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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Netflix is very invested in exposing children to cheerful transgenderism

 


By Andrea Widburg
It started when Libs of TikTok revealed that Netflix has a show that encourages the “non-binary” aspect of so-called “transgenderism” as a way for children to free themselves from societal expectations. After Elon Musk picked up on that tweet, the ball really got rolling, with Libs of TikTok revealing myriad Netflix shows, directly targeted at children, and all of which push the LGBTQ+ agenda.

Image created using AI.

Netflix is one of the granddaddies of home entertainment. In 1997, it was the first company to mail movie DVDs directly to people’s homes. Then, 18 years ago, once streaming became a thing, Netflix quickly moved over to that market. It’s now a worldwide purveyor of video entertainment (except in China, Crimea, North Korea, Russia, and Syria) and, as of this past January, had over 301 million customers. It is a big cultural player.

Speaking of culture, its current executive chairman is Reed Hastings, who is currently worth an estimated $6.6 billion and is one of the Democrat party’s big boosters. (This is ironic, considering that his father was an attorney in the Nixon administration!)

Back in 2021, when Netflix employees got their knickers in a twist after Dave Chapelle made jokes that transgender people found offensive, Reed Hastings refused to comment on the issue. However, Netflix let the world know that it had the employees’ backs:

“We value our trans colleagues and allies, and understand the deep hurt that’s been caused,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement to Fox Business. “We respect the decision of any employee who chooses to walk out, and recognize we have much more work to do both within Netflix and in our content.”

While Hastings was silent in 2021, he has let it be known that Netflix is a happy place for transgender employees. Thus, when asked in 2024 about the Chapelle kerfuffle, he offered this insight into Netflix’s hiring policies:

We had made a real point of recruiting trans employees and being trans friendly. This is like 2015 to 2019, roughly. We were proud of it, and we had amazing employees. And they felt as a whole that we had promised Shangri-La, and now we were betraying them. So there was an intense sense of betrayal amongst this group of employees and their allies.

 

That pro-trans ethos may explain Netflix’s programming decisions for children. The revelations started with this tweet:

Elon Musk saw the tweet, rebroadcast it, and announced that he was cancelling his Netflix subscription. Things snowballed from there.

Libs of TikTok continued to unearth programming at Netflix that targets children and promotes so-called transgenderism. Some, like the CoComelon show, have been around for years; others, like Ada Twist, Scientist, come from the fertile Obama factory:

If you’re wondering where this madness is coming from within the corporation, one person is Hamish Steele, a Netflix content creator and Charlie Kirk hater—and the man who created the Dead End: Paranormal Park show that started the whole Netflix exposé:

Again, none of this material is new. Dead End stopped being produced in 2023. However, with streaming TV, it lives on forever—that is, unless the streaming site removes it. What this means is that these shows are out there, and our children are finding them.

Thanks to Netflix content, children are being taught that transient feelings of being uncomfortable in their own skin—a perfectly normal part of childhood, when our bodies change non-stop and we’re dealing peers going through the same process—can be addressed by denying our essential biological nature. Normal human development is being pathologized and a “cure” offered to the vulnerable minds of little kids who still believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, and to older kids, who naively believe that there are no downstream consequences from following trends or acting on their impulses.

If the Libs of TikTok feed is anything to go by, a lot of people followed Elon Musk’s example and cancelled their Netflix subscriptions. That’s a very logical and, might I add, wise thing to do.

I’m betting, though, that they’ll find that all their streaming services have the same pro-transgender content hiding in the children’s section. The left has been engaged in a long cultural war, and only now are ordinary Americans finally figuring it out.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/10/netflix_is_very_invested_in_exposing_children_to_cheerful_transgenderism.html

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Ten Years of Censorship That Was Censored

 by Edward Ring

For every conservative in America who is delighted that at least some of the purveyors of hate speech and misinformation on the woke left are at last being held accountable, there is another who still adheres to the ideals of free speech. As UFC CEO Dana White recently said on 60 Minutes, “Probably the most important speech to protect is hate speech.”

That diversity of opinion never surfaced among the left, however, over the nearly ten years during which alleged misinformation and hate speech were suppressed whenever they originated from conservatives. Whether they were hard right or just right-of-center but touching on forbidden topics and themes, they were shadow-banned, demonetized, deplatformed, and debanked. Almost nobody outside their circles of followers ever knew, and for people on the left who did know, they didn’t care.

To those of us who followed the systematic suppression of unapproved content, it seems incredible that anyone can believe our mainstream news sources, pundits, and journalists working for PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and others, who are now proclaiming we have entered an era of unprecedented authoritarian censorship. This is a brazen lie, but people believe it.

In a conversation last week with someone whose politics are centrist, perhaps slightly left-of-center, I was surprised to hear this lie regurgitated, verbatim. With genuine apprehension, if not terror, and presented to me as undeniable fact, was that President Trump and his minions have imposed government control over the media. Democracy is dead. God help us all. Etc.

What I quickly realized was that it would be futile to attempt to discuss this any further. The fact of the government pressuring corporations to censor content they didn’t approve of—most corporations enthusiastically complied and would have done it anyway—is something that took off after Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 and didn’t even begin to slow down until Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022.

All of this was well documented in February 2025 when investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi (both former progressives) testified in a congressional hearing on what they dubbed “the censorship-industrial complex.” And we were there. We were watching.

In an attempt to document examples of censorship in 2019, in a “long form” article (this was way before Substack went mainstream) for American Greatness, “The Establishment War on the Intellectual Dark Web,” I documented many of the expulsions that had already happened since 2016. That article was premised as follows:

“Who are these censors? Not an oppressive government, but instead the private quasi-monopolies that control all online communication—the social media and video platforms, the providers of membership services, and the payment processors. Piss them off? Disappear into actual darkness.” That article also summarized—well before the 2022 defamation judgments—how Alex Jones had his voice crushed by censorship. It is a textbook case of what happened and can still happen.

After peaking at 125 million views in November 2016, Jones’s reach declined to 25 million views by July 2018, an 80 percent drop in 20 months. Even the industry journal Advertising Age acknowledged that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.” Then, for the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, Alex Jones’s “Infowars” was expelled from Apple Podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned Alex Jones’s InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; and his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, was wiped out.

We can document what happened to Alex Jones, but meanwhile, smaller players were being dealt out of the conversation by the thousands. And it wasn’t just social media that got into the act of censorship.

The next level of suppression was the denial of membership services. If a content creator is expelled from one membership service platform, they cannot easily rebuild on another platform. If they have, for example, a half-million supporters on Patreon, and Patreon expels them, then every one of those half-million supporters has to open an account with the new membership services platform, and only then can they elect to resume supporting that content creator.

Censorship didn’t (and doesn’t) end there. A website can open up its own membership services portal by adding a page that accepts donations and hooking it up to a bank account. But the ultimate link in the chain is online payment processors, of which there are only two, PayPal and Stripe. And if payment processors stop processing their transactions, they are dead in the water.

In 2019, as examples of content censorship became increasingly numerous, I launched a website in collaboration with American Greatness to highlight content creators whose work was being suppressed. We built and maintained a database for a year, adding more than 400 profiles. We divided our records into five categories: Christian Patriot, Climate Skeptic, Free Speech Ally, Irreverent Investigator, and Western Warrior. From August 2020 through August 2021, we also posted a weekly report highlighting how ongoing censorship was being applied. Examples were plentiful.

Remember when Gab.com was launched? The founder not only had to build a social media platform. To monetize it, he had to start up his own bank. Remember Parler? What about Facebook’s snitch campaign launched in July 2021, encouraging members to turn in anyone posting “extremism?” Remember when LinkedIn deleted the account of the scientist who invented mRNA? How about when Facebook suspended President Trump in July 2021, alleging he posed “a danger to the public?”

Censorship in those days already extended into realms nobody typically thinks about. The video application JW Player, claiming “PragerU’s content is misleading” but providing no examples, canceled their user agreement. Prager had selected JW Player in order to host videos independent of YouTube’s platform. Oops. Speaking of YouTube, remember when, in March 2021, they banned Trump’s speech at CPAC? How’s that for coordinated censorship: banning a US president from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

Back in 2021, Twitter was banning people faster than one could track. Notables included Bronze Age Mindset, Nick Fuentes, Project Veritas (and just for good measure, James O’Keefe), Rogan O’Handley, Way of the World, and, in one day, on February 7, 2021, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, radio host Wayne Allyn Root, and freedom activist Pamela Geller. Twitter banned Lin Wood’s #FightBack and Laura Loomer and took down a video from America’s Frontline Doctors.

Do we agree with everything that every one of these people has to say? No, of course not. We agree emphatically with some of the things that some of them say. Other utterances, here and there, we condemn. And we don’t agree as to which is which. But to repeat what Dana White famously just said, “Probably the most important speech to protect is hate speech.”

This is just a taste. Twitter erased thousands of accounts. So did Facebook. So did YouTube, again and again. The scope of censorship even reached WordPress, which deplatformed Conservative Treehouse. They built their website using WordPress, attracting up to 1 million visitors per day, and suddenly, voila, their WordPress engine stopped working. Where was David Muir? Where was Geoff Bennett?

The story of modern, technology-driven censorship goes on and on. What happened to Andy Ngo, a journalist of extraordinary integrity and courage, ought to show anyone who thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension is a novel harbinger of fascism everything needed to change their mind. Ngo was thrown off PayPal and Instagram and had his first book banned from the landmark independent bookstore, Powell’s, located in his hometown of Portland. For years, Ngo was maligned and physically attacked and has ultimately been driven into hiding. And yet PBS “news” reporters still preface any mention of his name with the stigmatizing adjective “far right.”

And so it goes. People plugged into right-of-center alternative sources of news and information, which by now is about half the nation, may not appreciate how much reach and credibility still rest in the hands of so-called mainstream media. Its mission is to omit any coverage of censorship prior to the incredible trauma suffered by two harmless, hapless, innocent, and vulnerable late night comedians at the hands of fascists. At the same time, they subject their viewers to ongoing conditioning—such that they can’t imagine anything remotely similar, let alone far worse, has ever happened before.


https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/01/ten-years-of-censorship-that-was-censored/

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The Left-Wing Terror Memeplex

 Many of us who work in politics have felt sickened since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We sense that a line has been crossed, perhaps permanently.

For years, the Left had accused conservative intellectuals of fomenting “stochastic terrorism”—incendiary rhetoric that inspires violence. This accusation was used to purge conservatives from social media, and, during the Biden administration, contributed to the F.B.I.’s decision to monitor conservatives, including parents who opposed critical race theory. The Left sought to use the stochastic terrorism construction as an all-purpose censorship tool.

This year, the tables have turned. Donald Trump is in power and left-wing violence has surged. Even The Atlantic, which previously seconded the idea of stochastic terrorism, has now conceded that political violence from the Left outstrips that from the Right.

After studying several recent incidents of left-wing terrorism, I want to articulate some initial thoughts about what I call the “left-wing terror memeplex.” This system, in which left-wing narratives inspire decentralized acts of violence, has four elements: prestige narratives, radicalized memespaces, copycat models, and disturbed individuals.

The memeplex is not organized like the older model of left-wing political terrorism, which relied on organized groups (such as the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army), decentralized cells, ideological formation, and meticulous planning. By contrast, the memeplex is decentralized, mediated through the Internet, and, on the surface, appears unorganized. Left-wing media and political figures peddle narratives through the digital sphere; an individual commits an act of terrorism inspired by those narratives; and the media and political figures pretend that the two are unrelated and that the terrorist was a “lone wolf.”

But if you dig beneath the surface, it becomes apparent that these dots are often connected and that the memeplex, though decentralized, is designed to radicalize disturbed individuals and generate bloodshed—with plausible deniability for political actors. In other words, the progressives who seed the memeplex are fomenting precisely the “stochastic terrorism” that they previously decried.

Let’s examine the elements one by one. First: the prestige narratives. For the past decade, the Left’s elite media and political figures have entrenched a series of hyperbolic and highly polemical narratives: that Donald Trump is analogous to Adolf Hitler; that America is about to fall to fascism; that conservatives are organizing a genocide of transgender people; that deportations are laying the groundwork for martial law. These narratives have taken root not only on the fringes of activism and academia, but are reflected in the headlines of the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, MSNBC, and other mainstream outlets.

Likewise, the Democratic Party has deployed these narratives in political campaigns, protest rallies, and social media messaging, arguing that the Right is on the verge of abolishing democracy and ushering in an authoritarian regime. None of these narratives is true, but each yields an emotional payout. Traditional liberals who donate to Democratic politicians and left-wing NGOs genuinely fear that President Trump desires to be a strongman and will do anything necessary to seize power. Politicians have always relied on heated rhetoric to solicit votes and donations. But the left-wing terror memeplex is different, in that the party’s “progressive” faction deploys these carefully crafted narratives in part to activate the radical elements within the broader coalition, including, most notably, anti-fascist and transgender activists.

The second element is the radicalized memespace. The prestige media writes the metanarratives, which filter downward through Reddit, Discord, Steam, Twitch, and other web platforms. Because these digital spaces rely on user-generated discussion and lack the editorial guardrails of a traditional publication, individuals can plunge deep into the radicalization process and take the premises of left-wing narratives to their grim conclusions. Democratic politicians shout that Trump is a fascist; users on Reddit and Discord conclude that the proper response to fascism is political assassination.

These radicalized memespaces are also tailored to psychosexual themes that, while not overtly political, are built on highly ideological concepts, such as intersectional identities. Transgender activists, for example, have anchored their narratives in queer theory, a discipline that is deeply tied to the politics of the Left, particularly in its most radical forms. In the memespace, the personal is always political.

A spate of recent terror incidents illustrates the connection. The Annunciation Catholic Church shooter, for example, appears to have been radicalized into a transgender identity through radicalized memespaces. The alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk reportedly played a “dating simulator” involving “furries.” Audrey Hale, who killed three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, identified as a transgender man and, in her diaries, described a desire to “kill my own race” and to “kill all the white kids,” showing how trans ideology can overlap with far-left racial politics.

The third element of the terror memeplex is the copycat model. Social scientists have long observed that spectacular acts of violence or terror can inspire others to engage in similar acts of violence and to view them as a competition: more blood, more spectacle, more death. Hale is typical, leaving behind more than a dozen notebooks that documented her fascination with school shootings, including the Columbine massacre, which remains the ur-event for this kind of violence.

More recently, Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of health insurance executive Brian Thompson has sparked a desire for emulation. While most mainline Democratic politicians and prestige media outlets have been careful not to endorse the murder of Thompson, the radicalized memespace has celebrated Mangione, turning him into an icon, calling for copycats, and seeding the ground for future assassinations. Many memeworld leftists have latched on to Mangione’s elite education and handsome appearance to give his nihilistic violence the patina of romanticism and celebrity. And their threats are not idle: the number of American executives who have sought security protection has increased, with many fearing that the C.E.O. assassination archetype, like the school shooting archetype, could replicate itself.

And finally, the fourth element of the left-wing terror memeplex: the disturbed individual. Since the French Revolution, left-wing movements have relied on psychotic, criminal, violent, and nihilistic people to cross the line into violence. In the past, left-wing organizations would painstakingly recruit, train, manipulate, and drive disturbed individuals to political violence through repeated human-to-human interactions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government was able to infiltrate groups of this nature through wiretapping, confidential informants, and other human intelligence, which, over the years, led to those groups’ destruction.

Human relationships are complex, and those involving disturbed individuals who want to commit violence are fundamentally unstable and can quickly blow up or burn out. The new left-wing terror memeplex transcends those limitations. The interactions that drive the new terror are not human-to-human in a direct sense, but rather, are mediated by digital technologies and decentralized at each link in the chain.

The psychological profile of these individuals has changed, too. The left-wing terror memeplex has sought to manipulate sexual ideologies and drive emotionally unstable loners and losers into violence. The alleged Kirk assassin, Annunciation school shooter, and Nashville school shooter all experienced sexual disorders, had troubled relationships with families, and spent an inordinate amount of time in the radicalized memespace, where they built the desire for death. Like in the film The Manchurian Candidate, the memeplex operates to remove “guilt and fear” through brainwashing and political conditioning—but, this time, in a totally decentralized and depersonalized manner.

It will not be easy to interrupt the left-wing terror memeplex. While I wholeheartedly support President Trump’s recent designation of Antifa as a domestic terror group, the left-wing terror memeplex is mostly distinct from the masked “black bloc” protesters who have, for example, descended on federal buildings in Portland, Oregon. While dismantling these Antifa groups is noble and just, it might not have a discernible effect on the digitally mediated violence generated by the terror memeplex.

But adopting other proposals could, in the long term, reduce the threat of left-wing terrorism. First, we must mete out social punishment for politicians and media figures who promote irresponsible narratives about impending fascism and “trans genocide.” They should be held accountable for their rhetoric and encouraged to moderate it—or to pay the political price. Those who romanticize, celebrate, and call for political violence should be met with social stigma.

In addition, law enforcement must develop a comprehensive strategy, within the confines of the First Amendment, to monitor radical left-wing memespaces and disrupt acts of violence. At a minimum, federal law enforcement agencies should develop the tools to track radical networks online, uncover illegal activity, and swiftly identify and arrest ringleaders, in the same way they target other criminal networks and conspiracies.

Eventually, we will also have to grapple with the proliferation of disturbed young Americans willing to commit themselves to nihilistic ideologies and engage in political violence. Our country is awash in DSM diagnoses, psychiatric drugs, and psychological decomposition. Not much can be done about these factors in the short term, but we should begin the conversation now, with no regard for political correctness or undue deference to the medical establishment.

The coming years will be a significant test for the left-wing terror memeplex. The Trump administration would do a great service to the country, and to the troubled young people caught in its web, if it took steps to dismantle it.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/left-wing-political-violence-terror

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Acadia Healthcare Shareholder Khrom Capital Urges Company to Launch Strategic Review



Khrom Capital Management LLC (“Khrom Capital”), which together with its investment funds and affiliates, owns 5.5% of Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. (Nasdaq: ACHC) (“Acadia” or the “Company”) and is one of the Company’s largest shareholders, today sent a letter to the Company’s Board of Directors reiterating its belief that the Company should pursue a formal review of strategic alternatives, including a sale, in order to maximize value for its shareholders.

The letter can be downloaded here.

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OpenAI Readies TikTok-Style App Powered Only By AI Videos

 OpenAI is preparing a standalone social app powered by its Sora 2 video model, according to Wired. The app “closely resembles” TikTok with a vertical video feed and swipe-to-scroll, but only features AI-generated clips — users can’t upload from their camera roll.

Wired reported that Sora 2 will generate clips of 10 seconds or less inside the app, though limits outside the app are unclear. TikTok, which started with a 15-second cap, now allows 10-minute uploads. The app will also offer identity verification, letting Sora 2 use a person’s likeness in generated videos. Others can tag or remix that likeness, but OpenAI will notify users whenever it’s used — even if the video isn’t posted.

Wired adds the software will refuse some videos due to copyright, but protections may be weak. The Wall Street Journal reports rights holders must opt out to keep their content from appearing in Sora 2’s outputs.

OpenAI is alerting talent agencies and studios to the opt-out system, which doesn’t allow blanket exclusions across all of a creator’s work. Instead, agencies can flag violations. “Our general approach has been to treat likeness and copyright distinctly,” said Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

The Journal notes OpenAI has struck deals with some studios and that its new tools echo ChatGPT’s image generator, which quickly filled the internet with Studio Ghibli-style memes. “Given the intense competition in the space, I think they think, ‘maybe we will ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission,’” said Georgetown Law’s Kristelia García.

OpenAI’s move comes as Hollywood pushes for stronger consent and compensation rules, and as courts weigh whether training on copyrighted content is “fair use.” The company is also seeking approval from California and Delaware attorneys general for a corporate restructuring that could affect investor funding, the Journal reports.

“For so many in the AI space, this move validates longstanding fears and underscores why we need guardrails,” said Dan Neely, CEO of Vermillio.

By launching a social platform around Sora 2, Wired suggests OpenAI is not only chasing TikTok’s momentum but also trying to lock users into its ecosystem. Building a community around AI-only content could make switching to rival tools less appealing.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/openai-readies-tiktok-style-app-powered-only-ai-videos

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ANTIFA By Night, NGOs By Day: Left-Wing Political Machine Runs 24/7 Outside Portland ICE Facility

 Real America's Voice correspondent Ben Bergquam visited the ICE facility in South Portland, exposing how the left-wing political machine operates, from Antifa attacks on the building at night to dark-money–funded NGOs providing support to illegal aliens by day. Together, this paints the picture of how the left's machine works to subvert the nation, and in extension, national security. 

Let's begin with Bergquam's late-night reporting outside the ICE facility in Portland that shows the federal government personnel countering Antifa warriors who attempted to undermine the Trump administration's deportation program of criminal illegals.

By early morning, Antifa cells scatter like ants, only to be replaced by workers from leftist NGOs, according to Bergquam, who spoke with Steve Bannon. He noted that these NGO workers are "aiding and abetting illegal aliens" outside the courthouse in Portland. 

Bergquam added, "These leftist NGOs are also part of the networks of telling these illegals when ICE is coming to their communities - it's all a coordinated effort." 

To simplify for readers, Bergquam is merely presenting Antifa and leftist NGOs as two arms of the same left-wing machine - one uses color revolution-style street tactics, the other institutional support, all in an effort with one goal: to obstruct President Trump's deportations of criminal illegal aliens. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/antifa-night-ngos-day-left-wing-political-machine-runs-247-outside-portland-ice-facility

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