The Virginia Department of Health offered resources for LGBTQ kids on its website.
But mere hours after The Daily Wire simply asked Governor Glenn Youngkin's
administration about the site, all of those resources were gone.
Sorry, kids, you're Governor not like you being challenged.
We've learned about this thanks to Virginia Mercury and the Washington Post,
who obtained internal emails from the Virginia Department of Health.
Here's what The Daily Wire was so upset by.
A reporter at The Daily Wire questioned two programs an initiative called
Queer Kid Stuff, an LGBTQ+ and social justice website for kids and
families, and Q Chat Space, which offered live,
professionally facilitated chats and online support groups for teens.
Hours after that inquiry, those programs and
all of the others listed on the resources for LGBTQ youth webpage were gone.
In a twist that no one could have seen coming sarcasm, The Daily Wire still
published an article attacking the State for offering those resources.
Headline, Virginia Department of Health Promotes Queer Kid Stuff Chat For
LGBTQ+ Identifying Teens.
When asked for comment by The Washington Post,
Youngkin spokesperson said, in Virginia,
the governor will always reaffirm a parent's role in their child's life.
Children belong to their parents, not the State.
The governor supports providing resources that are age appropriate.
However, the government should not facilitate anonymous conversations
between adults and children without a parent's approval.
Sexualizing children against a parent's wishes doesn't
belong on a taxpayer supported website.
What a great, direct, clear quote, except who is sexualizing children?
No one, they just made that up.
Queer people are allowed to have an identity.
Just cuz it don't match yours don't mean it's not okay, obviously.
And this attack isn't limited to just the Queer community.
Youngkin's administration has, at least three times in the year and
a half since he took office, removed information from the website without
consulting its own subject matter experts, records show stripping public health
resources on abortions, sexual health and pregnancy, among other issues.
But, the good news is, if you happen to have the exact life that
Governor Youngkin has, with the exact priorities and desires and
the exact personality traits, then all of the information you need for
your life will be safe on the website you can rest easy.
That's where we're at in Virginia.
>> Yeah, so this is what right wing media does.
They go around going, okay, let's figure out which State and
municipality doesn't hate gay people enough.
Let's look and look and look at this.
Is anyone helping gay people?
Anyone go, we found one, okay, let's attack, attack.
Now, wait, this is something that is a resource for
people who wanna find out more.
And by the way, a lot of them are teenagers, they can just go online.
In a sense, I'm glad that Virginia was providing these resources when people
need help, et cetera.
But it's not like if you shut it down, they can't find other information.
So, that's also good news, but it's also bad news and
that Republicans don't get it.
You're not gonna be able to shut down the Internet.
You're not going to be able to shut down human existence.
They're like, don't tell the kids about how there's gay people.
What if they turn gay?
And then you say, well, it sounds like you hate gay people.
They're like, no, I don't, I want their votes.
So, I'm gonna pretend that I don't hate them, and I'm gonna promise them tax cuts.
But the minute we're in office, like Youngkin in Virginia,
if some bullies from The Daily Wire contact me and say, hey,
you're being a quarter way decent to some of your citizens, man,
I'm gonna be on a war path because we had to protect the children.
What if they find out that there's gay people in the world?
Well, number one, there is, so they would become educated.
Number two, so what?
Well, the reason why we're having this conversation is something that
the right wing and honestly, the mainstream media is never frank about.
The reason we're having the conversation is because the right wing thinks that
being gay is wrong.
It's sinful, and they don't want their kids becoming gay.
They don't know, no, it's genetic.
They're born a certain way, it is what it is.
But no, they say, I don't want it, I don't want that happening for my kids.
And you have to respect that.
So I get it, I get it.
And we give kids as a sensitive topic as to what the parents,
what kind of autonomy they have, et cetera, but
just admit that you're saying, I don't want my kids to learn about gay people or
become, in their minds, become gay, because I don't like gay people.
I think their existence is wrong.
Okay, well, at least I would be honest, because that's definitely what
you're doing here, cuz Daily Wire didn't say, hey,
we have evidence of this platform or this website being used to sexualize children.
We don't have any evidence that any child had anything wrong done to them.
We have a world of evidence that the Catholic Church has abused thousands of
kids, but we never talk about it, we don't care at all.
We never talk about it, cuz we don't wanna demonize the Catholic Church.
We wanna demonize gay people.
And here we have absolutely no evidence that anything has ever gone wrong, but
we wanna shut it down because we hate gay people.
So Ben Shapiro, Glenn Youngkin, all Republicans, all right wing media pundits,
why don't you be decent for the first time in your life?
At least be honest enough to say, you don't like those people and
just stop lying cuz you're the most obvious liars in the world.
All right, Jacks.
>> Yeah, I continue to be amazed, I guess, ironically,
how determined the Republican Party is to run away from just the idea and
the thought of the democratic process, because at the end of the day,
Glenn Youngkin and everyone who made the decision
to take this off of the website could have simply ignored The Daily Wire.
They could have ignored them, or they could have pointed out what you said.
You all have no evidence and no facts to back up what you're saying,
you just whining and griping.
Because at the end of the day, people are gay, it's not a novel thing.
People have been gay for quite some time as far back as we can look, it's not new.
And given the fact that Millennials and Gen Z and even Gen X,
the younger the generation you go, the more people just kinda generally
accept that the LGBTQ community is alive and well and it ain't going nowhere, and
there's really nothing weird about it.
It's just a part of being alive.
So at the end of the day, like I said, they could have ignored this.
And you even see this with, Ron DeSantis, who's,
like, the epitome of how can we alienate people as hard as we can.
I think Cenk, you were in one commercial he just put out where they were trying to
make it look like Donald Trump, he supports the Queer community too hard, so
we can't have that.
And then his wife, Casey DeSantis, put out another commercial that was a minute and
a half longer cuz I guess she has a little bit more speaking and
social skills that doubled down and made it even worse.
But Republicans, more and more, they can't understand that you have to include people
or else you're gonna have to become more authoritarian.
But it appears that authoritarianism is just what they're gonna keep on
doubling down on.
>> Yeah, I'm just gonna say real quick, we talked about those DeSantis ads in
the first hour of today's show, and in case you haven't seen it,
they have a clip of me saying, congratulations, Ron DeSantis, you win.
They did not include the next sentence.
You win on being the most racist Republican in the race.
Yeah, wonder why they didn't include that part.
>> Yeah, I think everything you guys said is right.
And I also just wish still that we on the left could find a little bit
more nuance on some of these issues where we aren't feeding
into these right wing talking points.
Because I do think that when I dive deeper into these resources that were being
criticized by The Daily Wire, in my opinion, there were some things that
were maybe a little inappropriate to be exposing to children as young as 3 and
4, which was the rating on some of these videos on YouTube.
Like, what is transitioning, I don't think is something a 3 and
4 year old needs to be discussing or made aware of or
telling classrooms that they shouldn't use the words boys and girls anymore.
I think that's extreme and that's too much.
And a more nuanced response could have been to research those platforms
themselves in the Virginia Department of Health and perhaps altered the list of
very important resources that they had for young people, instead of just being like.
We don't wanna be looked like as though we're Bud Light and just erasing all
the resources entirely and leaving their young people hanging to be able to find
whatever it is they find on the Internet, as they, of course, Cenk pointed out,
will be able to do whether there's government approved resources or not.
So it's just giving up on and abandoning a whole community of people that could use
some direction from the government.
>> Okay, so Ben, that's interesting, let me agree and disagree on parts.
So, number one, I'm a parent, so don't worry about 3 to 4 year olds going to find
out videos from the Virginia website about transitioning or not transitioning.
They have no interest in that, all they have interest in is YouTube, okay?
[LAUGH] And so, they're not gonna go there anyway.
And if, they really they're going to Virginia website.
>> Those videos are on their YouTube page, just to be specific.
>> But Ben, that's my point, which is that as a parent of kids who are 10 and 12,
I saw them go through the process, I saw what they watch, right?
Whether it's on a Virginia government website, which is hilarious, nobody would
ever go there, unless you're a teenager and you're wondering about your identity
and you wanna just talk to someone and talk things through, et cetera.
But, even if they were to go on YouTube and stumble upon the Virginia thing,
they could also stumble upon a thousand other things, for
the right wingers out there, guys, you have to do parenting.
I'm sorry, but you do, and that's on you.
So they're always like, my God, my kids, what if somebody else talks to them?
And what if they find out about this?
Yeah, they're gonna find out about the world and then you give them the values
that you want, even if you have values I don't agree with.
So, now, but the point I'll agree with Ben on is, look, if you're starting to talk to
elementary school students about, hey, we're not calling people boys and
girls anymore, you're needlessly going into losing ground, right?
Don't do that, because then they're gonna use that to defeat you in elections.
And that is not core, right?
Core is, hey, Republicans saying,
I don't want my kids exposed to the fact that gay people even exist, right?
Because I think there's something inherently sinful about being gay.
I loathe that, that is a core human rights issue, right?
What we call boys and girls is not a core human rights issue.
And so, I know some people disagree with that, but that is also not very popular.
If we start calling boys and girls different names,
people are going to get freaked out by that.
And you say, well, they shouldn't.
Okay, I hear you, but then you're gonna lose an election.
They're gonna have more people like Youngkin get in.
That doesn't mean you compromise on core rights.
It means you're smart and strategic about how you play this politics.
I mean, look, The Daily Wire guys and
the right wing is running circles around people.
As much as I loathe them, they're winning these races and
they got this toxic ideology all over the media.
All over the media, right?
And they're like hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
And they're winning on that because whenever they go find anything that
the American people, because the American people want gay marriage to be legal.
They want gay rights, they want trans rights, the polling clearly indicates it.
That's why the Ben Shapiro's of the world and the Matt Walshes and all those toxic
people over there, they dig in and dig in and dig in until they find a nugget.
And they're like, some people in that community wanna call boys
something else and girls something else.
And we think that'll freak the average American out.
And then, that's when, unfortunately, to Ben's point,
some of our activists jump in and go, yes, let's go and lose on that losing ground.
They found a losing ground for us to fight on, let's go right there, no, don't,
don't go on the losing ground.
Go, we have tons of winning ground.
Go on the winning ground, get in power and then do the right thing and
give everybody equal rights.
And so, look, bottom line on any all of this is that those
sites in no way, shape or form sexualize children.
And the whole point of using children in this case is not because they're worried
about the children.
It's because they wanna use your kids as both shields and
weapons to drive hatred towards that community.
>> Pretty much I think one of the important things that you pointed
out is really picking what ground that you wanna lean on.
And at the end of the day, focusing on things like wages, our health care system,
education, stuff that really impacts everybody is how we're really gonna
move the ball forward, not just in federal elections, but especially State and
community in local elections.
But yeah, I think my final thought is that when it comes to stuff like this,
you show more strength by not backing down.
If you didn't take that off of your website,
you would have looked stronger even if people don't agree with you and
target fell victim to this as well, sometimes you just got to ignore it.
If people like, we don't like that you're supporting gay people, that's nice.
You're probably still gonna be in my line at Starbucks, so get over it.
And Glenn Youngkin could have done the exact same thing, but
the Republican party is completely dominated by, in a lot of ways online.