Elon Musk puts Twitter over a barrel.
It look like the United States is a social experiment and we are failing. We can learn something from China.
And calling the people from Disney groomers is really a charged accusation according to the Washington Post.
Let’s talk about it.
Freak Out!
Elon Musk is freaking the world out!
- You remember last week, Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, bought 9.2% becoming the majority owner.
- Twitter offered Musk a seat on the Board of Directors and Musk initially accepted.
- But, right before the first board meeting, he declined the offer.
- People were disappointed.
- Turns out, he would not have the power for change that he wanted and he would not be able to buy any more stock.
Well, Mush id making a huge move. In a $43 billion move, Musk has decided to buy Twitter right out and make it private.
He sent a letter to the SEC declaring his intentions (which he posted on Twitter, of course) then sent a letter to Twitter. Here’s what he wrote:
Chairman of the Board,
I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.
Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.
/S/ Elon Musk
So, basically, Twitter has a choice. Accept a very good offer and let Elon Musk own all of Twitter, fire everyone, make it private and open Twitter to everyone or he dumps his stocks and the Twitter stock craps the bed, killing anyone who invested in Twitter.
He basically has Twitter over a barrel.
Elon Musk is an American hero. He’d also create diversity in the social media space. He’d be the first African American owner of a social media company (Mush is South African.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/read-it-elon-musks-formal-letter-to-twitter-chairman-in-bid-to-buy-company
We Are A Social Experiment
So, Hollywood has committed to putting LGBTQ-crap into the movies they want to show in the United States. One of the things that pundits point out is would they do this in countries that do not embrace the LGBTQ-crap?
Well, we have an answer.
According to Variety:
References to a gay relationship in “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” were edited out of the movie by Warner Bros. for the film’s release in China. Only six seconds of the movie’s 142-minute runtime were removed. Dialogue that was edited out alluded to the romantic past between male characters Dumbledore (Jude Law) and Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen). “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling revealed Dumbledore was gay in 2009, but the movies had never explicitly referenced the character’s sexuality until this third “Fantastic Beasts” entry.
First off, I just don’t understand why JK Rowling did this in the first place. The Harry Potter series was made for kids and there was nothing about gay characters in the series until JK Rowley added it. I am a writer so she can do whatever she wants. I would want to.
I also don’t blame Warner Bros. China is a huge market. Now, I would never want my product in China. That’s the sin. But Warner Bros. has a commitment to their shareholders and China is a huge market. I would want all my movies there if I could ignore the unfair trade practices, the manipulations of weak countries for control, the suppression of their people, the overtaking and suppression of Hong Kong, the threats to Taiwan, the concentration camp and the genocide. So if I have to remove six seconds of my movie to please them, I would. I know you’re hearing from the right about how hypocritical and blah, blah, blah.
This is not a moment to piss on Warner Bros. This is a time to learn something. China says Warner Bros. can’t have their movie in China unless they take it out. How about if we do the same thing? I don’t mean the government bans movies, I mean we, as consumers just don’t go to the movies? If enough people just don’t go, the corporations will adapt to make money.
Remember that when your kid wants to buy that pair of Nikes.
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/fantastic-beasts-3-gay-dialogue-removed-warner-bros-explains-1235230373/
Disney Is Grooming Kids
We talked about Disney and their need to spread gender ideology through their films. Of course, they’re getting killed right now. People are dropping their Disney+ subscriptions (PolitiFact says Disney lost 350,000 subscribers in the last two weeks), not going to Disney World and not buying their crap.
The media is going out of their way to protect Disney along two fronts: Disney is right to go against this bill and Conservatives are causing trouble.
In the Washington Post, a writer named Christine Emba wrote an opinion piece called M-I-C-K-E-Y: He’s a Groomer Too!
Let’s get on with it:
Psst. Have you heard? Mickey Mouse is a groomer.
So wrote American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher, one of many on the far right who lately have wielded accusations of pedophilia and child sex abuse to slime opponents (real or cartoon) of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, more broadly known as the “don’t say gay” bill.
Way to start the article.
First off, I’m tired of everyone calling a Conservative someone who is on the “far right” like they are Nazis or something. He has a blog called The Conservative American. Rod Dreher is a Conservative. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Touchstone, Men’s Health, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He’s hardly extreme.
Also, the reason the bill is “more broadly known as” the don’t say gay bill is because dumbasses like this pushed that name. Here’s something I heard which is true. It can also be called the “don’t say straight bill” because no one can teach K-3 sex.
This was part of an extended salvo: “About the term ‘groomers,’” Dreher later clarified, “it’s usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society.”
Um, that’s what it does.
Ostensibly, then, this reckless deployment of a highly charged accusation is meant to keep kids safe from sexual confusion and harm. But the “groomer” discourse isn’t really about safety. It’s about control. And it could end up doing much more harm than good.
The “groomer” talking point has been taken up by political spokespeople, Fox News hosts and conservative celebrities, who have used the term to describe anyone from educators who let it slip that they have a same-sex partner to the Mouse himself. (Disney is under fire in conservative circles for having opposed Florida’s bill.) The suggestion is that by introducing — or simply being willing to introduce — children to questions of sexual orientation or gender identity, educators risk making young people more vulnerable to sexual predation or abuse. Indiscriminately labeling teachers “pedophiles” will help keep kids safe!
First off, 60% of Democrats think it’s weird to talk about sex and sexual identity with a five-year-old. I’m thinking it’s not only Conservatives that question the grooming of children. I also want to point out there is more sexual abuse of children in public schools than there was in the Catholic church. We don’t know who’s grooming for sex and who isn’t.
I also don’t want to hear anything from a Leftist about charging words and terms. The Left has been doing this forever. They changed the definition of racism. They loosely throw the term “phobia” around. They make up words. What’s ironic is she says Conservatives use the term “groomer” outside the standard definition (by the way, I don’t believe that. Groomer here is appropriate. More on that later) but, in the same article, she uses the super charged “don’t say gay bill”. And why? To control the narrative.
Of course, if conservatives really wanted to keep children safe from sexual predation, there is much they could do besides smear Mickey Mouse for occasionally sporting a pair of rainbow ears.
No, no, no. They are making films that normalize the trans and gay issues. They said they were doing that and they said they need to do it more. They admit they are sneaking it in. They’re doing a little more than wearing rainbow ears.
They might have spent more time closing the loopholes in Tennessee’s Republican-proposed “common-law marriage” bill that would have legalized child marriage (an amendment to address this oversight was added to the bill only this week, after progressive outcry). They might turn a more watchful eye toward members of their own party — Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, is actually under investigation to determine whether he had sex with a minor and engaged in sex trafficking. (Gaetz has emphatically denied the allegations.) They could have vocally supported legislation like the Emergency Funding for Child Protection Act, which was meant to support programs to prevent child abuse and neglect during the covid-19 pandemic. (That bill was eventually folded into the American Rescue Plan, which didn’t receive a single Republican vote.)
Some things:
- This is projection.
- The Tennessee bill was an oversight. It was fixed then passed.
- Matt Gaetz investigation started over a year ago. Notice, no one is talking about it anymore? That’s because the FBI isn’t investigating Gaetz. They are investigating the guy who accused Gaetz for blackmail.
- I won’t even start with the American Rescue plan. The reason it costs $100 for two packs of bubble gum and a Coke is because of the American Rescue plan.
None of that is happening. Which indicates that this frenzy about “groomers” and pedophiles is not about children’s well-being. Rather, it’s being used to manipulate a narrative and to discipline companies, individuals and even kids themselves.
The “Mickey is a groomer” attack stems from the idea that the best way to punish Disney for not getting in line with the Florida law is to accuse the corporation of pedophilia. And the tossing around of highly charged phrases is meant to silence teachers and educators in a way that legislation never could, by equating certain teaching material with pornography and the teachers themselves (especially those openly LGBTQ) with sexual predation.
Some things:
- To say that teachers and Disney should be talking about sex without parental permission is not in the best interest of the child.
- I will go a step further, if these people feel the need to talk about sex with a 5-year-old, they are groomers, even if they don’t want to have sex with the child. They are prepping the child to think sex is natural at 5-years-old, leaving them open to a pedophile. That’s grooming.
- I have read some of the material they were keeping in public school libraries. Oral sex, masturbation, sex toys and gay sex has been found in those books. With pictures.
- kind of sounds like pornography.
As conservative pundit Jesse Kelly put it in a Twitter thread that was later deleted: “Call them groomers and pedophiles if they oppose it. Put THEM on the defensive. Make THEM afraid.” He continued: “You have the high ground. Use it to destroy your enemy.”
It’s a cynical exploitation of loaded language to make bad-faith attacks. It’s also a way for parents to control what their children hear, by making anything that they oppose — same-sex marriage, say, or gender fluidity — seem beyond the pale.
Is she kidding?
The Left uses loaded language on an hourly basis. She did it a couple of times in this article. I think I talked about this before.
Although I don’t agree with the tactic, I do have some sympathy for the motive. It’s understandable that parents want to be the ones who teach their children what to believe. It’s worth asking just how early children need to be exposed to certain information about sex, or whether certain gender ideologies need to be discussed in a kindergarten classroom. Yet taken to the extreme — and the equating of early sex education with “grooming” is certainly extreme — these valid questions disappear in a haze of QAnon-inflected invective.
She doesn’t have sympathy for the motive of parents. How do I know? She’s equating parents who like the Parental Rights in Education with QAnon members. She might as well call them Nazis.
I have to be honest with you, I don’t even know what QAnon is and I’m as Conservative as it gets.
By the way, is that “charged language?
Plus, parents aren’t always right. And being involved in curriculum formation and teaching, while a worthy goal, does not mean controlling it from the top down. Sooner or later, all children become their own people — or at least they should. And over-sheltering can leave kids more open to harm.
Parents may not be right. But they do have more of an interest in their kids than the teachers do, or the government for that matter. And I think if we’ve learned anything over the last year, or in our lifetimes, the government has also been wrong a lot of the time. The difference between a parent being wrong and the government being wrong is a parent will try to fix things. The government just doubles down.
This new vocabulary game might end up backfiring. The conservative movement’s insistence on brandishing hyperbolic language will make their complaints sound less credible, not more. And if everything is “grooming,” soon nothing will be — which means parents may find it harder to call out real instances of abuse and predation when they do occur.
In that scenario, Mickey won’t be the one who has lost.
At least she didn’t say that teacher’s aren’t teaching this stuff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/07/mickey-mouse-is-a-groomer-conservative-talking-point/
https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/disney-employees-arrested-in-florida-human-trafficking-sting/