Wednesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson criticized the media for ignoring what he deemed to be the sexual exploitation of children, referring to Balenciaga’s child “bondage” ad.
According to the Fox News host, the lack of reaction showed a “tolerance” of pedophilia.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: It is a staple of so-called conspiracy theories that at the highest levels of politics and finance, there is a shadowy cabal of pedophiles who use their power to hide the crimes they commit against children. People think that. It sounds pretty far out to us. Too dark and strange to be true and of course, we are not, obviously, endorsing that idea. On the other hand, you can kind of see why people might believe it.
Jeffrey Epstein, for example. Epstein continued to dine with business moguls and heads of state long after he was arrested for having sex with minors. How did he do that? Why didn’t nobody say anything? Why did people keep eating with him?
Well, at the very least, we can conclude, based on the evidence that there is a tolerance for pedophilia among some, among the most powerful in our society, a tolerance that you would not find in, say, your average middle class American family. Some of the rich really are different that way. That’s clearly true, and in case you need more evidence of that, consider Balenciaga. Balenciaga is what they call a luxury brand.
Balenciaga is a company that sells $1,100 sneakers and cotton sweatshirts for 1,500 bucks to people who’ve literally run out of things to buy. You’re probably not doing your back-to-school shopping at Balenciaga, but some people apparently are.
So, this week, Balenciaga rolled out a new ad campaign on Instagram and the selling point of the ads was sex with children. One photograph showed a very young girl lying face down on a couch with candles, empty wine glasses, and a dog collar on a coffee table in front of her.
Another picture showed the same girl, a toddler, holding a teddy bear dressed in sexual bondage gear, including a leather harness and then, in case you missed the point, we’re for pedophilia at Balenciaga, another picture made it explicit. That picture showed pages from a Supreme Court opinion that struck down a law designed to fight child pornography.
Whoever staged the photo shoot made certain to include a portion of that opinion that use the word “sex” or “sexual” four times and of course, that was not an accident. Balenciaga wanted you to notice.
So, this seemed like a big story to us as we told you last night. Here you have a major international retail brand promoting kiddie porn and sex with children and not promoting it subtly, but right out in the open.
No healthy society can tolerate that, and in fact, none ever have tolerated it. There has never been a time in American history where pedophilia was considered anything other than the worst thing, the most horrifying crime imaginable.
Pedophiles famously get killed in prison because even murderers consider them immoral. That’s how out of bounds it is and has always been to sexualize children — it is totally unacceptable, but apparently it’s not unacceptable anymore.
Academics have redefined child molesters as minor-attracted persons and the point, of course, is to send the message that actually it’s not that big a deal. It’s just a different kind of love.
So, maybe not surprisingly given that trend, apart from a few isolated exceptions in the American media, almost all outlets completely ignored Balenciaga’s kiddie porn ad campaign.
There was not a single story about it in The New York Times this morning, or Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or on CNN or NBC. There was no talk of an investigation or a boycott. The usual outraged merchants stayed completely silent because they weren’t outraged.
Balenciaga ultimately issued a statement saying it was going to punish the photographer who did the shoot like it was the photographer’s fault and they didn’t know about it and after that, the story effectively died and that means that the CEO of Balenciaga, a man called Cedric Charbit, it will not become a social pariah for what his company has just done. He will continue, just as Jeffrey Epstein continued, to enjoy his busy social life, totally unpenalized with his many fabulous celebrity friends.
Here he is, for example, with the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, who looks very excited to be with him. Now, we found that picture, by the way, in less than a minute online. Yet, as far as we know, apart from us on this show, no one has asked Eric Adams about it and it is likely that nobody ever will, and the reason is simple, the media have no interest in covering the sexualization of children.
Their interest, and it’s a very intense interest, tellingly so, is in destroying anyone who complains about the sexualization of children or who even notices it. Noticing it, they tell us, is an attack on the LGBT community.
The assumption here, their assumption apparently is that gay people are in favor of molesting kids and of course, in favor of performing genital mutilation on minors, but that’s absurd. No normal person is for this, gay or not. It’s not anti-gay to oppose kiddie porn or to feel horror at the fact that doctors are cutting the breasts off of healthy teenage girls. These are crimes and most gay people think they’re crimes. Why wouldn’t they think that?
Protecting children from adults who want to sexually exploit them is a basic human instinct and it’s a noble instinct and yet NBC News is doing its best to redefine that instinct as a crime.
Yesterday, NBC brought on its law enforcement expert, by the way, a former Assistant Director of the FBI, to warn viewers that anyone who complains about the sexualization of children will be punished by the legal system, will be sued into bankruptcy and destroyed. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BEN COLLINS, NBC NEWS SENIOR REPORTER: There is going to be a drag brunch the next day at Club Q and that’s a way to get kids to see, “Hey, look, it’s a person, doesn’t necessarily look like the people that you see every day at the store or whatever, but these are real people with lives and emotions. They like the same stories that you do.” There is nothing sexualized about it.
But every time there is one of those now, the Proud Boys show up because there’s an account on the Internet called Libs of TikTok that’s been pushed by Tucker Carlson and the Babylon Bee in the far right.
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC NEWS: Tucker, in particular, seems fixated on this anti- queer panic. In addition to his diatribes against drag shows, he has platformed anti-trans activists, used particularly vicious and extreme rhetoric to attack children’s hospitals for providing trans youth with medical care.
FRANK FIGLIUZZI, MSNBC NEWS: If he is a consumer of the people we just rattled off from Lauren Boebert to Tucker Carlson, let’s get it out. Let’s get it out at trial. Let’s expose it for what it is. Name it and shame it.
He is a consumer of these people and those people should face civil consequences from the victims.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, the former Assistant Director of the FBI is calling for “civil consequences” against anyone who doesn’t like the sexualization of children. If you complain about it, you’re responsible for the murders that other people commit.
Is that in the legal code? No, it’s not, but NBC News is doing its very best to add it. MSNBC has spent the last two days suggesting that because he signed a bill banning teachers from sexualizing kindergartners, Ron DeSantis is somehow tied to a mass shooter in Colorado.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis infamously signed into law what critics have called the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which prevents some teachers from even discussing the existence of gay and trans folks.
DAVID JOLLY, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: When you have a “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in the State of Florida, for instance, or when Ron DeSantis wants to send the police to investigate drag shows.
ALEXI MCCAMMOND, NBC NEWS and MSNBC contributor: The “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida, it is certainly something that helps add to his national political profile, but one thing is clear, is they just want to continue demonizing folks and otherizing people.
BRANDY ZADROZNY, NBC NEWS REPORTER: They started moving in the spring to LGBTQ people. Specifically, they were really excited about the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: If you don’t want a kindergarten teacher to talk to your kindergartner about sex, you’re anti-gay? Ron DeSantis is the spiritual father of a mass murder in Colorado, really?
No matter how you feel about Ron DeSantis or about sex, it’s not plausible. In fact, it’s ridiculous. Yet, they keep saying it and the question is, why do they keep saying it? Well, they’re saying it because that’s how determined they are to keep you from talking about the subject.
They will call you an accessory to murder. They’ll threaten to sue you into poverty as the Assistant Director of the FBI just did, if you don’t shut up. It’s pretty weird when you think about it. In fact, it’s very weird, but they have nothing else to say because actually children really are being sexually exploited in this country, in some cases for money. It’s not hidden. It’s in the open and it’s totally real.
This summer, for example, Matt Walsh exposed the atrocities underway at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. A physician there admitted to mutilating the genitals of children because it’s a profit center for the hospital. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. SHAYNE TAYLOR, VANDERBILT MEDICAL CENTER: These surgeries make a lot of money. So, female to male chest reconstruction could bring in $40,000.00 a patient, just on routine hormone treatment I’m only seeing a few times a year can bring in several thousand dollars without requiring lots of visits and labs. It actually makes money for the hospital.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “It actually makes money for the hospital.” Now, if you were a muckraking reporter with a conscience, that would be the story of a lifetime. It’s all there on tape. A doctor admitting they’re mutilating the genitals of children for money, naming the dollar amounts. How could you pass that up?
But everyone passed it up. No one covered it. Instead, journalists attacked Matt Walsh for uncovering it. Really? What’s the motive there?
Nor do they cover what’s going on in hospitals across the country, including CHOP, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the famous hospital, a hospital that admitted in an e-mail to performing bottom surgery on a minor and slicing off the breast of young women for no medical reason whatsoever. There’s no medical justification for that ever, and yet they bragged about doing it.
In Boston, a staffer at the Children’s Hospital bragged on tape about two- year-olds preparing to transition. Truly insane. Utterly divorced from legitimate Medicine, but again, it was completely ignored. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. KERRY MCGREGOR, BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL: So, most of the patients that we have in the GEMS Clinic actually know their gender, usually around the age of puberty, but a good portion of children do know as early as seemingly from the womb and they will usually express their gender identity as very young children, some as soon as they can talk. They may say phrases such as “I’m a girl” or “I’m a boy” or “I’m going to be a woman” or “I’m going to be a mom.” Kids know very, very early.
So, in the GEMS Clinic, we see a variety of young children all the way down to ages two and three and usually up to the ages of nine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: That is not science. That doesn’t bear any resemblance to science. That’s scary and yet the media choose to ignore it. Why? Because no decent person can look that or any of this in the face without wincing, because it’s just too awful. It has nothing to do with medicine. It has nothing to do with improving the lives of patients or making this a better country. No. It is a dangerous cult that is causing irreparable harm to children — not just a few, but a lot.
Now, at some point when the spell breaks, our entire society will recognize this because it’s obvious and we will all recoil in shame that we ever tolerated it for a second, but we’re not there yet.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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