The Fight Against DEI, Woke Corporate America, the HRC and Trans Ideology: The FULL Robby Starbuck

Can social media videos really change anything? Well, Robby Starbuck has proved that they can change how companies behave. Starbuck makes videos that criticize companies’ woke policies. “You are funding one of the most aggressively woke agendas in corporate America,” he says. “And I have brought the receipts today.”

One by one, Starbuck posts his complaints about what some companies do. “It is time to expose John Deere,” he declares. John Deere ran DEI trainings. John Deere employees were being trained on the gender bread man. “It’s the whole concept that basically, gender is completely fluid,” Starbuck explains. He didn’t like that John Deere asked workers to make Ally Pledges: “I will show visible support to the LGBTQ community.” But after Starbuck posted his videos, John Deere said it would audit company training to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages.

“This is Harley-Davidson,” he says. “It’s time for them to be exposed.” Harley-Davidson was his next target. They too changed their policies. “Harley-Davidson is the latest company to drop diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” Starbuck notes.

Starbuck’s posts have persuaded lots of companies to change. “You get these big companies,” he points out. “Toyota, John Deere, Target, Walmart. Why did they listen to you?”

Here's my full, hour-long interview with Starbuck. We talk about how he got companies to drop DEI, what made him speak up, and finally, I push back against his new movie, *The War on Children*. We begin with how he’s changed from the days when he made music videos.

“If you’re low, come with me, ‘Cause I can get you hella high,” he quotes from one of his earlier works. “You've come a long way from your prior career.”

“I started to realize,” Starbuck reflects, “I directed a number of different people, everyone from Natalie Portman, Jamie Foxx, and The Smashing Pumpkins, and Snoop Dogg, and so on and so forth. So, I had a very diverse, to borrow a word from DEI, career, okay? I really ran the spectrum of all kinds of things from commercial to music video, documentary, and I owned a production company. So, we had well over a dozen directors across the world, and I learned a lot of things from that experience in the industry and from running the company and everything. But ultimately what I realized that was the most valuable, was that culture has a real effect on politics and on the country, and that I was not contributing to what I believed in by being a part of what was happening.”

“One of your videos is with Snoop Dogg,” I interject. “‘Set the mood, spoon and groom. I can get you high.’”

“Realizing that this stuff has a negative effect on culture and that it does real damage is something that continually became present to me when I became a dad,” Starbuck explains. “Because we have multiple directors at the company, they do all kinds of different work, and seeing that her peer group could be affected, our oldest, who's now 16, that really had an effect on me, you know, and so, we started to cut certain projects from the company and say, we don't do projects with this sort of thing or that sort of thing anymore, so on and so forth. And I'm sort of an anomaly in the fact that I made it in the industry very young. I wasn't even 18 years old when I started the company, and we had pretty much immediate success. And so, that in itself was sort of unique. But as a young man kind of navigating, becoming a dad, getting married, all that stuff, you learn a lot in that experience. And so, I’m not ashamed of it at all because I feel like I wouldn't be as effective as I am today if I didn't have that experience, had I not gone through all of it and seen the effect this culture has, seen the rot inside the industry myself with my own two eyes and been moved myself by my own journey in life and my wife and God and my children to say, "You know what? I want to be this person. I want to be the person that makes a positive difference. I don't want to contribute to a system that's going to rot us out from the inside just because I can keep my kids safe and I can keep my family safe and insulated from this." And that would've been the easier thing. It was like, stay in that, make money. You know, it’s good money, and insulate my own family from it. Which is certainly possible when you have the means and money, right? But it would've been the wrong example for my kids, especially, I want my sons to be men who have integrity and character and are going to do the hard things. And if I want them to be that, I need to be that.”

“You started your anti-DEI campaign after something that happened to your daughter?” I ask.

“Overall, my interest in DEI was sparked by something that happened to my daughter,” Starbuck replies. “My oldest daughter, she went to an elite private school in California, this is about probably eight, nine years ago now. And this came up essentially because we didn't know about it, but a white privilege speaker was brought to the school. Daughter comes home, tells us all about what's going on, and says, you know, the weirdest thing, they say, white kids can't eat together without inviting minorities. What am I supposed to do with that? Because it can make the minorities feel like they're not accepted. And I said, “Well, there's only one thing you can really do. You're going to have to go to all your white friends and tell them I'll be your token minority because you can check the Cuban Latino box technically, even though my wife's Scottish, you've got part of my DNA, you can check that box.” And I was joking, but it was then at that moment, I knew I had to look into this. I'm a very inquisitive person that will investigate, kind of, the things that I realize may be a problem. And so, this was one where I said, okay, I got to put that hat on and I've got to investigate this.”

“What made you start this campaign against companies?”

“When I dug into it, I realized this whole ideology around white privilege was really built around DEI and that it was the furthest left activist. In fact, in that case it was somebody connected with Antifa. It was actually a part of these trainings. And so, I realized there's a connection to all these things, right? So, at that point, I said, what is the downstream effect of this? I immediately thought, next step is college. After college, what is the next step after that? It's corporate America. And I said, and they're not starting at my daughter's grade. She's just part and parcel of what's happening. This is already in the universities, which means it's already in corporate America and the seeds have been planted. I looked at our country and I said, we're so divided on so many fronts. How did that happen? How did we get here? And I'd say one of the simplest answers I could give is that we started to force the most divisive conversations into every segment of culture, not just from entertainment, but into our workplaces, our kids’ schools. Everywhere you can conceivably think of. And as a byproduct, what naturally happens when you do that, is people get mad at each other and you divide people further. And so, I said, okay, where was, sort of, the most recent battleground where this happened? And it was the corporations, right? I think broadly, this sort of wild move to the left occurred after George Floyd. And so, I said, all right, that's the place we start at. And I looked at how we got here, what is the history of boycotts, what works, what doesn't work, right? And we looked back and we saw we're really in a new landscape now with social media and the ability to put together large blocs of people around ideas like this.”

“Everybody can speak,” I add.

“Exactly,” Starbuck agrees. “We're not dependent on legacy media to get our message out there. And the reality is our videos that we've done, they receive more views than CNN in primetime. So, companies on the flip side of that can no longer rely on the idea that like, okay, we can wait out a 24-hour news cycle because guess what? We could do it for a month straight if we want to. We don't answer to anybody at CNN, so I could just make a new video about your company tomorrow and I can do it again the next day and the next day and do it as long as I want. And companies have seen the financial ramifications of that. And so, I think that that's where we started and we realized if we want to get back to some semblance of sanity, we need to start with the companies that have conservative consumers first because that’s where it had a natural base.”

“Alright y’all, you’re going to want to see this,” Starbuck announces in one of his videos. “I don’t think anyone's gone into this the way I’m about to. It is time to expose Tractor Supply. What you see behind me, this is what workers see walking into the distribution center in Franklin, Kentucky.”

“And then we slowly shift our way and as you move the momentum, you're going to move it to a place where the companies that adopt these crazy policies are going to be looked at as the weird ones,” he continues. “And the companies that don't and frankly, get out of this business, they're going to be seen as the ones that are just center lane, they’re kind of, they're there and they're available for everybody. And that's been our goal with the whole project. I don't want all of the companies that we focus on and do these exposés on to become mirrors of my politics. Because frankly, it would be perpetuating the same problem in reverse. What we need is to have a solid core where these companies realize that they need to adopt corporate neutrality, get out of the business of division and say, you know what? The only politics we engage in is regulation around their business.”

“Why did they so wholeheartedly buy into this stuff in the first place?” I inquire.

“George Floyd was sort of a turning point where they invested a lot of money in this and it was purely, I think in a lot of ways, emotional because a lot of executives in that time period were made to feel very afraid about what was around the next corner,” Starbuck explains. “It was also in the era where Me Too is going on and all this other stuff's going on. And you could see like, oh no, you don't want to be the next thing, right? So, if your PR department comes to you with your HR people and they say, “Hey, we're going to look extremely racist if we don't start this DEI department and we don't invest some real money and time into it.” A lot of executives took that and said, “You know what? We don't want to be the next story, so we're going to invest money and time into it. We're going to say, yeah, sign off.” Because these ideas don't sound harmful, right? It's just like we're going to be more diverse. And a lot of them, they used equality as the real metric in their head. Instead of actually looking up what equity meant, they thought like, okay, it means the same thing. They don't mean the same thing. And they said, “Okay, well it sounds nice. So how harmful could this be?” And to be perfectly honest with you, the right didn't have a strong enough counterbalance to counterbalance what was going on in that shift to the left. So, they were able to run wild with it. And the left, very intelligently, I think, got a lot of their activists hired into these DEI departments. And so, then they became a total proxy for left-wing policy. And so that's how you got a lot of the trainings into the workplace that frankly are fringe things that just like 10, 15 years ago, if somebody discussed at work, it probably would've been a problem. But today it became actual policy dictated by the company that you need to not only accept these things, but you need to fall into line.”

“You're one guy with a computer and yet you get these big companies,” I say. “Toyota, John Deere, Target, Walmart. Why did they listen to you?”

“There's a number of explanations for this,” Starbuck replies. “Obviously at a certain point, our idea psychologically was that you shift the momentum to such a place that it becomes like a thing. Some companies, they actually, we knock on their door and it's like, oh, we're going to do our statement with Robby now. You know, it becomes a thing, but—”

“Really, they came and knocked on your door?” I ask, surprised.

“Oh yeah,” he confirms. “So, it's like some of them are happy that I'm knocking on their door. There's other camps, there's different buckets you put these companies in. Some are not happy that you're coming and approaching them. Others are like, thank God we have a reason to drop this, right? And so that just depends on frankly the politics of the people involved. Like, are they true believers who were pushing this stuff to perpetuate their own politics? If they are, they probably hate when we knock on their door. But we've been massively successful ultimately for financial reasons because companies have a lot of metrics they can look at. When they look at them, they see that we shift consumers that understand their wallet is a weapon. And so that means they see boots actually not walking through their doors often. They see real problems in the market. When we focused on Tractor Supply, they lost almost $3 billion in market cap. When we focused on John Deere, it was over $10 billion in market cap. You see a company like Harley-Davidson, Harley, they held out the longest of any company. And I think frankly, they're in a position— Because the CEO was a believer. He’s a true believer. They ended up buckling, they ended up changing policy and they ultimately did what we wanted them to do, which was get out of the business of wokeness, right? I would've said, fire the CEO, but they didn't listen on that one, right? I think they should have listened. If you look at their numbers now, they're not doing so hot. I think it's around a 60% drop year-over-year from that time period to now. And so that's a big problem, you know, as a brand, can Harley survive with those numbers? And I would say, I don't think so. And I think that, I don't think that that's going to work out for them. And so, if you say, “Oh, Harley, this great American brand, our new focus for it is going to be electric bikes.” I'd say that's a real misalignment with who your consumers are.”

[motorcycle revving]

“The all-new electric LiveWire from Harley-Davidson,” I note. “They sold less than a hundred bikes in this last quarter. That's not going to work, electric bikes.”

“But this focus from the CEO to go toward left-wing policy, extremely damaging to the brand,” Starbuck emphasizes. “The best thing the brand could do is get a CEO who understands their consumers. Somebody who has always been a Harley rider, who's American, they understand the brand and they say, “You know what? We're getting back to the heart and soul of Harley-Davidson. We're going to get back to the things that matter to our customers. We're out of this business of division and wokeness.” That's the only thing that could keep them, I think in the future, to be a compelling company to invest in.”

“I still don't get why they care so much about you,” I comment. “I have more Twitter followers than you do, but your followers do more stuff.”

“Yeah, mine are rabid,” Starbuck laughs. “Mine are rabid. Overall, I'd say that's really what it's about. They're activists. So, if you look at force multiplication, that's what I've always believed in. How can you force-multiply? I force-multiply extremely effectively. So, when I do a campaign like this, it's not just me that they have to worry about. It's a whole network of things and it's going to happen over a period of time. They've got to worry about basically every large influencer account on the right will amplify the message. And then you've got a wave of media stories from the left, like Bloomberg, to the right, like Fox News or Daily Wire. You're going to have coverage of it in every large podcast out there and it's going to continue on over that course of a month or two months, whatever it takes. And it is not a 24-hour news cycle. So, every day these impressions are coming in. So, we did some analytics and looked at say, the case of Harley-Davidson. You're talking about billions of impressions. Do you know how much money companies pay for billions of impressions? Positive side? It's very hard to get billions of positive impressions. Getting billions of negative ones has the same effect as billions of positive ones. And so, companies are desperate to avoid that. And also, I think frankly at this point, they're desperate to avoid the market reaction of holding onto DEI. Because aside from a couple anomaly companies, it's very hard for a company to withstand that. And there's a few anomaly companies out there that I think can withstand and weather either side of this, but for the most part, the market is rewarding companies that drop DEI.”

“Your strategy is not just to post, but to first go to them and say, “You're doing this. I'm going to tell people about it if you don't stop,” I observe.

“And some just stop?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Starbuck replies. “We go to them like any other investigative journalist and we say, “Hey, we have a story we're working on. This is a story. We want to confirm facts. We also want to have a conversation. We're willing to talk about it.” The thing that is, I'd say a larger public interest for us is if there is a willingness to change. If there is, we'd love to discuss that story because that's the story we're more interested in, which sort of speaks to, I think, the values behind what we're doing. Because if I was interested simply in clicks, we would go straight with the negative piece. I frankly don't need to fact-check it. I know we're right. So, if we just wanted clicks, we would run out there with the negative pieces. Because they get 10 times what the change announcements get because people ultimately are a little more reactive to that charged angry news of like, “Hey, they're doing that. That's crazy!” Right? But we're about creating change. So, if we want long-lasting change, we go to them and we say, “Hey, if there is that willingness there, we're willing to listen because we think this is a big public interest story.” And frankly, that's true. I do think it's a big public interest story and I think in the long term, the change stories are going to be the ones that bear out to be the most meaningful. So, that's kind of how we approach it, but every company knows, also the track record of what we've done, so, it's not like an empty thing. They've seen what we've done with all these other companies, some who want to go the negative route and have all of their dirty laundry aired in terms of what they've done around DEI and then the companies who say, “Actually, yeah, no, we want to change.” And I think the stories at this point are compelling enough that the smarter, wiser thing to do is to change.”

“Many companies that resisted, one week after you started posting, they flipped,” I point out.

“Yeah, I think that's a byproduct of a number of things,” Starbuck says. “So, at the beginning of this, when we started this, companies wanted to test us, and I don't blame them. I would have, if I was an executive, I would've tested whoever this person was, too. So, you're like, what kind of influence do they really have? So, that was smart business, frankly. If you had buckled and you were one of the first three companies immediately, it would've looked very reactive to somebody you couldn't say had a track record of “X,” “X,” and “X,” right? So, they were testing us essentially in those first few companies, and they saw in the results, they could look at their own metrics. How many people were they losing day over day inside stores, in foot traffic. Over the course of that time period, how was their stock doing? How were they doing versus their competitors? And you could see a very clear picture, that this was a problem wholly made of the story that we were focusing on them. And so, these companies, they had to do something to change. And that was the obvious answer, is we do this. Then you look at the reaction to the stories that we did following up, saying they changed. Extremely positive and forgiving audience that I have, that will say, you changed. You're doing the right thing. We understand it's not just a stick we wield, it's a carrot too at the end of it, like, we will reward companies that do the "right thing." And I think that's very important. So, companies do the right thing. They see there's a boost in stock price for many of them. They're getting those people back in their stores, and I think ultimately, that's what they want.”

“Coors Beer and Jack Daniels changed without you posting a thing,” I mention.

“Yeah,” Starbuck confirms. “We went directly to them, let them know that we were thinking about having a story that exposed a lot of these policies and they were prepared to change. Walmart, same thing. They were prepared to change before we ever put out the story that we had on kind of what their policies look like. Walmart will be removing all inappropriate sexual and/or transgender products that are marketed toward kids, things like chest binders for teenagers or books that encourage transitioning. That is all going to be gone. Bullet point number two, Walmart is going to review and stop funding to all events that could be sexually inappropriate.”

For kids. That includes drag queen story time or pride events that expose kids to sexually inappropriate topics. That’s all going to stop going forward. It was just, we contacted them. There was a willingness to change. And so that seemed like a very compelling story, being able to announce that Walmart was going to be changing policy. So obviously we go that direction because I think that's what's important.

That's not to say we will always choose that because if a company comes to us and they say, we want to do a change story and we can smell BS from a mile away, and they don't actually mean what they're saying and there's not real change behind it, we're not going to take that story. We're going to go directly the route that we sought out to go after, which is, expose the bad policy.

I'm confused by what happened at JPMorgan Chase. I bank with them, and I didn't know about any of this stuff, but what were they doing? They were doing a number of things at JPMorgan Chase and I think frankly, you're not the only one who didn't know what they were doing. I think their CEO actually didn't know some of what they were doing. They had a $30 billion project to fix racial— To invest in racial equity. And when Jamie Dimon, the very smart CEO, was told you were going to challenge them, Robby Starbuck is out there, going after companies. You now have a couple of activists going after your company. Really? Not that I'm aware of. Are you aware of this? Bring them on. He said, bring them on. And so, I went on CNBC and I brought it on and I brought their DEI policies, and to the credit of CNBC, I will say they let me just go. And I was holding up the DEI policies one by one. So, it was like, hey, guess who sponsored a Dylan Mulvaney event for children? JPMorgan. They funded this event for Dylan Mulvaney, the guy from the Bud Light fiasco. They funded this event for Dylan Mulvaney to speak to LGBTQ+ youth. They went and trained employees with The Genderbread Person, which if you've ever seen is again the most infantile ridiculous thing ever. This is it, here. It looks like something out of a kindergarten from hell. [laughs] You know, like. This is not something serious people or adults— But it’s useful! It discusses gender identity being different from biological sex and sexual orientation. They create all kinds of figments of their imagination on these trainings.

And so, the thing is, they don't only pretend these things are useful. They pretend they're true and they're factual. And if you stand up to it or you disagree with it, that you're some sort of maniac or you're a bigot and you don't belong in the workplace. And the truth is these are very divisive issues in the country, and frankly, the vast majority of the country believes that these things are crazy, that we have a male and a female and not this diverse spectrum of different things I can choose to be based on the day, that frankly, it'd be kind of weird if somebody my size walked into a woman's bathroom claiming to be a female right now just because I feel like it. I don't think that would make a lot of women comfortable. And so, these companies are perpetuating that as policy, and frankly, that's just crazy in my opinion.

So, when you see JPMorgan doing things like this and putting the full weight of a company behind it and spending billions of dollars on policy that's insane, I think people start to scratch their head and they go, why are companies doing this? And there are a lot of different reasons, but when you boil it down, even people like Jamie, I think did not understand what was going on because after I laid it all out on CNBC and put all the policies out there, he did a town hall where he said they're going to stop spending money on this, quote, "Stupid s***." He said, “I was never a firm believer in the bias training. I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid s*** and it really pissed me off.” Yep. So, this is a quick turnaround, right? It was like basically, bring it on. 24 hours later, I bring it on, on CNBC. And then 24 hours after that, basically, he's doing the town hall saying, “Well, I never really believed this.” This is a guy who, by the way, the media framed as a champion of DEI many different times, that he was like this guy who was fully aligned. And that's just not the case. It's really an ignorance of what's going on that is plaguing a lot of these CEOs. And Jamie's one of those examples where frankly, if you look at his business acumen, Jamie does know what he's doing in business. He's very smart when it comes to the financial and the analytical side of business. There's no doubt about that. But there was a real cultural divide here on this one. And I frankly do believe that he did not understand what the hell was happening under his nose. And that's the problem at a lot of these companies, is the CEOs were totally divorced from the lunacy that was being perpetuated by the DEI departments because frankly, they didn't have to deal with it. The normal employees did.

DEI sounds good. I like diversity. I want to be around different people. I respect that people from Cuba like you did not have opportunities I might've had. Inclusion is wonderful. Equity, they kind of cheated on. It came to mean equal outcomes, which is-- Is not equality. Yeah, it's communism. I mean that's what equity is at its core. It's the idea that you should punish the excellent by essentially not offering them any opportunity to do better than others. Because if you believe in equity, you believe everybody needs to end up at the same place. To believe that, you have to punish the excellent person who reached this point by working harder, and you have to say, artificially, we're going to pump this side up to here to meet the same level because that's what they consider fair. That's not fair. That's artificially creating a system that only punishes your best people. So what happens is a natural byproduct of that: everybody who worked hard to be excellent, suddenly stops trying. So, what happens in a country that adopts that mentality? They have no innovation, they're stagnant, and frankly, they go nowhere good. And eventually you run out of money and that's what you would face if the country as a whole embrace the idea of equity. It's communism in a new form. And so being perpetuated by companies is a very important point.

It is communism in a new form, one where you no longer need the state to own the means of production. You just need the state to own the minds of the people in charge of production. If you're able to do that, you create a whole new system with the same communist control schemes and mechanisms to be able to control people's speech and everything else, just through new vectors. So, big tech acts as a proxy for the Democratic Party instead of the government itself having to take on that censorship role the way they did in like say the USSR or in Cuba, they get to do it through the big tech companies and go, well, it wasn't us. But it doesn't really matter, does it? It's the control in the first place and it is coming from a central force. It's just masked by companies. And so, DEI is a proxy for all of that in the long run.

At John Deere workers made Ally Pledges. What's that? So, an Ally Pledge is essentially you pledging to be an ally to the LGBTQ+ community and what they believe in. I seek to be a lifelong learner and support the LGBTQ community by educating myself about legal and cultural discrimination throughout the world. There's a lot of problems with that, but I'm just going to jump off from here. Okay, so let's pretend you've got a Jewish worker, a Muslim or a Christian worker, many of which, their faith in their belief system means that they couldn't sign a pledge like that without violating it. Well, herein lies the problem. At John Deere, they were judging performance based on how well you engaged in DEI. So, what does that mean? That means if you didn't sign that pledge, you might be docked in your DEI performance, which means you might not get a raise, you might not get your performance bonus, whatever it might be. So, you're going to lose out on-- If you didn’t sign the pledge, which may have violated a tenet of your religion. Your faith. Exactly. And so that is something where you're introducing through DEI division in the workplace because you're talking about people who would never have gone out of their way to be rude to a fellow employee who happens to be gay. It wasn't on their mind. They were just trying to do their job that day when somebody approaches them and says, “Hey, sign this Ally Pledge.” Right? And John Deere's not alone, trust me. I mean we pointed them out and we put a focus on and spotlight on it, but they're not the only ones who did Ally Pledges. This is happening all over the Fortune 500 and you're pitting people into positions where they have to violate their deepest held values or potentially get fired, lose their bonus, lose their promotion, or become a social pariah in the workplace. Again, this also isn't secret at many of these companies. This is a public thing where people can see who signed the Ally Pledge and who didn't. So, you're not only risking your job and your raise or whatever it might be, but you're also risking your social status because you may be a pariah in the workplace if you were the one person who said, “I can't sign that.”

But do they really change? John Deere kept its DEI department. We have an ongoing process of going back and looking at these companies, and I would say if I had to choose one company out of every company that we have looked at, and this is a little bit of news here for some people, if I had to choose one we had to go back and look at again, it would be John Deere. If I had to make a prediction, we will be looking back at John Deere I think, because there's a lot of issues at that company. A lot of whistleblowers continue to come to us, very unhappy about the policy sets there. And that is something that we have promised is that when companies don't go all the way, we will come back. And I think John Deere felt enough of that focus the first time. They understand that they need to listen to the things their customers and their employees are upset about and frankly, fix the problem. And again, John Deere, they do business with the government. It's not just me. The government is very concerned about DEI as a liability by proxy. Now. Now, and so they're going to have to realign their business around the new world that they live in.

Pepsi said they’re sunsetting aspirational goals, but see an even bigger opportunity to more deeply embed inclusion. So, I'm going to explain an interesting part of these corporate statements. What these companies are doing and that we do understand, is they're trying to avoid the litigation from two different sides, and so that forces them into some weird corporate word salad. Okay? What we've always cared about is what are we getting at the end of the day. So, in the case of Pepsi, if you're on the right, here's what we're getting that we know we're getting: an end to all of the DEI trainings, period. They're going away. And that's not just for Pepsi, by the way. That's for every company they own, which is Gatorade. Quaker, you've got, I mean, it goes down the list. It's a big company. They own probably about 80 different companies under them that are household names. And so, you're losing all those DEI trainings. Then you're getting rid of the support they've given to the HRC. And the HRC, that's also a monetary thing. The HRC is the Human Rights Campaign. That's what they call themselves. They have nothing to do with actual human rights. They're an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization that pushes topics about transgenderism into the workplace and they support sex changes for kids. They were also big advocates against Donald Trump in this last election. And so, it's the overt politicization of the workplace for companies to align themselves with the HRC. And so, you're getting rid of their influence, you're getting rid of money going into their pockets, you're getting rid of this perpetual ideology being ever present in the workplace because the actual department is gone now, okay. So, they're getting rid of this stuff. The webpages, virtue-signaling. They're all gone internally, externally, that stuff is going away. So, when you look at what we're actually getting, we're getting all of the actual measurable stuff back onto our side here, some semblance of sanity back at work again and in the consumer space. And what is the left getting? I would argue they're getting nothing out of this change except for feeling like they're getting slapped. But at the end of the day, fairness can feel like oppression to people who have had things on very favorable terms for a long period of time. And the left has had the culture on very favorable terms for a long period of time. So, they're going through a period right now, that for them feels like oppression, but it's actually just fairness, which is what it looks like when a country goes back to sort of the center. And that's what we've been pushing for in corporate America. And that's kind of what we're getting. So, understand the corporate word salad statements, and it's probably the one thing I tell people, we got to kind of stomach the corporate word salad statements, but let's look at the veracity of the actions and we've got to keep an eye on it long-term.

The beautiful thing about— Why the word salad? Who's going to sue them? There's a number of groups that are ready to sue. In fact, some Democrat AGs have already written letters talking about going after these companies on a state-by-state basis. So— Based on what? On a bunch of different civil rights issues. And it's not to say they'll be successful, but they'll waste money, they'll waste time. Companies don't want to deal with that. They want to get back to doing business. And so ultimately that's where the focus is, is centered for these companies. And so, you get some of the word salad statements. They're kind of ridiculous because it's all over the place. We're dropping this, we're dropping that, we're dropping this, we're dropping that. And then it's like, but we're totally committed to inclusion. And I also think also in some ways when they do things like that, they're trying to, in the best way they know how via corporate speak to say, we're trying to include everyone now, which includes people that we didn't include before. Because inclusion and DEI didn't actually mean inclusion, but I think for people like us or like myself, we're so sick of the words, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” because they don't mean what they pretend to mean, that any utterance of even one of them makes us very trepidatious and I'd say critical and kind of on the defensive where we're like, do they really mean that? So, we have to wait and see. The beautiful thing about the way we've done this though is we rely on whistleblowers. So, if a company says they're going to do something, if they don't actually do it, the original people who work for them that are pissed off are going to come back to us and they're going to say, there's still this problem, that problem. And so, you can't just kind of skate out of this long-term. Eventually it's going to catch up to you. I would predict it will when it comes to John Deere. I think that they're going to have to have a come-to-Jesus there moment where they realize, okay, we've really got to wipe everything out because this has consistently been a problem now that has come up for us and it's becoming the story instead of our tractors being the story.

One company that has resisted not resisting you, it was another conservative group that hit them, is Costco. Mhm. They said, “We're keeping this stuff,” and their foot traffic is up and their stock is up. Anybody who is familiar with Costco and their story as a company, they're a very unique company. What sort of strikes me as an anomaly with Costco is not only the unique sort of cult following they have, but secondary to that, for most of these companies that we approach, their DEI policies are things that happened after George Floyd and they really got out of control, right? In Costco's case, a lot of the policies that they have around DEI are things they've had for decades and decades and decades, in some cases 50 years. And I have had conversations with their CEO about how those policies may violate the law. I don't think the end of the story is written on Costco. I do think that there's policies there that from my vantage point, look like they could be problems, but that's something that long-term has to be explored through the legal process in terms of, I think other places will look at it. Some Republican attorneys generals have said they're looking into this. Whoa, wait, it's supposed to be a free country. If Costco wants to have a policy that everyone has to stand on their head, what business is it of the government? There's the civil rights laws around not being able to hire and fire on the basis of race and sex. So, that's what we're talking about. So, if you give fundamentally preferential treatment to one race over the other, it's against the law and has been for a very long time. So that's one of the principal problems at the core of DEI is, you've had cases like, let's say JPMorgan we talked about earlier, they had internship programs that were only for black people or for Hispanics. That, in my view, violates the law too. I mean, again, that's a job for an attorney general to go after, But it seems appropriate. It's reparations. We don't have reparations in this country. Last time I checked. I mean, maybe that's something people need to vote on if they want reparations, but it certainly isn't the policy of the country and it violates the law, what they're doing.

We have a responsibility to try to strive toward what the Civil Rights era was really about, which is judging people on the basis of their merit and their actions and not on their skin color or their sex. These immutable characteristics that are things none of us can control. You can no more control that you have light-colored eyes than you can control any other part of your immutable characteristics. But should you be judged and treated differently for having light-colored eyes? No. I say that's ridiculous. That's insane. You should be judged on your character, on your actions, the things that you do in your life. But DEI says, actually, yeah, you should be judged by those things, those immutable characteristics. You should get some preferential treatment or you should be treated worse as a byproduct if you don't have the ones that we like. So again, I say that's the wrong way to treat people. You should judge people based on their actions, not on their skin color, not on these things none of us can control.

This is on Al Sharpton's show. The erasure of DEI truly is clearly a white supremacist move. They want to erase, not just DEI, but our past so that we will be lost in our future. A reverend saying this is a white supremacist move. So, are you a white supremacist? I would make for an odd white supremacist coming from a Latino background that actually, frankly, has other ethnicities involved as well. I'd make for a really bad white supremacist. Although I will say the word white supremacist is kind of like a lot of these words they throw around, like fascist, and just racist, transphobe. They're losing all meaning. Once you cross the Rubicon and you say, Larry Elder is the black face of white supremacy, I don't think anybody's listening to you anymore. And that's what the left has done. They've made an absurdity of all of this. And frankly, they're doing a disservice to the people they claim to stand up for. Because when you say essentially we're going to call everybody a racist, what you do is you disempower that word from having any meaning. And when somebody or something really racist comes along, nobody's going to believe you.

When you say you don’t want to invest in diversity, equity, inclusion, you’re saying that you want to erase our existence. What was happening previously to DEI? Because for that to be erasure of your existence, what existed before DEI? Because this is sort of a new thing. So, did black people not exist before that? It's just nonsensical. They make these statements that are meant to just be emotionally charged. They're supposed to make you feel something. They are emotionally powerful. And I will say they emotionally make me feel like everybody's lost their minds because none of this existed before DEI. If you want to get back to the idea of some semblance of fairness and treating each other kindly. These are things people can broadly agree on. Like let's unify around these things that are just frankly good for everybody, right? DEI is not

That. DEI has been a proxy and a Trojan horse for left-wing policy. And I don't think there's anybody who can comprehensively, coherently argue against that statement, because when you look at it and what it is actually played out to be, it is diametrically opposed to the very warm, fuzzy-sounding words they try to sell.

What do you mean? Like the words diversity or inclusion? They sound warm and fuzzy. It's why at the beginning it got a lot of buy-in from people. Equity's in a different camp because that's actually fundamentally a Marxist term. But inclusion, diversity—most people who hear that, especially females—I view it as good. I like diversity. They feel like that's warm, right? It's like, I want to be accepting of people around me. I want to include everybody. I don't want to be mean. Yeah. These are kind of principles we learn in kindergarten, and it's why, broadly, DEI in a lot of ways feels infantile in a way, the trainings, because the concepts are infantile. Yeah, we should just be nice to people. But that's the broad concept they tried to sell. What it actually turned out to be in reality looked a lot more like crazy trainings, overtly racist hiring practices, and forcing behaviors that are frankly meant to revolve around a political ideology, not around a set of ideals to say, "Hey, we include people."

I mean, how included do you think your average conservative employee feels in a DEI department for a company that has exclusively supported Democrat candidates? They don't feel like they're included in these conversations where they get forced to use pronouns at work for people. But they don't need to feel included. They're the winners; they're the people with the power and the money. I don't think they feel like they're winning. I think you look at this election very clearly. See, I don't think those folks feel like they're-- Now, they feel like they're winning. Well, I think they do now. But I would say previous to this, during this whole era of the explosion of DEI, I don't think that frankly they felt like they were winning. And if you look at just the hiring statistics, you can see companies have gone broadly into this new arena where they've said, hey, you know what? We're going to have exclusive programs just for black people, just for Latinos. I am Latino, and I’m saying that's racist. It's wrong. It shouldn't exist. Nobody should be excluded on the basis of their race. And I thought this was something we all fundamentally agreed on during the Civil Rights era, but frankly, this DEI movement is the enemy of what the Civil Rights Movement really fought for, which was a world where none of us were going to be judged on our skin color. DEI is saying, actually, we want you to exclusively begin by judging each other by your skin color, and we're going to decide which opportunities you can get and which ones you're not allowed to have on the basis of your skin color. And we're also going to make some assumptions about whether or not you're a good person, an oppressor, whether you've been oppressed, if you're deserving of certain privileges, yeah, again, only on the basis of your skin color. These are things that would've been the policy practices and ideas of people I think most folks would say were racist 70 years ago. Now they're trying to use that as some sort of way to virtue signal and pretend they're a good person. I have news for them: They're not a good person. It's actually pretty evil.

The NFL ran an ad a few years ago. [music] This was in response to a player who came out as gay, the first one. What's wrong with that? I didn't know they did that. First of all, that's funny. I mean, you know it's interesting with the time period shift that we're in now, the media landscape we're in now, do you think the NFL would run that ad? No. In fact, at the—They would get ripped apart over that ad. At the current Super Bowl, they took “End Racism” from the end zone and replaced it with “Choose Love.” Shocking thing that we found out recently is that if you put a sign in an end zone, it doesn't actually do the thing you put on the hashtag. So, you can put #endracism for 25 years in an end zone; it's not going to end racism. I've been all over the world, and weirdly, I've found that in sports that are popular in these other countries, they don't put virtue-signaling hashtags in their version of an end zone. Some of them have other weird virtue-signaling statements they do. But one commonality I found is that you're going to find racism in any society, any of them, and other countries are vastly more racist than the United States of America. I say that having been all over the world. The United States of America is the one that has everybody knocking on our door begging to come in here. And I think that'd be an odd thing to happen, for black folks to do, for Hispanic people to do, for Asians to do if we were this incredibly racist, awful country. I think we're actually pretty badass as a country, and that's why so many people want to be here.

And frankly, actually, I've got an idea. I have a beautiful idea. I think this would be maybe the most popular policy in American history. President Trump should introduce an immigration exchange where we say, anybody who lives in this country that is a citizen that hates this country, you don't like it? You feel some weird embarrassment inside you at any sense of patriotism, we are going to make you an offer you can't refuse. We'll give you $40,000 cash. We will pay for your move, in addition to that, to any left-wing country of your choosing, and we will make deals with those countries. We'll have a list of the countries we make these deals with, and we will take back a citizen of theirs. That is a problem for that left-wing country because they believe in freedom and love America. We'll do a one-for-one swap, and we will pay you. You just have to renounce your citizenship because you will never be invited back. You know you hate this country. So go, and we'll make that swap with these countries like Cuba, communist China, wherever it might be. We'll do the one-for-one swaps. In the end, it will not only save us money, but you will also see something really wonderful. You're going to see all these people who've been saying, we're a racist country. We're a transphobic country. We're the worst country on earth. You're going to see that suddenly their only excuse they had, which was, I can't afford to move, that's gone. And guess what? They're still not going to move because deep down, they know our country is a badass. This is badass country people want to live in for a reason.

A few famous people have left. Movie stars, Ellen, the talk show host. I generally don't make my decisions on the basis of what mentally ill people in Hollywood do. I mean, I will say this, as somebody who's directed Oscar-winning actors, actresses, some of the biggest music stars in the world, one thing I have always told young people is that the most deranged, depressed, mentally ill group of people I have ever met have tended to be celebrities. And I don't say that to be mean. There's plenty who are not like that, but it's a very isolating life. I think a lot of people don't realize that. You never know who you can trust. You know, you've got to always wonder, is this person doing this because they want something from me? Is it a status thing for them? Whatever it might be. It leads to sort of a lonely life for a lot of people where they kind of feel like everybody just comes and goes and they all want something. So, I think it's a bad metric to use for making decisions in life. That's what I've always told young people is, I wouldn't follow any celebrities in their decision-making.

Do you think Trump outlawing DEI in the government was a response to you? We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies. I think this is an overall issue where a lot of people have contributed, so I don't want to say it's all me or anything, but I'm very thankful that he's done it and I've been happy to give advice to people within the admin in different places on different priority sets that could be gone after. So you can really nuke this crazy ideology. I think another thing is just in general, we look at the entirety of society and our planet really, as a society that runs on incentives. So, if we understand that to be the case and everybody operates on the basis of how they're incentivized, we need to make sure we're properly incentivizing companies and government contractors to not just get rid of DEI, but to fully nuke this ideology into the ground. And so under the Biden administration, what they did is they forced companies to have DEI policies in order to get the contracts. We need to make it explicitly clear that any company or any segment of a company that has even a sliver of DEI is not only going to be kicked to the bottom of the pile, but they're going to be punished in a number of ways. And so I think that if you really truly use every lever of government, that's going to happen in a whole host of different ways that honestly, frankly, are probably better left private so that companies don't have too much ability to plan for it ahead of time. But frankly, you need to be extremely aggressive. I don't like giving credit to BlackRock very often, but I'll give credit to Larry Finke at BlackRock. He admitted you have to force companies to change behaviors. You have to force behaviors whether it’s gender, or race. And do you know what? I'm going to agree with him. I agree with him. You do need to force companies to change behaviors. And so that's exactly what I'm doing and that's exactly what the Trump administration should do, force these companies to change these absurd, racist, illegal behaviors. I ultimately think that this is something that they recognize is in violation of the law. And that's really what matters here is getting back to a semblance of sanity. So frankly, I don't care if it's inspired by me or if I have no inspiration or whatever. I care that we get back to some semblance of sanity in this country, and that means doing away with DEI.

And big tech, now that Trump's in charge, has flipped. I think that's a natural balance-of-power shift. I wouldn't say anybody should bet on that being a long-term thing. I think that you've got a few nodes of hope in Silicon Valley, but they're not the people at Google. They're not the people really principally that are running Facebook on a day-to-day basis. Even Mark Zuckerberg, he said some things, but actions speak louder than words, and people who are principally in charge of the day-to-day there, I don't think are people you could say are aligned with the MAGA agenda, you know. So that's the vast majority of big tech is like that. Then you've got these hope vectors, right? There's good people there. No doubt. There's folks like David Sachs and Elon Musk who I think are doing great things, but I don't know that you can really extrapolate that to mean that the entirety of big tech is really having a shift. I don't think they are. I think that they're trying to mask themselves enough to be able to get through four years, and they see this as a political problem for four years. I'm thinking longer-term than that. I'm thinking about, how do we shift things to a place where there's equal pressure and weight on both sides to keep us down the middle when it comes to corporate America? Because ultimately if we want a strong country, we need a strong economy. To have a strong economy, we need to have one where everybody feels like they can go and shop as a consumer without violating their deepest held values and they can go to work without violating your deepest held values. Under the system of DEI, that is not possible.

This is him trying to follow through on campaign promises to make it harder for black voters to move forward and to be successful in society. I would ask that lawmaker why they're a racist. Because fundamentally, there's this group of people, they hear the term DEI, and they immediately think black. You say DEI. They're like, black. And you're like, that's not what I said. I said DEI. And they go, black. And it's like, okay, we're speaking two different languages here. I'm saying DEI, you're saying black. That's like the automatic connection you're making. I don't know why you're doing that, but it's sort of weird and it's incredibly racist because what they're really saying at the root of it is they're saying, “I don't believe black people can succeed in a system based on merit.” I think that's kind of a terrible thing to say. Frankly, it's kind of racist, right? Because there's no denying there are people of every race that can succeed in a merit-based system. So that tells us the ability is there within each group of people. We've seen it; we've seen amazing people of every different race. So, these folks pretending that a merit-based system is suddenly going to result in no black people having jobs, no Latinos having jobs—it's just ludicrous. And frankly, the most angry people at those statements should be blacks and Latinos. I am Latino myself. I can tell you right now, I can succeed at anything I put my mind to. I don't need any special lifting up from the Democrats and the left in this country, which we've seen how good of a job they do at that. And it's not frankly fantastic. Okay, I mean, we've seen their sad excuse for "we're going to give you a step up in life." And it hasn't worked out well for the black community or the Latino community over the last few decades. So I think frankly, people are wise enough to realize we're not going to fall for the same stupid stuff anymore, and they're just trying to keep us divided. So, if we want to be unified, we need to stand up to those people who try to pretend DEI is a proxy for the word black. It's not. It's a proxy for: this is unfair, this is racist. These are the policies as they've occurred, and it needs to stop. We're no longer going to allow this division and racism in our country. We're going to judge people based on merit and on who they are, how they do their business every day, not on what they look like and their immutable characteristics, like their skin color.

Sunny Hostin on The View about Trump’s actions: This will specifically harm women, African Americans, and Latinos. What we’re going to see is a lot of pain, but especially to those communities that need those jobs. I think that's divorced from reality because essentially what she's actually saying is that minorities are not going to be able to get jobs if the sole thing you're looking at is merit, which the way I was raised, you call that racism. I think she's being racist. I think they're just saying that, look, we have a history of disadvantage. We were slaves in this country. None of them were. That would be my contention. None of you were. I'm Cuban. I could say my family went through this, they went through that. I didn't go through it. I'm not going to claim their disadvantage as my own disadvantage. I went from the son of a penniless refugee to a success in multiple different business avenues. I've employed thousands of people. That only happens in America. It's a success story you don't see a lot of other places. I have a hard time buying this idea that America is just so horrible, because if you look just at the actual numbers, I mean people are literally willing to break into this country from all over the world because they want to be here so badly. Now I oppose them doing that because it's clearly out of control. But there's a reason why so many people want to come here, of all different races, because this is the pinnacle of the idea that you can make success for yourself. You can be anything you can really put your mind to. What she's saying there is just, it's a disempowering statement and saying that these people cannot succeed on their own merit. And I think frankly that's a racist view. And it's a lens we need to stop looking at people through.

You touched on the HRC. All these companies were participating with the Human Rights Campaign. There was something called the Corporate Equality Index that they paid attention to. What's that? The Corporate Equality Index, I could only describe as a social credit system. That's essentially what it is. It scores your company on the basis of how deeply you were invested in LGBTQ+ issues. So, a company for them to get a 100%, these are some examples of things they need to do. They need to have a set number of LGBTQ+ events per year. Sponsor certain pride events outside of the exterior of the workplace. So those pride events I told you about earlier, those are internal ones that you have to host, but you got to do this external stuff too, right? Because you got to make it very well known to the world that you are all in on this. Okay? You've got to have—you go down the list, it's just absurd. Your health plan must cover trans surgery. Yes. You must donate to LGBT groups. Yep. Netflix was taken off the list because they aired Dave Chappelle's comedy. Sometimes, the funniest thing to say is mean! You know what else is covered? If you get a 100%, that means that your company is covering the transition of children for the employees' kids. That's what's happening if you're getting a 100%, that means you are covering those employees' kids' sex changes, especially in the states where they allow this, where you can get double mastectomies and the whole thing, right? That is coming from company funds. So, this is one of the reasons that I was really kind of invested in going after this issue as a part of our reshaping of corporate America. I don't want to give my money to a company that is going to turn around and use it to fund any sex changes of any child, period. There's no conversation to be had. It is antithetical to my beliefs. It completely opposes my religious beliefs. I believe it does great harm to children. I believe personally it’s child abuse. And I worked very hard in my state of Tennessee to get it banned as a practice. So, it is against the law in the state of Tennessee, and we set a standard for the country. We went to the Supreme Court, the whole deal, right? So, to me, this is a non-starter, non-negotiable issue as a consumer. So, when you see a company gets a 100% from the HRC, it's not just some foolish social credit system. It does great harm.

This year, the CEI rated 1,142 companies with an incredible 767 scoring top marks. Most of America's big companies got a 100% score. Yep, until we came along. Until we came along and told people the story of what that actually means, and the backtracking began. And now you have companies going and they're looking at their health plans and how they can change them to amend so they're not paying for the transition of kids anymore. And frankly, that alone will make everything we've done worth it, if it even changes health policy at a couple of the biggest companies on earth and prevents a group of kids from being abused? Then it was all worth it. And yet the Human Rights Campaign must be popular because people give them money. They've got millions of dollars. So, all of their money essentially is wrapped up in these corporate donations that they've gotten. I'm sure they get some small-dollar stuff from activist groups. If you look at the effect we've had, what you're going to find is that recently, I think it was just about a month ago, they announced that they fired a quarter of their entire workforce. And so that's going to continue. That's my prediction. I think--They were getting government money. They were getting government money too. Yeah. And you may not know this, but on their homepage, it's not just LGBT. You see protestors holding signs saying, "Abortion is health care." "I will aid and abet abortion." So, it is a question of what do they mean by human rights? Yeah, which humans, which rights? You know, that's the question you have to ask because apparently if you're a small enough human, you don't have rights and they'll actually support killing you. And yet all of America's biggest companies were sucking up to them to get on their list. And think about this, even crazier, in an election year, you had the head of the HRC saying awful things about President Trump. Awful, awful things. 34-time, felony-convicted, wannabe white nationalist dictator. It's truly grotesque stuff. I mean, just the worst fascist framing—Fine, that’s his right. And it's the same thing when it comes to Republicans as a whole. The HRC worked very hard for that entire year, framing Republicans as evil. Okay? And to have major corporations back a group like that, that fundamentally was that deeply involved in not just politics but extremely far-left politics says everything about how far this all went. That should

Be a non-starter period for the future for any company. You do not get that wrapped up in the politics of this country. Companies are not people. Focus on doing your job, doing the work of a company, provide a great service and that's it. At the end of the day, that's all people want—is for businesses to do their business, their fundamental core business, not to virtue signal to us or to perpetuate a political ideology.

Now you've made a movie, “The War on Children.” Tell us about it.

Yeah, "The War on Children" kind of covers everything kids have faced today in the West in general, which goes from gender ideology to the sort of communist mentality that's entered our schools, to just the depression crisis and the mental health crisis kids have faced, social media, how the world's changing rapidly around them. People have decided, you know what? They want to take action to protect their kids and that they've seen these things that we expose in the movie in a micro sense, but seeing how widely this is all going on and how the narrative is shaped by certain people and entities and political ideologies really opened their eyes to the fact that there's more we need to be doing on an individual level, that we're not powerless. We can change things and we need to start in our home bubbles. That's really where we can build a network locally, that once you pull out to an eagle-eye view, if everybody does that, the whole country is protected.

Because of your movie, you're banned from TikTok.

Yeah, actually, I guess we're just in the business of making news here today. I actually received a text message from TikTok in the last 24 hours that they are unbanning my account. They did ban it over the movie. So, "The War on Children" got it banned on there and Amazon also unbanned our movie. So, Amazon banned our movie “Prime” at the beginning.

Did they give a reason?

Yes, they said that it violated their content.

No, did they give a reason to now say you're okay?

No, but it was intimated to me by somebody that it was basically the politics have changed. So it's back on Amazon Prime now and I'm unbanned at TikTok and these are again, signs and symptoms that should tell you I was right when I warned about the idea of modern communism where companies act as a proxy for the government, because these things all occurred when the Democrats were in power and now, we're in a new time period where the people on my side are in power. Now these companies are tripping over themselves to go and say, “Oh, we're not banning you. We didn't mean it.” So, I appreciate the unbanning, but it kind of just proves my point that there's a problem there and we need companies to not be prisoners to political ideologies and instead just behave like they're actual companies.

One reason they might have banned you is that you do say that TikTok intentionally confuses kids about their gender.

Yeah. This is something we've seen and I don't think anybody argues with, not even TikTok. TikTok’s algorithm has fed young children in this country gender transition content that confuses them about who they are. And this is not just a minuscule problem with a couple of people. This is a social contagion at this point, where young people are being fed this content who have never thought about this. I want you to imagine a world where when you're a teenager, you feel a little bit like you don't understand yourself, right? You feel a little out of sorts. I think every teenager goes through that. I know I did when I was a teenager. You just like feel weird in your own body and everything's changing all around you. And this app that's super popular, it's the most popular, all your friends are on it and you sign up for it. And the first videos you see are happy people that are pretending to be happy, that are saying what made me happy and made me not depressed and made me not feel this terrible way you're feeling right now, is transitioning. And you start to ask them questions and this person answers your questions and they're really nice because they're kind of roping you into this. You start to build this idea in your head, well, maybe that's me. Maybe if I want to feel better, I'll feel better if I follow this person down this path. That's happening on TikTok all the time. So, we made arguments about TikTok in the film that you can see for yourself. You can see the difference between the version of TikTok that is in China. It is wholly educational for the kids in China. And we show this on camera, wholly educational versus what kids in America get, which is trash. It is absolute garbage. My own kids refer to it as brain rot.

I've heard this about TikTok in China, but how did you get the samples?

We have examples that are in the movie where you can see the actual app and you can see the differences. The version that’s served to Chinese consumers, called Douyin, is very different from the one available in the West. In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos. And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. And when you go on TikTok, you're being fed stuff about, change your gender? So, in the film we actually talk to teen focus groups where we ask them what they're being fed, what content were you given, and no leading questions. It's just like, what did you experience? What was your experience online? It ranges from content that is about confusing people on their gender to stuff that could be described as leading them into porn.

I'm just finding this hard to believe because I signed up for TikTok. The algorithm just gives you more of what you like and more of what you look at longer. I get kittens and soccer and military reunions. Yeah. I don't see any—

So, a lot of that's predicated when you sign up in not just TikTok’s case, but many different websites, predicated on existing information they have about you. If the sole information they have about you is you're a teenager and you're interested in pop culture, let's say, and that's where they orient you on their algorithm and that's the little information they have to plug in, you're more likely to get things like what we're talking about. And so all that has to happen is you engage with that content and once you engage with it, you're going to continue to see it on a loop. In fact, we interview a girl in the film who got a double mastectomy when she was 13 years old.

So Layla Jane, how old were you when they gave you a double mastectomy?

It was a month after my 13th birthday. I initially started seeing doctors for my gender dysphoria, when I was 12.

And she went through the process of how online, she engaged with content once and it continually came up. I didn’t even know that transition from female to male was an option until I was on social media. It just really appealed to me as a scared, traumatized, you know, girl going through puberty, precocious puberty. And I just clung to that idea. And it is where she started down the rabbit hole of thinking she was transgender and she destroyed a good chunk of her life, getting the double mastectomy, getting on hormones, doing all that. You have to be a barbarian to cut up a child at 13 years old who is clearly mentally in a terrible place, clearly does not have self-confidence, and your answer to that is to take a check from an insurance company to cut this girl up. You know, it just-- I'll never forgive the people who did this.

"War on Children" sounds like a war on children, but these transitions rarely happen. 0.08% of kids get diagnosed with gender dysphoria. If TikTok is converting them, they're not doing a very good job. The number who actually get surgery is even smaller.

So, you're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of kids who are getting into the medical procedures. Some of these numbers are out of date. If you look at the, and this has been the difficult thing for a lot of people, the healthcare numbers, they hide a lot of these numbers. They have been able to get some of the numbers out. And we talk about this in the movie, some of the numbers from the limited number of health insurers you have, you can extrapolate out and you can see that it's likely that this number of kids who are getting the surgeries is actually a pretty large number. In terms of the kids who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, it's certainly in many areas, way beyond the number that you stated. And that actually goes further to my point that this is a social contagion, because if you look at an area like UC Davis in California, that whole area surrounding it in the public schools, the number of kids who believe they’re some form of LGBTQ+ is well over 20%. I mean, it's massive. Okay? The vast majority of these kids in that area believe they're somewhere on the spectrum. A number of them believe they're transgender.

So why is it happening in pockets like this?

It happens to young teens everywhere. It doesn't happen in every country, that's for sure.

Everywhere in America.

Everywhere in America. And most wonder about themselves and then they go back to being what they were. Traditionally, that's how it's always been. And the wonderful thing about traditionally is that traditionally we haven't chopped kids up. And so, because we didn't chop kids up and give them double mastectomies, they were able to make that decision at 18 years old and go, actually, that was a really dumb silly mistake I made when I was 13 where I thought I was the opposite gender. It's kind of like a really bad haircut, right? You can take back a really bad haircut. I had a terrible one when I was about 13. And you can live through that. You can't live through chopping off your breasts and body parts when you're 18, without any scars. You're going to live with some serious scars and damage emotionally, if you do that to people.

Aren't there some people who genuinely feel like they're born in the wrong body? I know people who've had the surgery and they seem happier.

So certainly, people have existed that believe they're the other sex and they're not, but they believe that, and we've diagnosed that for a very long time through the DSM-5, which is where they put all of the definitions of mental illnesses. It is defined as a mental illness and it has been for a very long time. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who believe this. They certainly believe it. There's also schizophrenics who believe that they're Batman, who believe that they can fly off of the top of the Empire State Building. There's people who believe all kinds of things. It doesn't make it true. And so that's my contention is they can believe it all day long. That's fine. It doesn't make it the truth though, and I'm not going to pretend to affirm something that's not true, and it would be no kinder of me to affirm that they believe they are this thing that they can truly never be than it would be for me to tell the schizophrenic person that, yeah, in fact, you can fly off the Empire State Building. I would be doing a disservice by pretending that every delusion is actually in fact real, just because it might make somebody happy. Just because it might make somebody happy doesn't mean it's not harmful to other people or to themselves.

But it does make some people happy.

Sure. And if you're an adult and you make a set of decisions I disagree with, that's your prerogative. Knock yourself out. But once you cross a line and you start doing this to children who don't have informed consent, they don't understand what they're actually doing and what they're signing up for, I think there's no forgiveness. And I think that you're an awful, awful human being if you're anywhere near or involved with the concept of doing this to children, and especially at this point because the information's out there now, the information is there for people to understand the level of abuse that has occurred against a lot of these kids, and how many detransitioners have come out to explain just how crooked this industry is. There are so many kids out there who will tell you that they got their hormones, they got their puberty blockers, they got their double mastectomy approved without ever even being checked for mental illness, without ever being sat down and really being talked through in terms of the things going on in their life, being asked, "Hey, are you the victim of sexual abuse?" "How's your home life?" These questions aren't being asked to a bunch of these kids. It's just straight to, "No, we have to affirm transition" because that's what the woke ideology demands. It demands you always affirm. In fact, you can lose your parental rights if you don't affirm.

We have a mom in the film who lost her parental rights because she refused to affirm the gender identity of her daughter.

When CPS came to remove your daughter, will you walk us through that process?

Oh, my gosh, I was crying and then what should I do? They send her to a group home. I couldn't go visit after court. It was her new home now. CPS, the people who work there, the group home, trying to convince me that what my daughter needs is going to the, the transition and I have to respect her. And in the state's care, the daughter committed suicide, jumped in front of a train. It is the hardest interview I've done in my life, talking to that mom, because she tried to save her kid. She tried. The state, the state would not let her save her child.

You and your wife lobbied politicians in your state and got Tennessee to pass a law to ban puberty blockers, gender surgery for people under 18, and you tweeted that this is about parental rights, but parental rights would be letting the parents say, I think I know what's best for my 17-year-old. Government, leave me alone.

In general, the concept that we ban harmful procedures like this for children is really about protecting kids. Period. Like that's, bar none, like that is, you get down to the core of it, it is about protecting children and their innocence. It's not about parental rights. It's not just about parental rights because it's not all about parental rights. Think about it this way.

Well, I was speaking in the broader context of what was happening in Tennessee.

It’s anti-parental rights.

Yeah. It really is in the same sense that it's anti-parental rights to say we're going to ban parents from giving heroin to their kids. I mean, they're on the same level. So, a parent who's going to give heroin to their child, which is illegal, is on the same level as a parent in my view, that is going to give their child the sex change procedure or medicine to change their hormones. And so that's sort of the way that we see it. So no, the law we got changed in Tennessee was not a parental rights issue. It was among a time period where we had a set of parental rights issues going on. So I think that's where the post came from. But in terms of that specific bill, it was about protecting kids.

A hypothetical example: a kid in school decides, I want to change pronouns, please don't tell my parents. They might freak out.

They're going to freak out. Well, the school is not their parents, so it's not their position to be able to keep secrets from the parent. Parents have a responsibility to parent their kids, and ultimately at the end of the day—

So, the school does not have to tell the parent. If the parent's going to freak out, well, too bad. I mean, they're the parent, they need to know and have a right to know what is going on with their child at school. And the school is not the parent. It does not have a parental role or a parental right.

You called a politician a groomer because he says teachers shouldn't be forced to tell the parent. What's a groomer?

It's somebody who grooms children for this LGBTQ+ cult, essentially is how I would describe it. It's a group where, and this isn't all gay people, by the way, because there's a ton of gay people who oppose this. You've got Gays Against Groomers, you've got a number of other gay groups out there. The Log Cabin Republicans have been very vocal about a lot of these issues. It's essentially them grooming them for the hypersexualized cult and culture that has been built up by groups that seem to support a lot of these sort of HRC doctrine that's out there, that you need to force these conversations and these issues into every place, you need to force it on kids. Drag shows for kids is actually a good thing. Kids transitioning is a good thing. We need books about trans kids in school. We need to force this issue at every turn. People need to talk about it more. You've got to have it in the cartoons. "Paw Patrol needs a trans character." This is the train they're on, right? And it's a train that leads to ultimately a lot of really destructive policy and social issues.

Like?

If you look at just the division in society, you look at the mental health issues among the kids with LGBTQ+ identity, you've got astronomical mental health issues within that group of people. So that on its own is an area where you would be naturally concerned about continuing forward on a path where you're saying, we're going to try to increase the number of kids who align with this doctrine or dogma. It's an incredibly dangerous and fraught idea, just if you look at the health aspect of it. But secondary to that, it's aligned with a political ideology. So, it's very clearly not just about the sexuality and things along those lines. It's also about a political doctrine. They want these kids to be left-wing activists. That's why it's all intrinsically intertwined together. It's not just about, are you gay? And this is another insane thing about the transgender thing, they're probably taking a lot of kids that would identify as gay saying, no, you're actually the other sex. And so that in itself is also confusing.

In your movie, a woman from the Heritage Foundation says: Like they said, you know, we’re coming for your kids. Which makes it sound like there's this mob of gay people converting children.

Yeah. So, what's interesting about the description you just made is right after she says that, it flashes to video footage of a group of LGBTQ+ people in the streets saying, we're coming for your children. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children!

But that's just a line meant to make fun of conservatives like you.

Yeah, but no, they actually did this. Okay, so, if you look in the education system, they're coming via books. They're coming via the drag shows. They're doing all these things on a consistent basis to force it into schools. Look at the book "Genderqueer." Okay? It's the book that they all freaked out over because we continued to get banned from schools. They were trying to force a book into schools that forced pornography essentially in front of kids. So all of these books, they call them the banned books. There's a whole host of these books that are pornographic in nature. They put them in our kids' public schools, and then they say that we're the crazy ones because we don't want it there. It's not about it being a gay book. It's about the fact that they have pornographic content in it and that they're forcing sexual topics on kids and they're doing it all over the place and they're forcing it into entertainment, into every segment of culture. I mean, we were talking a second ago, and we covered this in the movie, all the kids' cartoons that they've forced LGBTQ+ content into. You have "Blue’s Clues" doing the drag queen ABCs. You've got "Paw Patrol" doing transgender characters. This has gone wildly out of control. It's about forcing an idea and trying to force acceptance of it. And that's something that I can't roll with when it's done so much damage to kids.

Thank you, Robby Starbuck. Thank you. I appreciate it. [swoosh] Here at Stossel TV we don’t force any ideas. We discuss and debate, and invite people from all sides to come here and make their arguments. If you’d like to help us do that, please click that button. [music]