veterans. And many of those veterans got the big old Doge axe or chainsaw or whatever. It really comes down to this. Anyone can go out there and awkwardly hug an American flag and do rallies for the troops where you jack off windraths to YMCA. In fact, every president should actually be forced to do that. I want to see them all do that. But when your party only cares about funding drones and bombs and doing war stuff

and thinks that being accommodating and inclusive and compassionate is pussy stuff, and then pulls funding from programs designed for research and welfare and mental health and housing, well, that's not supporting the troops. It's hurting them. Because a lot of people who need that stuff are veterans. They need the Veterans Crisis Hotline and medical research and fucking housing. And maybe if there's time not having a deal with a new war in Iran. Sorry, maybe this is subjective. But I don't think any president can accuse anyone of not supporting the troops while going to war and cutting veterans programs. I guess I'm weird like that. Weird, Cody. So we got crime. We got troops. These are the things that the GOP are

on paper good at talking about. Like, this is their turn. and they still suck at it. So imagine the clown explosion that occurs when they begin to dip into talking points they're way less savvy about. For example, one entire half of the United States population. Protecting women from their basic human rights. It's extremely simple to explain why the right wing

is so hyper-focused on trans people right now. It's the same reason they focused on gay and brown people in the past and continue to do so in the present and will continue to do so in the future. In short, there's always been some type of human in history that a large amount of cis-white people don't feel comfortable with, and that discomfort is able to exceed other political priorities. People will vote directly against their best interest

if it means attacking whatever current group of human has been deemed scary. Just look at how easily turfs will find themselves on the same side as fascists. And in this history, it's always been framed around public bathrooms, or locker rooms, usually in the name of protecting women. Segregation, the AIDS panic. These are very clear examples of this. It's wild that people still fall for it. But I think bathrooms are this very visceral place for people

where they feel sort of exposed, right? Personally, if I'm doing my shit business, it's going to take a lot for me to stand up. I could hear a T-Rex roar and still try to, like, calculate how close the sound is. And so, of course, conservatives love talking about trans people in these spaces. as well as women's sport,

because it allows them to claim that it's all in the name of protecting women. It's not. Spoilers, it's not. Of course it's not. I don't need to tell you all the legislation Republicans have pushed to show that it's not.

Instead, I'm going to talk about Riley Gaines as one of the more recent and high-profile examples. Not the highest profile, maybe like fifth on the list, but, you know, up there. You know Riley. She's that swimmer who tied for fifth place with a trans woman, during a big, important swim thing.

Swim fight. The thing where people swim and try to see who's the best swimmer at the swimming. They go into the swim box and they do the swim fight. So again, Riley and this trans woman named Leah Thomas, both of whom are very accomplished swimmers tied for fifth. And that should have been the end of the story. Fifth place, not great, but better than I could do.

But this single swim fight was all it took for gains to meander down a warpath against trans people competing in sports. And for the record, it was a slow roll. The story made it to the Daily Wire because of course it did. And at the time, Gaines wasn't all that critical of Thomas, saying, quote, I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that. Because there's no doubt that she works hard too. But she's just abiding by the rules of the NCAA put in place.

And that's the issue. Oh, okay. I mean, I don't really agree with that, but at least she's not misgendering Leah or saying that trans people are demons or whatever. There's not really a big story here. Unless you're a right-wing grifter. And shortly after this,

Gaines would become sucked into this big, dumb world of conservative punditry. She has testified at least 10 times in favor of anti-trans bills at various state houses. Like, she tours around the country doing that for money. And at one point was paid for political strategy consulting by Ron Goddamn DeSantis. What in the world, or in Florida, is a 20-something year old swimmer going to consult you on politically? I guess they both know how to lose by a wide margin. Or I guess in her case, it's tie for fifth by

no margin, whatever. And of course, sure enough, Riley showed up at one of Biden's state of the union addresses. instead of perhaps getting over a loss, or again, tying for fifth, not really losing, just tying for fifth. And continuing to pursue swimming, Riley found it easier to perpetually tread water as the lady on Fox News who turned a single grievance about a small moment in her life

into an entire talking head career. And not the fun kind where you're in the talking heads, the bad kind where you become a weird liar. And you're not even in the talking heads. Because as her fame rose, Gaines would begin to augment her harrowing tale of coming in fifth place. But in that locker room, we turned around and there's a six-floor biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress and we're exposed to male genitalia.

And so that to me- Because he hasn't had surgery, gender affirming surgery. Correct. At the time, correct. And so that to me was worse than the competition piece. No, it wasn't. Sorry, Riley, but that wasn't worse than the competition. You want that to be true because it doesn't make you look like the world's

Soros loser, or sorry, tire, who turned your loss, sorry, tie into a career. But that's not true. At least according to the other swimmers there, one of whom described Leah Thomas as, just in the corner, changing normally, keeping to herself. I mean, it even contradicts Gaines' initial Daily Wire interview, where they also described Thomas as publicly changing in the corner. It's my impression from this first interview that they were trying to direct Gaines into talking about the locker room specifically, and she didn't have too much to say about it.

Because in order for the lie to work, they have to spin trans people into perverts, you see. Anyway, Riley is now like a major right-wing political personality. Despite having no actual background in politics and nothing interesting, she could possibly add to the subject. But of course, this is a perpetually lowering bar the right-wing set long ago. I call it the written house effect. If you're a person with some kind of grievance against a perceived enemy of the right wing, no matter what that is or who you are, you are in.

No knowledge or charisma required. Heck, it doesn't even have to be someone who upset the left specifically. It just needs to kind of probably include the left, which means any behavior that upsets a large number of people. Like, the Daily Wire is sticking Jonathan Majors in one of their films as some kind of political. statement, as if that's standing up to the left. Guys, he's just an actor who was accused of beating his girlfriend. He maybe did a crime, he's not a political prisoner.

Whatever, I'm getting distracted as I do. I think I might, I think I might have ADHD. The point is that Riley Gaines is now some kind of soldier for anti-trans legislation. And you might forget that this is all in the name of protecting women, specifically in sports. Which is interesting, because this is where I tell you about Riley's former swim coach,

Lars Jorgensen, who back in 2024 was accused by multiple swimmers of sexual assault. Sounds bad. In response, Gaines put out a single tweet when the news first broke to sort of recognize that this Jorgensen scandal was bad and say she was totally blindsided, sorry, blindsided, and betrayed by it. Good start. I'm sure she will take up this charge. Or maybe she'll never mention it again and go on to call Jorgensen a fantastic coach just a few months ago. And I just felt this almost like this emptiness, right?

There wasn't a lot of satisfaction in doing what I did. I had great friends at a fantastic coach. Fantastic coach, you know, besides the assault allocations. Also buried the lead a little. But back in 2023, Riley Gaines went out of her way to defend. Jorgensen during a different investigation into complaints against him regarding abuse. So yeah, not sure why she was blind-sighted by this, but in fairness, she didn't say she was blind-sighted, so.

You get it. She doesn't really care. She don't care. Riley don't care about protecting women in sports. Of course she didn't and doesn't. She tied for fifth place against a trans person one time and felt frustrated and didn't know where to direct that feeling. And then a bunch of conservatives were like, right this way, missy! And boy, I sure hope she finds her way back to reality at some point. Because I'm not sure if you know this, but women are in peril in this country. Just not from dastardly trans people, sinisterly trying to live their lives quietly in the corner. There are actual sexual predators out there in power and specifically in locker rooms.

Statistically speaking, they are coaches, much like often. the top of my head, Riley's coach, who she thinks is fantastic. But not exclusively, I guess, because, hey, Riley, I'm gonna play you a video that contains one such predator. See if you can spot them. And by the way, we have a great person here. Where's our beautiful, great swimmer? Gaines, where's Gaines?

Come on up here, look at this. Look at this. Oh God, Riley, right! Look out! Look out! Riley, he's right there! The rapist is right there! You know how the thing you're specifically

mad about is trans women allegedly peeping on you while you change in a changing room? Well, good news, there's a disgusting man next to you who has specifically been accused of and publicly bragged about walking in on women's changing rooms. Young women! Get him, Riley! Use the pepper spray! I thought you cared about this. You get it.

You all get it, right? You get that hurting trans people has absolutely nothing to do with protecting women in the bathroom or locker room. Much like how they blamed immigration policy for Lake and Riley's assault and murder. So too are they trying to blame a scapegoat for this real problem of sexual assault, while completely ignoring the actual perpetrators of sexual assault. You know, coaches, family members, the people who are statistically likely to do that. Also known as a dude's in power. Always has been.

But aha, you see, dudes in power happen to be in power. So I guess we can't do anything about them and should just blame some trans people instead, which doesn't solve anything, unless you want to hurt trans people. In that case, congrats. So we have one more political prop to cover, the mother of all political props.

If political props were season finale of TV shows that were abruptly canceled, the next one is the alf of props. Look it up. I'm not gonna explain it here, probably because I'm pretty sure we've referenced and explained it in a different episode. But I am gonna do a cliffhanger for ads.

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Or, however the internet works, fan favorite movies like Pineapple Express, Gladiator, the Labor Day nudists, an adaptation of the novelization of Golden Eye, the hip replacements, the hip talking heads, interstellar, lethargic alligator, excitable spider monkey, mopee camel, the entire Star Trek film franchise, the Duke of Dayton, Adam Smith, Memoirs of an Invisible Hand, Carl Mark's Manifesto Destiny, John Maynard Cain's, aggregate expectations, and... Nacho Libre. Plus, binge-worthy TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob Square Pants, the Fairly Odd Parents, and The X-Files. Do you ever wonder about how Dr. Richard Kimball didn't really suspect that any of his colleagues would be perturbed about his discovery that a new medication for coronary artery disease

caused liver damage, and that he should have obviously known that his buddies were on the take from Devlin McGregor and would do whatever they needed to keep him quiet so that they could continue to falsify their research so that RDU 90 could be approved and Devlin McGregor could give you provasic? Do you ever think about that?

Pluto TV! They've got the free. Stream now, pay never, provasic. Okay, great, I'm back. I wasn't abducted by the US military alien task force to never be seen again and we can continue our show about cynical uses of political props by the GOP. All right, we got women. Troops, victims of crime, what's the final boss here? Have you guessed it? Write it down on a piece of paper if you've guessed it. Think of the children unless they're being shot in schools or sexually abused or trying to have an education or can't afford food or need health care or... All right, now throw away. that piece of paper because it's weird to just have a piece of paper with the word children written on it. Eat it. Eat the child paper. Did you eat it? You sick fuck, I bet you ate it. So, children are

obviously the ultimate wild card for any politician looking to do pretty much anything. Because we love them kids. I mean, we love the ones we know. We can't stand other peoples, but we love the ones we know, and we love the concept of children having been children ourselves. Pretty sure most people have been children at some point, save for, I don't know, Dave Batista. I feel like he exploded out of his mom fully formed. Just Batista bombed the doctor straight away. The point is that politicians everywhere, of all sizes in every country, seek out children for as many photo opportunities as possible.

Kissing those disgusting babies, shaking their gross little hands, having your own revolting kids to prove that your genitals work, bringing them to watch you sit at a tiny desk and take away their education. All the hits. But of course, if you want to really fearmonger people, you gotta tell them that their children are in danger. From leftist teachers who hate America, or from sex traffickers who dwell in our pizza parlors,

and want to use a public mask mandate to, I guess, steal your child, or from drag queens who are conspiring to trans your child. It's kind of weird that the GOP really wants to protect children from extremely elaborate, and hypothetical dangers that have zero evidence of existing, right? When was the last time a librarian indoctrinated a child in a harmful way? I've seen the librarian quest for the spear and the librarian returned to King Solomon's minds and the librarian curse of the Judas Chalice and all four seasons of the librarians and zero

episodes of the librarians the next chapter. And they don't do whatever it is I was talking about before I started listing off all the the installments of the librarian franchise. What were you... Oh, what was the last time a librarian, doctrinaated kids and so forth? You know, they don't do that. My point is, I think.

Have there been any drag queen sex abuse cartels getting busted by the police in the news? If you bing the words COVID and child death, do you think it's going to involve a lot of kids being forced to wear masks to be kidnapped? Seems weird that one of our two major political parties is very scared of ultra-specific dangers to children that have never really happened.

Like, why not start fresh? Let's bing, you know what, hold on, all right? Let's bing the question, what is the leading cause of death amongst children in the United States? And see what we get, all right? It's firearms. I see the problem now, wang-wash-wad whistle. But maybe I'm being reductive.

Let's examine their concerns about kids a little closer, starting with the way we educate them. For folks like Ronald DeSantis, it can be summed up with a single phrase. You know, we need to let our kids just be kids. And we have a very crazy age that we live in. There's a lot of nonsense that gets floated around. And what we've said in Florida is we are gonna remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy. Let kids be kids!

You said it, Ron. Exactly like that too. He even signed a bill called the Let Kids Be Kids Bill, designed to protect the the innocence of children. Okay, one has to assume that's in relation to the high number of mass shootings in the state. Oh, nah, it's about drag shows and trans people, of course. But darn it, I'm still being reductive.

I guess the idea here is that they don't want kids growing up too fast by being exposed to adult environments. There's been a massive push amongst Republicans to save our kids from radical ideology, which really just boils down to the existence of trans and gay people, and sex in the adult world in general. If you're under 18, according to Ron and a lot of the GOP,

you should be in school and hang with your friends, blissfully unaware of grown-up talk. And I don't quite agree with that, as there are more mature topics that can be introduced and explored in school. It's part of what school's about. But it's a consistent perspective, I guess. Except, what's wrong with expecting,

like, are young people to be working part-time now? I mean, like, that's how it used to be when I was growing up. Oh, right, they also love child labor, like super love it. They want to smooch it on its little coal-covered lips. And for the record, I also agree that it's fine to get a job at an early age. Money, while fake and stupid, is sadly something people need. And having money gives a teenager an amount of independence before they go out into the world on their own.

For example, a trans teen who's disowned by their parents. But that's not what Ron cares about. That clip I just showed was at a person panel about immigration. Their interest in letting young people work has nothing to do with giving them freedom and everything to do with the labor shortage caused by all the bad shit they're doing to migrants. And in fact, goes directly against the idea that we have to let kids be kids. Do you think kids aren't going to learn about adult stuff when working at, say, this slaughterhouse in Tennessee where they were illegally hired to clean the meat saws? I don't know. I guess what

saying is that you can't micromanage through legislation which adult things every kid in America is allowed to learn about and which they shouldn't. If your job is to clean the equipment used to eviscerate cows, you're probably entitled to a drag show or two. Heck, you think bagging groceries isn't going to expose kids to sex or adult language? Have you met a cashier? They're party monsters. This disconnect runs through everything they claim to be concerned about involving children. Kidnapping and child trafficking, for example. Bad stuff don't want it. Hey, you know what demographic of child is extremely vulnerable to human trafficking? Homeless kids. One out of every five runaway use is subjected to trafficking for labor or sex abuse.

So if you cared about child trafficking, you'd think they'd care about that. You'd think the Trump administration wouldn't be cutting funding to things like child protective services or school meals, or health care for kids, but they are super doing that. Did you know that over at the Department of Homeland Security, in their pursuit of deporting every brown person in the country, they have pulled funding and staff away from efforts to specifically combat human trafficking and child sex abuse? Because they have, the result being that last year, agents spent the least amount of time on child exploitation in a decade.

They also cut funding for victim services at the office on trafficking in persons at the Department of Health and Human Services, resulting in provider layoffs. Meanwhile, at the State Department, they slashed two goddamn thirds of their staff that was responsible for monitoring reports concerning sex trafficking. It's almost like they want the sex traffickers to win. Like, it's almost like the president is on their side. Like maybe, maybe he has a really close friend who was a child sex trafficker, and they wrote little fancy sex trafficker poems to each other about it.

Someone should look into that. So no, of course, they don't care about kids. A lot of them don't even see kids as people. The entire parents' rights movement from the GOP revolves around the idea that children don't have privacy from their parents. That if a kid is trans or gay and tells a teacher, that teacher should be forced to tell their parents. Some of them still think we should hit the kids, like this lawmaker in Oklahoma who

defended corporal punishment because of the Bible. They feign concern for kids growing up too fast while supporting military recruitment in schools. They are grotesque hypocrites who see children as an empty prop for whatever propaganda they choose to peddle. Look at this shit. Joining us in the gallery tonight is a young man who truly loves our police. His name is DJ Daniel. He is 13 years old and he has always dreamed of becoming a police officer.

But in 2018, DJ was diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctors gave him five months at most to live. That was more than six years ago. Look, obviously nothing against DJ and his cop aspirations, but that is downright dystopian to watch, right? That kind of political display shouldn't be legal to prop up a kid who battled brain cancer for the purposes of copaganda while simultaneously cutting funding to, no joke, childhood brain cancer research. You just can't do that! Starting March of this year, literally last month,

the pediatric brain tumor consortium is no longer getting federal funds because of Donald Trump, who I'm pretty sure is the same guy in that clip, hyping off that child with brain cancer, wants to be a cop. Holy fucking shit, man, straight into the sun. Just fling the entire planet, just dive the planet right into the sun, Trump first. So, no, they don't care about kids, they don't care about women,

they don't care about crime, or our troops. And you can tell that, not just from the nuclear hypocrisy on display, but from the simple fact that they have no interest in empowered, the people they are claiming to protect or honor. They don't actually want to listen to what the kids have to say. They barely want women to vote. Many of them don't at all these days. And as for our military, well, as we were writing this,

a Republican senator made headlines for physically shoving a Marine Corps veteran out of a hearing and breaking his arm in the process because he dared to protest the war they want to do. As we get word of more and more American soldiers dying in this war, that they won't call a war, even though it's definitely a war, and the resulting disaster, Trump is ostensibly just like, yeah, it is what it is, people die, that's the way the cookie crumbles. At 13 deaths, it's marginal, right?

These pieces of shit care so much about kids and women and the troops that the first thing they did on the first day of the war was have the troops blow up a school full of little girls. They don't care. Because if they cared, they would listen to these people. They are props to them. Props whose job is to sit quietly until they are needed for some grand display, likely designed to brainwash the masses.

Yes, I guess, much like that helmet the Riddler wears in Batman Forever, a film I may or may not have watched recently. Do you like my news jacket? It keeps me safe when I'm jogging at night. That's from Batman Forever, too. Also, not, there's no sequel to Batman forever. Too many questions. Too many questions.

Too many questions. Smoking! Batman. Thank you for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment about your favorite... Batman. Don't do that.

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