Far-right broadcaster Edward Szall used Tuesday’s episode of his “Cross Talk News” program to declare that we must “limit the access of free thought ” in response to Monday’s mass shooting that killed three children and three adults at a Christian day school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Szall, a bigoted, racist Christian nationalist, founded “Cross Talk News” with white nationalist Christian fascist conspiracy theorist Lauren Witzke after the two were fired from their positions with the virulently antisemitic program “TruNews” in 2021. Their “Cross Talk News” program now airs on the network founded by virulently anti-LGBTQ bigot and right-wing conspiracy theorist Stew Peters.
Like so many other right-wing activists, Szall and Witzke reacted to the news that the perpetrator of the shooting in Nashville was transgender by declaring, in Witzke’s words, that “we’ve got to make it illegal for people to promote transgenderism, to participate in transgenderism; it needs to be a criminal offense.”
Szall agreed, but asserted that this was only a first step. What really must be done, he insisted, is for the United States to follow the models set by China, North Korea, and the Taliban by limiting people’s access to the internet so that they can’t even find information about transness.
“We’re gonna limit internet access,” Szall declared. “You know who taught me this lesson recently? The frickin’ Taliban.”
“We export a lot of things here in the West,” Szall continued. “We export our sin. The first thing we do [when] we go into a country, we try to make sure they have abortion legalized, and we try to make sure that they’re not able to criminalize homosexuality. Well, the third thing we do is we export the internet to them, internet access.”
“We make a lot of bones about China being tyrannical and terrible,” he added. “China limits the access of their citizens to the internet. … North Korea is actually a very conservative society. There’s no such thing as a homosexual, an open homosexual in North Korea, no such thing as abortion. The North Koreans are very conservative; they’re tyrannical but conservative.”
“What we’re exporting, what we’re making available to people is a gateway to sin,” Szall proclaimed. “We need to, in the wake of a mentally ill epidemic, limit the access to the drug. One of the drugs here is more information about where you can change your gender, change your identity, think about life differently. No, how about we limit the access of free thought in this respect and instead raise children up in the way they must go?”
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