Speaker 1: What's going on.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It
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your support. So it's been about a decade, but man,
I am so ready for the rematch. I feel like
it is it George Foreman who just passed away, and
like he won re won a title at age like
forty six, you know, beating some guy I forget who,
uh that was like twenty years younger than him. Right,
it's the comeback of HB two baby, that's right. We're
gonna have another bathroom battle. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina
introduced a bill this week that would limit bathroom access.
This is WRAL, so just keep that in mind. Laura Leslie,
Will Duran and Ryan BEISESSI three reporters on this story.
So they say the bill would limit bathroom access by
transgender people in some state buildings. So it is about bathrooms,
but it's more than bathrooms. There are other facilities like prisons.
But I think the real problem for the left is
the definitions. I think this is going to be the
real problem for them.
Speaker 1: I'll explain.
Speaker 2: I've read the legislation or the proposed legislation.
Speaker 1: Back to the.
Speaker 2: Wral story, though, the effort comes nine years after North
Carolina's former Republican governor lost his job amid a national backlass.
So here's the threat. You Republicans better not do this.
You'll end up just like McCrory.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Although Pat McCrory did not just lose because of HB two,
he barely lost and it was largely due to I mean,
Democrats made this the issue, yes, and the media, but
I repeat myself, But the real swing that we saw
when you compare the vote totals, the real swing was
North Mecklenburg and it was over the toll roads. McCrory
had carried the area and then he lost the area
in North Mech And Democrats know this, by the way,
that's why they targeted the North Mech area with these
astroturfed fake groups with you know, names like no tolls
and stuff like that. They weren't they didn't care about
the toll road issue, but they knew voters in North
Mech did. And I was not here in Charlotte. I
was not on the air in Charlotte. I was up
in Asheville at the time. But I was following the
story to some degree about the toll roads. And you know,
my understanding of it was that the North Mech people
and the North Mech elected officials who had greenlit the project,
the toll road to be built by the private company,
and then they got a whole bunch of backlash because
people are like, you should just widen the road and
not have toll lanes. And they want, you know, four lanes.
They don't want two for the toll road and two
non toll. They want all four for everybody to drive on.
They don't want any of the tollings. And so the
you know, the staging of a project like that takes
years and runs through the local development people, the local
or local elected official bodies and stuff that sit on
these transportation I think it was called the Mecklenburg Union
Metropolitan Planning Organization used to be called Mumpo.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it still is.
Speaker 2: But you get all these elected people representing you know,
representing different cities and county and state dot is on there,
and so they have these like monthly meetings. I used
to go cover the meetings all the time and they
would talk about these types of projects and whatever. But
again I didn't follow the course of this project as
it made its way through those levels of planning. And
it started under Biv Purdue, the Democrat governor, and it's
so she was the one. It was her administration that
began the process. But again you've got all of these
local levels that were all involved in it, and by
the time mcquori wins election takes over. My understand was
that like the contracts were already done and the North
Mech people were like, you need to break the contract.
They were demanding that he scrapped the contract at a
cost to the state, and if I remember correctly, it
was like one or two billion dollars or something. So
they just wanted they wanted the state to build the road,
not charge any tolls, oh, and pay like a two
billion dollar fee for breaking the contract with this Spanish company.
That was my understanding of the issue. I didn't find
the North Mech position to be a reasonable one. I
did not, But they all turned out against McCrory and
we got Roy Cooper. And I'm sure the folks in
eastern North Carolina that had to, you know, spend the
next eight years living in hotel rooms because of his
inability to manage a crisis, I'm sure they're very appreciative
of the North Mech swing, as are the people in
western North Carolina right that had to deal with Cooper's
failure of a response in that disaster, as I'm sure
the entire state that had to live under King Roy's
COVID ED or Ed's his emergency declarations. What'd you think
I'm at anyway, Yeah, so we all suffered for eight
years because North Mech didn't want to proceed with the
toll roads. That's that's been my read on the situation.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I'm not interested in going back and litigating it or anything.
What's done is done. We are pasted the Cooper reign.
But the HB two house built to the bathroom bill
fight from nine years ago was that's the one that
the left and the media, but I repeat myself, has
has attributed McCrory's loss to at least now wr L
is saying that it's you know, partially, it's partially, or
it's a little bit it was part of a reason
why he lost.
Speaker 1: I'm not so sure that's the case, but why quibble.
Speaker 2: So the effort comes nine years after North Carolina's former
Republican governor lost his job amid a national backlash aimed
at the state over a similar GOP backed bathroom law
that some residents, businesses, entertainers, and athletics groups considered discriminatory
against transgender people. But then they all became transphobic. I
guess is that what happened? Why, like, within nine years
everybody became transphobic? Or did it simply take nine years
for people to fully recognize what these policies do. See
I was, I was in defense of House Built two.
House Built two that was remember propose by our former congressman.
But at the time he was a state representative, Dan Bishop,
and I talked with Dan Bishop frequently about the HB
two bill when it was, you know, being debated and
all of the backlash and everything. So what happened in
nine years? Did everybody become transphobic. No, they became educated
because to me, this was like my understanding at the
time was like, this is sort of the first fight
over this issue, and to me it was pretty clear
that the left was taking advantage of people's politeness, of
people not wanting to offend, of people not wanting to
you know, be perceived or called discriminatory, and they took
advantage of that. And now everybody recognizes that this is
the tactic and it has been, and that the issue
comes down to one of competing interests and competing rights.
And when you have that friction point right, somebody is
going to quote when and somebody is going to lose
when they have a competition of the rights of the interests.
And that's where you have to craft the law to
spell it out and give an explanation basically in doing so.
And to me, the evidence was clear that going down
this path for opening up all bathrooms and locker rooms
and prisons and everything else, that this would do more
harm than good to more people. And the argument that all, well,
you know, transgenderism is such a tiny little percentage of
the population, so therefore it is not a problem. That
was never the issue for me that was never I
never found that to be a persuasive argument. It doesn't matter.
What matters is you've created this law that allows bad
actors to take advantage. And the response from the left
was always well, we can imprison people or find them
and arrest them and charge them after the fact. The
problem there is, though, that you've already allowed for the
victimization of citizens of children. You've allowed them to be
victimized first, and so then you're going to come and
bring a penalty in whereas why not try to protect
on the front end thereby removing the possibility or limiting
the possibility of the offense occurring in the first place.
Very simple to me, This was always a very simple
kind of an argument. That's what it comes down to.
And it was encapsulated, I thought in a discussion I
had at the time with a state representative named Brian Turner,
and I'll tell you about what he said and why
I didn't believe him. All Right, if you're listening to
this show, you know I try to keep up with
all sorts of current events, and I know you do too,
and you've probably heard me say get your news from
multiple sources. Why, well, because it's how you detect media bias,
which is why I've been so impressed with ground News.
It's an app and it's a website, and it combines
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. During the HB two debate up in when
I was up in Asheville, the local state representative, Brian Turner,
came on my program. We had an hour long debate
and discussion about HB two mainly and I asked him
at one point because he had he has a daughter,
and at that point, I want to say, she was
probably around twelve, and we were talking about, you know,
him as a father, and I threw out this analogy.
Speaker 1: Or an example to.
Speaker 2: Test his position, and I said, all right, let's say
you're you're getting off the plane, and let's say you're
at Charlotte Douglas Airport right getting a layover whatever, you
and your daughter are traveling. You get off the plane
and you go in, you guys go to use the restroom.
She says she has to use the restroom, and she
proceeds to walk in the women's room, and you witness
me follow her in. Are you going to follow me in?
Speaker 1: What are you going to do?
Speaker 2: And he at first did not answer. You know, he
tried to talk about, well, you know, this other thing
and we would try to find someplace else, or you know,
that's not really the issue whatever. And I kept dragging
him back to this example because I wanted to test
what he himself would do. And he finally said that
he would call security. I said, I don't believe you.
I don't believe that you would call security and then
hope that somebody in the airport's security apparatus would eventually
get to your zone and then get to that bathroom. Meanwhile,
your daughter is in there and I followed her in.
I don't think you would do that. I think you
would walk in. But more importantly, the fact that you
would call security proves my point, which is that we
are all the potty police, which is what the left
called pat mcquarie, and they made all sorts of these
vulgar references to the desire of Republicans to inspect everybody's junk. No,
we do not want to be like a potty police
enforcement agency or something. But we in a high trust
society are, in fact everybody you me everyone in public spaces. Right,
we're supposed to uphold the norms, the standards. We're supposed
to respect those standards because we are living with other
people in our society.
Speaker 1: Right. Look, if you want to wiz off.
Speaker 2: Your porch into your front yard, you are free to
do so as long as you're not in the vicinity
of anybody else and nobody is seeing you, right Like,
that's the These are the trade offs of living out
in the sticks with nobody around you, versus living in
like a high rise apartment. You don't get to do
that kind of thing. There are trade offs. And when
when you go to a highly populated or any you know,
populated area, any kind of a public square, there are
standards and the community sets those standards. And so this
is the House build Too. And now this new iteration
of it, which is called Senate Bill five sixteen s
five sixteen, this is the manifestation of the society setting
a standard. Nine years nine years since HB two, things
have changed. Right, people were not equipped to make these arguments,
and people were afraid of countering the left wing narratives
that were immediately rolled out by Democrats in the media.
But I repeat myself, the bill, Senate Bill five point sixteen,
according to WRAL, is not as sweeping as House Bill
Too was, which banned transgender people from using the bathroom
of the gender they identify as in all city, county
and state buildings. Again this is WRAL. So they use
the left wing narratives, the vocabulary, the gender that they
identify with. Right, they still say that, but we're talking
about members of the opposite sex.
Speaker 1: That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: If you are a dude, you do not get to
access the women's spaces. The new bill would not apply
to many government buildings, but it would apply to public
schools and prisons, as well as some other institutions that
receive government funding, such as domestic violence shelters. Right, so,
obviously this bill is monstrous. How dare you say a
as a man cannot access the domestic violentce shelter? What
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Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: So, the new bill that's making its way through the
North Carolina legislature, Senate Bill five sixteen. It applies to
public schools, prisons, domestic violence shelters. It also stops short,
according to Wral of a full ban on transgender access
into the bathrooms all over, essentially saying transgender people can
only use bathroom, changing rooms or sleeping quarters of the
gender they identify as if nobody else is present. Right, So,
in other words, it's a it's a women's bathroom, and
a guy who thinks he's a woman will be allowed
to access that room if there's nobody in there, so
that you won't be violating any law. A single or
multiple occupancy restroom changing facility or sleeping quarters within a
covered facility, not like with a roof, but like a
facility that's covered by the law, shall only be used
by one designated biological sex at one time. The bill
also clarifies that trans children who stay with classmates overnight
on field trips, lock ins, or other school activities have
to room with members of their birth gender, not the
gender that they identify as Democratic lawmakers decried the bill
bill saying gob lawmakers need to move on from their
focus on transgender people, which this is always one of
those talking points. I never understand why people say it.
There are literally hundreds of bills that have been filed
in the legislative session, hundreds of them by Republicans. The
idea that this is a quote focus and this is
the only focus of Republicans is absurd.
Speaker 1: Number one.
Speaker 2: Number two, the reason why they have to do this
is because you guys focused on this stuff. You guys
kept pushing the envelope, you guys kept transgressing, and now
that there is pushback.
Speaker 1: You're like, why are you going to focus on this issue.
Speaker 2: No, it's a response to your focus on the issue.
Senator State Senator Julie Mayfield out of Bunkhom County, so Ashville.
She said, quote, we need to recognize who people are. Yes,
I agree, and that is what we are doing. That
is what the law does. It recognizes who people are.
It is an immutable, unchangeable characteristic. You are a male,
you are a female. By the way, do not ask
Julie Mayfield anything about economics. She was on the Charlette
or the Asheville City Council while I was up there,
and she believed that if you provide enough supply, then
you'll get the demand. That's what she said during a
Nashville City Council meeting that we have to like She's like,
that's just basic supply and demand.
Speaker 1: And I'm not an economist.
Speaker 2: I used to run this sound bite all the time,
but she talked about how she never took an economics class,
and it shows.
Speaker 1: It shows.
Speaker 2: In twenty sixteen, House Build two was passed and signed
into law. That law, according to wil prompted PayPal, the
online money transfer service, to cancel A three and a
half million dollar global operations center that would have employed
four hundred people in Charlotte. Lionsgate Films moved production for
a comedy series pilot from Charlotte to Canada. Other firms
threatened to halt expansion plans in the state. The NBA,
the NCAA, the ACC all canceled athletic events, and more
than two hundred CEOs signed a letter calling on state
leaders to repeal the law. The law was partially repealed
after Democrat Governor Roy Cooper defeated McCrory in twenty sixteen.
Now A wil doesn't mention anywhere in this article is
what we learned from a report at the Wall Street
Journal at the time, which was that Roy Cooper whipped
up the business leader's actions. He made a call to
the salesforce guy who is a big time lefty Megadnor Benioff,
ben Steve benyonlf I think is his name, LGBT guy,
and he then applied pressure and whipped up and rounded
up a lot of his pals in the business industry
to target North Carolina. And Roy Cooper then threatened his
fellow Democrats in the legislature to not work on any
kind of amendments or changes to House Build two until
after the election because he wanted the issue.
Speaker 1: So he.
Speaker 2: Basically helped to organize and foment the targeting of his
own state, a boycott of his own state he was
Attorney General at the time, because it served his political aims,
his personal political goals. That's what Roy Cooper does, that's
who he is. And as soon as he got into office,
he then sold out the LGBTQ crowd by signing the
partial repeal of House Bill too. But like they did
it in phases and whatever and so, and the lgbt
folks just wanted to straight up repeal. They wanted it gone,
and Roy Cooper ran on a promise to do that.
And then as soon as he got in and after
Democrats had refused to do any kind of repeal, he
told them, you will have no role in my administration
if I win. He told him that, like he's gonna
punish you. And we saw over his eight year tenure
we saw him do that, go after his fellow Democrats
and primaries and the like. So he won and then
he signed the repeal and the LGBT crowd was not
happy because it wasn't a full repeal. In recent years, though,
wil says, Republicans in North Carolina and other states have
taken up a new focus on transgender topics as the
issue has energized voters in the GOP base others. It's
not just the GOP base, guys, Wil not just GOP.
One of the most effective ads Trump ran that got
a lot of people over to his side.
Speaker 1: Right, Kamala is for they them, Donald Trump is for you. Right.
Speaker 2: There were economic reasons, right, inflation, taxes, all of that,
but this issue, like the left went too far and
Wral has a blind spot for that, because the thing
about being on the left is that you can never
go too far.
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Speaker 1: I have a message here.
Speaker 2: This is from Russ, He says for me, the house
built two rights balancing issue always came down to sheer
numbers and probability. The number of passing trans people is
so much lower than the number of bad actors who
would take advantage of the free access to victims. Also,
I'm old enough to remember the kid who had a
peanut allergy having to eat lunch in the office or
hallway instead of banning peanut products for the whole school.
Individual rights are important, but you can't inconvenience everybody to
accommodate a very small group, right. This is I was
talking about this competing interests, the competing rights issue being
at the heart of the HB two debate and transgender
access into these safe spaces for women. They are competing,
they are competing interests. You cannot allow both. You cannot
designate something to be a female only space and then
have somebody come along and say there is no such
thing as female right, So there has to be a
decision made, And at first a lot of people in
society said, Okay, we'll accommodate. We don't want to be
accused of being transphobic, we don't want to be accused
of being a bigot. We don't hate these people, because
that's what we were told we were doing. If we said, well, no,
maybe we should didn't allow women or men into like
the showers with the women, because the opportunity there for
bad actors to take advantage of the situation is too great.
And we were called all sorts of names for that,
and that's always been, in my mind, the heart of
the issue. So let's talk to Mike. Hello, Mike, Welcome
to the show.
Speaker 3: Hey, Pete, how are you doing on this wonderful Wednesday?
Speaker 1: And I'm doing all right?
Speaker 3: How are you good? Deal? Yeah, I'm going to find
I wanted to find what just because you just talked
about just now the opportunity for bad actors to act bad.
And one of my first questions, I guess because I
just I don't know. Maybe I'm just not reading enough.
How I spread this problem? What problem of transgender women
going into women's bathrooms and causing any kind of problem?
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm just not reading correct, that would be correct.
You are not okay?
Speaker 3: So can you tell me, like maybe five instances in North.
Speaker 1: Why just North? Wait? Why just North Carolina?
Speaker 3: How about in the country? Then?
Speaker 1: Yeah, because there, Yeah, so I am.
Speaker 2: I regularly come across stories regularly, like I couldn't even care.
It's way more than five. I don't keep track of
the number. For you, Mike, I doubt it would persuade
you either way, because whatever number I gave you, you would
still say is probably not enough. But it does happen
all the time, regularly, regularly, it goes yet, it goes
on in prisons. Guys get sentenced into and then say
they're trans and they go into women's prisons and then
they offend in the women's prison.
Speaker 1: That happens regularly.
Speaker 2: It happens regularly where people are arrested and they claim
to be trans and we don't know if they are
or not because they can just say that they are,
and they got access into a women's restroom. That happens.
It happens regularly, Mike. So I come across stories about this.
I would say probably once every two weeks if I
had to, if I had to, gets.
Speaker 3: And these are trans women that just use.
Speaker 1: The that now they're dudes. Yeah, they're dudes going into
women only spaces.
Speaker 3: When you say they're dudes, yeah, you know, like like
listen to be like you in the airport following the
daughter hypothetically.
Speaker 1: No, I'm talking about it.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about a human being that has that has
the chromosomes of a male.
Speaker 1: It is an adult male. That is what a dude is.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, you understand, of course that while it's only
a very small percentage, maybe one, two or three percent
of human beings on this earth do not have your
basic male female. Ah.
Speaker 2: Yes, the old Ffleinfelter syndrome argument, right, the point zero
one percent or the intersex argument is that the one
you're going to make here.
Speaker 3: There are certain ones. I mean, most people needs to
have an x chemoizone or yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is right.
Speaker 2: So, Mike, what we're talking about is setting rules for
the ninety nine point nine percent of the population that
lives in a civil society, right, And that's.
Speaker 3: Where I'm asking, so of those people, how big a
problem is this?
Speaker 2: Why are you limiting it only to the intersects. Why
wouldn't you Why wouldn't you make it about all all dudes? Well,
the laws in the books now, right, right, that's after
the fact. I already addressed that this is what I
mean you're making, Mike. I already outlined all of these
arguments that you're stating at the beginning of the hour.
I went through these arguments that the left makes, and
I don't I am not persuaded by any of them.
Speaker 3: I'm just asking for the why there's such a need,
and more importantly.
Speaker 2: Why there's such a need is because women only spaces
are we're designed for a certain societal benefit, was to protect.
Speaker 3: Women, Okay, And I guess what I'm asking is how
risks are women from this huge problems that folks on
the right seem to be talking about all the time.
Speaker 1: So should we so, Mike, should we have no? Should
we have no?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: Should we have no laws against homicide? Because it doesn't
really happen a whole lot, really when you look at
the entire.
Speaker 3: Population, ridiculous stretch.
Speaker 2: Why you're making the numbers argument, You're you're appealing, You're
appealing to the frequency as if that gives you some
sort of moral standing, and it doesn't.
Speaker 3: Making any moral arguments, I'm talking about pricticity.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, you're you are making moral You're
saying that, why are you focused on this?
Speaker 1: Why are we spending time on this? Because the numbers
are so small?
Speaker 3: Right, that's my question?
Speaker 1: Right, So why have homicide laws because.
Speaker 3: They're more homicide in our problems? Like you're talking about?
Speaker 2: So, wait, you think homicides occur more often than say,
sexual offenses.
Speaker 3: Much more often than problems of transgender women going into
women's backroom, I will say that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, so am I right?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: No, no, So that's why I said, though, you have
a societal impact as well, that when you open up
all of the spaces, you give more hunting grounds for
the predators. And I would prefer not to allow those
hunting grounds to be opened up. That's and again, I
went through all of these arguments at the beginning, and
they're not persuasive, and it's why you guys are losing
on this issue, and you will continue to lose on
the issue.
Speaker 1: But I appreciate the call. All right, that'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
so if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.