They Built the Surveillance State for Them, Now It’s Pointed at Us

Doug Berger: 00:05
On the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack, we take a look back on the initial news coverage full of errors and speculation. Then we talk about the surveillance apparatus constructed in the aftermath being used by President Trump today against his so-called enemies, which happen to be all of us. A local TV station carries racist water over undocumented people having driver’s licenses. And finally, we fact-check an election mailer sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Voice Over: 00:43
This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

Doug Berger: 01:00
At the time that I’m recording this segment, we’ve just passed the 25th anniversary, or man, that’s probably a poor word. 25th anniversary of 9-11. Probably one of the worst days in American history. Probably way up there with when the day that Kennedy was shot and and uh Lincoln was assassinated, that type, that type of earthquake-y thing. And so I had some some things about some things I want to talk about in reg in relationship to the attacks on 9-11. Uh, the first thing is what I did, and I’ve done this on occasion since then, but I really decided to do it this time, is I uh on YouTube you can find the live coverage from that day from various networks. I watched uh ABC, I watched uh the BBC, uh CBC in Canada, uh I think uh NBC I’ve watched before, and CBS, and also CNN from that day. So uh and a lot of these videos they start with the moments leading up to the initial attack, and then it’s like hours and hours and hours of coverage. Um, if you’re a masochist like me, I mean I didn’t watch it, you know, point by point by point. I would fast forward like when the I fast forwarded to the second plane, I fast-forwarded to the collapse and all this stuff. But what what you really hear though, that they really don’t talk about now, nowadays, is how much misinformation and speculation was going on at that time. Um for example, when I was watching the Canadian network, a Canadian news network, uh CBC, they had some security guy that they were interviewing who was speculating, and he said that a plane had crashed in Colorado. And and after the segment after the guy was talking to him, the the anchor, Peter Mansbridge, my favorite, my favorite all-time network anchor was Peter Mansbridge, who used to do the CBC The National and other uh news things uh during that time. And he and he had come on like probably an hour into the terrorist attacks to um anchor the CBC coverage, which happened on the other networks too. They had their primary anchors come in. But anyway, so Peter Mann’s after he talked to the security guy, Peter Mannbridge came back and he said, he said, um, we do not have uh confirmation of a plane crashing in Colorado, so we don’t want to say that that exactly happened until we are able to confirm it. You know, he said that right away. And there was some other ones. Um a lot of the networks were talking about a car bomb outside the uh State Department. Uh after the Pentagon was hit. People saw the smoke and thought it was the State Department on fire. Well, it wasn’t a car, there wasn’t a car bomb. Uh the Pentagon had been hit. Um, you know, and so that was and that stuff when it when it’s live and and we didn’t have the internet didn’t exist like it is today with Twitter and social media, you know, giving you uh blow by blow about it. Uh, you know, there was like MySpace and things like that. But generally people had to do the legwork and interview people and make phone calls and go to these places to find out this information. And the other thing that I wanted to talk about besides the the coverage was I’ve visited, I haven’t got a chance to go to New York to visit uh the World Trade Center site, the what they called at the time Ground Zero. But I did visit the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I did that probably 10 years ago. We went, yeah, we were on a vacation to the East Coast, and we were driving through Pennsylvania, and that was always the plan we were going to stop off. Um and very somber. Um and they were doing the the the other thing too was with the general coverage of the 25th anniversary. Um, I didn’t care for the network’s coverages as much. Uh C-SPAN, the the uh public affairs channels, the cable channels that we recently got on my my uh I have a Hulu account, and they recently picked up C SPAN, probably because of the 250th, the 250th anniversary of the revolution. But C-SPAN had some a lot of documentaries, and I watched a lot of those documentaries, and one of them was they took a tour of Shanksville, the Flight 93 memorial. And one of the things I learned that I didn’t know at the time, and I don’t know why I didn’t learn it then, was when you’re walking down the walkway towards the wall of names, and there’s a at one side of the memorial, there’s a wall of names of the victims, and you’re walking down this walkway, and there’s like an angled wall, and then you see a field, like a grass field. And I always thought that that was a nice touch, grass field, kind of bringing in some of the some of the uh outdoors and everything, and kind of find out that that was the debris field of the Flight 93 crash. And so it’s like kind of sacred ground because there’s probably victim body parts and stuff and tissue and stuff that was in there because that plane hit at 500 miles an hour and was obliterate basically obliterated. You know, many they didn’t recover, I don’t I don’t think they recovered any bodies, any human remains, like full human remains. They did recover the black boxes, which for the other uh terrorist, the other planes that crashed, they didn’t. But for the Shanksville one, they did recover the the voice recorder and the and the plane, the plane data recorder. But the human remains they didn’t. And so they went through the site, tried to collect as much as they could, and then they kind of buried it, the rest of it there. They covered it over and planted it and made sure that the grass grew back. And so that whole debris field is like a cemetery now. And then they have a gate when you get to the wall of names, and there’s a gate that’s only open for the families of the victims, and then they can take a path farther back to this boulder that they use as a memorial stone that marks the impact area of the plane. And so family members can go back there, and so they did that uh during the ceremonies. They had a memorial service on 9-11, and they did uh reef lanes, and then family members said the people’s names, and then once, and then they played some music and things like that, and then afterwards the family members that were gathered, then they went together past that gate that only the family can go past to visit their their uh dead dead loved ones. And so that was very touch-in, and I got emotional sometimes about some of that stuff. And then there’s other things like uh uh I just watched one the other day where the this guy’s taking a tour of the World Trade Center site, and there’s still um remnants of the collapse of the buildings and the other damage on buildings in that area. There’s like uh dents and scratches and things like that that they kept. Um there’s a path station under that’s called the Oculus, it’s um an open-air thing where you can get to the to the trains, and and they kept some of the steps and some of the doors from when it was the World Trade Center to go to the trains and things like that. So the other thing, too, was they were having the reading of the names at ground zero in New York City. And now typically what this does is all the all the government people show up. Um you had four the four living past presidents. You had Obama, Bush, uh Jr. Um Clinton, and Biden and their and their wives, and then you had uh Mayor Julie, uh former Mayor Giuliani, the current mayor mandami, and you had Bloomberg and and the other the other mayors there. And the only person that wasn’t there was Donald Trump, President Trump. And the reason why President Trump wasn’t there, but uh J.D. Vance was there, but President Trump was not there. The reason why President Trump was not there was because they wouldn’t let him make a speech. Now, they have not allowed politicians to make speeches at the at this memorial service for decades, probably since the 10th anniversary at least. The it’s not a time for politicians to make speeches. It’s a time to remember the victims of the tragedy. You know, it’s time to have uh a reflection and and read the names so that everybody knows who never came back from from that disaster. It’s not a place to make and and and the thing is, I knew if he got a chance to make a speech, it was gonna be all about him. He was gonna talk about his frickin’ ballroom and how he lost the elect how the election was stolen from him, all that bull crap. I just knew that that’s what he was gonna do. So what he and ended up, him and his uh sometime wife uh Melania, they went to the memorial service at the Pentagon so that he could give a speech. And Whiskey Pete Heggseth also gave a speech. And it was kind of worse than what I thought it was going to be, both of them. They decided to make it about war with Iran. Trump tried to connect the World Trade Center terrorist attacks with Iran. And and trying to use that as a justification for his petty war that he he he can’t win and can’t finish against Iran. And that is just so I mean, the guy lies. I mean, it’s easy to figure out when he lies, his his lips move. But that is just such a big lie. It’s not it, it’s the worst, worst kind of lie, you know, and he knows it’s a lie, but he doesn’t care because he’s trying to make himself look good. And the reason why it’s a lie is because when they did the investigation of the terrorists that that hijacked the planes and crashed them, every single one of them was Saudi, Saudi Arabian. They came from Saudi Arabia. They were paid for and trained by Osama bin Laden, who was also a Saudi. During and then somebody uh in one of the documentaries I was watching reminded me that two, two or three days after the attacks, special permission was given to allow Osama bin Laden’s family that had been in the United States to leave to fly out and go back to Saudi Arabia at the time that the airspace was closed to everybody else. So to try to connect it to trying to connect the terrorist attacks to Iran is just silly. And so then Whiskey Pete, who must have taken a shot at testosterone, talking about uh how great the military is, and the military is is good, but his leadership is crap. They they’re he fired all the good generals. He only kept the generals that that listen to him and and are his yes men, and they’re really mucking it up, mucking it up. So luckily I didn’t have to hear that. Um I watched clips of it later. And then of course, then the other thing that I wanted to mention about 9-11 and the aftermath is the security apparatus that was installed that people like me complained about 25 years ago. Um the formation of uh homeland security and and uh the TSA and the um the warrant warrantless uh special courts to do surveillance and and the blacks the black sites where people were taken to be for rendition. They called it rendition, where if you were uh uh suspected terrorists, they would take you to a black site somewhere off the books and interrogate you. Um you had the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was also tried, they tried to tie that into 9-11, the Bush administration did. And we found out from the 9-11 report that Iraq and Afghanistan had not, and the Taliban had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. Again, this was Saudi Osama bin Laden, it was his plan, he financed it. The people that did it were Saudi, he’s Saudi. You know, the Taliban may have looked the other way and not warned anybody, but they weren’t specifically involved. And so we got into a war in Afghanistan because of that. And that war went until just recently with the Biden administration when we got out of Afghanistan and the fascist right gave us a whole bunch of crap about it. But you had that and you had the Patriot Act, which is that warrantless uh surveillance uh court. And and you have to ask yourself, has it really made us safer? I don’t think so. Because at least not not before before Trump took over and and screwed everything up, I don’t think it made us any safer. Uh, we had people that worked in the FBI and counterterrorism and things like that, that broke up some potential attacks and things like that, but the surveillance state and TSA and Homeland Security didn’t keep us safe. It was law enforcement, following leads, you know, probable cause, arresting people. That’s what kept us safe, has kept us safe. And so, of course, now that we have uh Mussolini Jr. in the White House, he has decided to use those tools that was established to keep us safe from outside terrorists. He decided to turn those tools inside and use them against his enemies, his perceived enemies. Uh, progressives, uh, and what he calls the organized Antifa cells and uh anti-Semitic people, um, things like that. So, you know, people like me, you can go back, you can look at uh my writings, bring me up in the uh Google, Google me, and I did not support the Patriot Act, I didn’t support the surveillance apparatus that was installed. There’s many of us that didn’t, because we knew that it would be used against us eventually, and that is exactly what’s happening now. So the sooner that the orange turd gets out of office, as soon as we can get some accountability and get some other people in charge of Congress who can hold him accountable, it will be so much better for everybody else. But in the meantime, the results of 9-11 basically gave us the fascist state that we’re living in right now with Trump. And that reminded me of the famous uh Ben Franklin quote: those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Even though that that uh quote doesn’t apply to government surveillance, it fits talking about government surveillance. For me, 9-11 is gonna be always gonna be a somber time, and I’ll probably still beat myself over the head watching video coverage of it from back in the day and trying to remember or not remember how I felt that day and how depressed I was, and I think I was up all day. I worked nights. I was I think I stayed up until I just was so exhausted I fell asleep, probably at seven, eight o’clock at night. That’s how traumatized I was at the time. And I didn’t even lose anybody. I wasn’t a victim per se, but we were all victims. And that’s the whole per purpose of terrorism is to make everybody a victim.

Voice Over: 20:41
For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

Doug Berger: 21:01
We know from experience that the Republican Party can’t run on their record because their record sucks. For example, here in Ohio, the Republican Party has been in charge and had us and has had a supermajority since at least 2011. And so they can’t run on their record. They try, they say that, you know, hey, if you want to get these things fixed, you know, vote for us. But they’re the ones that have been in charge this whole time. So we know that they can’t run on their record. So what they try to do is they try to do the culture war stuff, the hysteria, trying to uh talk about boogeyman that’s coming for everybody, trying to get you scared and that you have to have to vote for them to get to take care of it. So, you know, we’ve had the hordes of uh illegal immigrants. That were on a train that were headed to the border. We’ve heard that before. Currently, they’re still throwing trans people under the bus. One of the uh negative ads that I’ve seen recently, the Republican is saying how the Democrat opponent is uh had voted for men to play women’s sports or supported men playing women’s sports, which wasn’t really true, but they just go into hysteria. So the next part, hysteria that they’ve been talking about, and and it’s kind of a subset of the one you might be familiar with, where they talk about illegal immigrants murdering uh poor, unsuspecting white women uh here in this country. And they make sure that they publicize that as much as and and as hot as they can to justify deporting people and d doing the ice roundup because you know, these gang members are going around killing innocent white women. You know, it’s racist. We know it’s racist, and that’s the whole point. Well, the subset of that argument that that has been going around recently is undocumented people who get into traffic accidents and and the other driver is killed. Uh, we had that with the semi-truck drivers in Florida with that were getting the CDL licenses and they were not citizens. And so the federal government put a stop to that because CDLs are usually federal licenses. You have to go through a process through the federal government to get them. The other one that we had recently here in Ohio was a undocumented man was driving a truck, a pickup truck or a van or some type, got into a traffic accident in Fulton County, which is next to where I live, and the driver of the other car was killed. So now John Housted and uh Adam Bird, who is a state senator, I believe, he’s in the state legislature, they want to make it illegal for citizens to have uh not non-citizens to have driver’s licenses. So the gentleman that was the driver of the pickup or van or whatever it was that crashed um had a driver a drive-only license from the state of Connecticut. And as uh, and I’m gonna play the um WTOL, this is what uh prompted this segment was they had this interview with Houston and and Byrd on WTOL under their uh 11 investigates moniker. And that’s another story in itself, but uh what we’ll get to is that Connecticut is one of 19 states that allow undocumented people to get driver’s licenses. You still have to prove your identity, you still have to take the test, the driving test, and then if you pass all that, then you get a driver’s license where you can drive only. You can’t use it as an ID, you can’t use it to vote or anything like that. You can only use it to drive in the state or elsewhere because of mutual uh application. So let me play this news story. This was from September the 4th, and then once we’re done with that, then we’ll come back.

News anchor #1: 25:59
Ohio lawmakers are now pushing for changes to who can legally get a driver’s license following a deadly crash in Fulton County.

Brian Duggar: 26:06
Yeah, the driver charged in that crash is an undocumented immigrant who had a legal license issued by the state of Connecticut. The crash killed a 29-year-old Fayette man last weekend.

News anchor #1: 26:17
Lead investigator Brian Duggars has been looking into this story. Brian, Ohio lawmakers are upset about this, now questioning how someone in the country illegally could legally be licensed to drive.

Brian Duggar: 26:28
Absolutely. In fact, Ohio Senator John Hustad told me this afternoon that he plans to take this issue all the way up to President Trump.

Jon Husted: 26:38
I intend to have a conversation with the president. I I made uh Sean Duffy and Mark Wayne Mullen, who are the who are the secretaries of transportation and homeland security, aware of this. Uh and uh I continue when I get back to Washington. Right now I’m in Ohio, but I want to get back to Washington. I’m gonna take this up with uh everybody uh that I can because this is something that’s gotta stop.

Brian Duggar: 27:00
At issue, so-called drive-only licenses. Connecticut is one of 19 states, along with the District of Columbia, that allows people who cannot establish lawful presence in the United States to obtain a driver’s license. And federal lawmakers say that’s the type of license Washington Naula Akoa had when Highway Patrol says he caused this deadly crash. August 29th, troopers say Naula Akoa failed to yield at a stop sign at State Route 66 and County Road In, striking an SUV driven by 29-year-old Austin Carr Grimes. Grimes’ SUV overturned and he died at the scene. Two passengers, including a three-year-old, were taken to the hospital with minor injuries. Naula Koa was arrested. Housted’s office says he entered the United States without inspection and was here illegally. Housted has now asked the departments of transportation and homeland security to take action against states issuing these types of licenses. But in our interview, Houston acknowledged driver’s licenses are controlled by the states and then went considerably further.

Jon Husted: 28:15
Right now, uh the administration uh cannot take action against these states, but well, I intend uh to ask the governors to stop this practice, and if they refuse to do it, I could take it a step further and deny those states uh their highway funding.

Brian Duggar: 28:32
Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont strongly disagrees. His argument, undocumented residents are already driving, requiring them to be tested and licensed, puts trained and insured drivers on the road. And Connecticut does require testing.

Jon Husted: 28:50
Well, that’s fantasy. Uh these people are in the country illegally. They’re committing a crime by their very presence in the country. And instead of enforcing the rule of law, uh this governor of Connecticut uh makes it more dangerous.

Brian Duggar: 29:07
But Ohio may not have to wait for Washington. Six months before this crash, State Representative Adam Byrd introduced House Bill 722. The legislation would prohibit someone unlawfully present in the United States from driving in Ohio, even if another state has given that person a valid license.

Adam Bird: 29:29
We would not have recognized a driver’s license issued by a sanctuary state to an illegal alien.

Brian Duggar: 29:35
Birchville has not moved beyond the committee stage, but he says this crash should give it new urgency. The General Assembly still lists House Bill 722 as introduced.

Adam Bird: 30:02
Um at the end of the year.

Brian Duggar: 30:20
Eleven investigators have been told they’re working for a Rhode Island company and staying in Perrysburg. The Highway Patrol says the immediate cause of this crash was Naula Coa failing to yield it a stop sign. The records released so far do not establish that his immigration status or Connecticut’s decision to license him caused the crash. Byrd himself acknowledges that his legislation could have made Naula Coa’s driving illegal in Ohio, but could not guarantee he wouldn’t have been behind the wheel.

Adam Bird: 30:54
Could it have still happened? Of course it could have still happened, but it would not have occurred uh in a legal way.

Brian Duggar: 31:01
Now, as you heard there, Byrd tells me he’s hoping the House will hold hearings on his legislation by the end of the year, and he believes this accident will make that happen. Reporting in studio, this Brian Duggar for 11 Investigates.

Doug Berger: 31:15
All right. So there’s a couple things about that art about that story that kind of bothers me. First of all, that it’s under their 11 investigates um label, that it’s something to be investigated. It’s a traffic accident. The Ohio State Patrol uh said that the driver of the car, the Naulula Ochoa, failed to yield as a stop sign at State Route 66 and County Road Inn, striking an SUV driven by 29-year-old Austin Carr Grimes. Grimes’ SUV overturned. He died at the scene. Two passengers, including the three-year-old, were taken to the hospital with minor injuries. Uh Naulua Achoa has been charged in the case and is being held on an ice detainer, which naturally that’s what’s going to happen when you’re an undocumented person and you get in trouble with the law is they turn you over to ice. So that’s the first thing. This isn’t something that needs to be investigated. We know what the problem is. The problem is that this Nalula Achoa was driving the car and it failed to yield a stop sign. It’s a common everyday thing. But the fact that these Republicans are screeching about it and being hysterical about it just proves how racist they are. You know, because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of traffic accidents in this country. Um, Fulton County, they’ve had quite a few recently, where somebody failed to stop at a stop sign or was distracted or something and got into an accident and somebody died. Happens daily, on a almost on a daily basis. That that’s you know, that’s life. That’s what happens. And so you know that they are using this as a political stunt simply because in uh uh Brian Duggar, the uh lead investigating reporter, said Houston also acknowledged that driver’s licenses are administered by the states, and the federal government cannot simply invalidate the licenses on its own. And so basically what Houston said, but I intend to ask the governors to stop this project, and if they refuse to do it, I’ll take it a step farther and deny those states their highway funding. That’s one way a federal government gets a state gets states to comply with something that they want them to do when they have no other power to do it, is they’ll take away uh federal dollars. Years ago, there was a push to get states to have uh their um age for to allow alcoholic drinking uh to be bumped up to twenty-one. Uh many states had 18. And there was this push because of a lot of traffic accidents, believe it or not, to get the the age of consent for alcohol drinking to 21. And in order to get many states to do that, they threatened their highway money. I think back then the people that were opposed to it called it an unfunded mandate because you were telling them to change their their uh policy or their laws uh under the force of losing their money. So like you’re holding a gun to their head. Uh the other thing, too, that bothered me about this was um Adam Bird’s comments. Uh he’s a state representative. I apologize. I thought he was a senator. And and this is the quote, and they quoted it in the printed copy of the report. Says, uh, and this is Byrd was talking to Brian Duggar about he proposed a law that would not recognize Can I get driving privileges. He says, uh, we would not have recognized a driver’s license issued by a sanctuary state to an illegal alien, Byrd said, could have still happened. Of course it could still happen, but it would not have occurred in a legal way. So, first of all, the guy already caused an accident that resulted in the death of somebody in the accident. So he’s already committed a crime. Vehicular manslaughter is one of those types of crime, whatever. And traffic incidences can get you deported. You know, if you get in trouble with the law for any reason, that does subject you to deportation. And as uh Duggar mentions in his piece at the end of his piece, that it that the driver’s immigration status had no connection as to causing the accident, which means that the accident didn’t happen because Ochoa was uh an illegal alien, as they like to say, an undocumented person. But it makes it worse because he was an undocumented citizen. And to call Connecticut a sanctuary city simply because they allow uh undocumented people to get get uh driver’s licenses, uh that’s the the the pristine idea of racism right there. And I think Byrd also referred to his uh status as being a crime. It it’s technically not a crime to be an undocumented person here illegally. It will get you deported, but it’s not a crime. You know, usually if it’s a crime, you get prison time. You can’t get prison time because you’re here illegally. The worst that can happen to you is that you get deported. It’s a civil crime, a civil incident. And so these uh Republicans they always do this. They uh they do this hysteria, throwing people under the buses uh and everything. And so that’s what bothered me. This whole story bothered me because Channel 11 spent their investigative team time to investigate something that need didn’t need to be investigated. And so I sent Brian Duggar, the reporter, uh an email asking him, you know, how’d he get this story? And uh what I believe is that the John Houston campaign or or some Republican tipped him off or and sent them like a press release or something. And again, just because you make it illegal for undocumented people to have driver’s licenses in Ohio and you don’t recognize other, and you won’t recognize other states if this law gets passed, that will not prevent an undocumented person from driving. It doesn’t prevent uh a citizen from driving, not having a driver’s license in most cases. Uh what it does is it subjects you to worse penalties if you get caught. That’s all. And some people take that risk. And so this is just another example of them trying uh proposing a solution for a problem that does not exist. It does not exist. There is not this wholesale problem of undocumented people getting driver’s licenses illegally or driving illegally. If you get if you get a driver’s license from a state, more more than likely another state is going to recognize that driver’s license. That’s the way it’s worked forever, ever since they’ve had driver’s licenses. And now they want to make this change simply because of the status of the driver. And I don’t think that that’s fair. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either complement a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets at Secularleft.substack.com and it is totally free.

Doug Berger: 40:17
Because it’s election season, we are getting a lot of mailers in the mail from different campaigns. And what I’ve noticed coming from the Republican side is what I expected. It’s no big surprise, is they’re not dealing with any of the issues that people actually care about. They are fear-mongering, like trying to connect some of the Democrats to communism. And then the other one, the other playbook that they’re using, is the trans uh transgender women hysteria. Still going. Um, I believe uh Derek Marin, who was running for the 9th district in 2022, talked about that. He’s talking about it again. And then and also Senator John Housted, who’s running against Sherrod Brown. And this just came today. It was a mailer uh paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is chaired by Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, and authorized by Housted for Senate. And it’s basically all lies. It’s just all lies. What they’re trying to do is trying to peg Sherrod Brown as somebody who you need to watch because he supports transgender people. Because those are the scary people, remember. Those are the people that are coming for your daughters, according to Republicans. So on the one side of it, they have career politician Sherrod Brown, dangerous, crazy liberal. That’s another thing, another key word that they’re they’ve been using recently, crazy. They stole that from the Democrats uh in 2024 when uh uh they were talking about Republicans and like Trump being weird. Well, the Republicans are using the word crazy, which doesn’t surprise me that the Republicans would be using a slur like crazy. And so, like I said, they have this Sherid Brown dangerous, crazy liberal. Then it’s got the first heading says encouraging sex changes for minors. Sherrod Brown opposed a bill protecting children from life-altering gender mutilation surgeries, and even encouraged Ohio kids to get sex changes. That is false. He did not encourage kids to get sex changes. He did he did oppose the bill. Um the fine print cites a WSYX report from July of 2023, and it was an interview that he gave about a bill that was introduced by Senator, then Senator J.D. Vance that aimed to ban gender-affirming care for minors federally. The bill was Senate Bill 2357, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, sought to make it a felony for doctors to provide surgery or prescribe puberty blockers to anyone younger than 18. And so Senator Brown Senator Brown at the time said, a child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, and their doctors, Brown said, according to an archive snippet of the interview, not politicians. I will never agree with anyone that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period. Vance’s bill, which would have Established punishment for doctors performing the procedures was referred to a committee and it never received a vote. Said when Political Fact, and it’s who did the fact check, asked Brown’s campaign whether Brown supports doctors providing gender reassignment surgery and puberty blockers to minors, spokesperson Matt Keyes responded broadly. Sherrod cares about the health and well-being of all children. He does not believe the government has any role in a family’s personal health care decisions, Keyes said. And then it goes on to say that Brown has long supported policies advocated by LGBTQ, plus rights activists, including marriage equality. In 2017, he introduced the Senate’s first Pride Month resolution. But Brown has said relatively little specific to gender-affirming care for minors, though has generally said he supports allowing patients to make decisions with their doctors. And so they the uh MAGA Republicans use this. This article was from uh 20 from the 2024 campaign. So they they so they used this in the last pol the last campaign against Brown. The same argument. And so then that led to also another citation, and I think that’s where they got this this this uh information from originally, was a letter that Brown signed on to in 2023 urging the Biden administration to broadly protect access to German gender-affirming care. But again, that letter that’s quoted was not encouraging kids to get sex change operations, um, which doesn’t happen. That’s just a lie that that uh anti-trans people, transphobic people uh trot out. And it was a letter that was written to Biden to mark the trans day of visibility, and it was signed on by several several senators, mostly de well, it was all Democratic senators, and they were compl they were upset about the violence and and the the discrimination, the laws banning gender affirming care, um some of the trans kids are getting uh being victims of violence, they’re committing suicide, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a general support of trans people. And so the ad that says Sherrod Brown opposed a bill protecting children from life-altering gender mutilation surgeries, that that’s true. Even though that’s how they are framing it, it’s not life-altering gender mutilation surgeries. Gender affirming care doesn’t just include surgeries, it’s a full course of action, mental puberty blockers, um, and before you even get to surgery. And then it said he even encouraged Ohio kids kids to get sex changes. That is false, completely false. So then we go to the next heading. Says men and girls that that he supported um Sherrod Brown supported men and girls’ sports and locker rooms. Says Sherrod Brown co-sponsored a bill to force states to let men compete in girls’ sports and let biological men use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. Again, that is bigoted framing. They big they framed it using bigotry rather than an honest critique. And that is based on a bill that he co-sponsored, that Sherrod Brown co-sponsored back in 2023. It was Senate Bill 5. It’s called the it was called the Equality Act. And what it would do is it would prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity with respect to businesses, employment, housing, federal funded programs, and other settings. So to say that he co-sponsored a bill to force states to let men compete in girls’ sports, that is false. And to let biological men use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, that is also false. It w it would be the bill uh would prevent states from banning transgender women from competing in girls’ sports, and it would ban states from prohibiting transgendered women from using their uh gender-assigned uh bathrooms. And then finally, the other um heading says taxpayer-funded drag shows for kids. Sherrod Brown sponsored a plan to send seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of your tax taxpayer dollars to a group that promotes drag queen song and story time for kids. And again, that’s another bigotry bigoted framing based on some fact. Uh Senator Brown did submit a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar uh grant for uh uh an organization called Harmony Columbus in the Harmony Center. And the grant was to pay for the conversion of their space to expand it and to renovate it so that other groups could use it. Now they the Republicans based this claim on a Fox News article or Fox News report in September of 2023. And lucky for us, Fox keeps a archive of all their article, all their stories, so I could find it, so I could actually read it. And the title of it was Ohio Democrat earmarked a six-figure amount to group that promoted drag queen song and storytime. The event which took place in January was intended by children of all ages. So then you’re reading the article. It says the funding request for Harmony Project Productions Incorporated, a group with a mission to build a more inclusive society by breaking down social barriers, bridging community divides, and empowering the voices of people through arts, education, and volunteerism, came as part of Brown’s spending requests for fiscal year 2024 that were submitted to the State Appropriation Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Related Agencies. It would be for the group to renovate a performance community-shared office and programming space that can not only accommodate the organization’s growth, but local community partners who lack adequate space to serve their constituents and clientele. So then we get to the crux of their claim. In the Fox News article, it says prior to Brown’s request, the Columbus-based group promoted a drag queen and storytime event in January to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Moments from the event, which is said to have been put on by Franklin County, was attended by young children, were shared to the group’s Instagram page. And lucky for us, that video from that day is still available online. And so let’s listen to it. Let’s listen to the audio, and then I’ll come back in with a comment.

Drag Queen #1: 52:02
Like a tree, I’m here to grow. Like the mountains, I’m here to stand. Like time, I’m here to be and be everything I can.

Drag Queen #2: 52:13
Dreams. If we don’t have dreams, who are we? And if we don’t go after our dreams, then who are we too as well? So this just says that we’re all here in the dream, dream big.

Drag Queen #3: 52:26
Like the sky, I’m boundless too. When I believe in myself, there’s something nothing I can do.

Random person: 52:34
You know, Franklin County’s all about being welcoming and trying to be story time that needed to happen, needed to be a part of the dreams and the hopes and desires of everybody in the community.

Drag Queen #2: 52:45
In my dream, you can become anything you want to be in life as long as you have a little help along the way.

Random person: 52:54
It’s really important for me that they have a model of what it means to respect everybody.

Drag Queen #2: 53:06
All dreams can be a reality as it is in the pay week, and we’ve all been able to, you know, make great strides in life off of history.

Drag Queen #1: 53:13
Be able to just to read to kids and to read to adults and for them not to look at us with discrimination and just know that we’re here for one purpose and one purpose only, which is to share our love and our beliefs and and to show our individuality. That was the most amazing part of today.

Drag Queen #1: 53:30
It was amazing to have our community come out and support us. Um, we had a very diverse group of people, and it was just a wonderful event. And I can’t wait to do another one.

Doug Berger: 53:45
So basically it was drag queens who were they sang a little song at the beginning of their little performance, and then they read a story to uh a room full of children. There was a lot of children there. The activity, the event was put on by the Franklin County Board of Commissioners, and so it was free to people that wanted to come, and there was adults and children there. And I will have a link to the video if people want to watch it, but the drag queens in the video were not performing their typical act, they were performing in front of children, so they were conservatively dressed, believe it or not. They weren’t showing any body parts. Just it was just, you know, they were wearing gowns and they had the full makeup and the hair, and that was it. They weren’t twerking, you know, because you get uh transphobe saying that during these drag queen story times that these people perform, um that it’s uh obscene because body parts are shown. Well, like I said before, when I’ve talked about this before, that when drag queens are profess they’re professional performers, they know their audience. So if they’re going into a room that’s full of kids, they are going to dress appropriately for that audience. They are going to perform appropriately for that audience. And so that’s what happened in this case. Now, this is just one activity that this Harmony Pro uh Productions was uh associated with. They have a choir, they have uh musicians that play there, um, and some other activities. And so this was just one of many activities. And they weren’t even sponsoring it, they were letting them use their performance space. Again, it was sponsored by the Franklin County Board of Commissioners. And the fact that they’re they were saying that uh that it was uh giving taxpayer dollars to a group that promotes drag queen song and storytime for kids is a lie. Because the group doesn’t promote that, that was just one activity that they had and they shared the video from it. And I also checked, and all the information I could find is that the Harmony project did not get the money. So it didn’t make it into the final budget or whatever it was. That’s all I could see. They they did get a grant, a government grant for five hundred thousand dollars, but I think that might have came from either uh a local government agency or from the Franklin County itself. So what I wanted to do with this little bit, and I’ve probably taken way too long to talk about this, is to basically fact-check this ad that I got from the John Houston campaign. It’s complete lies. And again, if you ban gender-affirming care, if you throw trans kids under buses and don’t care about the violence towards them and and want to uh take away their rights to exist and and don’t want them to exist, that does not do anything to make gasoline more affordable, food more affordable, housing more affordable. It doesn’t do anything about items that people care about. It doesn’t end the war in Iran. It’s a culture war thing. This is what this is what Republicans do when they have nothing else to run on. They can’t run on their their policy because they have none, and they’ve been a terrible governing body since Trump took over. Especially, especially John Houston. He hasn’t he has done nothing but parrot everything that John that uh Donald Trump wanted him to do. And here we go again. So if you get so if you see these ads and it’s got this transgender hysteria on it, you can just toss it in the trash immediately because it’s not true. It’s a lie. They are lying.

Voice Over: 58:26
Thank you for listening. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us. See you next time.