John Gerardi Fills In - How Trump Prevailed in This Election

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trump won the election and Kamala Harris lost the election.
With the issue of abortion sort of being a little
bit sidelined, it wound up being I think, not nearly
as important an issue as I think Kamala Harris hoped.
It was the only one issue where she was pulling
better than Trump. It was the one issue where, you know,
the main issues where Trump pulled better tended to be

(00:22):
the real drivers of the election, the economy, inflation, et cetera.
And I want to discuss I think. So this is
John Girardi, by the way, filling in for Trevor Carey
here on The Valley's Power Talk. As many of you know,
I'm the executive director at Right to Life of Central California,
so I'm kind of I've been thinking about abortion a

(00:45):
lot since this election and thinking about how Trump really
moderated his tone and positions on the abortion issue. Republicans
took a lot of stuff about abortion out of their
their party platform. We have a lot fewer hard commitments
on abortion. We've got pro abortion people being nominated to
kind of critical positions in Trump's cabinet that'll oversee abortion funding,

(01:07):
like Robert Kennedy Junior Kennedy has been pro abortion pretty
much his old career, so I don't to think of
this is maybe a bit of a preview to Right
to Life Radio, and I want to talk about this phenomenon,
how it was that Trump was able to kind of
prevail here. I think it's a problem that people don't

(01:32):
like to think about abortion, they don't like to talk
about abortion. And I was kind of struck by something
that I hope is interesting to all of you, this
tweet I saw the other day from Planned Parenthood, and
I'm going to talk about this a little bit. I
do my show Saturday mornings at nine AM for Right
to Life called Right to Life Radio, and we discussed

(01:55):
a bunch of issues relating to abortion at the California level,
at the federal level, at local level. We talk about
human interest stories. We talk about like motivations for why
abortion is so commonplace, kind of the human element to it.
And I saw this and it made me really think.
It was a tweet from Planned Parenthood. For those who

(02:16):
don't know, Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest abortion provider.
It's a huge chain of affiliates. Each individual affiliates individual
affiliate is a nonprofit that runs several clinics. In each
of these nonprofit clinics, they do abortions and abortion is
the main driver of their business. Nothing else they do

(02:36):
makes them any money. Really, a lot of them are
lost leaders to get someone on birth control that they
know is going to fail within a few years so
that they come back as abortion patients. Abortion is just
their bread and butter as far as of all the
services they do, it's the biggest revenue generator. They have
this tweet that they send out and it says, trigger

(03:01):
warning pregnancy. What did you wish you learned about pregnancy
before becoming pregnant? Trigger warning? Now, for those of you
who aren't hip to this Millennial and gen Z lingo
trigger warning, it comes from a lot of sort of

(03:22):
a lot of millennials in gen Z have turned to
therapy as a replacement for religion, and the language of
therapy and therapists and mental health professionals has really infected
Millennial and gen Z discourse in ways that I think
sometimes are unhealthy. But basically, a trigger within mental health

(03:43):
is some topic that can elicit from someone struggling with
mental health issues some kind of negative adverse response, and
this is a legitimate thing that I think in many
cases that could legitimately really cause someone distress if someone
had been, for example, if someone had been a victim

(04:04):
of something horrible like sexual assault, for example, and they
turn on radio show and someone's talking about that, that
could potentially be a triggering thing for that person. It
could cause maybe it could be something that causes them
advert symptoms, mental distress, distress, whatever. What liberals have done

(04:27):
is take the concept of a trigger warning and applied it,
I think in ways that are wildly overly broad, and
liberals have developed these crazy sort of viewpoints that basically say,
if I'm encountering a viewpoint that I don't agree with,
this is something that is triggering for me, it is
something that could cause me existential angst and harm. And

(04:50):
this justifies in their eyes, you know, various forms of
censorship on college campuses, things like that. And I was
struck that planned parenthood thinks. So now again I can
maybe understand someone saying, hey, you know, we're gonna be
talking about sexual assault. If that's something that's a difficult

(05:11):
topic for someone to address, you know, just want to
give you advanced warning, a trigger warning that that's something
we're gonna discuss. I can kind of understand that for
something that's obviously traumatic and bad, like inherently so, like
sexual assault, no situation which sexual assault is okay or good,

(05:32):
I understand that everyone's experience of it is universally negative. Okay,
you want to do that for a topic like that,
be my guest. But here's Planned Parenthood doing so for pregnancy. Pregnancy,
the mere mention of pregnancy in their eyes, pregnancy is
such a negative thing that Planned Parenthood thinks this is

(05:55):
the kind of thing we need to attach to trigger
warning to now. A bunch of people responded to this
on Twitter. A bunch of people in the replies said,
you know, what's one of the things I learned about
pregnancy that I didn't know about before is how beautiful
it would be to feel my baby kicking inside of me.
And pro lifers wound up responding to it with positive
things about pregnancy, just to try to sort of troll

(06:15):
Planned Parenthood. And I kind of flippantly was tweeting a
bit about it and said, you know, only Planned Parenthood
would be so psycho as to think that pregnancy is
in and of itself a negative thing, such a negative
thing that it requires a trigger warning. Well, I thought
about it a lot more, and I think it ties

(06:37):
into our electoral politics, ties into the experience a lot
of people have had, and it's made me think maybe
I was a little too flippant. Let me explain what
I mean. I heard a woman speak once who had
been like an executive director of a planned parenthood clinic
in Texas. Her name is Abby Johnson. Some of you
may have heard of her. She came to Fresno to

(06:58):
speak about a month ago and she had this massive conversion.
She stopped being involved with Plant Parentage. She left Plant Parentage,
she had a religious conversion. She's now pro life. And
she talked about how when she started at Planned Parentage
she had this attitude of well, abortion is a tragedy,
it's a sad necessity, and it's only something that people
should pick as a last resort. But when you work

(07:21):
at planned parenthood and that's your bread and butter financially,
what winds up happening? She said? Over time, her conscience
got deadened and she was recommending abortions to anyone, no
matter how minor the difficulties they were facing in their pregnancy.
Tiny amount of insecurity. She was recommending abortion for everybody
she encountered. Her conscience was just getting deadened. She didn't

(07:43):
think of abortion as anything to bat an eye at.
It's the thing that when you're a hammer, every problem
looks like a nail that needs to be beaten. When
all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I think her experience is basically the experience of playing

(08:03):
parenthood as an institution. They look at pregnancy anyone expressing
any kind of reservation about any pregnancy, not only as yes,
you should obviously have an abortion, but this is a
money opportunity for us. For them, they view pregnancy as

(08:25):
a problem to be solved. You know, a lot of
the argumentation we see in America on the abortion debta
is you'll see the pro choice side yelling abortion is healthcare.
Abortion is healthcare, and then you'll hear people on the
right saying abortion is not healthcare. And I think sometimes
people think that's just two different ways of saying abortion

(08:45):
is bad or abortion is good. That's not quite what
it means. What is healthcare. Healthcare is some kind of
intervention to take someone from being unhealthy to healthy, or
to keep someone in a date of health. If abortion
is healthcare, then what is pregnancy? What ill What illness

(09:13):
is abortion curing? What adverse condition is abortion? Addressing? Is
someone who's pregnant unhealthy? Well, No, pregnancy is a natural
bodily process, It's a healthy, natural thing. Abortion is not
fixing anything wrong. It's artificially ending this natural process. Indeed,

(09:38):
in some ways the signature event around which so much
of female biology is ordered and oriented. Planned parenthood views
that again, this signature process of female biology as a

(10:03):
problem to be fixed, a problem to be resolved. It's
healthcare to stop it. That mindset has impacted I think
so many people all over the country. It's a denial

(10:26):
of our very nature, of who we are as human beings.
It's a denial of female biological reality. That this is
not a natural process. This is a perversion to be
stopped and artificially halted and arrested. And their messaging of

(10:51):
that has been effective. By the age of forty five,
one out of every four American women will have had
an abortion. I guarantee someone listening to this show has
had an abortion or is a man who was involved
in one. Guaranteed that someone listening to this has had
that experience.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
And.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
I think what we see in this election is a
wounded country where so many people have been through abortion.
And we know, by the way that about seventy percent
of women who go through abortions would rather not have
had one. About seventy percent of women say they felt
coerced into having their abortion, whether it's by financial need
or sometimes direct pressure from a partner, maybe outright coercion

(11:42):
in some cases. One out of every four adult women
voters about that many for guys, how many people you
think are hurt by that? And seventy percent of those
didn't want to do it? How many people you think

(12:04):
are hurt by that? How many people you think might
feel conflicted emotions about that? And how many people do
you think never want to think about that? Again, it's
probably a lot. Even among people who didn't have an abortion,
they know someone who did, probably, and they don't want

(12:25):
to think about it. They don't want to dwell on it. It's
an unpleasant topic. I recognize I am a strange person
relative to the rest of the population. I think about it,
I talk about it. I try to highlight stories of
people who think about it and talk about it, and
to highlight that this is not really good for us

(12:46):
as a society to address problems of poverty or financial insecurity,
healthcare insecurity, to address those problems with this solution is
cruel and it has way more impacts than people want
to admit care to admit, want to acknowledge. We don't

(13:09):
want to think about it. And I think that's what's
reflected in state ballot initiatives on it, in national polling
on it. We don't want to think about it. Kamala
Harris saw that. Yeah, she kind of had a better,
a more favored position among the American electorate than Trump
did on abortion. But guess what it wasn't what was

(13:29):
driving most people's votes because they don't want to think
about it. When they're forced to think about it, they
think about it as little as possible. All these ballot
initiatives that have been passed in these states saying, oh,
I guarantee ah right to abortion. People want to put
themselves in the middle. Oh okay, well some kind of
right to abortion. Maybe, Okay, that's fine, just voter foring
get away from it. They don't realize that what they're

(13:50):
voting for is actually a very broad right to abortion.
When you just vote for a right to abortion broadly
worded like that, you're voting for maybe third trimester abortion, abortion,
all kinds of extreme abortion measures that maybe you didn't intend.
And it made me think I was too flippant. I

(14:11):
was like, you, look at you idiots at planned parenthood.
You think what kind of a psycho thinks of pregnancy,
the process by which all of us came to be,
this beautiful thing between a man and a woman to
bring a child into this world? That you think you're
such psychos you think of pregnancy writ large as something
requiring a trigger warning. Maybe I'm naive, Maybe I'm I'm

(14:34):
off base. Abortion is so distorted this country and so
made us not want to think about it, that maybe
they're right and I'm wrong. It does maybe need a
trigger warning because of what they have wrought, because of
this denial of human nature that they've wrought, because of

(14:54):
their these people who needed a helping hand and all
they got instead was an abortion. I think that's why
abortion wasn't the big driver. We don't want to think
about it, we don't want to look at it in
its horrible, ugly face, because so many people are hurt

(15:18):
and wounded by it.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
This is Super Tuesday with Trevor Carrey on The Valley's
Power Talk.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
John Girardi in for Trevor. Thanks to Trevor Carrey and
to all the guys at Power Talk, Ryan and Agent
Squire's all the guys for letting me fill in for Trevor.
It's always fun and you can catch me after this
hour six pm is the normal installment of the John
Girardi Show. John Girardi Show is every Monday through Friday,
six to seven pm. One of the things I've been following,

(15:48):
especially on Right to Life Radio, which again you can
hear me and my buddy Jonathan Keller every Saturday morning
at nine am on Right to Life Radio is Trump's
various cabinet picks, and specifically I towards, well, what is
this signaling as far as abortion policy. I'd say Trump
was kind of cagey about what he was going to
do about abortion. He correctly identified probably that abortion was

(16:10):
the one issue that he wasn't doing better than Harris.
And again my thesis is that I think Americans don't
want to think about abortion. I think too many people
have been harmed and hurt and wounded by abortion and
don't want to think about it. It is an icky
thing to actually face head on, but it's a necessary thing,
I think, to face head on if you want to
deal with it with I think the compassion that's necessary,

(16:31):
and that's what motivates a lot of my work. So
I want to do a little bit of a run
through on some of the issues where Trump's cabinet picks
could have a big impact. So first, we have HHS,
the Department of Health and Human Services, which Trump is
appointed RFK. People fail to understand. HHS is, by budget,

(16:55):
the single biggest executive branch department. It's overseeing Medicare and Medicaid,
so all that money. It's overseeing the FDA, our regulation
of food and drugs. It's overseeing the National Institutes of
Health and the Centers for Disease Control, so all of
our analysis and research and government funding of research for

(17:19):
stuff that relates to healthcare. It's a massive, massive bureaucracy
that touches on the abortion question in like twenty different ways.
It's overseeing the entirety of Obamacare and the Obamacare markets
and all that. So Trump put Robert F. Kennedy Junior

(17:43):
in charge of it, who has always been pro choice.
Now he's kind of meandered on what his abortion position
exactly is. At one point during the campaign he said, oh,
actually I support limiting abortion only to the first trimester,
and then a week later he said, no, I don't
support that. I completely I think abortion's totally okay, no
holds barred. Now some thought was, well, maybe he's still

(18:06):
going to tell whatever the Trump administration line is going
to be on abortion. But then there was this big
story that the Trump administration decided not to appoint, in
fact rejected appointing this guy named Roger Severino to be
the deputy director of HHS. Severino is great. He was
an HHS official under Trump forty five and he's super

(18:29):
duper pro life. If he had been appointed the number
two at HHS, I would have been overjoyed. But no,
he's not going to get the gig. Now. Head of
the Centers of Disease for Disease Control is former Congressman
Robert Weldon, who's pro life. It's pretty good National Institutes

(18:51):
of Health Jay Boticharia is going to be in charge.
That's really important. To cut off federal funding for research
using the body parts of a borded children in various respects.
That's good, that's really good. Other appointees seem okay, but
others are not so hort it's not so hot. Rather,

(19:15):
making doctor memmet Oz the head of the overseeing Medicare
and Medicaid seems like a bad pick. He's been hugely
wishy washing on the abortion issue. And what I just
want to know from a Trump HHS is is there
any kind of guiding pro life plan? Is there any
kind of plan for getting the federal government you know. Look,
Trump has said multiple times over the course of the campaign,

(19:39):
abortions should be left for the states. Okay, fair enough.
If you want abortion to be left for the states, though,
President Trump, you need to extricate the federal government from
the various ways in which the federal government funds abortion.
You need to get the federal government out of funding
abortion through Title ten. Abortion providers have been able to

(20:01):
use Title ten to get a funding for decades. It's
this ridiculous thing. Dick Nixon wrote Title ten specifically to
not let abortion providers get money. And what did abortion
providers do under the Clinton administration? They develop this fiction
that oh, within the four walls of our abortion clinic.
There's another clinic that's the Title ten clinic, and it
can get all this Title ten money because it's not

(20:22):
going to an abortion provider. But within the same four
walls of this abortion clinic, the Title ten clinic can
refer people to get abortions and still get all this money.
It's ridiculous. Plain parent gets tens of millions of dollars
for it. Trump cut off that money in his first term.
I hope he'll cut it off in the second term,
but he needs the personnel to accomplish it. I don't

(20:44):
know if he's quite got it, and I don't know
if the leadership has a kind of real strategic way
of thinking about it. So again, for the sake of
these people who need this help, that is what I
hope happens. I hope that there's a real focus.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
This is the tremoratary show Condom Valley's power Talk.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
I want to talk about a story that's it's impacting Canada,
it's impacting now the UK, and it's with us here
in California. It's a foretaste of things to come. So
Canada legalized physician assisted suicide. The United Kingdom is on
the verge of legalizing physician assisted suicide, and we in

(21:31):
California legalized physician assistant suicide in twenty fifteen. Canada is
suiciding thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And the
premise of assisted suicide has basically been once you get

(21:53):
some certain threshold of having some kind of terminal disease,
you can have physician assisted suicide. So that's different from euthanasia. Basically,
an assisted suicide what it is is a doctor prescribes
you a deadly drug that you take. In euthanasia, the

(22:16):
doc is giving you the deadly drug. So in the
slippery scale, we started assisted suicide, then we go to
voluntary euthanasia, then we go to less than voluntary euthanasia.
Now in Canada, they're letting people get assisted suicide who

(22:37):
are just like homeless, who've got the kinds of problems
mental health, drug abuse problems that homeless people have. They
get sick in any way, shape or form, and then
they just are being encouraged to kill themselves. In Canada,
the wait time for a CT scan. Here we go,

(23:02):
the median weight time in Canada again, Canada socialized medicine.
The median weight time for a CT scan in Canada
last year was sixty six days. The wait time for
government funded physician assistant suicide eleven days. Now, what are

(23:23):
the moral principles involved here? I would say the fundamental
moral principle is we shouldn't kill people. We shouldn't help
people kill people. Do people suffer at the end of
the life, Yes, they do in many cases they do.
Should we do everything possible to improve or palliative care
to help people, Absolutely we should. But once you cross

(23:44):
that threshold of saying yes, people can kill themselves, it's
not hard to go to the next step of I
can help you kill yourself, to I can just kill you. Well,
you would have wanted to die, You should have wanted
to die. I can kill you, and that's more. And

(24:06):
who suffers it's the people at the bottom of society
in Canada. A lot of it's happening now with like
homeless people almost people have got various kinds of mental
health problems, drug problems, anything goes wrong, they're not going
to be taken care of. Disabilities rights advocates have always
worldwide opposed assistant suicide. Why because their healthcare is the

(24:26):
most expensive, especially in well Whether it's private funded health
insurance systems like ours, or government funded in health insurance systems,
there's a limited amount of resources to go around. Healthcare
providers are incentivized to cut costs, and you know, it's
a heck of a lot cheaper than chemo, than dialysis.

(24:48):
Just killing somebody subtly encouraging them to kill themselves, not
so subtly encouraging them to kill themselves, saying we will
cover assisted suicide, but we won't cover this. This is
now being debated in the United Kingdom whether or not

(25:10):
the United Kingdom is going to legalize physician assistant suicide.
I just want to add this, this kind of personal experience,
this kind of personal touch to all this. So, my
father passed away in March of this year, and it

(25:34):
was after a very difficult struggle with cancer, and especially
the last year of his life. My dad suffered pretty badly,
and we knew that his cancer. We learned sort of
at the start of that last year that his cancer

(25:54):
had progressed in a really aggressive and really bad fashion.
So sort of from March of twenty twenty two through
March of twenty twenty three, we knew it was bad shape.
My dad. Possibly, I don't know for a fact, but
all this assisted suicide stuff, the kinds of people they're

(26:16):
talking about are people like my dad. And did my
dad suffer?

Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Did my mom suffer watching him? Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (26:29):
She did.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
And to my dying day, I'll never be able to
fully appreciate and thank her for the ways she took
care of my dad. It was truly heroic. And that's
what marriage is. It's the greatest and most shining example
of it I've ever seen in my life. But I

(26:55):
think we have to have this fundamental appreciation that life
is good. And I know that's sounds like a slogan,
that sounds like something generic. I wouldn't trade that last
year with my dad for anything. I wouldn't trade those
little moments of being able to call my dad on
the phone and joke with him. To send my dad

(27:17):
and we both liked the Sopranos. We didn't like any
of the sex or violence in it. We just liked
all the jokes, the Italians, you know, busting each other's chops.
And so I would text my dad quotes from what
Paul Walnuts said or something with something in the news
that we could joke about. Godfather quotes and things like that.

(27:38):
I'll treasure that last year, being able to shoot the
breeze with my dad, being able to talk with my
dad about important stuff, important stuff at work, important stuff
with life, being able to watch football with my dad.
Having one day where my dad was having a really

(27:59):
tough time and I sat on the couch next to
him and I held his hand and we just sat
there together. And I'll never ever, I would never trade that,
the fact that my kids got to be with him

(28:21):
for one more year. I would never trade that for anything.
And as hard as it was, and maybe it's easy
for me to say, and it's harder to impress that
on him, but I also think about the kinds of
devoted care my dad got from all his physicians who

(28:43):
never I don't think any of them ever once breathed
anything about assistant suicide to him, And thank god they didn't.
I think my mom would have ripped their head off.
I would have been right there with her. But those
docs loved him, the various doctors who were helping him
and trying and try, and and they loved him. Once

(29:03):
assisted suicide gets in the picture, doesn't that that fundamentally
changes that doc patient relationship. This person goes from being
your healer, someone who's gonna move having on earth to
help you, to the person who might just facilitate you dying.
It bastardizes the practice of medicine. It perverts and twists

(29:26):
it from this is to heal to this is to kill,
from giving life to taking life. I think it perverts
our whole medical system and where funding goes. Every state

(29:47):
in this Union that has legalized position assisted suicide has
seen their paliative care efforts go down. And there's no
it's no wonder why why I pay for all these
paliative care efforts. Pailadive care is expensive, paily to care
is hard. Just get this guy to kill himself. And

(30:13):
I think so much. We've just bought into this idea
of autonomy. We've just bought into Well, it's my body
and my te if I'm gonna do it, if I'm
the one that suffering, it's my true wel Come, I
can't kill myself.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
One of the.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Ways in which assisted suicide is being promoted in Great Britain,
They've got these ads on the London Underground, their subway system.
It shows a woman in pink pajamas, dancing in her kitchen,
and it says, my dying wish is my family won't
see me suffer and I won't have to. And I
guess you know. I try to address these things through

(30:51):
sort of value neutral arguments without necessarily always trying to
bring in Christianity. But you're going to suffer. Everyone has
to suffer. We're all going to die. It's this unreality.
It's this detachment to act as though you're never gonna die,
that you're never going to have suffering in your life.

(31:11):
It's a denial of reality. And you know, for those
of your Christians out there, maybe many of you, maybe
most of you, we look on the Cross and we
can see that there's value there. There's something redeeming there.

(31:34):
It's not meaningless. It's not nothing, even from a and
again even from a purely humanistic, totally throw out Christianity
throughout religion, there was value in that last year of
my father's life. There absolutely was, no matter how you slice,
no matter what faith background you come from, the love

(31:58):
we were able to exchange in that year it was
worth it. It just feels like in California we're such
a bridge too far. We've passed it in twenty fifteen,
and it's another one of those topics no one wants
to talk about. We talked about this with abortion. No
one wants to think about it. No one wants to
talk about it. We don't want to look squarely in

(32:19):
the reality that we're all going to die one day.
We don't want to think about it. But if we
really love people, we won't kill them. We won't encourage
them to kill themselves.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
This is Super Tuesday with Trevor Carrey on The Valley's
Power Talk.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Thank you all so much for listening. It's been a
great three hours filling in for Trevor. We've got John
Girardi show More of Me coming up right after starting
at six to soho five go six to seven here
on Power Talk, as we do every night every weeknight.
Rather uh, just in this last set we had that
was a heavy hour. That was a heavy hour of radio.

(32:59):
I thank you if you stuck with me through it.
I had a lot, a lot of heavy stuff on
my mind. I wanted to get it out. Let's just
end this with a little bit on Thanksgiving. First of all,
I think I'm gonna give this warning at the end
of John Gerardi Show. Love your family, even if you

(33:23):
disagree with them about every political thing under the sun.
Just make a commitment. We're not gonna argue about Trump.
We're not gonna argue about Kamala Harris, We're not gonna
argue about any of that crap. You only get so
many of these things with people you love. So you
hug everybody, You watch some football, you drink, you eat

(33:44):
some dang turkey, eat some stuffing, have a fun time.
Don't get tied up in these things. Okay, I'm really
looking forward to having Thanksgiving with my family this year.
You know, you know, as I mentioned, the last second
was sort of my first things of thing without my dad.