Season 9, Episode 13 October 13, 2024

On this episode, we'll hear about time and time again, how the Democrats can't rely on their ideals to win an election, trans kids and the battle against TikTok.

Transcript

Hello!  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley.  On this episode, we’ll hear about time and time again, and how the Democratic Party can’t rely on their ideals to win elections.  But first (Not the Headlines!)...

I’ve spoken a number of times about transgender issues on the Listening Tube.  I’m about to speak about it again.  But first I want to make it clear that I have nothing against transgender people on a personal level.  I don’t understand why they get bunched in with homosexuals and non-binary people or the other people included in the LGBTQ+ group, because transgender is a far different thing than all the other letters.  It’s different than transexual, too.  All of those categories other than transgender keep their bodies the way they are.  Only transgender people try to change their sex organs with surgery and chemical support.  But if that’s what they want to do once they’re adults, then fine.  I don’t care what you do once you’re a legal adult and are responsible for your own actions and decision.  Until then, it’s a different story.
We have to protect our children.  We not only have to protect our children from the world around them, we also have to protect them from themselves.  Some countries in Europe have recognized that.  A recent report says that France, Britain, Norway and Sweden have taken steps to move away from the premise that “gender-affirming care” is the proper course of action.
I’ve wondered aloud on this program before about why, if a child is confused about gender, do we automatically assume they need a sex-change operation?  If you’re a boy and you feel like a girl, or if you’re a girl and you feel like a boy, how exactly is that measured?  What justification is there to treat a doubt or a feeling with a physical remedy first?  Shouldn’t the thought or feeling be examined through the lens of mental health first?  You, know, before you start lopping off body parts?  Why do some people assume that if there’s a dispute between the mind and body, the body is wrong and the mind is right?  That the body has to be changed, and not the mind?  
But all that’s really irrelevant when you consider that these are just kids.  They’re confused about a lot of stuff!  If a boy’s confused about how to kiss a girl, you don’t cut off his lips!
I’m the oldest kid in my family.  My little sister Janine was born four years after me.  All she knew was that I was older than her, and I was a boy.  At some point, she assumed that when she grew up, she would become a boy.  I can remember her once saying, “When I get to be a boy…”  I don’t know why she thought that.  I can’t relate, because I’m the oldest.  But in today’s society, Janine would have been given puberty blockers and had her breasts cut off.  She grew up to be a confident and happy person, despite never becoming a boy.  That’s just one example of why we should not allow children to make decisions about their physical gender.  Very few of them complete the process, and many of them later regret beginning the process.  Gender-affirming care” is a misnomer.  There is no affirming, and there is no care.  The people who promote this harmful practice are mutilating our children for the sake of an agenda and for the scientific research.  
Somewhere along the line, the progressives felt they needed something to promote that would make even the most absurd seem ordinary.  What could me more absurd than to think that Mother Nature herself has no idea what she’s doing?  That our DNA and our genetics, honed over several millenia, suddenly started mixing up minds and bodies.  Do we really have that little faith in the very nature of our being?  Is there no credit to be given to the fact that the gender structure we’ve been living under for thousands of years is suddenly making so many mistakes that it requires surgery to correct?  And it’s appearing in young people, even before they reach puberty?  Even before they become an adult?
Now, you might be thinking, “But Bob, you don’t have to be 18 to know who you are.”  And I get that. But it’s still the responsibility to protect children from themselves, and you don’t become an adult until you’re 18.  Even though we’re still idiots at 25.
When somebody want’s you to protect trans kids, you can by keeping them from making a terrible mistake.  Until they’re old enough to legally make decisions for themselves, it’s our responsibility to protect them from themselves.
There’s an organization called “Do No Harm” that maintains a database on so-called gender-affirming care.  They try to keep track of such incidents.  It’s much easier in Europe, where centralized record-keeping is common, but they’ve been able to compile some surprising statistics on the subject.  They weren’t able to include non-insured people in the tally, nor anyone insured by one of the largest providers in the west, Kaiser, because they don’t make their records public.
In the four years between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14-thousand minors were given puberty blockers, hormones or surgeries in the United States.  More than 57-hundred kids underwent facial, breast or genital surgeries.  Nearly 9000 kids, who were given an average of seven separate prescriptions per kid, for a total of more than 62-thousand prescriptions.  That’s more than 119 million dollars over four years paid out to sex-change clinics, much of it tax dollars.  Again, that’s secondary to what’s being done to our children.
The doctors and clinics who perform these sex-change operations on children have forgotten the first rule of medicine:  Do no harm.  These children are being harmed, and they don’t seem to care that mostly irreversible procedures are being performed on kids who haven’t developed, either physically or intellectually, enough to even be faced with a choice like that.  Yet the whole industry is being supported by school districts around the country who enact rules against informing parents that their child is going by a different name at school than they are at home, and want to be addressed by pronouns not consistent with their bodies.  And the teachers are tasked with memorizing which students want to be called something they aren’t, with the threat of termination hanging over their heads if they fail to get it right all the time, or simply refuse to play along.  
Meanwhile, 19 states have declared themselves “trans sanctuaries.”  But these sanctuaries don’t differentiate between adults who have the right to rule their own destiny, and children, who don’t and shouldn’t.  These sanctuary laws protect people who perform these surgeries, even if they did it in a state where it’s been prohibited.  The prohibitions in nearly all of the states where there is one make it clear that the law only applies when a minor child is involved.  Once you’re a legal adult, have at it! You’re responsible for your own actions.  Twenty-six states have prohibitions on gender altering surgery for minors.
Clearly the major difference between the right and left on the transgender issue is the level of maturity needed to declare that your a man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s body. For the conservatives, that level of maturity is granted to every one in America at the age of 18.  The liberals want children to decide for themselves what sex they are, and then provide the means to accommodate the child when they decide they want to be somebody else.  What child doesn’t imagine being somebody else?  They’re easy prey for those who have an agenda.  You got to get ‘em early, though, before they begin to be able to make decisions for themselves.

Speaking of ways other people try to control our kids, tictock is now the subject of a new lawsuit brought by Attorneys General from 14 individual states, including red and blue states.  They say politics makes strange bedfellows, and this is one example of that.  This unlikely group of AG’s have accused TikTok of purposely addicting children to its platform with content that never ends, keeping kids engaged for hours at a time, and damaging their mental health with challenges that encourage sometimes dangerous behavior and something called push notifications that come at night, disrupting sleep.  TikTok claims it has safety features for parents and screen time limits which can be used to prevent addictive behavior.  
But the top law-enforcers in 42 of our 50 states seem to agree that there’s a big problem here, and they’re not waiting for Congress to fix it.  Those 42 Attorney’s general called for a Surgeon General’s warning on social media apps for young users.  Now, 14 states have stepped up their game to go after one of the media companies from a legal angle, and it’s TikTok in the crosshairs.  They tried to get a warning put on the product, and now they’re accusing TikTok of knowingly damaging the mental health of millions of American kids, many younger than 13, which TikTok claims they don’t allow to use the platform.  A story about it says TikTok’s own internal documents show otherwise.  Not only are they allowing children under 13 on the app, they’re also illegally collecting those children’s personal information.  
But it’s the kids between 13 and 17 where TikTok truly focuses its energies.  It’s one reason why depression in teens is directly relative to the amount of time they spend on social media.  And TikTok has mastered the art of keeping them longer than anyone.  Besides depression, the lawsuits contend TikTok use leads to what an Associated Press story calls profound psychological and physiological harms such as anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.  Hmmm.  Body dysmorphia.  I wonder how that differs from body dysphoria.

Look that up liner

According to verywellhealth dot com,  body dysmorphia is a mental health condition resulting in an overwhelming preoccupation with your body or appearance.  They say someone who suffers from this mental health condition may focus excessively on minor physical flaws or even perceived flaws that other people wouldn’t notice.
Gender dysphoria is treated a bit more gingerly, according to verywell mind dot com.  It speaks of dysphoria in general terms as a mental health condition, but goes out of its way to alter the definition of dyphoria when it’s applied to gender.  All the treatments for dysphoria are mental health treatments, once any physical condition is ruled out.  But when it comes to gender dysphoria, the first thing they do is change the physical instead of providing the mental health services the patient would get if they had any other kind of dysphoria but gender dysphoria.  Just go see a shrink, you’ll be able to work through this!  You have the power!  When it’s gender dysphoria, it’s not a mental health problem, it’s a physical problem.  You need to get body parts removed.
The good news is, we don’t see any evidence that TikTok’s causing gender dysphoria, but it is causing body dysmorphia.  Either way, there’s a desire to make physical changes to your body.  But TikTok doesn’t care about what gender you are, they just want to make you feel bad about yourself.  They do so by showing endless video clips of people much more attractive than you, and getting you to focus on the imperfections that make each of us unique.  Profound psychological and physiological harms are just an unfortunate by-product of the money-making, personal information-gathering Chinese Communist Party tool that Americans freely and gladly surrender their mental health and compromise our national security.
Speaking of which, in case you forgot, TikTok is also on the brink of becoming unavailable in the United States.  Congress passed, and President Biden signed a law earlier this year that will require TikTok to be sold out of control of its parent company in China.  TikTok’s fighting the law, but if it stands, the app may become obsolete in mid-January of next year.
TikTok is under a lot of pressure from both state and federal governments.  Each of the state lawsuits, while sharing some of the same complaints, also present a wide variety of accusations, each of which TikTok will have to defend in separate courts.  Fourteen state courts and the federal courts where they’re protesting the new law requiring them to be sold.  The financial burden would be enough to make a normal company give up.  But Tiktok has the backing of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the billions of advertising dollars they’re accumulated.  This could be a long battle ahead. Both the federal government and the individual states believe they have solid cases against the social manipulation platform.  Let’s hope they do.  Personally, I believe our children and the United States would be better off without the poison of TikTok.

Let’s Go Back liner

1582
Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian calendar. Which means that in Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, this day and nine others never happened.  Proving that time only exists because we choose to keep track of it.  October 4 of 1582 is followed directly by October 15.   Tommy bite.

1884
Greenwich, in London, England, is established as Universal Time meridian of longitude.  Hence the term ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ which became Universal Coordinated Time.  The tale is that the men who devised the grid around the globe ran the Prime Meridian right down the middle of the conference table where they presented their work.  Today it’s marked by a stainless steel strip embedded in the ground and a laser beam.  Modern technology has moved the prime meridian slightly, but it’s still nearby.  The origin was for universal shipping times, and those old rules are still in use today.  Tommy bite.


1947
Captain Chuck Yeager of the U.S. Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound - over the high desert of Southern California - and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.  That’s just one thing Chuck Yeager did.  We learned about him in Air Force basic training.  He started out as a private in the Army and became a General in the Air Force.  He served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.  He would be put in charge of the new Aerospace Research Pilot School, training astronauts.  He’s considered one of the greatest pilots of all time for a dozen different reasons, but all anyone ever remembers is that he was the guy who broke the sound barrier.  Tommy bite.
If you’re traveling faster than the speed of sound and you stub your toe, how long does it take for you to hear yourself go,’ow, ow, ow, ow, owwwww!!!!’

1968
Jim Hines of the United States of America becomes the first man ever to break the so-called “ten-second barrier” in the 100-meter sprint in the Summer Olympic Games held in Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds.  This was the equivalent of breaking the four-minute mile.  They made a movie about that.  But in a sprint, covering more than ten meters a second was an incredible feat.  Today, the fastest anyone’s been able to run that distance is 9.58 seconds, just 37 one-hundredths of a second faster than the record in 1968.   Tommy bite.

1982
U.S. President Ronald Reagan proclaims a War on Drugs.  Tommy bite.

Phone and email liner


People on both sides of the American political aisle claim that democracy is at stake in the upcoming election.  If the other side wins, we’re doomed.  We may even lose the right to vote, depending upon who’s in charge and who you believe.  Here we are, nearly 250 years into our American experiment, and it all comes down to this.  While America has survived all kinds of political parties and ideals over it’s brief history, this election may end any hope of an opposing party ever gaining ground again.  The thought is that whichever party wins this Presidential election, regardless of how Congress turns out, they’ll be able to hold onto power by hook or by crook for evermore.  Most of us would like to think that American people are smarter than to let that happen, and the good news is, the Democrats think we’re too smart to let that happen.  That’s why they’re not taking any chances.  Because Americans are mostly smart (and harmless), the Democrats employed the old ‘divide and conquer’ concept when it comes to manipulating the upcoming election.
It used to be all about who’s ideas were better.  A politician would tell the people he or she wished to represent, and if they got enough people to agree with them, and vote for them, they earned the right to represent the people.  At whatever level of government.  It seems like a fair way to decide.  But what if there’s a third opinion?  That changes the dynamic considerably, especially if two of them have similar ideas.  Because if the third one has vastly different ideas than the other two, that candidate has a better mathematical chance of winning a popular vote, if you consider only that the people who disagree with the third candidate will divide their votes between the other two.  Knowing this, tenticles of the Democratic party bankrolled conservative candidates to divide the voters, thus giving the Democratic candidate a better chance of winning.  Not because of the ideas or vision or agenda of the party, but because of the math, or the odds, or however you want to put it.  It’s a way for the Democrats to manipulate the democratic process.  They don’t believe their ideas are good enough to win, so other measures need to be taken.
If you pay attention to American politics at all, you know that the House and Senate have very slim Majorities on both sides, so it won’t take a lot to change the course of history, depending upon how Congress shakes out.
Well, a candidate running for a congressional seat to represent a district in Minnesota just pulled out of the race when he realized that he’d been recruited to run as an Independent by a group called Patriots Run Project, according to a story by the Associated Press.  The story says the candidate was one of several candidates recruited to run because they had ideals similar to Donald Trump.  Reporter Ryan Foley did some digging on these candidates.  They were planted in at least eight important congressional districts in Nebraska, Montana, Virginia, and Minnesota.  More than half of them have since realized they were being used as pawns in a real-life game.  Six of them were retired, disabled or both, but they thought it would be an honor to work with Donald Trump if he were to become President again.  That’s why they agreed to run.  This Patriots Run Project was pulling people off the street and bankrolling the efforts and filing the paperwork and getting the signatures needed to put a Trump supporter on the local ballot for Congress in order to divide the vote of the conservatives. That’s not democracy.  That’s not getting people to vote for your ideals, that’s dividing us into even smaller groups to further an agenda instead of the will of the people.  If you can’t change the minds, manipulate the numbers.
But how did the Patriots Run Project find the guys to use as pawns?  Facebook.  They ran pro-Trump ads and looked for people in the districts they targeted who responded to the ads, then got them into conversations and eventually convinced them they should run for Congress.  As an Independent, or a Libertarian.  All roads, including advice and help with petitions and funding lead to Democratic operatives, but the actual financiers have been able to hide their identity.  Facebook has removed the groups pages, but they should be able to say who paid for them.  Regardless, many men, no women, were recruited to run parallel campaigns with Republican candidates where the democrats needed a leg up.  One candidate in Nebraska was bankrolled by a woman in New York who’s a registered Democrat, but her identity is being protected.  If you can’t get the people to vote for your ideas, then what is it about your vision requires you to manipulate the will of the people?  Why do you feel you have to cheat?  The democrats literally went out and found unsuspecting patriots and filled them with visions of grandeur that they might play a part in America’s history.  All in an attempt to deceive the people of that district and divide those with patriotic viewpoints.  Their ads even sought out patriots.  That’s not democracy.  What does that say about the Democratic Party?  Patriots is a dirty word to them.  They literally used the word ‘Patriot’ to lure the enemy pawn.  Let’s face it, there’s isn’t a liberal in the country who would be lured by the word ‘patriot.’
The party that claims to be trying to save democracy is also the party that presented a candidate for President of the United States who has never won a primary.  Nobody has ever voted for Kamala Harris to be President, or be a candidate for president.  Joe Biden won the votes of his party to earn the right to run for re-election.  He was forced out of the election after winning the party’s delagates. That’s not democracy.   
Yet a recent poll by Georgetown Institute believe that the top four threats to democracy are Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans, major news organizations, and social media.  No mention of the Democratic Party or any single liberal person.  And Donald Trump has been elected to represent his party three times now in Presidential primaries.  Kamala Harris has never been elected to represent her party in a Presidential primary.  Tell me again who’s a threat to Democracy...  
When speech is suppressed in an attempt to alter the opinions of the voters, democracy is threatened. That’s exactly what the Democrats have tried to do, and have successfully done, with the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop, which was a widespread conspiracy to not only keep the story out of the news, and off of social media, but also discredit its very existence and pass it off as Russian propaganda.  Just before the last election, the Democrats got 51 former intelligence officials to sign a statement suggesting it was.  That was election manipulation like we hadn’t seen before.  We now know that the laptop contained information that could have changed the course of American history, and it was kept under wraps by the FBI.  The same FBI who had agents claiming they wouldn’t let Donald Trump be president again.  That’s not democracy.  There has never been a time when the First Amendment right to Free Speech has been more under threat than it is right now by the Democratic Party.  Free Speech is the foundation of Democracy.  Without the freedom of speech, the political party in power will always say they support democracy, because they know they control the message, and when you control the message, you control everything.  Trying to control speech isn’t democracy. Only one party truly believes in the freedom of speech, and it isn’t the Democrats.  You cannot defend democracy if you cannot defend the freedom of speech.  I will give the Democrats credit for defending the supporters of terrorists to say whatever they want to say.
But threats to democracy can also be much more subtle.  The expansion of social programs, once designed as stop-gap measures for extreme circumstances, have become lifestyles, and by keeping people in an endless cycle of depending on the government, the Democratic Party has forced people to vote in favor of their very survival instead of what’s best for the country.  That’s not democracy.  
But if only democracy was being threatened by the left in America.  The recent administration has made it clear their intention is to move more toward socialism, and with Kamala, Marxism.  
Just take a look at the Bill of Rights, or the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and see how many of them the current administration has upheld to your standards.  The First Amendment is at risk for the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion.  The Second Amendment is at risk, as Harris has an agenda to limit firearms.  The thirds seems okay.  The current administration has already demonstrated their willingness to violate the fourth amendment concerning search and seizure.
Donald Trump’s sixth amendment rights were violated during the Biden administration, as well as the seventh and eighth.  And all of it because Donald Trump enforced the tenth, which gave abortion laws back to the states.
The Democratic Party has veered so far off course that’s it’s become something other than American. If that’s not enough, Biden, Harris and other Democrats also call for adding more justices to the Supreme Court, as many as 13 from the current nine.  They’ve also proposed term limits for Justices. It seems like the system of checks and balances isn’t working well for the Democrats, so instead of changing their ideals to match the Constitution, they try to change the rules to meet their needs, and don’t enforce laws that are inconvenient to them.  That’s not democracy.     
Lest we forget how the Democrats tried to use laws to keep Donald Trump off of ballots in several states.  None of their efforts were successful.  
The influx of illegal immigrants could also be explained as a form of Democratic cheating.  If you put enough people into the right areas, you can alter the census, and how representation is determined. That’s not democracy.  That’s election manipulation.  
The current vice-presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket recently called for an end to the Electoral College as outlined in the Constitution and how it’s applied today.  The left isn’t happy that we have the most envied form of government in the world, and keep trying to change it to take power away from the people and the protections our system provides.  The left will say they’re protecting democracy and accuse the right of being the threat, but when you look at the big picture, it’s the right that’s been the most transparent, open and inclusive side of the political spectrum.  While the right runs on ideas and policy, the left resorts to dirty tricks on old patriots, media manipulation, silencing opposing viewpoints and challenging the Constitution itself.  The very rules that have made America the greatest nation on the planet are under attack by the very party that claims to be trying to save democracy.  While the right is promoting voter ID to protect the process, the left files lawsuits to prevent voter rolls from being cleaned up from ineligible names.  That’s not democracy.  That’s intentional action to undermine democracy.
If you’re really worried about the state of democracy after the next election, the party that is the most threatening to democracy is the ironically named Democrat party.  
If you value your freedom, if you value your right to free speech and the right to listen to opposing viewpoints, if you want a government that will protect your rights, then the Democratic party isn’t the party for which you should be voting.  
If you’re part of the two-thirds of Americans who think the country is headed down the wrong path, don’t vote for the incumbent.  A vote for the Harris ticket is a vote for rewarding dirty tricks and circumventing the political process and playing with people like they were tokens in their own demented game.  And news networks like CNN, MSNBC, ABC and CBS are all openly supporting the candidate that will only let them speak if they say what the party wants them to say.  That’s not journalism, that’s not democracy.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2024.  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube.  Subscribe today, or text me from the homepage!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.