December 11, 2025 • 27 mins
In this episode, Mary Katharine Ham and Karol Markowicz take a sharp, timely look at some of the most important stories shaping today’s political and cultural landscape. They break down the latest twists in the Miami mayoral race, explore how prolonged school closures continue to affect youth mental health, and examine persistent media bias surrounding coverage of Donald Trump.
The conversation also highlights the public’s reaction to Erika Kirk’s remarkable resilience following the loss of her husband, offering insight into how public figures navigate grief under scrutiny. Normally is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Thursday.
Follow Clay & Buck on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/clayandbuck
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey guys, we're back. Normally the show was normally it
takes for when the news gets weird.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I'm there to sell him him and I'm Carol Markowitz
plus going over there, Mary Catherine.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
It's all right.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I don't think I mentioned this, but my kids did
me so dirty this week.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oh what they do?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
They posed really nicely for our picture and now I
have to do a Christmas card.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh yay. Great. Because I'm still suffering with what I'm
writing on.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Mine, I decided not to write anything. I was like, yeah, Sela.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Vi, I don't know. I did that last year and
a lot of people were like, oh, I missed the
little story about your kids, and I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, Well, writing is hard.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Writing is very hard. And we were just saying that
right before the show began, talking far easier than writing.
Writing is difficult, and it's yeah hard. So we're not
going to get totally into this because this isn't one
of our topics. But a lot of people are asking
what we think about the Myami mayoral race going to
a Democrat, and we had talked about it on the
(01:04):
show before, and I think we should just get into
it a little bit, so I would just say what
I've said previously on the show is the Miami mayor
is not like the New York mayor. It's not like
this huge, you know, big deal mayor. It's a few neighborhoods.
It's Miami City. Nevertheless, it's not great that a seat
(01:26):
that had been Republican for a very long time, and
again fairly liberal republican, but still Republican, has now gone
to a Democrat. Two things about this One, it's an
off year election. Democrats are more motivated. We talk about
that on here all the time. Two, they don't actually
run under a party, so it's not even like you
could say, oh, there was a party line thing, although
(01:48):
you know, maybe Democrats came out and voted for her anyway,
But Eileen Higgins is the new going to be the
new mayor of the City of Miami. Now, again, this
is only a few neighborhoods. It does not include. For example,
people think of Miami, they think of South Beach they
have a Republican mayor. Surfside they have a Republican mayor.
It's just you know, Sunny Isles they have a Republican mayor.
(02:09):
Bay Harbor they have a Republican mayor. These are all
the different areas of Miami under the Miami Dade umbrella.
So this is just one part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
There are many Miamis.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
There are many many Miamis who knew.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I do think this is like, you know, it doesn't
portend great things. Right. There was also another special election
for this is a state based House representative in Georgia,
not a US House representative, but he the Republican lost
a seat there that in twenty twenty four he had
won by some twenty plus points. Yeah, and it was
(02:45):
a district that was plus twelve in twenty twenty four
and he was just edged out by the Democrats. So
that is you know, there's obvious energy here from Democrats.
There are obvious issues for Republicans that if they are
not on top of addressing and if they are intent
on pretending don't exist, yes, you'll get more of this.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right. The message of these races has to be the
Republican Party has to get the voters more motivated. There
is something to be said for we just had a
presidential election last year. The Republican candidate won. Republican candidates
are on cruise control a little bit not candidates. Republican
voters are on cruise control a little bit. The party
needs to work on that, The president needs to work
(03:25):
on that. We need to have the messaging bee. We
need you to come out and vote again. It's time
to come back out. Let's go.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Let's make it happen every two years. Guys, that's how
it works. So but you got I look, it is
the business of convincing people over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Over and over again. Hard we do. Yeah, all right,
let's get back into what our first topic of the
day is. It's actually a combination of two of our things.
Now it can be told and still mad Bro's it's
a topic made for us. So it turns out that
youth mental health health suffered because schools stayed closed and
(04:03):
improved when schools reopened. No way, who could have guessed this.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I can't imagine who figured this out. Yeah, I'm glad
we have this new evidence. As if we didn't know that,
like there were very real social costs to social isolation
before this. Like this is the thing that bothered me
about COVID is that no one did risk analysis. Instead,
they went all in just in uninfection. As if that
(04:30):
were the only risk in the world. And it's as
if we knew nothing about human behavior up until that moment. Yeah,
so then they were just like, no screens for seven
hours a day is fine for kids, and in your
house all day is totally fine. We don't have any
refuting evidence for that. It's like your brain. Your brain's
the refuting evidence.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
But also it was evidence that they themselves had produced
before that. That's it's really crazy. It's that the same
people who had made the evidence to say this stuff
is bad, like screens or not seeing faces for or
that kind of thing, then reverse themselves because they were
told to. Basically, it was like, no, now you have
to change what you thought before, and they they it
(05:10):
was just a big lie. And when you have a
result that you want and you change the evidence to
get to that result, that is not science. And that's
what we were saying the whole time, is that none
of this is science based. None of this has any
basis and anything factual. You're just telling us what the teachers'
unions want you to say, and that doesn't fly. This
(05:33):
is also this was a study of nearly two hundred
thousand California school children who have private insurance. So this
is already not The poorest segment of the population is
who I think has been absolutely ignored throughout this whole process. Actually,
I was on America's newsroom today and I felt myself
getting angry talking about this time, like I am still mad, bro,
(05:56):
and I really I like started getting like, you know,
the poorest kids were held back from going to school.
I just remember all the rich parents around me sending
their kids to private school or going to their beach
house and sending the open public schools there or whatever,
and the poorest kids had nobody saying anything, and the
teachers union stopped those schools from opening the longest, you know,
(06:18):
going back to California, the truth is that the private
schools opened months and months before the public schools. Gavin
Newsom's kids got to go to school, well before the
public school kids got to go to school. So it
just it really still pisses me off, and I don't
know if I'm ever going to get over that.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, I like also, they continue to give themselves an
out right. So the headline on this New York Times
coverage of this study, which was produced by the journal Epidemiology, says,
youth mental health improved when schools reopened. Study finds with
the end of school shutdowns, children's mental health appointments fell sharply,
though other factors may have contributed. There's also inside here
(06:57):
a quote from one of the doctors who was involved
in this. This is definitely a piece of evidence that
I wish we'd have at the beginning of the pandemic
to inform the conversations we were having a lot of
people knew that we knew badly. We were saying it. Yeah,
we were saying it. There was evidence, as you point out,
that the very same elite organizations had studied in the past.
(07:17):
There was also specific study of kids who missed school
for a long period of time due to Katrina when
they were displaced that the NPR reporter who famously wrote
the Now It Can Be Told book on school closings
that she didn't report on very much while she was
at NPR, oh education reporter, She noted that there was
a study available for this that was like, oh, yeah,
(07:37):
this is real bad for students. Yes, yes, And by
the way, this cop out where they're like, I wish
we'd had this information, had we known. Yeah, you could
check Georgia or Texas or Florida or Europe.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Or say right, Europe opens in the summer of twenty twenty.
Come on, do the CARDI b ies the you know,
you can see with your eyes the European children were
not dropping dead. And that we knew, we knew. And
the other thing, I'm it's gonna continue to be angry
about this, and another thing, and one more thing. We
(08:12):
knew since the beginning that older people were at most
at risk for this virus. We knew that March twenty twenty.
I have evidence that I was saying that in March
twenty twenty, and I'm nobody. So we knew that the
kids were out of school. When the elderly population went
back to like seeing shows and going to restaurants and
(08:34):
just you know, being right up in each other's faces,
and the kids still stayed out of school. It was
a political calculation. It was all about politics. It was
all about what Randy Winingarten wanted. And that's what went
wrong here. I do appreciate that the author of this
New York Times piece about the study does mention that
by fall of that year, many private and public schools,
(08:56):
mostly in Republican led states, reopened. So it was a
political thing. And guess who thinks that somebody else is
responsible for this, Mary Catherine, here's Randy Weingarten looking for
somebody to blame.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
I do wonder what you think, like looking back to
that tumultuous period of time, do you think that teacher
unions and Democrats have done enough self examination in the
role they played in pandemic school closures?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Like were their mistakes made?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah? Of course there were, and there were mistakes made
by everyone. There was huge mistakes made by the Trump
administration to not be clear, to not focus on safety
as they were focusing on reopening it. Reopening became political,
not became something that we all should have prioritized.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Reopening became political. It was you, ma'am. It was you.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
It was you. She does this dance every time where
she as they all did. She's like, I wanted to open.
I just I wanted to open safely. The safely meant
give me many, many, many billions of dollars. Yeah, me
first place in the vaccine line. Then I won't go
back to school. Also give me more billions. And the
(10:15):
safety that I'm going to set the bar for cannot
possibly be reached by ninety percent of schools.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Will never be met.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, was what she did. That was what she did.
If you look at the map that she offered, under
the strictures that she offered when they came and wrote
policy for the Biden administration, it was unattainable. The point
was to say we want to open and to not
allow reopening. That's what she did. And by the way,
can I read some of the specifics here. The study
published on Monday, tracked medical claims for one hundred and
(10:44):
eighty five thousand privately ensured children from ages five to eighteen.
Nine months after school's reopened. The probability that a child
would be seen by a provider for a mental health
condition was reduced by forty three percent. The authors found
spending on mental health medications decrease by seven point five percent,
and spending on other treatments like therapy decreased by ten percent.
The improvements were more striking among girls, which is something
(11:06):
we always hear about mental health challenges. These are the
prices we paid for, frankly, the ransom that Randy Winingarden wanted.
And God, by the way, in your taxpayer money. Because
while this was happening. It's not just mistakes were made.
People like us who were pointing out that the NPR
reporter had written in June. Anya Kamenets is her name,
(11:29):
She had written in June about kids of essential workers
gathering at YMCA's and ways they had mitigated spread, and
that there hadn't been not a dang infection that came
from the kids of essential workers in these spaces. We
all knew if you wanted to figure it out, you
could have figured it out. And we're pointing out that
this is real and it's happening in Europe and Britain,
(11:51):
and they're calling us like human sacrifice people.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
That's what they wanted teachers to die. Yeah, that was
the other thing, Like, you know, Andy Winegarden doesn't have school,
doesn't have kids in the public school system. We did,
you and I did. What did we not care if
our kids were going to die? Of course we cared,
you know, I think we cared maybe a little bit
more than Randy Winegarden did. So the fact that we
had seen the data, seen what Europe was doing, seeing
(12:17):
what was happening in certain states, we didn't make a
ridiculous decision to want our kids to go back to school,
and you know, for both of us it changed a
lot of things going forward and the way that we
looked at the public school systems where we lived. So
you know, we're not alone in that. Randy Winegarden, as
people like to say, is the biggest school choice advocate
(12:37):
in the country.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
She really is.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It really does push people out of public schools and
into private schools and they end up, you know, petitioning
their governments to have school vouchers and all of that.
She's at the forefront of that, you know revolution. Congratulations
Randy Winerarten.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I would say she's done far more than I have
for the cause, and I guess in that way I
appreciate her. But this, the gas lighting continues to this
day about what they did, which is say we want
schools open, make it impossible for them to open. And
the very credulous allies in the press were like.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, I know they want them open, they want them open.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
No another thing they did, by the way, I just
can end again one more thing. Another thing they did
was was say, well, the communities, the marginalized communities that
you're talking about, that we are allegedly disadvantaging by having
schools closed, they don't want to open. And you did
see in polling that many minority families were more worried
about infection than others, perhaps because they had generational households,
(13:35):
all sorts of things. But what you also found is
once schools opened in an area and you saw that
no one was dropping dead, everyone wanted to go back. Yea.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
So it was right.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
It was a spiral created and sustained by school boards
and teachers unions.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, all right, they're not going to get away with this,
not on normally, not on this show. No, we're going
to keep talking about it. We'll be right back with
more on normally.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
All right, we are back with the media's newest line
of attack on Donald Trump, which woo it's a doozy. Yeah,
he's old, Carola. They're gonna do the investigation on an
old president.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Now have we had an old president before? I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It's never happened, right, it never happened.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So The Atlantic has a piece called the Enfeebling of
the President. Trump is showing signs that he's lost the
physical stamina to do the job. And our friend Tom
Bevan at RCP tweeted this and said unbelievable balls by
media orgs to push this stuff after four years of
gaslight in the public over Joe Biden. There's another piece
(14:49):
in the New York Times by Frank Bruney, is sleepy
Donald to the new sleepy Joe? Was there an old
sleepy Joe? I missed the story on that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, yeah, Yo, did you guys do that? Don't worry
does Frank have an op ed on that? Because I
don't think he does. He yes, Frank says at a
cabinet meeting last Tuesday, President Trump didn't merely close his
eyes and achieve a dreary stillness universally recognized as a
vertical net. He did so during a gathering convened at
least in part so he could bathe in his acolytes flattery.
(15:18):
They batted their eyes at him. He might want to
think twice about letting the television cameras in next time.
And he says it's giving us presidential deja vu. He's
starting to give President Joe Biden vibes. I of all
the criticisms you can make of don I know, Yeah,
there are many, Yeah, the one about his energy level,
(15:40):
than that's not it.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
He actually has more vigor than I do often, and
like this guy, he really doesn't sleep and I really
like sleep. So he and I just can't align on this.
They keep talking about the MRI that he had in October.
The Atlantic piece goes over it again that we don't
know what he had the MRI on, and I don't know.
(16:04):
He seems more than fine, Like, get him on something else,
get him on being abrasive, get him on you know,
being rude, any of any of those things fine, but
fun lack of energy is just something I don't see
them pinning on him, especially again after ignoring the last
guy completely and telling us that we were crazy for
(16:25):
thinking that that guy wasn't qualified or wasn't up to
the run.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
No, it's a it's a classic media ploy, right, which
is like, oh no, we're on the case, just only
for the people who we dislike. That's it, that's the rule.
And this is why, you know, many conservatives get understandably
extremely frustrated with this double standard, because the media will
suddenly pretend that this very big issue, the fitness of
(16:50):
the president, the mental fitness of the president, is a
very big and important issue that they cannot ignore. It
would be irresponsible, and it's like, where were why are you?
Where were you? We know exactly where you were. You
were hiding, Yeah, for four years, and you lied to everybody.
And this trust deficit has a lot of downstream, really
bad effects, not just with the media trust deficite, but
(17:13):
every major institution that insisted on lying to us about
many things in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yep, and those lies are still reverberating now because nobody
believes anything anymore. Nobody believes anyone anymore. The conspiracy nutty
culture that we're in right now is a direct result
of that. I think back to all the lies we
were told, and this is why nobody believes anything anymore.
(17:40):
But okay, the Atlantic piece, you know, the writer is like,
the meeting was really boring. I'm also not interested in
sitting through several hours worth of secretaries delivering absequious praise.
But they're doing it for his benefit. If he wants
more efficient meetings, he has the power to make it so.
During one and the thing is, it's written so like
(18:00):
how much he hates these people. During one moment, Secretary
of State Marco Rubio prattled on about how only Trump
could achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, which by the way,
is true. Trump himself slumped slowly forward with his eyes closed,
and sat up before his eyelids fluttered again. The President
did rouse himself at the end of the meeting, finding
the energy for a racist rant about Somali's I'm sorry,
(18:23):
like it's just, you know, the idea that everything that
these people do is bad and you need to constantly be,
you know, pummeling them for Rubio prattled on Marco. Rubio
prattled on, I've noun prattle.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Ever, I actually watched that meeting and he definitely didn't prattle.
It is again, even if you hate Donald Trump, yeah,
and they do, having media availabilities and open cabinet meetings
on a regular basis is greater than not doing those things.
(18:58):
Even if you don't like the way that people talk
in the meeting, guess what you're in the room, you
get to report on it. These are things that Biden
did not offer, period.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
And they didn't care. They didn't care that Biden never
talked to them. Ever, he was never allowing media to
be anywhere near him because then they would know the truth,
which they already knew because we could all see it.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Again.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I mean, you want to do the eyes again, we
could do two Cardi eyes in one and one I
got see with the eye.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Well, so that's my thing. My thing too, is like
you could see this in polling where like eighty five
percent of voters six months before the press ever dealt
with it, were like, yeah, he's too old for a
second term. Yep, everyone could see it. It was majorities
of Democrats. I want to say, sixty five to seventy
percent of Democrats said this, and the press was just like,
(19:49):
la la la la la. That is not true and
that doesn't work. And I do love to watch Nate
Silver periodically lose his mind at near a Tanden over this.
Near a Tanden was a Biden administration, highly placed official
who no doubt hit all of this, no doubt knew
about it. And yet she will be on X like, ooh,
(20:10):
that president is looking quite old? Can you tell from
a distance now near when you couldn't tell in the
room before.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah. I had a twenty twenty one column called there's
something wrong with the President.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We all knowed it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Come on, everybody called it. Though I don't even feel
like I was unique among that. I think we were
all like, there's something really wrong with this guy?
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, should we call this podcast?
Speaker 2 (20:32):
We all knew, We all knew all.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Along many things. We knew many things.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
We'll be right back with more on Normally and widow defense.
We are still on it, all right.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
We're back on Normally with an occasional segment which I
wish wasn't necessary, and that is widow Defense. Erica Kirk
is once again taking criticism because she is in public,
out and about, talking, smiling, quoting things, defending Turning Point USA,
the legacy of her husband, and people don't like that.
(21:08):
They don't like it. They think it portends that she
didn't really care. It's unsreely. Yeah, I hate this argument. Widows,
as I know very well having been widowed myself, function,
They raise their children, they smile, they go out, they
do things, and they should because you want them learning
to go about life again. I think that Erica Kirk
(21:31):
has done it in a really kind of stunningly strong way.
And I almost think this happened with me a bit too.
I almost think strength, which by the way, I think
is a gift of her faith and was with me.
Strength sort of works against you because if you're not
looking crushed all the time. For people they think that
that's somehow suspicious. I want to note this guy, John
(21:52):
Pavlovitz tweeted today, I've had paper cuts that took longer
to heal than Erica Kirk.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Ah what a jerk and.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Hold on, wait for it. His bio is this author
of If God Is Love, Don't be a jerk?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Like, seriously, dude, book my friend. Hey, I have a
book recommendation for you.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
It is especially for someone who claims to be religious
as he does. It's really the bar is solo not
to publicly castigate a widow with two young children.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Right. It's like, if you're going to judge someone, just
do it in your head, Like why do you need
to tell everybody this? And that's another thing. I think
that people just have stopped having inside thoughts, like sometimes
you can just think something and not share it with
your followers. It's really possible. It's been done, it is.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I spoke to some of this on America's newsroom the
other day, particularly the argument you get from some people
that Erica Kirk is a public figure, therefore everything is
in bounds. Here's what I had to say about that.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
I think it's really fitting that Charlie's message that he
left behind is not bare knuckle politics or even ideology,
but pointing people toward God and toward a practical way
of practicing their faith. I think that's what he was
very much into, particularly at the end of his life,
and Erica is stepping into those shoes to communicate that
as well. When she notes that people don't know you,
(23:18):
people don't know what's going on behind the scenes, I
just want to note when she takes incoming and takes
criticism about how she's living her life because she is
out there and she is a public figure. She's a
public figure now because her husband was murdered in cold
blood and because she believes in his legacy, and because
she wants to speak about it, because she smiles or
speaks well, that means she's powerful. She's a powerful woman
(23:41):
of faith, and she is being given power to do
this from a God who loves her. And people don't
understand that many the life she lives behind the scenes,
she's probably shielding us from a lot of her innermost feelings.
And I really, as somebody who was widowed myself with
two young children, I admire the strength she's showing and
the way that she's had to step into these shoes
(24:01):
and to do this, and I frankly, to do battle
against darker forces who are trying to speak about Charlie's
legacy themselves. She's the person to do it, and she's
doing a great job.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
She really is. That's the thing. Like I root for her,
I root for TPUSA. And it's like if Charlie could
see that some of the people that he considered friends
are taking a sledgehammer to his organization and criticizing his
wife and throwing her under the bus like this, Like
I just I can't believe what he would say. I
(24:34):
just imagine him seeing this and just being devastated at
how this all turned out.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
No, it's really shocking. And I think the trust deficit
that we talked about earlier, where many people have been
betrayed by major institutions and media, and frankly, the AI
world is going to make it even harder for us
to know what is true and what is not. Combined
with the attention economy, has created some of the worst
incentives and actors I have ever seen my life. I
(25:00):
have known many widows, many of them are treated very badly.
They people get in legal fights, they get in fights
over property and legacy and all sorts of things. They're
shunned from their former families. Like all sorts of bad
stuff happens, because grief is really hard for people. But
I've never seen what the Candace Owens and at all
are pulling with Erica Kurkin. And it's really really wrong.
(25:23):
And we have to use our discernment to decide when
asking questions isn't just asking questions.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Right, asking really stupid questions is not actually the way
to get to the bottom of anything. Yeah, you know
my own shirts and Egyptian planes and I don't know
French and Masade agents and just it's stupid. It is stupidity.
And if you're falling for it, I urge you to
get help, talk to somebody, Go to people you care
(25:52):
about and say, I've been following Candace Owens, and she says,
and see what they say about it. If they really
care about you, they're going to try to talk you
down from it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well, and as Erica notes, and I think she's right.
She says, she follows Charlie's rule on this by not
always answering each charge and I think that's probably the
correct spiritual decision for her that she doesn't have to
get She's been admirably above the fray this entire time,
whether the left or the former friends of the Right
are talking about her, I think she's done the right thing.
(26:22):
So she talks about that, but she also noted what
she wants is justice, and one way to achieve that
is not to taint the jury pool with a giant
conspiracy theory flood that makes it harder to get justice.
So I pray for her just in her daily life
and everything she's doing, and we will always be on
Wido defense hear it normally.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Well, thanks for joining us on Normally Normally airs Tuesdays
and Thursdays, and you could subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts.
Get in touch with us at normallythepod at gmail dot com.
We're going to have a special ask us Anything episode
two of them at the end of the year, so
please send us your question anything you want answered on
those shows. Thanks for listening, and when things get weird,
(27:05):
act normally
Hey guys, we're back. Normally the show was normally it
takes for when the news gets weird.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I'm there to sell him him and I'm Carol Markowitz
plus going over there, Mary Catherine.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
It's all right.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I don't think I mentioned this, but my kids did
me so dirty this week.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oh what they do?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
They posed really nicely for our picture and now I
have to do a Christmas card.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh yay. Great. Because I'm still suffering with what I'm
writing on.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Mine, I decided not to write anything. I was like, yeah, Sela.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Vi, I don't know. I did that last year and
a lot of people were like, oh, I missed the
little story about your kids, and I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, Well, writing is hard.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Writing is very hard. And we were just saying that
right before the show began, talking far easier than writing.
Writing is difficult, and it's yeah hard. So we're not
going to get totally into this because this isn't one
of our topics. But a lot of people are asking
what we think about the Myami mayoral race going to
a Democrat, and we had talked about it on the
(01:04):
show before, and I think we should just get into
it a little bit, so I would just say what
I've said previously on the show is the Miami mayor
is not like the New York mayor. It's not like
this huge, you know, big deal mayor. It's a few neighborhoods.
It's Miami City. Nevertheless, it's not great that a seat
(01:26):
that had been Republican for a very long time, and
again fairly liberal republican, but still Republican, has now gone
to a Democrat. Two things about this One, it's an
off year election. Democrats are more motivated. We talk about
that on here all the time. Two, they don't actually
run under a party, so it's not even like you
could say, oh, there was a party line thing, although
(01:48):
you know, maybe Democrats came out and voted for her anyway,
But Eileen Higgins is the new going to be the
new mayor of the City of Miami. Now, again, this
is only a few neighborhoods. It does not include. For example,
people think of Miami, they think of South Beach they
have a Republican mayor. Surfside they have a Republican mayor.
It's just you know, Sunny Isles they have a Republican mayor.
(02:09):
Bay Harbor they have a Republican mayor. These are all
the different areas of Miami under the Miami Dade umbrella.
So this is just one part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
There are many Miamis.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
There are many many Miamis who knew.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I do think this is like, you know, it doesn't
portend great things. Right. There was also another special election
for this is a state based House representative in Georgia,
not a US House representative, but he the Republican lost
a seat there that in twenty twenty four he had
won by some twenty plus points. Yeah, and it was
(02:45):
a district that was plus twelve in twenty twenty four
and he was just edged out by the Democrats. So
that is you know, there's obvious energy here from Democrats.
There are obvious issues for Republicans that if they are
not on top of addressing and if they are intent
on pretending don't exist, yes, you'll get more of this.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right. The message of these races has to be the
Republican Party has to get the voters more motivated. There
is something to be said for we just had a
presidential election last year. The Republican candidate won. Republican candidates
are on cruise control a little bit not candidates. Republican
voters are on cruise control a little bit. The party
needs to work on that, The president needs to work
(03:25):
on that. We need to have the messaging bee. We
need you to come out and vote again. It's time
to come back out. Let's go.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Let's make it happen every two years. Guys, that's how
it works. So but you got I look, it is
the business of convincing people over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Over and over again. Hard we do. Yeah, all right,
let's get back into what our first topic of the
day is. It's actually a combination of two of our things.
Now it can be told and still mad Bro's it's
a topic made for us. So it turns out that
youth mental health health suffered because schools stayed closed and
(04:03):
improved when schools reopened. No way, who could have guessed this.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
I can't imagine who figured this out. Yeah, I'm glad
we have this new evidence. As if we didn't know that,
like there were very real social costs to social isolation
before this. Like this is the thing that bothered me
about COVID is that no one did risk analysis. Instead,
they went all in just in uninfection. As if that
(04:30):
were the only risk in the world. And it's as
if we knew nothing about human behavior up until that moment. Yeah,
so then they were just like, no screens for seven
hours a day is fine for kids, and in your
house all day is totally fine. We don't have any
refuting evidence for that. It's like your brain. Your brain's
the refuting evidence.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
But also it was evidence that they themselves had produced
before that. That's it's really crazy. It's that the same
people who had made the evidence to say this stuff
is bad, like screens or not seeing faces for or
that kind of thing, then reverse themselves because they were
told to. Basically, it was like, no, now you have
to change what you thought before, and they they it
(05:10):
was just a big lie. And when you have a
result that you want and you change the evidence to
get to that result, that is not science. And that's
what we were saying the whole time, is that none
of this is science based. None of this has any
basis and anything factual. You're just telling us what the teachers'
unions want you to say, and that doesn't fly. This
(05:33):
is also this was a study of nearly two hundred
thousand California school children who have private insurance. So this
is already not The poorest segment of the population is
who I think has been absolutely ignored throughout this whole process. Actually,
I was on America's newsroom today and I felt myself
getting angry talking about this time, like I am still mad, bro,
(05:56):
and I really I like started getting like, you know,
the poorest kids were held back from going to school.
I just remember all the rich parents around me sending
their kids to private school or going to their beach
house and sending the open public schools there or whatever,
and the poorest kids had nobody saying anything, and the
teachers union stopped those schools from opening the longest, you know,
(06:18):
going back to California, the truth is that the private
schools opened months and months before the public schools. Gavin
Newsom's kids got to go to school, well before the
public school kids got to go to school. So it
just it really still pisses me off, and I don't
know if I'm ever going to get over that.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, I like also, they continue to give themselves an
out right. So the headline on this New York Times
coverage of this study, which was produced by the journal Epidemiology, says,
youth mental health improved when schools reopened. Study finds with
the end of school shutdowns, children's mental health appointments fell sharply,
though other factors may have contributed. There's also inside here
(06:57):
a quote from one of the doctors who was involved
in this. This is definitely a piece of evidence that
I wish we'd have at the beginning of the pandemic
to inform the conversations we were having a lot of
people knew that we knew badly. We were saying it. Yeah,
we were saying it. There was evidence, as you point out,
that the very same elite organizations had studied in the past.
(07:17):
There was also specific study of kids who missed school
for a long period of time due to Katrina when
they were displaced that the NPR reporter who famously wrote
the Now It Can Be Told book on school closings
that she didn't report on very much while she was
at NPR, oh education reporter, She noted that there was
a study available for this that was like, oh, yeah,
(07:37):
this is real bad for students. Yes, yes, And by
the way, this cop out where they're like, I wish
we'd had this information, had we known. Yeah, you could
check Georgia or Texas or Florida or Europe.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Or say right, Europe opens in the summer of twenty twenty.
Come on, do the CARDI b ies the you know,
you can see with your eyes the European children were
not dropping dead. And that we knew, we knew. And
the other thing, I'm it's gonna continue to be angry
about this, and another thing, and one more thing. We
(08:12):
knew since the beginning that older people were at most
at risk for this virus. We knew that March twenty twenty.
I have evidence that I was saying that in March
twenty twenty, and I'm nobody. So we knew that the
kids were out of school. When the elderly population went
back to like seeing shows and going to restaurants and
(08:34):
just you know, being right up in each other's faces,
and the kids still stayed out of school. It was
a political calculation. It was all about politics. It was
all about what Randy Winingarten wanted. And that's what went
wrong here. I do appreciate that the author of this
New York Times piece about the study does mention that
by fall of that year, many private and public schools,
(08:56):
mostly in Republican led states, reopened. So it was a
political thing. And guess who thinks that somebody else is
responsible for this, Mary Catherine, here's Randy Weingarten looking for
somebody to blame.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
I do wonder what you think, like looking back to
that tumultuous period of time, do you think that teacher
unions and Democrats have done enough self examination in the
role they played in pandemic school closures?
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Like were their mistakes made?
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah? Of course there were, and there were mistakes made
by everyone. There was huge mistakes made by the Trump
administration to not be clear, to not focus on safety
as they were focusing on reopening it. Reopening became political,
not became something that we all should have prioritized.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Reopening became political. It was you, ma'am. It was you.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
It was you. She does this dance every time where
she as they all did. She's like, I wanted to open.
I just I wanted to open safely. The safely meant
give me many, many, many billions of dollars. Yeah, me
first place in the vaccine line. Then I won't go
back to school. Also give me more billions. And the
(10:15):
safety that I'm going to set the bar for cannot
possibly be reached by ninety percent of schools.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Will never be met.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, was what she did. That was what she did.
If you look at the map that she offered, under
the strictures that she offered when they came and wrote
policy for the Biden administration, it was unattainable. The point
was to say we want to open and to not
allow reopening. That's what she did. And by the way,
can I read some of the specifics here. The study
published on Monday, tracked medical claims for one hundred and
(10:44):
eighty five thousand privately ensured children from ages five to eighteen.
Nine months after school's reopened. The probability that a child
would be seen by a provider for a mental health
condition was reduced by forty three percent. The authors found
spending on mental health medications decrease by seven point five percent,
and spending on other treatments like therapy decreased by ten percent.
The improvements were more striking among girls, which is something
(11:06):
we always hear about mental health challenges. These are the
prices we paid for, frankly, the ransom that Randy Winingarden wanted.
And God, by the way, in your taxpayer money. Because
while this was happening. It's not just mistakes were made.
People like us who were pointing out that the NPR
reporter had written in June. Anya Kamenets is her name,
(11:29):
She had written in June about kids of essential workers
gathering at YMCA's and ways they had mitigated spread, and
that there hadn't been not a dang infection that came
from the kids of essential workers in these spaces. We
all knew if you wanted to figure it out, you
could have figured it out. And we're pointing out that
this is real and it's happening in Europe and Britain,
(11:51):
and they're calling us like human sacrifice people.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
That's what they wanted teachers to die. Yeah, that was
the other thing, Like, you know, Andy Winegarden doesn't have school,
doesn't have kids in the public school system. We did,
you and I did. What did we not care if
our kids were going to die? Of course we cared,
you know, I think we cared maybe a little bit
more than Randy Winegarden did. So the fact that we
had seen the data, seen what Europe was doing, seeing
(12:17):
what was happening in certain states, we didn't make a
ridiculous decision to want our kids to go back to school,
and you know, for both of us it changed a
lot of things going forward and the way that we
looked at the public school systems where we lived. So
you know, we're not alone in that. Randy Winegarden, as
people like to say, is the biggest school choice advocate
(12:37):
in the country.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
She really is.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It really does push people out of public schools and
into private schools and they end up, you know, petitioning
their governments to have school vouchers and all of that.
She's at the forefront of that, you know revolution. Congratulations
Randy Winerarten.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I would say she's done far more than I have
for the cause, and I guess in that way I
appreciate her. But this, the gas lighting continues to this
day about what they did, which is say we want
schools open, make it impossible for them to open. And
the very credulous allies in the press were like.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, I know they want them open, they want them open.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
No another thing they did, by the way, I just
can end again one more thing. Another thing they did
was was say, well, the communities, the marginalized communities that
you're talking about, that we are allegedly disadvantaging by having
schools closed, they don't want to open. And you did
see in polling that many minority families were more worried
about infection than others, perhaps because they had generational households,
(13:35):
all sorts of things. But what you also found is
once schools opened in an area and you saw that
no one was dropping dead, everyone wanted to go back. Yea.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
So it was right.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
It was a spiral created and sustained by school boards
and teachers unions.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, all right, they're not going to get away with this,
not on normally, not on this show. No, we're going
to keep talking about it. We'll be right back with
more on normally.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
All right, we are back with the media's newest line
of attack on Donald Trump, which woo it's a doozy. Yeah,
he's old, Carola. They're gonna do the investigation on an
old president.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Now have we had an old president before? I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
It's never happened, right, it never happened.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So The Atlantic has a piece called the Enfeebling of
the President. Trump is showing signs that he's lost the
physical stamina to do the job. And our friend Tom
Bevan at RCP tweeted this and said unbelievable balls by
media orgs to push this stuff after four years of
gaslight in the public over Joe Biden. There's another piece
(14:49):
in the New York Times by Frank Bruney, is sleepy
Donald to the new sleepy Joe? Was there an old
sleepy Joe? I missed the story on that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, yeah, Yo, did you guys do that? Don't worry
does Frank have an op ed on that? Because I
don't think he does. He yes, Frank says at a
cabinet meeting last Tuesday, President Trump didn't merely close his
eyes and achieve a dreary stillness universally recognized as a
vertical net. He did so during a gathering convened at
least in part so he could bathe in his acolytes flattery.
(15:18):
They batted their eyes at him. He might want to
think twice about letting the television cameras in next time.
And he says it's giving us presidential deja vu. He's
starting to give President Joe Biden vibes. I of all
the criticisms you can make of don I know, Yeah,
there are many, Yeah, the one about his energy level,
(15:40):
than that's not it.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
He actually has more vigor than I do often, and
like this guy, he really doesn't sleep and I really
like sleep. So he and I just can't align on this.
They keep talking about the MRI that he had in October.
The Atlantic piece goes over it again that we don't
know what he had the MRI on, and I don't know.
(16:04):
He seems more than fine, Like, get him on something else,
get him on being abrasive, get him on you know,
being rude, any of any of those things fine, but
fun lack of energy is just something I don't see
them pinning on him, especially again after ignoring the last
guy completely and telling us that we were crazy for
(16:25):
thinking that that guy wasn't qualified or wasn't up to
the run.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
No, it's a it's a classic media ploy, right, which
is like, oh no, we're on the case, just only
for the people who we dislike. That's it, that's the rule.
And this is why, you know, many conservatives get understandably
extremely frustrated with this double standard, because the media will
suddenly pretend that this very big issue, the fitness of
(16:50):
the president, the mental fitness of the president, is a
very big and important issue that they cannot ignore. It
would be irresponsible, and it's like, where were why are you?
Where were you? We know exactly where you were. You
were hiding, Yeah, for four years, and you lied to everybody.
And this trust deficit has a lot of downstream, really
bad effects, not just with the media trust deficite, but
(17:13):
every major institution that insisted on lying to us about
many things in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yep, and those lies are still reverberating now because nobody
believes anything anymore. Nobody believes anyone anymore. The conspiracy nutty
culture that we're in right now is a direct result
of that. I think back to all the lies we
were told, and this is why nobody believes anything anymore.
(17:40):
But okay, the Atlantic piece, you know, the writer is like,
the meeting was really boring. I'm also not interested in
sitting through several hours worth of secretaries delivering absequious praise.
But they're doing it for his benefit. If he wants
more efficient meetings, he has the power to make it so.
During one and the thing is, it's written so like
(18:00):
how much he hates these people. During one moment, Secretary
of State Marco Rubio prattled on about how only Trump
could achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, which by the way,
is true. Trump himself slumped slowly forward with his eyes closed,
and sat up before his eyelids fluttered again. The President
did rouse himself at the end of the meeting, finding
the energy for a racist rant about Somali's I'm sorry,
(18:23):
like it's just, you know, the idea that everything that
these people do is bad and you need to constantly be,
you know, pummeling them for Rubio prattled on Marco. Rubio
prattled on, I've noun prattle.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Ever, I actually watched that meeting and he definitely didn't prattle.
It is again, even if you hate Donald Trump, yeah,
and they do, having media availabilities and open cabinet meetings
on a regular basis is greater than not doing those things.
(18:58):
Even if you don't like the way that people talk
in the meeting, guess what you're in the room, you
get to report on it. These are things that Biden
did not offer, period.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
And they didn't care. They didn't care that Biden never
talked to them. Ever, he was never allowing media to
be anywhere near him because then they would know the truth,
which they already knew because we could all see it.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Again.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I mean, you want to do the eyes again, we
could do two Cardi eyes in one and one I
got see with the eye.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Well, so that's my thing. My thing too, is like
you could see this in polling where like eighty five
percent of voters six months before the press ever dealt
with it, were like, yeah, he's too old for a
second term. Yep, everyone could see it. It was majorities
of Democrats. I want to say, sixty five to seventy
percent of Democrats said this, and the press was just like,
(19:49):
la la la la la. That is not true and
that doesn't work. And I do love to watch Nate
Silver periodically lose his mind at near a Tanden over this.
Near a Tanden was a Biden administration, highly placed official
who no doubt hit all of this, no doubt knew
about it. And yet she will be on X like, ooh,
(20:10):
that president is looking quite old? Can you tell from
a distance now near when you couldn't tell in the
room before.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah. I had a twenty twenty one column called there's
something wrong with the President.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
We all knowed it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Come on, everybody called it. Though I don't even feel
like I was unique among that. I think we were
all like, there's something really wrong with this guy?
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, should we call this podcast?
Speaker 2 (20:32):
We all knew, We all knew all.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Along many things. We knew many things.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
We'll be right back with more on Normally and widow defense.
We are still on it, all right.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
We're back on Normally with an occasional segment which I
wish wasn't necessary, and that is widow Defense. Erica Kirk
is once again taking criticism because she is in public,
out and about, talking, smiling, quoting things, defending Turning Point USA,
the legacy of her husband, and people don't like that.
(21:08):
They don't like it. They think it portends that she
didn't really care. It's unsreely. Yeah, I hate this argument. Widows,
as I know very well having been widowed myself, function,
They raise their children, they smile, they go out, they
do things, and they should because you want them learning
to go about life again. I think that Erica Kirk
(21:31):
has done it in a really kind of stunningly strong way.
And I almost think this happened with me a bit too.
I almost think strength, which by the way, I think
is a gift of her faith and was with me.
Strength sort of works against you because if you're not
looking crushed all the time. For people they think that
that's somehow suspicious. I want to note this guy, John
(21:52):
Pavlovitz tweeted today, I've had paper cuts that took longer
to heal than Erica Kirk.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Ah what a jerk and.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Hold on, wait for it. His bio is this author
of If God Is Love, Don't be a jerk?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Like, seriously, dude, book my friend. Hey, I have a
book recommendation for you.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
It is especially for someone who claims to be religious
as he does. It's really the bar is solo not
to publicly castigate a widow with two young children.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Right. It's like, if you're going to judge someone, just
do it in your head, Like why do you need
to tell everybody this? And that's another thing. I think
that people just have stopped having inside thoughts, like sometimes
you can just think something and not share it with
your followers. It's really possible. It's been done, it is.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I spoke to some of this on America's newsroom the
other day, particularly the argument you get from some people
that Erica Kirk is a public figure, therefore everything is
in bounds. Here's what I had to say about that.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
I think it's really fitting that Charlie's message that he
left behind is not bare knuckle politics or even ideology,
but pointing people toward God and toward a practical way
of practicing their faith. I think that's what he was
very much into, particularly at the end of his life,
and Erica is stepping into those shoes to communicate that
as well. When she notes that people don't know you,
(23:18):
people don't know what's going on behind the scenes, I
just want to note when she takes incoming and takes
criticism about how she's living her life because she is
out there and she is a public figure. She's a
public figure now because her husband was murdered in cold
blood and because she believes in his legacy, and because
she wants to speak about it, because she smiles or
speaks well, that means she's powerful. She's a powerful woman
(23:41):
of faith, and she is being given power to do
this from a God who loves her. And people don't
understand that many the life she lives behind the scenes,
she's probably shielding us from a lot of her innermost feelings.
And I really, as somebody who was widowed myself with
two young children, I admire the strength she's showing and
the way that she's had to step into these shoes
(24:01):
and to do this, and I frankly, to do battle
against darker forces who are trying to speak about Charlie's
legacy themselves. She's the person to do it, and she's
doing a great job.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
She really is. That's the thing. Like I root for her,
I root for TPUSA. And it's like if Charlie could
see that some of the people that he considered friends
are taking a sledgehammer to his organization and criticizing his
wife and throwing her under the bus like this, Like
I just I can't believe what he would say. I
(24:34):
just imagine him seeing this and just being devastated at
how this all turned out.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
No, it's really shocking. And I think the trust deficit
that we talked about earlier, where many people have been
betrayed by major institutions and media, and frankly, the AI
world is going to make it even harder for us
to know what is true and what is not. Combined
with the attention economy, has created some of the worst
incentives and actors I have ever seen my life. I
(25:00):
have known many widows, many of them are treated very badly.
They people get in legal fights, they get in fights
over property and legacy and all sorts of things. They're
shunned from their former families. Like all sorts of bad
stuff happens, because grief is really hard for people. But
I've never seen what the Candace Owens and at all
are pulling with Erica Kurkin. And it's really really wrong.
(25:23):
And we have to use our discernment to decide when
asking questions isn't just asking questions.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Right, asking really stupid questions is not actually the way
to get to the bottom of anything. Yeah, you know
my own shirts and Egyptian planes and I don't know
French and Masade agents and just it's stupid. It is stupidity.
And if you're falling for it, I urge you to
get help, talk to somebody, Go to people you care
(25:52):
about and say, I've been following Candace Owens, and she says,
and see what they say about it. If they really
care about you, they're going to try to talk you
down from it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well, and as Erica notes, and I think she's right.
She says, she follows Charlie's rule on this by not
always answering each charge and I think that's probably the
correct spiritual decision for her that she doesn't have to
get She's been admirably above the fray this entire time,
whether the left or the former friends of the Right
are talking about her, I think she's done the right thing.
(26:22):
So she talks about that, but she also noted what
she wants is justice, and one way to achieve that
is not to taint the jury pool with a giant
conspiracy theory flood that makes it harder to get justice.
So I pray for her just in her daily life
and everything she's doing, and we will always be on
Wido defense hear it normally.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Well, thanks for joining us on Normally Normally airs Tuesdays
and Thursdays, and you could subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts.
Get in touch with us at normallythepod at gmail dot com.
We're going to have a special ask us Anything episode
two of them at the end of the year, so
please send us your question anything you want answered on
those shows. Thanks for listening, and when things get weird,
(27:05):
act normally
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