Hollywood Has a Predilection for Minors and Communists

two bits of news that involve you, Senator. One is your new book, your upcoming book, One Vote Away, How a single Supreme Court Seat can Change History, that is coming out in about three weeks. And then related to that, you have been added to the shortlist to the President's shortlist for the Supreme Court. So I have to ask you, will you be that one seat that can change history? No, I'm not gonna be. I'm very happy where I am. Come on, you're not gonna do it, but it matters immensely.

I don't want the job, but but but I do care a great deal about who gets it. And and that book that's a book I've been working on really since this spring. I spent the spring and summer during Lockdown writing it. And actually the copy you're holding is the first hard copy I've actually seen that it is like a physical, real book. We literally just got that a few minutes ago. October sixth is when it's going to be released, although it's on Amazon now for pre order.

It's also if you go to one votaway dot com that'll connect you to Amazon, you can pre order it there. And what the book does is it really goes through all of the fundamental constitutional liberties that are hanging in the balance at the court. And each chapter in the book is a different constitutional liberty. So there's a chapter on free speech, there's a chapter on religious liberty. There's a chapter on the Second Amendment. There's a chapter on

US sovereignty. There's a chapter on politics and elections that talks in depth about Bush versus Gore, something that could well be highly relevant in another two months as we see Democrats in all likelihood litigating the results of this election. Could you could have Bush versus score at times fifty all over the place and multiple jurisdictions, And what the book tries to do is just It tells the inside stories of the major landmark cases, many of which I

helped litigate it. So I was I was in the middle of a lot of these cases, and so Bush versus Gore. I was a young lawyer as part of George W. Bush's legal team. So I tell the inside stories. And you know, it's designed to be interesting, to be accessible. You don't have to be a lawyer to read it. It's designed to really tell you, all right, what's what's going on in these cases, what's going on at the court. Why do I as an American care about Supreme Court nominations?

And what stunning and most people don't realize is just how many of our fundamental liberties are hanging by a single vote, either positive or negative. In some cases, one additional conservative vote would make a really positive difference. In a whole lot of other instances, one additional liberal vote.

We have four radical leftist justices on the Court. One more, I think would be devastating, And I don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say that that may well be the single most important issue in this twenty twenty election. This is the problem, and it's why I like the idea of you senator on the Supreme Court, because you know, we've had a lot of conservatives go squishy once they get onto the Court. But of course we also need you in the Senate. We all should

need you in the political fights. I like being in the political fight. Yeah, I like being and the court's the wrong place to do that. If I were a justice, i'd stay out of political fights. I'd stay out of policy fights. A principal judge doesn't engage in that. You simply follow the law. That's what I do if I were a justice, I don't want to do that. Yeah, I want to be right in the middle of the fight. And I gotta tell you, I look at the Senate,

I look at the political scene. We need fighters right now. I think what we're doing on this podcast, I hope makes a difference, engaging on issues that matter. And so I hope to be part of nominating and confirming two, three, four, five great principled constitutionalist justices. But I don't want to be one of them myself, all right, So I will stop for now pressuring you to accept a potential Supreme

Court nomination. I do want to get to one of those fights that you're involved in now, which is this issue of Cuties. Cuties is this French movie that sexualizes eleven year old girls and it's now on Netflix. Netflix is promoting this thing like crazy. The poster is nauseating, the movie is nauseating. You came out very strongly and called for a Justice Apartment investigation into whether this is what child pornography or exploitation. Can you can you lay

down the legal aspect of this? So last week I wrote a letter to Attorney General Barr into the Department of Justice, asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Netflix has violated any of the criminal laws prohibiting the distribution of child pornography. And you know, it's an interesting thing.

So this movie is all about eleven year old girls and the actresses, as I understand it, are eleven year old girls who are dancing suggestively, dancing like strippers, engaged in sexually explicit conduct on screen, and Netflix, a US company, is promoting it and pushing it. And that's not okay. Sexually exploiting. Look, I'm the dad of two little girls. Abusing kids is not okay. And just because net Flix

is now one of the Hollywood elite. Everyone treats it as perfectly fine to take out to produce a movie and distribute a movie where kids are being sexually exploited, and that is a federal crime to sexually exploit children. Well, here's what Netflix is saying. Netflix says this is completely misunderstood. A lot of prominent left wingers are saying this too. That's completely being misunderstood by right wingers who haven't seen

the movie. And this puts conservatives in a terrible box because from everything we know about the movie, we don't want to watch it, right, But then you're told that, well, if you haven't watched it, and you can't have an opinion on it. I had no intention of watching this movie, but you know, I work for a news outlet. I was told by my editor that I had to watch the movie. I had said, I don't want to watch

this as disgusting. I don't want to. They said, no, you have to watch it to give a review of it. So I was on vacation for a week. I was there with my wife and two of our friends. So we say, okay, put the movie on. It is as bad as they say. It is true that one of the messages of the movie, perhaps is that it's bad to sexually exploit kids. The problem is in conveying possibly that message the movie sexually exploits kids. I mean, there

are moments you have to look away. My friends fiance when we were watching this, stormed out of the room in tears. It was that nauseating. How do we fight that? So, look, I haven't watched the movie. I'm not I don't bring much the movie, and I get and it's an odd thing that the sort of twitter world of the blue check bark journalists that are all defending kitty porn. Yea, you know, the law matters, and there actually is. So my letter to Attorney General bar explicitly cites the federal statue.

And let me tell you what the federal statute provides. So it's eighteen USC. Section twenty two fifty two, and it says that any person who knowingly transports or ships using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce, any visual piction, if the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit content.

So this is the question, because when I watch it, I mean, the one good thing I can say about the movie is they're not nude, right, but it is licentious if there is no question, it is exploitative. So, and the statute doesn't require that they may nude. It prohibits distributing materials that have children engaging in sexually explicit content.

Is the language of the statute, and the punishment under the statute for violating it is that you'll be fine under this titled and imprisoned not less than five years and not more than twenty years. But here's something interesting, Michael. There's actually an aggravator in the statute that says if the child or children in question have not attained twelve years of age, that the punishment is actually increased to a minimum of ten years in a maximum of twenty years.

So in this case, we know there are eleven year old children. There's no dispute about that. I haven't seen the movie. I don't know if the depictions satisfy the requirements of the statute for sexually explicit conduct. But you know what, it's not my job as a US senator to investigate that. It is the Department of Justice's job. So I asked them, look, I don't know if this violates the law or not, there's certainly a prima facial case. We know their children. The ads they're putting out are

explicitly sexual on the face of it. And you know, there was one one professor who tweeted back at me and said, well, you know, Cruz doesn't understand this is a French film. And definitely, well it was kind of interesting a because my letter explicitly references that it's a French film. So the professor, and this says something about the state of our academy hadn't bothered to read my letter but instead was happy to criticize it. Of course.

But number two, it actually the child pornography laws in the US don't give you a blank pass if it happens to be produced overseas. It doesn't matter where child porn is produced. If you're distributing it, it is a felony. And by the way, Netflix is a multi billion dollar corporation. These guys are getting rich. This is a major for

profit endeavor. And you know, one of the people who has been completely silenced on this is Barack Obama, and who has a deal with Netflix, and not a small deal, I mean, according to the public reporting, he's been paid what fifty million dollars from Netflix, So he is literally making tens of millions of dollars and is completely silent on is he okay with a company that is distributing at a minimum sexual exploitation of children. That's kind of

the bare minimum. And there are a couple of reasons. Look, it is a reasonable question to say, all right, what is permissible? What is art? What is free speech? What is pornography? That those can be complicated questions, but and listen on the question of free speech and sexual conduct. What consenting adults do is their business. You know, consenting adults want to do something, knock yourself out. You got a right to do whatever you want. Well, on this

issue of consenting adults. Actually, this ties in with another very very creepy thing that's going on now being pushed by Democrats in California. It's called Spey five. We have an newsom just signed it into law. This basically says that if a twenty four year old man has sex with a fourteen year old boy, he does not have to register as a sex offender. What is going on, I mean, what is that about? And how is that legal? I guess because obviously the fourteen year old is not

a consenting adult. Well, today's Democratic Party, and this was pushed by the Democratic supermajorities and the californ on your legislature. It was signed by the Democratic governor of California. To the best of my knowledge, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been utterly silent on it. If they said anything on it, I certainly haven't seen it. But but it it is normalizing child abuse. And what it's saying. Listen, a twenty four year old having sex with a fourteen

year old is not okay. And under the law, fourteen year olds young children are not permissibly allowed to consent. You have two adults, they can consent to whatever they want, but children don't by definition, don't have the legal ability to consent. And the problem is the Left that they're normalizing. It's why you see the media. They don't want to be critical of this Netflix movie because it suggests there

are any standards or lines that can't be crossed. But when you produce a movie like like this Cuties movie number one, it okay, you gotta think repedophile in America, Yes, he is going to watch this movie, that this is titilation, that that will encourage and drive more pedophilia. But it also we know of at least some children who were

directly harmed by this movie. And those are the child actresses, the eleven year olds who are being asked by their producer, asked by the director to engage in sexually explicit conduct. And and under the law there is no First Amendment right to film kitty porn, to distribute kitty porn. That when you're abusing a child, the usual responses is that you're prosecuted and locked up in jail, and that's designed to protect kids. But here's what they say, right, They'll say, well,

it's not pornography. It might be sexually explicit, it might be exploitative, but it's not. It doesn't rise to the level of pornography. And the federal statute is not a pornography statute. So so so in actually this is not something I talk about in the book One Vote Away. But look, the Supreme Court for years engaged in the world of what is pornography, what is obscene, and what is not. I can't define it, but I know it

when I see it. That was Potter Stewart's famous test for it, which which is I can't define it, but I know it when I see it, um, and uh,

you know, they're they're great stories. I think Bob Woodward talks about it in The Brethren, where where they used to have in the seventies they would have airings of of porn movies that had been challenged on whether they were obscene or not, and the court would have to watch it to figure out and it would be I think in a basement, um they would they would air them. But but the I think it's Woodward tells the story of like the clerks would be sitting in the back

going I see it. Yep, that's it, I say, I know it, I know it, and that's definitely it. As I recalled, I don't I hope I'm not telling tales at a school here. Did did you watch a porn movie once with Sandra day O'Connor. I did. It's It's one of the things I talk about it in the book the book as well, and it says awkward. You know, look, you're twenty six years old and you're with a woman

in her seventies watching like graphic depicting. You're like, wow, okay, this is really awkward, but you know it was even I'm sure weirder and more awkward. William Renquest and Sandra Day O'Connor dated, that's right, in law school. They were They were classmates at Stanford. He was number one in the class, she was number three. I've always said, you know, I wonder what happened to the poor, poor Schelove who was number two. He's got to feel like a total loser,

gotten by history. But not only did they date, so Renquist actually proposed marriage to O'Connor in law school. Now she turned him down. She married, She was Sandra Day. She married John O'Connor, and it ended up for fifty years. Justice O'Connor and her husband and the Chief and his wife were good friends. They socialized together. But imagine for a second you're in your seventies and your eighties and you're standing in a room with a woman you dated

fifty years earlier, and there's porn on the screen. That was a weird and awkward moment, and you know it when you see it, And I think this is this is the key here because regardless, and by the way, I'm glad the Supreme Court is out of the business of assessing whether a particular film is or is an obscene that that that sort of amorphous judgment, Uh, didn't make any sense for the court to be in And I think this the First Amendment protects a lot of speech,

but what it doesn't protect is abusing kids. That that that kids are aligned, that that is just qualitatively different from adults. Right, and and even even if even if the Netflix argument is right, that this doesn't rise to the level of pornography. Actually, frankly, I mean, who know the parts that I shut my eyes to. Who knows? But it doesn't seem that it does. It's it's degenerate filth.

It is exploitative, and I think it meets the criteria that the test of the statute is whether it's a visual depiction that involves the use of a minor engaging and sexually explicit conduct. Yeah. So, look, they could do a documentary on child abuse, on child trafficking that would actually be quite valuable a lot of kids. You know, one of the many problems with child porn is many of the kids are trafficked. They they're kept against their wishes.

Not only can they not consent, but but in far too many instances, These are kids who are kidnapped and trafficked and forced to engage in these acts. And I think the Department of Justice should investigate whether this violates the law. But I think it speaks volumes that Hollywood thinks it's it's immune from the law, that that that that the standards that applied everyone else Hollywood is exempt from.

There is something going on here, you know, there is something in common with the promotion of this movie Cuties with SP one forty five. I remember when when and let me stop for a second on SPE one forty five. Yeah. So the argument that the California Democrats give in the legislature, as they say, this is a gay rights issue, and because it's already the case that if it's a heterosexual relationship twenty four to fourteen, then the offender doesn't need

to register. It's whether someone registers as a sex offender. And as I understand at California law, if it's heterosexual says they don't have when this law said if it is homosexual, they don't have to. My view is, okay, the first law is a little bit crazy. Well, if you want to address that and have have parody, Okay,

how about if you abuse a child, you register. Yeah, this did remind me of an issue that hit Bernie Sanders, your colleague in the Senate, back in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, which is he wrote some very odd essays in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies. In nineteen sixty nine, he wrote an essay called the Revolution is Life Versus Death something to that effect, in which he implies that we should normalize child sexual behavior. And it

wasn't just Bernie who said this. This goes all the way back to a strange figure named Wilhelm Reich on the left who in the nineteen thirties he developed this theory of the universe that the whole life force is something called an orgon and war cancer disease, it's all caused. I feel embarrassing in saying this in front of us senator, It's caused by people not having enough orgasms. Seriously, this is what he said, and basically you needed something called

an organ accumulator. Woody Allen later parodied this as the orgasmatron. Very prominent leftists owned these weird boxes that Norman Mailer had one, JD. Salinger had one, and this very kookie theory pervaded some leftist thought, radical thought all the way up through the nineteen seventies, and that's what Bernie Sanders was writing about. And frankly, I think it's what we're seeing today. Can I ask you a question, Michael here, what the hell do you guys study at Yale? But like,

I'm sorry, I don't know this mandatory curriculum. Who this schmuck Schmidt whatever his name is. I'm not familiar with his writing professor. Yeah, well, okay, whatever it? Uh, yeah, okay, that's weird stuff, yam. In the remaining couple of minutes we have, we we've touched on Hollywood and the left broadly in all this kind of creepy sex issue. But

let's not forget about the creepy a totalitarian issue. Because while you've got Netflix, you know, not just hosting this this creepy movie, but but promoting it, you've simultaneously got Disney coming out and thanking the Chinese government, groveling to the Chinese government even as they say that they might not be able to work in Georgia because Georgia passes

a pro life law. Yeah. So this is the movie Mulan, which which Disney filmed and did a live action version of the animated film, and they filmed it in the region in China where the Wagers are are held in concentration camps, where they're being tortured, where where they're being murdered, and we're talking most estimates are more than a million weekers. Wagers are are an ethnic and religious minority in China. They're Muslims, and the Chinese government viciously persecutes the um.

So Disney goes in films presumably right next to the concentration camps and the police agency the and when I say police agency, I mean the Communist Party stormtroopers, police state who are abusing and torturing the weakers. Disney thanks them.

I mean it truly is so. I just joined a group of I think it's twenty other senators, bipartisan group, in writing a letter to the CEO of Disney asking a whole series of questions about why they were filming in China, what concessions they had to make to make to the Chinese government, what they knew about about the torture and murder of the Wagers, and why they are thanking the Titalitarian government engaged in that torture and murder,

and we also asked for what communications they had about them. And look, we'll see how does he responds. But it's not complicated. The answer is because of money. I mean, look, we saw a similar story with the NBA that had a basketball camp in this same region and they actually had weager teenagers, fourteen and fifteen year old boys being physically abused. NBA coaches knew about it, the NBA knew

about it, and they were just fine. And whether it's Disney or the NBA, you've got a lot of American companies that, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, are more than happy to kiss up to jack booted thugs in

the Communist Party in China. Well, then, just to play Devil's advocate one more time in the last minute or so that we have left, what the left is doing right now is saying, on the issue of cuties and on the issue of Mulan, that conservatives or hypocrites, because conservatives we talk a good game on free speech, but then you know, we don't like the sexually explicit movie, and we don't like Disney, a private company, doing what it wants to do in the pursuit of the dollar.

So are we hypocrites or not? Well, no, the laws should apply and the standards should apply fairly and even lead everyone. So in the world of child exploitation and porn should be that is a uniform standard. It doesn't matter where your politics are, you're not allowed to engage

in child exploitation and porn um. When it comes to doing business with China, look, I mean there are number one, their US sanctions against certain Chinese entities that Disney needs to be sure it hasn't violated US sanctions law because that can have real and crushing financial implications. But look, there is an element. There are lots of people in the media, There are lots of people in the academy that will be apologists for the Chinese communists. You know what,

they got a First Amendment right to do it. I will happily defend their right to speak out. But you know what I will also would do happily condemned the garbage they're saying. Free speech doesn't mean you're immunized from being criticized for what you say. I means you still get to say things. You're going to say things, and the rest of us get to say, why are you supporting and praising and apologizing for and condoning jackbooted thugs, and why are you making money on it? By the way,

it's the same point I've raised about Barack Obama. Why is Barack Obama making fifty million dollars for Netflix when they are distributing materials that are exploiting children? And now that he can make the money from Netflix, But people are entitled to ask that question about what you're choosing to support, and in particular whether it violates the federal criminal laws, as in this instance it may well have.

At the same time that these studios are removing Gone with the Wind, one of the most celebrated movies in American history, removing cop shows because it's politically incorrect. Now from streaming platforms, they're promoting cuties and they're promoting peons to the Chinese government. That is a major cultural problem. And I don't think there's anything hypocritical about about raising it.

But but you know that they do have new standards for the Academy Awards now and they have explicit racial quotas now that you have to have um a percentage of disadvantaged populations to be eligible for Best Pictures. So so I don't know if if if like they're going to have to go back and and remake the Godfather movies.

Apparently too many Italians. You and I are both you have more Italian blood than I have, but we both have some Italian Apparently too any Italians and the Godfather, so you need to, like, I'm not even sure what they're going to do to make it comply. Are we sufficiently persecuted? I mean that's a question too. Can we

maybe win an Oscar? I I mean, these are this brave new political world is really raising a lot of questions, and maybe, Senator, and one of these episodes we can do it live from the Academy Awards hopefully, UM, as long as you promised never never to pose as as as Oscar that I can promise you. I think that would be exploitative, an explicit. Nobody wants to see that either. Indeed, that is our show, Senator, Thank you very much. On

Michael Knowls, this is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes organizations and candidates across the country. In twenty twenty two, Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.