May 27, 2025 • 32 mins
A prominent blue state just passed legislation making it illegal to "misgender" or "deadname" someone in many contexts. I break this down and explain why it's illegal and misguided in this episode of the Brad vs Everyone podcast. Plus, Republican senators revolt against the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," and a report details the most controversial part of Trump's immigration policy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is now illegal to dead name a trans person
in Colorado. Finally, good news for trans people. None of
this is forcing somebody to do something that they don't
want to.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Another day, another insane law being pushed in the name
of trans rights. We're going to break down the latest
crazy law coming out of the state of Colorado purporting
to advance trans rights but actually undermining the First Amendment.
(00:30):
Plus the big beautiful bill heads to the Senate, and
a report highlights the controversial side of Trump's immigration policies.
All this and so much more is coming up on
today's episode of The Brad Versus Everyone podcast, my daily
show where we take on the craziest ideas from across
the Internet, our media, and our politics, all from an
independent perspective. So for our first story, we've got to
(00:52):
check in on Colorado, the very blue, heavily democratic controlled state,
where they're doing some stuff that, honestly, guys, this is
getting dystopia. Take a listen to this reporting from nine
News about a bill that was just signed into law
by Colorado Governor Jared Polis that means misgendering is illegal now.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
A bill creating new protections for transgender people will soon
become law. Democratic Governor Jared Polis signed the Kelly Loving
Act today, named after a transgender woman killed in the
Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. This legislation expands the
state's definition of discrimination to include intentionally refusing to use
someone's preferred name. Also makes it easier for somebody to
(01:34):
change their name on legal documents. The bill had been
watered down now excludes language that would have had courts
consider a parent's refusal to recognize their child's transgender identity
in custody battles.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So it is a good thing that one of the
controversial parts of this bill that I talked about on
the show some weeks ago, where they were actually going
to make it a form of custody dispute relevant factor
if you didn't use your child's preferred pronouns, including like
neo pronouns and the lot, they were going to hold
that against you in custy disputes, potentially taking people's kids
(02:06):
away because they wouldn't affirm controversial notions of gender identity
that are not really rooted in science in many cases,
which was of course insane and no better way to
cause outrage and alarm people than to go after parents, right.
So I was glad that was stripped out of the bill,
but what we're left with is still a pretty remarkably
radical and in my view, obviously unconstitutional piece of legislation.
(02:29):
Signed into law by moderate Governor Jared Polus, this law
classifies misgendering referring to somebody by the pronouns that are
not the pronouns they prefer, so for example, referring to
a transwoman as he and him, referring to their biology
rather than their preferred and state at identity, and dead
naming use somebody's old name after they have declared that
(02:51):
they prefer to be called a new name, or even
legally changed their name, which you can do well. The
new bill classifies these things in places of public accommodation chas, restaurants, bars,
retail stores, and in housing and employment as illegal forms
of discrimination. That means, in these contexts, it's essentially illegal
(03:12):
for employees to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of
a person who identifies as transgender or even non binary,
or even on the surface. This law seems to suggest
that if somebody goes by neo pronouns and demands to
be called slug slugs, then it would be illegal for
somebody in a place of public accommodation to not do
(03:33):
that and go along with that. Now, under this law,
the only exceptions included are for the name portion if
it includes offensive language, which is very vague, or if
it's being requested for frivolous purposes, which again is very vague,
And then no exceptions at all are included for the pronouns.
So forget the term preferred pronouns in the state of Colorado.
(03:54):
They're now mandatory pronouns, at least in some contexts. This
news is actually being celebrate it by some transactivists and
TikTok influencers, like this one video where interesting points were made.
Take a listen.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It is now illegal to dead name a trans person
in Colorado. House Bill thirteen twelve, also known as the
Kelly Loving Act, is finally good news for trans people.
The bill was named to honor Kelly Loving, a trans
woman who was shot and killed in the twenty twenty
two Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. If this law
makes it illegal to dead name trans people informal settings
such as workplaces or schools, it also makes it significantly
(04:33):
easier for Coloradoians toes I use Colorado's Coloradoians. It makes
it easier for people from Colorado to change their names
and their gender markers on their birth certificates, marriage certificates,
and driver's licenses. This law will also allow students to
choose whatever uniform they want to if they go to
a school that requires a uniform, which means that anyone
(04:54):
can wear a boys' uniform, anyone can wear a girl's uniform.
What would the non binary uniform be. It would be
entirely you're gonna show up to school looking like the
Lockness Monster. But I would also like to point out
that good news for trans people is just being able
to be yourself. None of this is forcing somebody to
do something that they don't want to. It's just giving
people and like everybody, this applies to everybody, not just
(05:17):
trans people. It just gives everybody more security in being
who they are. Think about that this is.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
A w So the reason I had to include this
video was because it got like half a million views
and lots of people were positively lapping this up in
the comments. But it's just so obviously incoherent. You just
described a bill making it illegal to dissent. Other people
are being forced by the power of the government to
affirm your pronouns and affirm your name, choice, and your identity,
(05:44):
to agree to messages and ideas conveyed by the usage
of those words that they may not agree with internally
or may contradict their fundamentally held values and beliefs. And
you're saying this takes nothing from nobody, This harms nobody.
It's just people getting to their lives. No, that's the
very problem. I've always thought. You should be free to
call yourself whatever you want. You should be free to
(06:07):
ask other people to call you whatever you like, and
then it should be up to them to decide whether
they want to do that, because that's just what it
means to live in a free society with freedom of
speech protected by the First Amendment, rather than having the
government force you to affirm a very radical and very
new set of beliefs like this, but to actually describe
(06:29):
this legislation and then come to the conclusion just seconds
later because this is a pretty short video, that it's
not forcing anyone to do anything is bizarre, Like, are
we not teaching basic reading, comprehension, and critical thinking adequately
in schools anymore, because how you can maybe you still
(06:49):
support it, we can have that debate, but how you
can come to that conclusion after just contradicting yourself like
thirty seconds before is kind of jaw dropping, even by
the abysmally low standards and expectations that I have for
TikTok political commentary. So we should just be honest about
what this law is. It is very obviously an attempt
(07:10):
to have the government, the state government in Colorado, put
one its thumb on one side of the scale, to
basically use the power of the state to force people
to adopt one side of a hot, contested, ongoing debate
about the meaning of sex and gender in society and
if anything, embrace an affirm a pretty pretty minority viewpoint.
(07:32):
I think it's fair to say on some of this stuff.
By mandating that skeptics use people's pronouns or names, even
when they're stretched to the point of absurdity, they are
forcing you to affirm a belief system against your will.
And some supporters of this might try to deny that,
but imagine the opposite. Imagine it was illegal for you
to use your preferred pronouns, or it was illegal for
(07:53):
your friends to call you what you like to be called.
I'm pretty sure you would see it then, how that
violates your kind of fun? The mental rights to free
expression and freedom of conscience and beliefs. It's the same
thing applied in reverse, guys. This is just basic one
plus one equals two stuff when it comes to the
philosophy of rights and coexistence. And the advocates behind this
(08:16):
law really weren't very shy that their intention was to
do exactly this, to silence the opposition, to force their
viewpoint onto others through the power of the government. For example,
a state lawmaker named Representative Lorena Garcia said, this bill
is the bare minimum of what we can do as
a state. And the fact that we have to legislate
for people to not bully and misgender and dead name
(08:37):
people because of whatever insecurities they might have is sad
to me. Why can't we just respect one another? Why
can't we just understand that someone else's identity has nothing
to do with me or you. It has nothing to
do with me or you, But you're legally forcing us
to embrace and affirm it and participate in it, so
(08:59):
clearly has something to do with us. And I'm sorry,
but people might disagree with some of this stuff for
reasons other than their own insecurities. And I understand that
Representative Garcia thinks that it's respectful to use people's pronouns
and refer names and neo pronouns or whatever. But respect
is not legally mandated in a free country. And more importantly,
(09:23):
people disagree about that. They disagree about what the respectful
thing to do is. And guys like again, people have
the freedom to say things you consider disrespectful. Have you
you read the First Amendment, my friend, It is first
in the Bill of Rights for a reason. Some strident
feminist types probably consider it very disrespectful for you to
(09:46):
refer to biologically male people as a woman as she
slash her. But they can't make that illegal, not in
a free country, not without violating the First Amendment. Because again,
respect is to some degree in the if the beholder,
and a lot of this stuff is subjective, and that's
why people should be allowed to decide for themselves. I mean,
the state lawmakers like Garcia were very open about the
(10:09):
idea that they're trying to legislate away people's right to
disagree on this issue, but that's unconstitutional, which is why
a coalition of concern groups is suing the State of
Colorado and challenging this legislation, arguing that it violates the
First and fourteenth Amendment because it explicitly engages in unconstitutional
(10:29):
viewpoint discrimination and quote compels them to use language endorsing
the state's view on highly contested and highly political matters
of sex and gender. To me, the people filing this
lawsuit are just obviously correct. Good people can reach different
conclusions on how to best treat and handle situations where
people have different gender identities or experienced gender dysphoria, and
(10:53):
they can decide for themselves whether they want to go
along with pronoun usage in all contexts, in some contexts,
or in no contexts. So that's the point. They can
decide for themselves, and yes, even in a place of
public accommodation. To me, it's just obviously extremely censorious overreach,
and it's the government coming down firmly on one side
(11:15):
of a contested social debate and trying to squeeze the
other side out of public life and being able to
express their opinions openly. That's just not allowed under our constitution.
And even if you're a pro trans radical person who
thinks every pronoun under the sun is valid, you shouldn't
want the government to have that power because that same
(11:36):
exact power could be used in red states to make
it illegal for people to use pronouns that are not
corresponding with biology in places of public accommodation. Like that
shouldn't be a Pandora's box of government power that anybody
wants to open. So I obviously think this law should
be struck down. And it's really a remarkable reflection to
(11:57):
me that even like moderate members of the Democrat Party
like Governor Jared Polis are somehow all in on this
kind of thing. But yeah, it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, and
the courts, this is why they exist, and this is
why it's important to uphold their legitimacy and follow their rulings. Yes, Maga,
I'm talking to you at least some of you who
have a problem with that on other issues, because they're
(12:18):
there to uphold our rights, and in cases like this,
it becomes obvious why that's so necessary and so important.
Yet I just also have to stress to Democrats that
set the law aside, set the constitution aside. For a moment.
You're never going to win like this. You're never going
to force and to bully people into accepting your social agenda.
(12:39):
This kind of approach, this comply or be crushed attitude
of cancel, illegal, criminalize, punish, is only going to engender
more resistance and more hostility and further inflame the cultural
war that is tearing this country apart. And I really
struggle to understand how after the last several years, the
(13:02):
last half decade of evidence, Democrats could still be going
with this obviously counterproductive and divisive approach. But you guys,
let me know what you think in the comments below,
especially the Colorado people in my audience. I want to
hear from y'all, and do make sure you hit that
like button while you're at it. Make sure you subscribed
if you aren't yet, please do consider becoming a member
(13:22):
of the channel and supporting my works. My videos keep
getting demonetized. I just turned that option on, so definitely
check it out. Remember you can send me voice notes
for my Friday episodes with your welk car stories, your
personal situations where you need advice. I'm getting so many
of those and loving going through them and have so
many good ones planned for this Friday. But now let's
talk politics, and let's check in on Washington, DC, where
(13:46):
the girls are fighting in the gop. Okay, they are
not all getting along because the so called Big Beautiful Bill,
the Trump blessed massive budget spending bill and tax cut
bill that is moving through Congress just passed the House
I think by just one single vote, which is like
(14:06):
a razor thin margin, and it goes to the Senate
where it faces similarly pretty tough prospects of getting through
but has to receive at least a bare majority of votes.
It can go fifty to fifty, and then the Vice
president gets to break the tie, so they need fifty
votes to pass this. And you already have multiple Republican
(14:27):
senators breaking with the president on this and speaking out
against the Big Beautiful Bill for reasons that seem pretty
straightforward to me. Here is Senator Ron Johnson, who is
a reliable Trump Republican from Wisconsin, but is pretty outspoken
here about not wanting to go along with this bill
because it adds too much to the deficit and the debt,
(14:49):
which Trump promised to entirely eliminate. Take a listen to
what Ron Johnson had to say.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
President Tronks suggested that the debt is not really top
of mind of his concerns. He wants Republicans to fall
in line. He wants republic to pass the bill. You
told CNND quote, somebody's got to be the dad that says,
I know y'all want to go to Disney World, but
we can't afford it. I guess I'm going to be
that guy unquote. So how determined are you to be
that guy? If it actually means telling President Trump you
(15:16):
are going to vote against the bill, and you're going
to try to get other Republican senators to join you
unless there are major major changes.
Speaker 5 (15:23):
Well, in twenty ten, I sprang on the Tea Party movement,
and as I did parraise my I would shout, this
is a fight for freedom. We are mortgaging our children's future.
It's wrong, it's immoral. It has to stop. I haven't changed.
My campaign promised in twenty ten and every campaign after that,
was to stop mortgaging our children's future. It's immoral, it's wrong.
It has to stop. And so he may not be
(15:46):
worried about that. I am extremely worried about that. That
is my primary goal running for Congress. This is our moment.
We've witnessed an unprecedented level of increase spending fifty eight
percent since twenty nineteen, other than World War Two. This
is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable
pre pandemic level spending. And again, I think you can
(16:08):
do it, and the spending that we would eliminate people
wouldn't even notice. But you have to do the work,
which takes time.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I think he's spot on here. You have to understand
that we're looking at under this bill running massive, massive
budget deficits in the very near future, even bigger than
under baseline law. For example, according to the non Partisan
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the twenty twenty seven
deficit will be more than one third larger under this bill,
(16:36):
So instead of the projected current number of one point
seven trillion, it will be a two point three trillion
estimated deficit. That's insane. That's a huge, huge budget deficit,
and trillions dollars more piled onto the backs of young
people like myself who will be paying off the interest
for the rest of our lives, and under generations that
(16:58):
aren't even born yet. So my view on this has
always been very simple, I understand that maybe during a
recession you might want to run a small budget deficit
to kind of stimulate the economy with text cuts or
different spending programs. But then you should run a surplus
in when you're not in a recession to balance it
out over time, because it is, like Ron Johnson says,
(17:20):
massively immoral to enjoy benefits today, which is what this
spending is supposed to be. I understand that not all
of it actually goes to benefits, to benefiting people. A
lot of it doesn't. But this spending is supposed to
be for things we want today, but we are passing
the tab down to future generations. How would we look
at parents who took out credit cards in their children
(17:42):
or grandchildren's names, bought a bunch of stuff for them
for themselves with it, and then let their grandkids and
kids pay it off the rest of their lives. We'd
be like, Wow, those are terrible people, very selfish, very
unfair of them to do that. That is what Congress
does when it runs these massive deficits and just piles
on to the trillions and trillions of dollars of the
(18:04):
national debt, which hurts the economy in a bunch of ways,
and again has these massive interest payments that people will
have to pay off for decades and decades to come.
I do think that is immoral and wrong, and basically
every Republican says they think the same, but then when
they actually get into power, they go and blow massive
holes in the deficit in the budget. Anyway, another one
who's speaking out on this is Senator Ran Paul, who
(18:27):
is a strong fiscal hawk. He had this to say
about this whole fiasco.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
Biden's spending levels. When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican
other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels,
which are going to give us a two point two
trillion dollar deficit. Now, if you increase the debt sailing
four to five trillion dollars, that means they're planning on
two trillion this year and more than two trillion next year.
That's just not conservative. So I've told them if they
(18:53):
strip out the debt sailing, I'll consider, even with the imperfections,
voting for the.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Rest of the bill.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
But I can't vote to raise debt sealing five trillion.
There's got to be someone left in Washington who thinks
debt is wrong and deficits are wrong, and once to
go in the other direction, the idea that we're going
to explode deficits and the projections are now looking at
over three trillion dollars in deficits over the next ten years.
I think is just, you know, not a serious proposal.
Somebody has to stand up and yell. The emperor has
(19:21):
no clothes and everybody's falling in lockstep on this pass
the big beautiful bill. Don't question anything. Well, Conservatives do
need to stand up and have their voice heard. This
is a problem we've been facing for decades now, and
if we don't stand up on it, I really fear
the direction of the country is born.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I agree with him again. I mean, I understand that
they have a very thin majority in Congress, so they
can't get a perfect bill, and they have to try
to appeal to like moderate squish Republicans and the Freedom
Caucus or whatever. But they have to be able to
do better than this, a bill that's expected, according to
the Wall Street Journal, to add three trillion dollars or
(19:59):
so to the deficit over a decade. When they ran
on balancing the budget entirely and ending budget deficits, which
of course was never realistic. But you could at least
not increase them by that much, couldn't you? Is that
really too much to ask. Most Republicans are just scared
of Trump. He wants to pass this bill. He's attacking
(20:20):
people who don't go along with it. I give credit
to the few out there like Ron Johnson and Ran
Paul who apparently actually believe at least some of the
things they say they believe, and are willing to take
a stand even if it's going to get them angry
tweets from the White House. It's been one of the
great sorrows of my political career, as somebody who's quite
fiscally conservative, to just watch ninety nine percent of Republicans
(20:45):
lie to my face for years that they were fiscal hawks,
that they believed in free market capitalism, that they were
going to balance the budget, that they were going to
do all these things, and then get in power and
give massive handouts to corporations and special interests they align with,
carve massive loopholes in the tax code for special interests
that benefit them, and refuse to meaningfully cut spending or
(21:07):
roll back these entitlement programs that are driving our country
into this massive fiscal crisis. Maybe I was dumb in
naive for ever believing any of them. I always knew
some of them had to be full of it, but
I didn't realize that it was basically all except a handful.
What do you guys think? Do you support the big
beautiful Bill. I certainly don't. I understand you can't get
(21:28):
everything you want, but you have to be able to
do better than this monstrosity if you ask me. But
I definitely want to hear from you, guys, So let
me know what you think in the comments. Up next,
we're going to talk about what I think is probably
the most insidious and immoral thing from the entire Trump
presidency so far. I think it was very clear, at
least to me, that Biden's border policies were a catastrophe.
(21:53):
We had a huge border crisis. Border states were overrun,
You had millions of people coming here illegally without proper vetting,
without order, and it was an absolute disaster. And Trump
was elected with a mandate to sort out this disaster,
and to be clear, he did. His policy changes that
the border have resulted in extremely low levels of illegal
(22:15):
border crossings and apprehensions he's seemingly solved the border crisis
with his policies, but he's done more than that. He's
gone above and beyond in some ways that I didn't
expect and that I do think violates some pretty basic
aspects of human rights and constitutional law. For example, I'm
(22:36):
going to pull you a clip of the Cato Institute's
David Bier on MSNBC. And yes, I know it's MSNBC,
but he's a right wing libertarian guy from the Cato Institute,
which is not a liberal source whatsoever. And he outlines
some details from a new report, but how the Trump
administration incarcerated roughly fifty legal immigrants in an El Salvador
(22:58):
prison with no trial and no charges, even though they
never broke any immigration laws at all. Take a listen
to him summarizing his report, and then I'll get into
the details.
Speaker 7 (23:07):
The Trump administration expelled, really rendered these individuals from Venezuela
to l Salvador to a prison. We are imprisoning them
at our expense. Again, no charges, no trials, not even
a hearing before their removal.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
We went through we.
Speaker 7 (23:26):
Documented at least fifty cases, fifty out of the two
hundred and fifty who were sent fifty cases of people
who came legally to the United States. They never violated
any immigration law. And the whole premise of the administration's
argument here is people came here illegally, so they have
no due process, they have no rights whatsoever under the Constitution.
(23:47):
These people came legally at the invitation of our government.
They were detained and then ultimately expelled without a hearing,
without due process. And that's the concern here for everyone
who has who whether you are a US citizen, whether
you're a legal permanent resident, whether you're someone else who's
come here legally. This is with the administration's advertisement to
(24:09):
the world of what America does to people who come
to our country. We don't give you any rights. And
that should be not only scare immigrants who are coming here,
but Americans who are traveling abroad, because we will have
no right to object when a country does that to
a US citizen traveling abroad to an authoritarian country who
(24:30):
does these kind of things.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
So just hearing him describe it like that is astounding.
It is wrong to incarcerate people in prisons without charges
or trial, even believe that if they're illegal immigrants. I
think they're entitled to basic due process, but especially if
they're legal immigrants, like refugees or people who got permission
to enter the country, we are violating their human rights
(24:55):
by sending them to and paying for them to be
in El Salvador prisons with horrible conditions, and we haven't
even convicted them in a court of law. If they
truly are the horrible people that Trump says that they are,
then I want them imprisoned, absolutely. But you still owe
every human being a basic level of human rights, and
that includes a right to habeas corpus, to know the
(25:16):
charges against you, a right to a trial where crimes
against you are proven. They could have just deported people
who were here illegally. They sent a lot of these
people to countries that aren't where they're from, not their
home nation, and then they didn't just deport them. They
paid for them to be imprisoned, which is like effectively
the same thing as US imprisoning them, which we couldn't
(25:36):
do without a trial or charges. And I don't really
see how it's any different just because we pay another
country to do it. I got to give you guys
more details from this Cato Institute report because it's honestly
one of the most horrifying things I've read in a
long time. Fifty plus Venezuelan's imprisoned in El Salvador came
to the US legally, never violated immigration law. These people
(25:56):
came to the United States with advanced US government permission,
were vetted and screened before arrival, violated no US immigration law,
and the US government turned around and disappeared them without
due process to a foreign prison. It is paying the
Salvadorian government to continue to keep them incarcerated. So this
is all sourced and all vetted. These are factually true claims,
(26:19):
and we are paying for the Salvadorian government to imprison
these people but never gave them charges or a trial,
to say nothing of the really horrifying conditions in some
of these prisons that I think violate the Eighth Amendment
and the prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment if we
were to ever do them here in the US, and
we're just contracting it out to another country. I oppose
(26:40):
this even for illegal immigrants, but it's exponentially even more
horrifying that they're doing it to legal immigrants as well.
These legal immigrants include a temporary visa holder and four
men who were authorized to travel through the US Refugee program.
The government vetted these refugees abroad and concluded that they
would face persecution, letting them resettle in the United States.
(27:02):
The other forty five legal immigrants scheduled appointments using the
CPB one app through which they were permitted to seek entry.
Among those with appointments, twenty four were paroled into the
United States, where they could live and work legally for
up to two years, while the other twenty one were
detained at the port of entry. A lot of these
people don't exactly seem like supervillains on the surface either.
(27:23):
The men were workers, construction laborers, pipe installers, cooks, delivery drivers,
a soccer coach, a makeup artist we talked about the
makeup artist on the show before, a mechanic, a veterinarian,
a musician, and an entrepreneur. Most of those who were
released quickly found jobs in the United States. A majority
of the men are fathers. Altogether, the men were trying
to support forty four children. The US government did not
(27:45):
inform their families, lawyers, or anyone else of their impending
imprisonment at US government expense in a Salvadorian prison known
for torture and other abuses that would be illegal inside
the United States. Agents simply disappeared them without charge or
trial or even acknowledgment, which is rightly considered a crime
against humanity. That is astounding to me that these people
(28:07):
were sent to this prison, and their families and lawyers
weren't even told where they were sent or why, or
how to get in contact with them and whatnot. Can
anyone really defend that, even if you broadly support Trump
being tough on the border deporting illegal immigrants, all of
this is just so remarkably incredibly above and beyond to me. Now,
(28:28):
the Trump administration says that these people are all confirmed
members of gangs and criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations, but
they don't have a whole lot to back up those claims,
as this report makes clear. Investigations by The New York Times, Bloomberg,
and CBS News have all found that few of the
imprisoned men have any criminal record. All these legal immigrants
(28:50):
denied gang membership, and only two appear to have had
a US criminal conviction of any kind, both for minor
drug offenses. About two dozen of them. The legal immigrants
were detained immediately at the port of entry where they
were authorized to seek entry, so there is no possibility
that they demonstrated any gang ties or committed any crimes
inside the United States. Most, at least forty two were
(29:13):
labeled as gang members primarily based on their tattoos, which
Venezuelan gangs do not use to identify members and are
not reliable indicators of gang membership. According to court documents,
DHS created a checklist to determine that heavily weights, dressing
like a gang member, using quote gang signs, and most critically, tattoos.
(29:35):
No criminal conviction, arrest, or even witness testimony is required. Wow,
call me crazy, call me a woke lib if you want.
I don't think we should be sending people to prisons
based on what tattoos they have. That's not exactly an
exact science, and lots of people in the Latin American
(29:58):
world have all kinds of tattoos. Doesn't mean they're in
a gang or a criminal and that we can just
skip the whole charges, trial evidence thing. I think this
is a violation of human rights, and I also think
it's a violation of their constitutional rights, because even though
they're non citizens, the Constitution applies to non citizens as well.
(30:19):
It very clearly says in the Fifth and fourteenth Amendments
persons are entitled to due process of law and can't
be cannot be deprived of liberty by the US government
without due process. And in this case, they're being sent
to prisons by the US, a government contracted out, with
no trial, no charges, and based on what tattoos they have.
I don't know how anybody can think that's anything other
(30:41):
than a blatant violation of human rights and constitutional rights.
I'm really horrified by it, and I say that as
somebody who is in many ways supportive of many of
Trump's immigration policies. I want border security, I want to
stop the flow of illegal immigration. I think criminal illegal
aliens should be deported who actually are in gangs, who
do come here and commit time. But to just be
(31:01):
rounding people up like this and condemning them to these
horrific fates with so little process or evidence or fairness,
I think is a really ugly and evil thing to do,
and I think it will have real ramifications for the
US economy. People are not going to want to come
here as tourists. People are not going to want to
send their students here to come to our colleges and
(31:23):
our universities. If they really think that people who are
here legally can have their rights violated in this egregious manner.
It's not moral, it's not right, and it's not in
America's best interest long term to send this kind of
message to the world. That's my take. If some of
you guys disagree, I want to hear from you in
the comments, Please do explain why, and with that we'll
(31:45):
wrap up this episode of the Brad Versus Everyone podcast.
Thank you all so much for tuning in. Please do
make sure you subscribe if you aren't yet, do it
that I like button before you go, And with that,
we'll talk again real soon.
It is now illegal to dead name a trans person
in Colorado. Finally, good news for trans people. None of
this is forcing somebody to do something that they don't
want to.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Another day, another insane law being pushed in the name
of trans rights. We're going to break down the latest
crazy law coming out of the state of Colorado purporting
to advance trans rights but actually undermining the First Amendment.
(00:30):
Plus the big beautiful bill heads to the Senate, and
a report highlights the controversial side of Trump's immigration policies.
All this and so much more is coming up on
today's episode of The Brad Versus Everyone podcast, my daily
show where we take on the craziest ideas from across
the Internet, our media, and our politics, all from an
independent perspective. So for our first story, we've got to
(00:52):
check in on Colorado, the very blue, heavily democratic controlled state,
where they're doing some stuff that, honestly, guys, this is
getting dystopia. Take a listen to this reporting from nine
News about a bill that was just signed into law
by Colorado Governor Jared Polis that means misgendering is illegal now.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
A bill creating new protections for transgender people will soon
become law. Democratic Governor Jared Polis signed the Kelly Loving
Act today, named after a transgender woman killed in the
Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. This legislation expands the
state's definition of discrimination to include intentionally refusing to use
someone's preferred name. Also makes it easier for somebody to
(01:34):
change their name on legal documents. The bill had been
watered down now excludes language that would have had courts
consider a parent's refusal to recognize their child's transgender identity
in custody battles.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So it is a good thing that one of the
controversial parts of this bill that I talked about on
the show some weeks ago, where they were actually going
to make it a form of custody dispute relevant factor
if you didn't use your child's preferred pronouns, including like
neo pronouns and the lot, they were going to hold
that against you in custy disputes, potentially taking people's kids
(02:06):
away because they wouldn't affirm controversial notions of gender identity
that are not really rooted in science in many cases,
which was of course insane and no better way to
cause outrage and alarm people than to go after parents, right.
So I was glad that was stripped out of the bill,
but what we're left with is still a pretty remarkably
radical and in my view, obviously unconstitutional piece of legislation.
(02:29):
Signed into law by moderate Governor Jared Polus, this law
classifies misgendering referring to somebody by the pronouns that are
not the pronouns they prefer, so for example, referring to
a transwoman as he and him, referring to their biology
rather than their preferred and state at identity, and dead
naming use somebody's old name after they have declared that
(02:51):
they prefer to be called a new name, or even
legally changed their name, which you can do well. The
new bill classifies these things in places of public accommodation chas, restaurants, bars,
retail stores, and in housing and employment as illegal forms
of discrimination. That means, in these contexts, it's essentially illegal
(03:12):
for employees to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of
a person who identifies as transgender or even non binary,
or even on the surface. This law seems to suggest
that if somebody goes by neo pronouns and demands to
be called slug slugs, then it would be illegal for
somebody in a place of public accommodation to not do
(03:33):
that and go along with that. Now, under this law,
the only exceptions included are for the name portion if
it includes offensive language, which is very vague, or if
it's being requested for frivolous purposes, which again is very vague,
And then no exceptions at all are included for the pronouns.
So forget the term preferred pronouns in the state of Colorado.
(03:54):
They're now mandatory pronouns, at least in some contexts. This
news is actually being celebrate it by some transactivists and
TikTok influencers, like this one video where interesting points were made.
Take a listen.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
It is now illegal to dead name a trans person
in Colorado. House Bill thirteen twelve, also known as the
Kelly Loving Act, is finally good news for trans people.
The bill was named to honor Kelly Loving, a trans
woman who was shot and killed in the twenty twenty
two Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. If this law
makes it illegal to dead name trans people informal settings
such as workplaces or schools, it also makes it significantly
(04:33):
easier for Coloradoians toes I use Colorado's Coloradoians. It makes
it easier for people from Colorado to change their names
and their gender markers on their birth certificates, marriage certificates,
and driver's licenses. This law will also allow students to
choose whatever uniform they want to if they go to
a school that requires a uniform, which means that anyone
(04:54):
can wear a boys' uniform, anyone can wear a girl's uniform.
What would the non binary uniform be. It would be
entirely you're gonna show up to school looking like the
Lockness Monster. But I would also like to point out
that good news for trans people is just being able
to be yourself. None of this is forcing somebody to
do something that they don't want to. It's just giving
people and like everybody, this applies to everybody, not just
(05:17):
trans people. It just gives everybody more security in being
who they are. Think about that this is.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
A w So the reason I had to include this
video was because it got like half a million views
and lots of people were positively lapping this up in
the comments. But it's just so obviously incoherent. You just
described a bill making it illegal to dissent. Other people
are being forced by the power of the government to
affirm your pronouns and affirm your name, choice, and your identity,
(05:44):
to agree to messages and ideas conveyed by the usage
of those words that they may not agree with internally
or may contradict their fundamentally held values and beliefs. And
you're saying this takes nothing from nobody, This harms nobody.
It's just people getting to their lives. No, that's the
very problem. I've always thought. You should be free to
call yourself whatever you want. You should be free to
(06:07):
ask other people to call you whatever you like, and
then it should be up to them to decide whether
they want to do that, because that's just what it
means to live in a free society with freedom of
speech protected by the First Amendment, rather than having the
government force you to affirm a very radical and very
new set of beliefs like this, but to actually describe
(06:29):
this legislation and then come to the conclusion just seconds
later because this is a pretty short video, that it's
not forcing anyone to do anything is bizarre, Like, are
we not teaching basic reading, comprehension, and critical thinking adequately
in schools anymore, because how you can maybe you still
(06:49):
support it, we can have that debate, but how you
can come to that conclusion after just contradicting yourself like
thirty seconds before is kind of jaw dropping, even by
the abysmally low standards and expectations that I have for
TikTok political commentary. So we should just be honest about
what this law is. It is very obviously an attempt
(07:10):
to have the government, the state government in Colorado, put
one its thumb on one side of the scale, to
basically use the power of the state to force people
to adopt one side of a hot, contested, ongoing debate
about the meaning of sex and gender in society and
if anything, embrace an affirm a pretty pretty minority viewpoint.
(07:32):
I think it's fair to say on some of this stuff.
By mandating that skeptics use people's pronouns or names, even
when they're stretched to the point of absurdity, they are
forcing you to affirm a belief system against your will.
And some supporters of this might try to deny that,
but imagine the opposite. Imagine it was illegal for you
to use your preferred pronouns, or it was illegal for
(07:53):
your friends to call you what you like to be called.
I'm pretty sure you would see it then, how that
violates your kind of fun? The mental rights to free
expression and freedom of conscience and beliefs. It's the same
thing applied in reverse, guys. This is just basic one
plus one equals two stuff when it comes to the
philosophy of rights and coexistence. And the advocates behind this
(08:16):
law really weren't very shy that their intention was to
do exactly this, to silence the opposition, to force their
viewpoint onto others through the power of the government. For example,
a state lawmaker named Representative Lorena Garcia said, this bill
is the bare minimum of what we can do as
a state. And the fact that we have to legislate
for people to not bully and misgender and dead name
(08:37):
people because of whatever insecurities they might have is sad
to me. Why can't we just respect one another? Why
can't we just understand that someone else's identity has nothing
to do with me or you. It has nothing to
do with me or you, But you're legally forcing us
to embrace and affirm it and participate in it, so
(08:59):
clearly has something to do with us. And I'm sorry,
but people might disagree with some of this stuff for
reasons other than their own insecurities. And I understand that
Representative Garcia thinks that it's respectful to use people's pronouns
and refer names and neo pronouns or whatever. But respect
is not legally mandated in a free country. And more importantly,
(09:23):
people disagree about that. They disagree about what the respectful
thing to do is. And guys like again, people have
the freedom to say things you consider disrespectful. Have you
you read the First Amendment, my friend, It is first
in the Bill of Rights for a reason. Some strident
feminist types probably consider it very disrespectful for you to
(09:46):
refer to biologically male people as a woman as she
slash her. But they can't make that illegal, not in
a free country, not without violating the First Amendment. Because again,
respect is to some degree in the if the beholder,
and a lot of this stuff is subjective, and that's
why people should be allowed to decide for themselves. I mean,
the state lawmakers like Garcia were very open about the
(10:09):
idea that they're trying to legislate away people's right to
disagree on this issue, but that's unconstitutional, which is why
a coalition of concern groups is suing the State of
Colorado and challenging this legislation, arguing that it violates the
First and fourteenth Amendment because it explicitly engages in unconstitutional
(10:29):
viewpoint discrimination and quote compels them to use language endorsing
the state's view on highly contested and highly political matters
of sex and gender. To me, the people filing this
lawsuit are just obviously correct. Good people can reach different
conclusions on how to best treat and handle situations where
people have different gender identities or experienced gender dysphoria, and
(10:53):
they can decide for themselves whether they want to go
along with pronoun usage in all contexts, in some contexts,
or in no contexts. So that's the point. They can
decide for themselves, and yes, even in a place of
public accommodation. To me, it's just obviously extremely censorious overreach,
and it's the government coming down firmly on one side
(11:15):
of a contested social debate and trying to squeeze the
other side out of public life and being able to
express their opinions openly. That's just not allowed under our constitution.
And even if you're a pro trans radical person who
thinks every pronoun under the sun is valid, you shouldn't
want the government to have that power because that same
(11:36):
exact power could be used in red states to make
it illegal for people to use pronouns that are not
corresponding with biology in places of public accommodation. Like that
shouldn't be a Pandora's box of government power that anybody
wants to open. So I obviously think this law should
be struck down. And it's really a remarkable reflection to
(11:57):
me that even like moderate members of the Democrat Party
like Governor Jared Polis are somehow all in on this
kind of thing. But yeah, it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, and
the courts, this is why they exist, and this is
why it's important to uphold their legitimacy and follow their rulings. Yes, Maga,
I'm talking to you at least some of you who
have a problem with that on other issues, because they're
(12:18):
there to uphold our rights, and in cases like this,
it becomes obvious why that's so necessary and so important.
Yet I just also have to stress to Democrats that
set the law aside, set the constitution aside. For a moment.
You're never going to win like this. You're never going
to force and to bully people into accepting your social agenda.
(12:39):
This kind of approach, this comply or be crushed attitude
of cancel, illegal, criminalize, punish, is only going to engender
more resistance and more hostility and further inflame the cultural
war that is tearing this country apart. And I really
struggle to understand how after the last several years, the
(13:02):
last half decade of evidence, Democrats could still be going
with this obviously counterproductive and divisive approach. But you guys,
let me know what you think in the comments below,
especially the Colorado people in my audience. I want to
hear from y'all, and do make sure you hit that
like button while you're at it. Make sure you subscribed
if you aren't yet, please do consider becoming a member
(13:22):
of the channel and supporting my works. My videos keep
getting demonetized. I just turned that option on, so definitely
check it out. Remember you can send me voice notes
for my Friday episodes with your welk car stories, your
personal situations where you need advice. I'm getting so many
of those and loving going through them and have so
many good ones planned for this Friday. But now let's
talk politics, and let's check in on Washington, DC, where
(13:46):
the girls are fighting in the gop. Okay, they are
not all getting along because the so called Big Beautiful Bill,
the Trump blessed massive budget spending bill and tax cut
bill that is moving through Congress just passed the House
I think by just one single vote, which is like
(14:06):
a razor thin margin, and it goes to the Senate
where it faces similarly pretty tough prospects of getting through
but has to receive at least a bare majority of votes.
It can go fifty to fifty, and then the Vice
president gets to break the tie, so they need fifty
votes to pass this. And you already have multiple Republican
(14:27):
senators breaking with the president on this and speaking out
against the Big Beautiful Bill for reasons that seem pretty
straightforward to me. Here is Senator Ron Johnson, who is
a reliable Trump Republican from Wisconsin, but is pretty outspoken
here about not wanting to go along with this bill
because it adds too much to the deficit and the debt,
(14:49):
which Trump promised to entirely eliminate. Take a listen to
what Ron Johnson had to say.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
President Tronks suggested that the debt is not really top
of mind of his concerns. He wants Republicans to fall
in line. He wants republic to pass the bill. You
told CNND quote, somebody's got to be the dad that says,
I know y'all want to go to Disney World, but
we can't afford it. I guess I'm going to be
that guy unquote. So how determined are you to be
that guy? If it actually means telling President Trump you
(15:16):
are going to vote against the bill, and you're going
to try to get other Republican senators to join you
unless there are major major changes.
Speaker 5 (15:23):
Well, in twenty ten, I sprang on the Tea Party movement,
and as I did parraise my I would shout, this
is a fight for freedom. We are mortgaging our children's future.
It's wrong, it's immoral. It has to stop. I haven't changed.
My campaign promised in twenty ten and every campaign after that,
was to stop mortgaging our children's future. It's immoral, it's wrong.
It has to stop. And so he may not be
(15:46):
worried about that. I am extremely worried about that. That
is my primary goal running for Congress. This is our moment.
We've witnessed an unprecedented level of increase spending fifty eight
percent since twenty nineteen, other than World War Two. This
is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable
pre pandemic level spending. And again, I think you can
(16:08):
do it, and the spending that we would eliminate people
wouldn't even notice. But you have to do the work,
which takes time.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I think he's spot on here. You have to understand
that we're looking at under this bill running massive, massive
budget deficits in the very near future, even bigger than
under baseline law. For example, according to the non Partisan
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the twenty twenty seven
deficit will be more than one third larger under this bill,
(16:36):
So instead of the projected current number of one point
seven trillion, it will be a two point three trillion
estimated deficit. That's insane. That's a huge, huge budget deficit,
and trillions dollars more piled onto the backs of young
people like myself who will be paying off the interest
for the rest of our lives, and under generations that
(16:58):
aren't even born yet. So my view on this has
always been very simple, I understand that maybe during a
recession you might want to run a small budget deficit
to kind of stimulate the economy with text cuts or
different spending programs. But then you should run a surplus
in when you're not in a recession to balance it
out over time, because it is, like Ron Johnson says,
(17:20):
massively immoral to enjoy benefits today, which is what this
spending is supposed to be. I understand that not all
of it actually goes to benefits, to benefiting people. A
lot of it doesn't. But this spending is supposed to
be for things we want today, but we are passing
the tab down to future generations. How would we look
at parents who took out credit cards in their children
(17:42):
or grandchildren's names, bought a bunch of stuff for them
for themselves with it, and then let their grandkids and
kids pay it off the rest of their lives. We'd
be like, Wow, those are terrible people, very selfish, very
unfair of them to do that. That is what Congress
does when it runs these massive deficits and just piles
on to the trillions and trillions of dollars of the
(18:04):
national debt, which hurts the economy in a bunch of ways,
and again has these massive interest payments that people will
have to pay off for decades and decades to come.
I do think that is immoral and wrong, and basically
every Republican says they think the same, but then when
they actually get into power, they go and blow massive
holes in the deficit in the budget. Anyway, another one
who's speaking out on this is Senator Ran Paul, who
(18:27):
is a strong fiscal hawk. He had this to say
about this whole fiasco.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
Biden's spending levels. When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican
other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels,
which are going to give us a two point two
trillion dollar deficit. Now, if you increase the debt sailing
four to five trillion dollars, that means they're planning on
two trillion this year and more than two trillion next year.
That's just not conservative. So I've told them if they
(18:53):
strip out the debt sailing, I'll consider, even with the imperfections,
voting for the.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Rest of the bill.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
But I can't vote to raise debt sealing five trillion.
There's got to be someone left in Washington who thinks
debt is wrong and deficits are wrong, and once to
go in the other direction, the idea that we're going
to explode deficits and the projections are now looking at
over three trillion dollars in deficits over the next ten years.
I think is just, you know, not a serious proposal.
Somebody has to stand up and yell. The emperor has
(19:21):
no clothes and everybody's falling in lockstep on this pass
the big beautiful bill. Don't question anything. Well, Conservatives do
need to stand up and have their voice heard. This
is a problem we've been facing for decades now, and
if we don't stand up on it, I really fear
the direction of the country is born.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I agree with him again. I mean, I understand that
they have a very thin majority in Congress, so they
can't get a perfect bill, and they have to try
to appeal to like moderate squish Republicans and the Freedom
Caucus or whatever. But they have to be able to
do better than this, a bill that's expected, according to
the Wall Street Journal, to add three trillion dollars or
(19:59):
so to the deficit over a decade. When they ran
on balancing the budget entirely and ending budget deficits, which
of course was never realistic. But you could at least
not increase them by that much, couldn't you? Is that
really too much to ask. Most Republicans are just scared
of Trump. He wants to pass this bill. He's attacking
(20:20):
people who don't go along with it. I give credit
to the few out there like Ron Johnson and Ran
Paul who apparently actually believe at least some of the
things they say they believe, and are willing to take
a stand even if it's going to get them angry
tweets from the White House. It's been one of the
great sorrows of my political career, as somebody who's quite
fiscally conservative, to just watch ninety nine percent of Republicans
(20:45):
lie to my face for years that they were fiscal hawks,
that they believed in free market capitalism, that they were
going to balance the budget, that they were going to
do all these things, and then get in power and
give massive handouts to corporations and special interests they align with,
carve massive loopholes in the tax code for special interests
that benefit them, and refuse to meaningfully cut spending or
(21:07):
roll back these entitlement programs that are driving our country
into this massive fiscal crisis. Maybe I was dumb in
naive for ever believing any of them. I always knew
some of them had to be full of it, but
I didn't realize that it was basically all except a handful.
What do you guys think? Do you support the big
beautiful Bill. I certainly don't. I understand you can't get
(21:28):
everything you want, but you have to be able to
do better than this monstrosity if you ask me. But
I definitely want to hear from you, guys, So let
me know what you think in the comments. Up next,
we're going to talk about what I think is probably
the most insidious and immoral thing from the entire Trump
presidency so far. I think it was very clear, at
least to me, that Biden's border policies were a catastrophe.
(21:53):
We had a huge border crisis. Border states were overrun,
You had millions of people coming here illegally without proper vetting,
without order, and it was an absolute disaster. And Trump
was elected with a mandate to sort out this disaster,
and to be clear, he did. His policy changes that
the border have resulted in extremely low levels of illegal
(22:15):
border crossings and apprehensions he's seemingly solved the border crisis
with his policies, but he's done more than that. He's
gone above and beyond in some ways that I didn't
expect and that I do think violates some pretty basic
aspects of human rights and constitutional law. For example, I'm
(22:36):
going to pull you a clip of the Cato Institute's
David Bier on MSNBC. And yes, I know it's MSNBC,
but he's a right wing libertarian guy from the Cato Institute,
which is not a liberal source whatsoever. And he outlines
some details from a new report, but how the Trump
administration incarcerated roughly fifty legal immigrants in an El Salvador
(22:58):
prison with no trial and no charges, even though they
never broke any immigration laws at all. Take a listen
to him summarizing his report, and then I'll get into
the details.
Speaker 7 (23:07):
The Trump administration expelled, really rendered these individuals from Venezuela
to l Salvador to a prison. We are imprisoning them
at our expense. Again, no charges, no trials, not even
a hearing before their removal.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
We went through we.
Speaker 7 (23:26):
Documented at least fifty cases, fifty out of the two
hundred and fifty who were sent fifty cases of people
who came legally to the United States. They never violated
any immigration law. And the whole premise of the administration's
argument here is people came here illegally, so they have
no due process, they have no rights whatsoever under the Constitution.
(23:47):
These people came legally at the invitation of our government.
They were detained and then ultimately expelled without a hearing,
without due process. And that's the concern here for everyone
who has who whether you are a US citizen, whether
you're a legal permanent resident, whether you're someone else who's
come here legally. This is with the administration's advertisement to
(24:09):
the world of what America does to people who come
to our country. We don't give you any rights. And
that should be not only scare immigrants who are coming here,
but Americans who are traveling abroad, because we will have
no right to object when a country does that to
a US citizen traveling abroad to an authoritarian country who
(24:30):
does these kind of things.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
So just hearing him describe it like that is astounding.
It is wrong to incarcerate people in prisons without charges
or trial, even believe that if they're illegal immigrants. I
think they're entitled to basic due process, but especially if
they're legal immigrants, like refugees or people who got permission
to enter the country, we are violating their human rights
(24:55):
by sending them to and paying for them to be
in El Salvador prisons with horrible conditions, and we haven't
even convicted them in a court of law. If they
truly are the horrible people that Trump says that they are,
then I want them imprisoned, absolutely. But you still owe
every human being a basic level of human rights, and
that includes a right to habeas corpus, to know the
(25:16):
charges against you, a right to a trial where crimes
against you are proven. They could have just deported people
who were here illegally. They sent a lot of these
people to countries that aren't where they're from, not their
home nation, and then they didn't just deport them. They
paid for them to be imprisoned, which is like effectively
the same thing as US imprisoning them, which we couldn't
(25:36):
do without a trial or charges. And I don't really
see how it's any different just because we pay another
country to do it. I got to give you guys
more details from this Cato Institute report because it's honestly
one of the most horrifying things I've read in a
long time. Fifty plus Venezuelan's imprisoned in El Salvador came
to the US legally, never violated immigration law. These people
(25:56):
came to the United States with advanced US government permission,
were vetted and screened before arrival, violated no US immigration law,
and the US government turned around and disappeared them without
due process to a foreign prison. It is paying the
Salvadorian government to continue to keep them incarcerated. So this
is all sourced and all vetted. These are factually true claims,
(26:19):
and we are paying for the Salvadorian government to imprison
these people but never gave them charges or a trial,
to say nothing of the really horrifying conditions in some
of these prisons that I think violate the Eighth Amendment
and the prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment if we
were to ever do them here in the US, and
we're just contracting it out to another country. I oppose
(26:40):
this even for illegal immigrants, but it's exponentially even more
horrifying that they're doing it to legal immigrants as well.
These legal immigrants include a temporary visa holder and four
men who were authorized to travel through the US Refugee program.
The government vetted these refugees abroad and concluded that they
would face persecution, letting them resettle in the United States.
(27:02):
The other forty five legal immigrants scheduled appointments using the
CPB one app through which they were permitted to seek entry.
Among those with appointments, twenty four were paroled into the
United States, where they could live and work legally for
up to two years, while the other twenty one were
detained at the port of entry. A lot of these
people don't exactly seem like supervillains on the surface either.
(27:23):
The men were workers, construction laborers, pipe installers, cooks, delivery drivers,
a soccer coach, a makeup artist we talked about the
makeup artist on the show before, a mechanic, a veterinarian,
a musician, and an entrepreneur. Most of those who were
released quickly found jobs in the United States. A majority
of the men are fathers. Altogether, the men were trying
to support forty four children. The US government did not
(27:45):
inform their families, lawyers, or anyone else of their impending
imprisonment at US government expense in a Salvadorian prison known
for torture and other abuses that would be illegal inside
the United States. Agents simply disappeared them without charge or
trial or even acknowledgment, which is rightly considered a crime
against humanity. That is astounding to me that these people
(28:07):
were sent to this prison, and their families and lawyers
weren't even told where they were sent or why, or
how to get in contact with them and whatnot. Can
anyone really defend that, even if you broadly support Trump
being tough on the border deporting illegal immigrants, all of
this is just so remarkably incredibly above and beyond to me. Now,
(28:28):
the Trump administration says that these people are all confirmed
members of gangs and criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations, but
they don't have a whole lot to back up those claims,
as this report makes clear. Investigations by The New York Times, Bloomberg,
and CBS News have all found that few of the
imprisoned men have any criminal record. All these legal immigrants
(28:50):
denied gang membership, and only two appear to have had
a US criminal conviction of any kind, both for minor
drug offenses. About two dozen of them. The legal immigrants
were detained immediately at the port of entry where they
were authorized to seek entry, so there is no possibility
that they demonstrated any gang ties or committed any crimes
inside the United States. Most, at least forty two were
(29:13):
labeled as gang members primarily based on their tattoos, which
Venezuelan gangs do not use to identify members and are
not reliable indicators of gang membership. According to court documents,
DHS created a checklist to determine that heavily weights, dressing
like a gang member, using quote gang signs, and most critically, tattoos.
(29:35):
No criminal conviction, arrest, or even witness testimony is required. Wow,
call me crazy, call me a woke lib if you want.
I don't think we should be sending people to prisons
based on what tattoos they have. That's not exactly an
exact science, and lots of people in the Latin American
(29:58):
world have all kinds of tattoos. Doesn't mean they're in
a gang or a criminal and that we can just
skip the whole charges, trial evidence thing. I think this
is a violation of human rights, and I also think
it's a violation of their constitutional rights, because even though
they're non citizens, the Constitution applies to non citizens as well.
(30:19):
It very clearly says in the Fifth and fourteenth Amendments
persons are entitled to due process of law and can't
be cannot be deprived of liberty by the US government
without due process. And in this case, they're being sent
to prisons by the US, a government contracted out, with
no trial, no charges, and based on what tattoos they have.
I don't know how anybody can think that's anything other
(30:41):
than a blatant violation of human rights and constitutional rights.
I'm really horrified by it, and I say that as
somebody who is in many ways supportive of many of
Trump's immigration policies. I want border security, I want to
stop the flow of illegal immigration. I think criminal illegal
aliens should be deported who actually are in gangs, who
do come here and commit time. But to just be
(31:01):
rounding people up like this and condemning them to these
horrific fates with so little process or evidence or fairness,
I think is a really ugly and evil thing to do,
and I think it will have real ramifications for the
US economy. People are not going to want to come
here as tourists. People are not going to want to
send their students here to come to our colleges and
(31:23):
our universities. If they really think that people who are
here legally can have their rights violated in this egregious manner.
It's not moral, it's not right, and it's not in
America's best interest long term to send this kind of
message to the world. That's my take. If some of
you guys disagree, I want to hear from you in
the comments, Please do explain why, and with that we'll
(31:45):
wrap up this episode of the Brad Versus Everyone podcast.
Thank you all so much for tuning in. Please do
make sure you subscribe if you aren't yet, do it
that I like button before you go, And with that,
we'll talk again real soon.
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