Donald Trump Jr. posted the following on X.
This seems less than ideal… pic.twitter.com/ioABhrWqIf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 20, 2024
Bill Maher, known for his critical commentary on social issues, used his “New Rules” segment on “Real Time with Bill Maher” to discuss the recently released Max documentary, “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV.” The documentary delves into the sexualization, abuse, and exploitation that took place within the children’s television industry, with a focus on Nickelodeon.
Maher criticized what he saw as hypocrisy among liberals and the broader American left for dismissing similar warnings from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about Disney’s involvement in inappropriate and sexualized content for children. According to Maher, when a Republican such as DeSantis called out Disney for this behavior, he was dismissed as a “hick and a bigot.” However, the same scrutiny wasn’t applied to other children’s entertainment networks, such as Nickelodeon, where serious allegations of abuse have come to light.
Maher’s critique extended to the left’s inconsistency in confronting these issues due to tribalism and partisanship. He pointed out examples of child exploitation within Disney and questioned why there was a disparity in how similar issues were treated depending on who was bringing them to light. He referred to cases where Disney employees were arrested for sex crimes against children and accounts from former Disney child stars who spoke about the pressure and sexualization they faced in their early careers.
MAHER: And finally, New Rule: As one of the few people in the public eye who has gone through life and never had kids, someone has to tell me why am I always having to defend them? I don’t even like kids! But I also think it’s every adult’s job to protect them.
Have you all been watching the Max documentary called Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV? OMG. Nickelodeon? It wasn’t a studio, it was Neverland Ranch with craft services.
It is just scene after scene, clip after clip of the child stars of their day being subjected to obviously inappropriate, highly sexualized degradation and quite a few pickles going through glory holes. I was grossed out and I’ve gone camping with John Waters.
I kid you, John, I love you.
So I don’t know if this documentary is the talk of your town, but it is out here because it didn’t just expose a dangerous workplace, it also exposed hypocrisy. Because, it must be pointed out that when the evil governor of Florida was saying the exact same thing about kids and creepy stuff at Disney that liberals now find intolerable at Nickelodeon, he was dismissed as a hick and a bigot. But why would a kid’s content factory like Disney be all that different than the one at Nickelodeon?
A 2014 CNN report discovered that at least 35 Disney employees had been arrested for sex crimes against children. And in 2021, Disney child star Alyson Stoner confessed she only narrowly survived the toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline. The next year, child star Cole Sprouse told The New York Times that young actresses at the Disney Channel were heavily sexualized from an early age.
You know, Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. And the reason we find pedophiles in the Boy Scouts and the rectory and kids TV is that’s where the kids are. This – DeSantis wasn’t wrong! But we’re so tribal now, the left will overlook child-f***ing if the guy from the wrong party calls it out.
Sure Nickelodeon messed up Amanda Bynes, but the Mickey Mouse Club was where Britney Spears got her start, and she’s perfectly fine. And get this: After Brian Peck, who was one of the lead creeps at Nickelodeon. Served 16 months in prison for the molesting he did there. Disney hired him, naturally to work on a children’s series. Oh, for pedophiles in Hollywood. It’s a small world, after all.
And not just Hollywood. There are Instagram moms these days who are practically Only Fans-ing their itty bitty beauty queen daughters by having them wear skimpy bikinis and eat bananas to build social media stardom. They’re called sharenters, a hybrid of sharing and parent. I call them pimps, a hybrid of pimp and s.
And people who believe in social justice have agreed this is wrong and this is bad and exposing kids to an adult world of lurid costumes and garish make-up borders on abuse. Now hurry up and get in the car, we’re late for drag queen story hour.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being a drag queen, but maybe it’s time to admit that sometimes drag queen story hour is more for the queen than the kids. Sure, kids love a clown, but does the clown have to have tits? And when I see a five year old tipping – tipping?! – at a bar under a sign that says “It’s not going to lick itself” Do I have to pretend that’s cool in order to keep my liberal ID card? Sorry, I can’t do that.
If you want kids to be more tolerant, why not have handicapped people read them stories? Kids are more likely to encounter disabled people than drag queens in life. Geez, can’t we just go back to the good old days when kids were read simple stories with simple morals like if you’re a lonely single man, just make a boy out of wood.
I’ve said it before, wokeness is not an extension of liberalism anymore. It’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite. Teaching kids not to hate or judge those who are different. Great! Proud we got there, all for that. But at a certain point, inclusion becomes promotion. And contrary to current progressive dogma, children aren’t miniature adults wise beyond their years, they’re morons.
They’re gullible morons who will believe anything and just want to please grown-ups. And they don’t have any frame of reference, so they normalize whatever’s happening.
That’s why endlessly talking about gender to six year olds isn’t just inappropriate, it’s what the law would call entrapment. Which means enticing people into doing something they wouldn’t ordinarily do. For example, after 9/11, there were several cases of overzealous federal agents leading sad losers into terrorist plots, like the undercover FBI agent who got seven out of work dudes in Liberty City, Florida, to sign on to a plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Oh, please. These guys didn’t even have a gun. But when someone said, wouldn’t it be cool if we taught the man a lesson and blew something up, they said, yeah, that would be kind of cool. Entrapment! Suggesting someone into something they wouldn’t otherwise do. And if you think that some of that isn’t going on with gender in schools, you’re not watching enough TikTok videos.
TIKTOK CLIP: I pledge allegiance to the queers. I’m not allowed to be out as trans non-binary at school. My response to this is to be as obnoxiously queer as possible.
MAHER: There’s a certain kind of activist these days who wants to take heterosexuality – old school, old fashioned, boring, minding its own business heterosexuality – and lump it in with patriarchy and sexism and racism and tell kids, wouldn’t it be cool if you were anything but that? It also seems to be the theme of kind of a lot of kids books these days. I never used the phrase gay agenda because I thought it was mostly nonsense. And it is. Mostly. But a director for Disney Television Animation did say after she was hired.
VIDEO CLIP: The showrunners were super welcoming to like my like, not at all secret gay agenda. Like I was just wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. No one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.
MAHER: Look, I’m all for adding queerness wherever I put some in my drink before I came out here tonight. But maybe we should think about giving kids a break from our culture wars for a minute, or at least until the election is over.
