07-07-25 - *FULL SHOW* Texas Flood Horror; Trump vs MS-13; Tariffs Return

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Obviously, I think for the whole country, what's happened in
Texas has put something of a pall on the weekend,
especially for me as a parent. It turns out that
they have just started a press conference with updates in Kerrville,
Texas right now, So I want to jump in and

(00:20):
have a listen. I think this is the city manager
speaking right now.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Twenty seven children, fifteen adults and nine children.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Are pending identification.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Okay, this is the sheriff. I'm sorry, this is the
county accounted for in one counselor.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
We continue to offer our condolences to those affected, reunite
and the families remain our top priority here on this operation.
Please note that Highway thirty nine, an o Ingram loop,
remains closed to the public other than those who live.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
In that area would not be allowed out there.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I will I'll turn it over to Senator Creep, same
as our city mans, our city manager Alter Rice.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Good morning, A. Dulton Rice, the city manager for the
City of Kerrville. As everybody knows, we are working in
conjunction with the city under a unified command response and
work and again a lot of devastation. Our hearts go
out to the families and the victims. We want to
continue to work together as a community. We love the
media support on this to be able to communicate that message,

(01:25):
communicate family, communicate togetherness, and we really appreciate all the
support and helping us be able.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
To do that.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
Search and rescue o, as a sheriff said, search and
rescue operations will continue today from Hunt in North Kerr
County all the way to Canyon Lake and Comal County.
Now we're only focused on the Kirk County side, but
we wanted to talk about that because from a linear
from Hunt all the way to Coomal County and a
straight line distance is over one hundred kilometers. This is

(01:53):
a massive field that is happening. And again this is unprecedented,
unprecedented flood events. So we are still currently in the
in the primary search phase, which is the rapid one
they are running it. You know, we have different segments
that are gritted out. Each one of those segments are
taking anywhere between an hour to three hours, up to

(02:13):
two kilometers for each segment. So what that means is
they're running into a lot of technical challenges with terrain,
with water, even potentially you know, with weather, you know
in the rising fields.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
We've talked about this before.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
Volunteers stay out of the way, because if we start
getting weather reports and in all you know, in all
the other complications that are out there, we then have
to pull off of those search and rescue missions to
be able to communicate to those volunteers to get off,
to make sure that they don't become victims themselves. Those
operations involve nineteen different local and state agencies. In addition

(02:48):
to conducting primary and secondary searches, they will be conducting
welfare checks on areas in north North Kirk County impacted
by power outages.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
And when we say search and rescue operations, right, that's
good for now and you get the idea. It was
a difficult weekend. I have to say, I don't like
starting a Monday like this. July fourth Independence Day is
for me, the most American and most probably most joyous

(03:20):
of holidays. I talked about a little bit as we
were heading into the holiday. Right, there is so much
to love about this country. And it doesn't mean we
like everything every day, and doesn't mean we like everything
that any given politician is doing. But wouldn't we understand
what this country is based on and what this country
is supposed to be and what we usually strive for.
There's nothing like it, and there's never been anything like it,

(03:41):
and I don't know if there'll ever be anything like
it again. And there is so much to celebrate and
so much to love about the United States of America.
And you know, I just wanted to have a lovely,
actually fairly quiet holiday weekend. And you know, Chris and
I did some stuff on Friday, obviously a day, and
we took a lovely hike and all that, and then

(04:02):
you know, then we get this, Then we get this news,
and uh, it's just especially as a parent. You know,
before I had kids, when I'd hear a news story
that involved the death of a child, it would bother me.
But once I became a parent, it was a whole
different thing.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
I don't think I need to explain I don't think
I don't think.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
It needs to be explained, but it just it changes you.
It changes you. And hearing these these stories about all
these dead children is brutal. It's brutal, and there have
been a couple real glimmers of you know, a little
bit of sunshine out of out of that gloom. And

(04:47):
let me let me share. Let me share one story
with you. I'm sure you heard this already. You've probably
been glued to the news. But gosh, all right, So
I thought I was gonna share a good story with you,
and now I'm not. I just learned this as I'm

(05:09):
reading the news story, because it was just updated. There
was a news story over the weekend that two young
girls were found alive, like thirty feet up a tree
about fifteen miles down the river from Kerrville. And it
was this kind of miracle story of these two girls

(05:30):
being rescued. And of course my thought was, I have
no idea how two young girls would survive being taken
down a river for fifteen miles, but such was the story.
And now here's the update. This is from the New
York Post website. US Representative Chip Roy of Texas, and
he represents that district revealed on Sunday that the supposed

(05:52):
harrowing tale of survival of two girls who clung to
a tree until they were rescued from the Texas floods
was a false report. He says, the story of rescues
in Kendall County was not true. Wow, one thing I
was kind of looking forward to being able to share
with you, and now there's an update that it wasn't

(06:14):
even true. It's a difficult weekend. It was a very
difficult weekend. We're not going to spend the whole show
on this, I promise, And in fact, I have a
ton of other stuff to do. Starting the very next
segment of the show, We're gonna move on to some
other things. We will keep coming back to this from
time to time during the show. Obviously, as Ted Cruz
is saying on television right now, this is a parent's
worst nightmare, and Texas is grieving. And I suppose I

(06:37):
don't need to say it, but if you are a
person of faith, I'm sure your prayers are already with
the families in Texas, the families of victims, the families
of people who simply don't know where their loved ones are.
We'll be right back by the way. If you ever
have a chance to listen to the Guy Benson's show,
I have a listen today if you feel like it,

(06:58):
I will be filling in for Guy Benson. So I've
got six hours of radio today, Yeah, why not? Why not?
All right, let's do something completely different there's actually a
local story from the Denver Post, and I'm I'm reading
this thing, and I'm of two minds about it as
I'm as I'm reading it. One is this, you know,

(07:18):
very much of an old school muckraker kind of reporting,
if you know that term, from the old days, of
journalists really going after businesses and stuff, especially big corporation
stuff like that. And I'm not saying they're wrong. It
was kind of a niche to push back on large
businesses and media outlets, and some politicians made made a

(07:40):
living at that, and sometimes justified and sometimes not. But
I also think, as I read this story, there's some
stuff here that seems like a real problem, and maybe
the enforcement mechanisms or the penalty for people who don't
comply maybe should be a little more. And here's the
headline from the Denver Post, how Denver allows faulty or

(08:01):
inoperable elevators to keep trapping people, And the subhead is
Denver Fire regulates elevator operators but rarely uses full enforcement capabilities.
And the reporter on this at the Denver Post is
Sam Tebatschnik, who has been on air with me a
couple of times for different stories. He writes about very

(08:21):
interesting topics, and I don't think he's some you know,
wild eyed crusader. I think this is you know, real
news reporting here. So obviously, like a lot of news stories,
it starts off with a story about someone, because those
are the things that really grab people. Genie Chase remembers
crying a lot in December and January. It was the
holiday season, a time for merriment and to see family,

(08:44):
but Chase couldn't see anyone. She couldn't even leave her
Denver apartment for two weeks, both elevators at the Avondale Apartments,
an affordable housing complex at thirty two seventy five West
fourteenth Avenue, didn't work, stranding disabled and elderly residents in
their homes. Chase has been in a wheelchair since two
thousand and nine, the result of a nerve condition that

(09:06):
leaves her unable to walk. Living on the fifth floor
means she relies on the elevators for her livelihood. She
missed vet appointments for her dogs, she missed physical therapy sessions.
She couldn't go to lunch or anywhere else with her son.
She said, I got really depressed and felt like everything
in my life was taken away from me and there
was nothing I can do. Both elevators at the building,

(09:27):
according to SAM, have expired certificates of operation, with one
elevator last inspected in October of twenty twenty three. Denver
law mandates that elevators be inspected by a third party
service at least once a year in order to renew
those certificates, and this gets to the enforcement part here.
The Denver Fire Department, which oversees conveyances in the city,

(09:50):
warns that noncompliance will result in officials shutting down elevators
and issuing summons is to appear in court. The problem
Denver Fire hasn't actually done that in it least five years.
Elevators across the city are trapping people inside or are
otherwise inoperable, and conveyance regulators aren't doing enough to ensure

(10:11):
they're working properly and safely. According to a Denver Post investigation,
the fire department in Denver responded to just under thirty
five hundred elevator rescue calls since the start of last year,
and the newspaper reviewed the thirty addresses with the most
elevator entrapments, and ten of those thirty or a third

(10:32):
of them. One or more of the elevators had expired
certificate of operation. Check this out. Denver firefighters received forty
three elevator rescue calls at Presbyterian Saint Luke's Medical Center
over the past eighteen months. What the Hilton at the
Colorado Convention Center twenty eight rescue calls during that same period.

(10:56):
A public housing building in the Baker neighborhood in Denver
twenty responses, and so on. Skipping ahead. When an elevator
breaks but doesn't require firefighters to respond, the department never
gets notified. It's not clear whether any city agency hears
about it. And just in the interest of time, I'll

(11:16):
just kind of summarize a little bit what Sam.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Says in this.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
There are a lot of buildings where the elevators keep failing.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
The fire department.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
Sometimes goes out, as we just said, sometimes they might
not even know, but the fire department goes out. And
oftentimes they just simply don't enforce or can enforce, and
they say, all right, you got to show up for
such and such a hearing, but they don't. And of
course you'll get these buildings that are kind of low
end buildings almost like slumlords owning them, and they don't
want to spend the money to fix up the elevators.

(11:45):
But the bottom line is, if you've got people living
on a high floor in a building, or even on
a low floor in a building, if they're not very
mobile people or someone can fined to a wheelchair, you'd
have to think that not getting an elevator fixed within
some very short period of time should come with really
significant financial penalties and maybe criminal charges. You're entrapping people

(12:11):
who are relying on you to be able to get
in and out of the place they live in that
they are paying you to be able to live there,
or you know, a hospital or whatever. You've got these responsibilities,
and it'll be very interesting to see if the city government,
the fire department, or you know, anybody gets a fire

(12:32):
lit under their butts. From this report from Sam Right
that one of the section titles in the article city
Oversights still too fragmented and weak. You know, to me,
this is this is a real thing. You got all
these people I mean in a hospital, in a hotel.
And then all of these probably lower end buildings mostly

(12:55):
could be public housing, could be affordable housing, whatever it
might be. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you are
supposed to be a hostage in your own apartment. It's
not right. And I'm grateful to Sam for doing this investigation.
Maybe we'll get him on the show to see, you know,
as a follow up, to see if he hears anything
from the fire department or from the city what they're

(13:17):
going to do about it. We'll take a quick break,
we'll be back with the great Andy McCarthy, my good
friend Andy McCarthy, and Andy wrote a very interesting piece
about the Trump administration and MS thirteen that I want
to get to in a second.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Andy, I want to ask you one.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Other question though that I didn't tell you I was
going to ask you. It just occurred to me. I
wanted to ask you this, and I don't think you've
sp spent as much time on it as let's say,
your Fox colleague Paul Morrow. But I was wondering if
you had any thoughts on why the prosecutors in Idaho
decided to go with a plea deal rather than going

(13:53):
for the trial and the death sentence.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (13:57):
I don't have a good handle ross on what the
murder evidence was. It's not unusual for the Justice Department
to take a sentence of life imprisonment without a parole,
to take the death penalty off the table, which is

(14:19):
I think my understanding of how that's going to go,
my own view of it is.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
For what it's worth.

Speaker 5 (14:28):
The courts are hostile to the death penalty, and these
death penalty cases are they're made more difficult by virtue
of charging the death penalty, and the outcome is uncertain
in the sense that it often takes years to get

(14:48):
the appellate courts to get through the appellate litigation because
a lot of the appellate courts push against the death penalty.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
So it's a I've seen, Well I don't Yeah, I
guess I.

Speaker 5 (15:05):
Don't know enough about how it works, and I don't
know how to give an intelligent answer to that.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
All right, Yeah, I thought it was I thought it
was an interesting decision, and I knew you hadn't focused
too much on it, So that's okay. You wrote a
fascinating piece for National Review and it's entitled Trump DOJ
drops cases against top MS thirteen leaders. You reference a

(15:30):
New York Times report that's entitled Trump vowed to dismantle
MS thirteen His deal with Bukeley, that's the president down there,
threatens that effort. So what is this about? What do
we need to know?

Speaker 5 (15:44):
Well, you know, I think given all the rhetoric the
administration's engaged in it about MS thirteen and the reliance
that it's placing on the President's and Secretary Rubio's relationship
that they have developed with the Naib Bukela, who is
the president of El Salvador, it's relevant, to say the least,

(16:12):
to examine what's happening here, which is that with respect
to two of the main defendants that they've managed to
get into the American criminal justice system, the administration has
now dismissed the charges against these two guys, while at
the same time, I think jacking up the rhetoric with

(16:34):
respect to this guy, Abrego Garcia. And you know, contrary
to what people say here, I'm not carrying a brief
for Abrego Garcia.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
I think the administration has.

Speaker 5 (16:45):
To follow the law and has to follow due process,
and I have I don't have any reason to doubt
that Abrago Garcia is somehow connected to MS thirteen, although
if you read the indictment the Justice Department itself filed,
they seem to go back and forth on that question

(17:06):
about whether he's an associate or a member or somebody
that respect. They're not exactly clear on exactly what his
connection is. But here Ross, we're dealing with two people
who are at the very zenith of MS thirteen, which
is a very regimented organization because it has a, you know,
sort of international sprawl. These are two guys that are

(17:29):
in the two organizations within MS thirteen that are at
the very highest echelon of MS thirteen. The administration has
dismisscharges against them and return them to L. Salvador under
circumstances where there's a lot of evidence developed by the
Justice Department itself that Ukela has corrupt dealings with gangs in.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
General in L.

Speaker 5 (17:57):
Salvador and MS thirteen in particular, where some of the
deals that he's made with them, a big condition of
that is to shield their top members from American prosecution.
And the only other thing I would say about it
is I was a prosecutor in the Justice Department for
a very long time. The Justice Department's practice, including in

(18:19):
cases that I participated in, was to make deals with
foreign governments to the extent that it was necessary in
order to bring big offenders into our system and prosecute them,
with the understanding that if we didn't do it, the
likelihood was going to be that nobody did it.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
So for example, in the piece that you.

Speaker 5 (18:41):
Mentioned, I note that I was in a case in
the nineteen eighties, which seems like forever ago, where we
prosecuted the head of the Sicilian mafia. We had to
agree to a thirty year ceiling on the charges against him,
even though the defendants that we had handed in the
United States we're looking at life in prison because in Europe,

(19:05):
which is where this guy was, that was the ceiling
that you could get for the kind of charges that
we were bringing. So we had to agree to the
thirty year cap in order to get them to extradite
him to us. But we thought it was worth it
because who else was going to prosecute him for the
crimes he had committed against Americans if we didn't do it.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
And I think I could be remembering this wrong, Andy,
so you can correct me, because I'm sure you will
remember it correctly. But I think that in order to
get El Chapo extradited to the United States from Mexico,
we had to promise we wouldn't seek the death penalty.

Speaker 5 (19:38):
Yeah, that's that's pretty common because there's no death penalty
in Europe, and there are a lot of countries where
there's no death penalty. Uh, and we often have to
make that deal in order to get a European country
or a country that doesn't have the death penalty to

(19:58):
send somebody.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Here. Share a few just short sentences from the New
York Times piece that Andy references in his great piece
for National Review, And again if you go to National
Review dot com you'll find it. And by the way,
I didn't properly introduce Andy. So he's a former federal prosecutor.
As he mentioned, he's a contributing editor at National Review.
Andy as a Fox News contributor. So whenever there's serious

(20:21):
legal stuff, especially on the federal side, going on, you
will see Andy show up on Fox. So let me
just share this with you.

Speaker 5 (20:28):
Just but Ross, but Russ, we've established he doesn't done
nothing about IDAHOM.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
That's right, that's right, exactly all right. This is from
the New York Times. Even among the brutal ranks of
the transnational gang called MS thirteen, Vladimir Arevalo Chavez stands
out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say,
known as Vampiro. Like Vampire, He's been accused of overseeing
killings in at least three countries. His arrest in February

(20:57):
of twenty twenty three was a major triumph for American investigators,
who only months earlier had accused him and twelve other
gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed, and corruption in a wide
ranging federal indictment on Long Island. But this April, prosecutors
who brought those charges suddenly and quietly asked a federal
judge to drop them, citing national security concerns. They said

(21:20):
they needed to return him to El Salvador. So continue Andy, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (21:28):
Well, I have national security concerns about them sending him
back to El Salvador if he's running an enterprise from
there that's involved in murder, including murders in the United States,
according to these indictments.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
And I would point out Ross.

Speaker 5 (21:44):
That one of the main things that's charged in the
two indictments that the Justice Department has brought since twenty
twenty is that we had an FBI agent who was
working on the case in l Salvador, and that agent
had to be pulled out with his family because there
was a conspiracy by MS thirteen to murder him. So,

(22:06):
in my experience in the Justice Department, when they conspire
to murder one of ours, we prosecute that guy if
we can get any if we can get our hands
on and bring into our system anybody who is complicit
in something like that. The last thing that we would
ever do is take someone who might have been involved
in something like that, much less what we're talking about here,

(22:28):
which is, you know, people who are at the very
highest echelon of this enterprise, sending them back to the
place where they committed the crime in the first place.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
It doesn't seem very sensible.

Speaker 5 (22:42):
Now, to be fair, I assume what the administration would
say is that they're going to face justice in Al
Salvador and that they're incarcerated there.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
And the only thing I can.

Speaker 5 (22:55):
Say about that is the Justice Department's own case, particularly
the second indictment that was brought in twenty twenty three.
A big part of the proof in that case is
that officials in Bukele's government cut a deal with MS
thirteen that they would reduce violence in El Salvador in

(23:17):
exchange for various corrupt accommodations that were made for the
leadership there, including you know, getting prostitutes into the prison,
making it easier for them to run msvor thirteen in prison,
various payments.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
And stuff that.

Speaker 5 (23:34):
You know, the indictments are available publicly, people can read them.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
That's that's our evidence.

Speaker 5 (23:40):
That's not like stuff we read in the New York
The New York Times report that you just read from
is basically reading from Justice Department indictments when it comes
to this, So we're sending these guys back to a
place where the Justice Department itself says Bukele has a
corrupt deal with MS thirteen, and we're taking people who
we had in our system and sending them back there

(24:04):
without prosecuting.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
So obviously we're speculating more than a little, but there
does appear to be, as you say, evidence put together
by the Justice Department, including in Trump's first term. If
I got that right, that suggests that the president of
l Salvador has a corrupt relationship with MS thirteen as
you just described. So these two MS thirteen kingpins who

(24:28):
we probably had dead to rights and were probably going
to be convicted in federal court and go to prison
in the United States for a long time, are going
to get sent back to L Salvador? Are they there already?
Are they already in L Salvador? Do you know? Yes,
they're already there?

Speaker 5 (24:44):
And is what no one is and I believe I
believe Aravello. The judge has not granted the government's dismissal
of the indictment, although as we saw with Mayor Adams,
there's not much a judge could do if the Justice
Department decides not to prosecute the first guy, Osiris Luna,

(25:05):
not Osirius Luna. I'm sorry, Caesar Lopez has already gone back.
Osiris Luna I mentioned because he was one of the
Bukla regime officials who, apparently, according to the Justice Department,
was key to these negotiations with MS thirteen.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Right. So I think that if if the intent of
the L. Salvador government was really going to be to
put these guys in prison, in a real prison in
a way that keeps them from operating their gangs, they
would have just left them here to serve their time
in an American prison. So if they insist on bringing

(25:43):
them there, I think it's it's not crazy to conclude
that they will either not put them in prison or
do the other thing that you said create for them.
The El salvadoran equivalent of club fed, but even better
with conjugal visits and hookers and blow And it sounds

(26:06):
like so if that's true, it must be that Pam
Bondy knows and the order is probably coming from Donald
Trump after getting a request from the president of L. Salvador.
I'm guessing how else would that happen.

Speaker 5 (26:23):
Yeah, I think the Justice Department here is just taking
its marching orders. I doubt that Bondi is that deeply involved.
What we've seen so far with Bukele is it seems
to be that the administration's agent for dealing with Bukele
as Secretary of State Rubio.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
In fact, it was Rubio who was in L.

Speaker 5 (26:43):
Salvador when they announced this agreement between Salvador and US
that El Salvador, for payment of what I think was
about six million dollars, agreed to give US three hundred
detention spaces for people that the Trump administration wants to deport.
And obviously the kurrent Trump administration, unlike the first Trump administration,

(27:05):
is prioritizing the deportations over the prosecution of MS thirteen
and Ross, I would just point out you mentioned before
that the first case was brought under the Trump Justice Department.
It was the Trump Justice Department that's set up the
task force against MS thirteen that the Biden administration actually continued.

(27:27):
So that task force, which I think is called Vulcan,
is responsible for both the cases that were.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
Brought against these MS thirteen members.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
All right, so last night for you on this Andy.
So if this is some kind of corrupt bargain, and
if the President of L. Salvador has some kind of
corrupt deal with MS thirteen, from the perspective of the
federal government, like who cares? And I mean that literally
in our federal government, who cares? Right? Donald Trump doesn't care.

(28:01):
Donald Trump supporters don't care if Trump breaks the law,
So they're definitely not going to care if the President
of L.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Salvador breaks the law.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
It's all kind of like utilitarian ends justifies the means
lawlessness all the way down. So even if this is
what it looks like, is there anything ever going to happen?

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Well, no, I would be surprised.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
You know.

Speaker 5 (28:27):
Look there, as we saw again with the Mayor Adams case,
Constitutionally speaking, ross it's up to the executive branch who
gets prosecuted. And if the executive branch doesn't want to
bring a case, Congress can't make them, The courts can't
make them. If they want to no longer pursue a
case that they've indicted, no one can make them. My

(28:49):
point is, why are we sending these guys back, particularly
before trying them.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
You know, there's nothing in life that says that you know,
you have to If you're going.

Speaker 5 (29:01):
To send somebody back who's in the American justice system,
you have to you have to do it right away.
We could try them first, We could have the public
airing of what the evidence is against them. We could
do all those things and then send them back to
serve their time in El Salvador if that's if we're
satisfied that that L Salvador will keep them in custody.

(29:24):
But it's always been the Justice Department's approach that when
kingpinn types orchestrate major crimes against the United States, we
want to prosecute those people ourselves.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
To make sure that they get the justice they deserve.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yeah, I think you don't really come out and aggressively
say this really stinks. But I get the implication from
the piece that you think there might be something really
wrong going on here, and I don't know that we'll
ever find out, because I think the people who are
in a position to find out have been told to
turn to turn away. Andy McCarthy's great piece for National

(30:03):
Reviews entitled Trump DOJ drops cases against top MS thirteen leaders.
I will also tell listeners. Normally you'd have to pay
to read this article, but I'm a subscriber and I
used on one of my small number of gift links
to post this on my blog in a way that
you can read it without a subscription.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
But I recommend you subscribe.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
After that so you can get to all of Andy's
writing at National Review. Andy, thanks so much for your
time today as always, and thanks for bringing that important
story to my attention. Thank you, Ross all right, good
seeing you. All right, that's the great Andy McCarthy. We'll
do some other stuff here for a few minutes. Let's
see what did I want to do here. We got
a couple of things, you know, let's do a little

(30:44):
foreign affairs here just for a couple of minutes. So
today President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel are
meeting at the White House. Don't know just what time.
If it happens during my show, we'll try to bring
you some audio of that. But it is today, and
I just want to give you a little inside baseball
or sort of big picture thinking as to what's going

(31:07):
on here. So President Trump sees himself as a potential
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and for the record,
I see him that way too. There may be other
things I disagree with him on, but I've said this
many times and it's not sarcasm, it's not hyperbole, it's
it's it's it's I'm I have a hard time thinking

(31:29):
of someone who has done more to try to advance
world peace, believe it or not, than Donald Trump. You know,
I wouldn't have thought I'd be saying that some years ago,
but here we are now. So So he attacked Iran
after letting Israel do it first, by the way, which
is a very important thing, because it showed the world

(31:50):
and especially the Middle East, that Israel is strong without
the United States. And by the way of a significant
percentage of the weapons that Israel used in all that
were made in Israel. They still buy a lot of
American stuff, but a lot of that was made in Israel.
They're getting more and more self sufficient on the weapons side,
and so they did it first proved what they need

(32:10):
to prove. They don't have the bunkerbuster bombs. They're talking
about leasing or buying a B two with the bunkerbuster capability.
We'll see if that happens. But Trump jumped in and
did that stuff with Iran. And who knows how long
Iran's nuclear program is set back. It's probably a lot
longer than the liberals are saying, and not quite as
long as Donald Trump is saying. But somewhere it was

(32:32):
real damage to the to the to the worst most
evil regime in the world. It was great. And that's
a regime Iran that's trying to start wars everywhere and
has forever. And one of the things that Trump worked
on in his first administration is so called Abraham Accords.

(32:52):
A few different countries signed these deals with Israel to
basically normalize relations and you have, you know, tourism flights
between these countries now. And probably if the first Trump
administration had lasted one year longer, probably they would have
gotten Saudi Arabia, which is a big prize. Now, once
the war in Gaza started, Saudi Arabia backed away from

(33:13):
that for now because the so called Arab street their
population very very much siding with the Palestinians. Now, Saudi
Arabia still has a significant motivation to get some deal done,
not just with Israel, but one that puts them in
the very good graces of the United States. With Iran
as a threat because it's basically Iran against everybody else

(33:34):
in the region, one interesting dynamic following the attack on
Iran is that with Iran massively weakened, there is actually
less incentive now for Saudi Arabia to sign a peace.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Agreement with Israel.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Trump is trying to push all this together by leaning
on Israel to end the war in Gaza, leaning on
Saudi Arabia to then do a deal with Israel, by saying, hey,
I got Israel to stop that. Now I need you
to do this for me. We took out Iranian's nuclear stuff.
We did that partly for you. I need you to
do this for me. So we will see how it

(34:10):
all plays out. It is very interesting. Trump over the
weekend said he thought there was a good chance of
a deal that would see, as he put it, quite
a few hostages released. There was some kind of deal
on the table that might get out. Let's say half
of the twenty remaining living hostages and some of the
non living hostages. We'll see how it all plays out.
Feels like Friday to me, I don't know why, Why

(34:31):
the hell would it feel like a fright? I don't know,
I don't know. Let's start over. Hey, I'm ross happy Monday. Dragon.
You were telling me you blew stuff up. Of course
I'm a little jealous. I didn't blow anything up. Yeah,
just tell us a little about blowing things up.

Speaker 6 (34:47):
Well, the nephews went up to Wyoming and bought thousands
plar old or a dollar amount of fireworks.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
You know, we had a neighborhood war.

Speaker 6 (34:55):
So one block, you know, shoots a couple of big
ones off, and the fall the block over shoots a
couple of big ones off, and we all just go.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Ooh and have a great time. Did you personally light
any stuff? I did not this time. No. All right,
good burgers and some potato solid And we had a
very boring Independence Day weekend, which was fine. You know,
it's fine. We've done a lot of stuff. Christin and
I did a wonderful hike. I don't know if you're

(35:23):
if you're a hiker or folks who were listening, but
and normally it's funny. Kristen tells me, don't tell your
listeners about where we hike because it'll just get more crowded.
But it was already kind of crowded a place called
Chief Mountain in Jefferson County, and it was it was great.
It was it was really great, and it was it

(35:45):
was about a two hour hike. You started about ten
and a half thousand feet and you ended about eleven
and a half thousand feet of altitude. It's it's out
and back, it's not a loop, and it was just
a very very lovely hike. The boys go with you, no,
just just the two of us, just the two of us,
which was which was fine. Yeah, it was absolutely fine.

(36:06):
And I got to say, not to be a not
to be a downer here, but the stuff in Texas
and these children just kind of put a pall on
the weekend for us on the rest of the weekend
once we once we heard that news, the uh that
was that was difficult, and especially knowing that you know

(36:28):
what I do for a living. I'm gonna have to
come talk about it, think about it, and stay on
top of the news. And then I'm actually doing I'm
filling in for Guy Benson later today, so I got
to do another three hours. We're going to talk about it,
and I'll tell you what I want to ask listeners
a question about about this and this. This came to
mind when I was talking with Guy Benson's producer, who's

(36:49):
a woman who's a mom, and I wonder if there's
a at least slight different in difference in reaction between
men and women to this. So Guy Benson's producer is
an awesome and awesome lady named Christine, and Christine's a mom,
and yesterday she took her kid off to Christian camp.

(37:17):
And then the reason I mentioned Christian, these camps in
Texas are explicitly Christian camps. And and and this morning
my older kid so but my older kid is technically
an adult at this point, and my older kid left
to go camping with actually his work, his work group,

(37:38):
and I, you know, gave him a big hugs that
have a good time, And I didn't have any thought
in my head about it being dangerous or anything. And
I still really don't in a sense, you know, even
what happened in Texas is you know, it's it's once
a century kind of thing, you know. I don't know,
but I wonder. I wonder for those listening right now,

(38:03):
does what happen down there put any kind of change
in thinking or even just change in emotion into how
you think about your kids or if you're a little
bit older, maybe your grandkids heading off to camp. Do
you hug them a little harder? Do you make you know?
Do you or do you think maybe I won't send them?

(38:24):
And I do wonder if there's a difference between men
and women. So I would like to know how you're
thinking about this. Text me at five six six nine
zero and tell me if you are a man or
a woman. And I want to see if there's any
discernible trend in the reactions between men and women. A
listener asks where can I catch Guy Benson's show streaming

(38:46):
Guy Bensonshow dot Com one pm to four pm Mountain time.
I will be I will be filling in for Guy today.
It's funny how this is just a small thing I'll
just mention just for fun. So A listener. A listener
says TDS much this morning, and I guess that was

(39:07):
about something I said in the conversation with Andy McCarthy
about sort of lawlessness from time to time in the
Trump administration. And then I didn't even notice that text.
And then a few minutes after that, in the same segment,
I talked about how Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
And it really is funny how people who don't think

(39:27):
very much will respond to something that I or anybody
else says about Donald Trump that's critical about Trump and
just say it's TDS. Right. It really is funny if
you if you think that, if your default is that
somebody who says anything critical about Trump suffers from TDS,

(39:50):
then you're the one with the problem. So let's let's
just keep that in mind. What else did I want
to do with you here? There's just so much to
do on this on the show today. Oh okay, this,
I need more time for this story than I have
right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
hit a break here, come back to a story that

(40:12):
my son, my younger son, told me about. So my
younger son is one of these kids who's very interested
in online gaming and following cryptocurrency and this whole kind
of constellation of stuff. And he sent me a video
of a story about a guy, and then I went
to look it up and it turns out it's absolutely

(40:34):
true about a twenty year old who stole a quarter
billion dollars in cryptocurrency while barely breaking a sweat and
then acted like a moron and is going to jail.
I'll tell you about it next. Regarding the question I

(40:54):
asked a couple minutes ago, and I want to keep
those coming in and then I'm going to come back
to them in the next segment of the show, because
I think these are fascinating. And the question, if you
weren't listening, you know, six minutes ago, is is this
does what happened in Texas over the weekend, in this
horrendous tragedy with the loss of life, and especially the

(41:15):
loss of life of these children, does it change how
you think about your own kids or your own grandkids,
especially as they're going off to camp or that kind
of thing. So, and you can answer that any way
you want. I would like to know with your answer

(41:35):
whether you are male or female, just so I can
kind of get a sense as to whether the answers
are different between men and women. I will tell you
so far, it seems like the answers from men and
women are very similar, probably more similar than I might

(41:55):
have expected. And I'll just say a lot of a
lot of men really feeling deeply moved by not just
moved by what happened in Texas, but changing thinking a
little bit and being more worried, more concerned, very very upset.
And I'm going to come back to that in the

(42:16):
next segment of the show. Well, I'll have more time,
but please keep texting me at five six six nine
zero and tell me anything you want to tell me
about how you are reacting to the news in out
of Texas in the context of thinking about your own
kids or maybe grandkids if you're a little older, and
potentially them going off to camp or that sort of thing.

(42:38):
So what I want to do just for a few
minutes here, and like I said, we'll come back to that.
I posted a video on the blog at Rosscominski dot
com that my younger kids sent me, and it's about a.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
Ten minute video.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
And I like watching these videos at one and a
quarter speed or one and a half speed, so you
can watch a ten minute video in seven or eight minutes.
Is pretty good about about a twenty year old kid
from Singapore, originally from Singapore, I think maybe he moved
to California perhaps, and how he suddenly acquired two hundred

(43:15):
and sixty three million dollars worth of bitcoin and you
got to watch the video. Actually it's a it's an
unbelievable story. But I'll try to summarize a little bit here.
This guy and a friend of his who he met
playing Minecraft. But they play Minecraft on this very specific

(43:36):
server where it's described because I don't know about this myself,
but it's described as a as a particular version of
Minecraft where one major aspect of the game is to
cheat as much as you can and steal as much
as you can from other people playing the game, and
basically defraud people within the game and all that kind

(43:57):
of thing. And of course that either would attract a
certain kind of mindset or create a certain kind of mindset.
And this kid, as is often the case these days,
a lot of these young people who are doing the
online gaming are also paying close attention to the cryptocurrency market,
sort of a get rich quick thing that they're all
very interested in My own kid is quite interested in
it as well. And so they start thinking as they're

(44:22):
watching people trading these meme coins, these junk coins, and
they see some people making money, but lots of people
losing money. And the people who are making the money
are the people who create the coins, and it's basically
a grift, and they're basically stealing from everybody else, but
it's legal. And so this young guy starts thinking to himself, Gosh,
there's probably a lot of money to be made in

(44:43):
stealing rather than trading cryptocurrency. So they targeted this guy
whose name escapes me right now, but it's a guy
who was a big shot in Silicon Valley and setting
up all kinds of tech company ease and supposed to
be worth some number of billions of dollars. And this

(45:04):
is a guy who you would think would know more
about internet security.

Speaker 3 (45:08):
Than anybody you could think of.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
But what they did was they they started researching him
and understanding his psychology, and then they found an email
from him, and then they created a page that made
it look like an official Google page, and they sent
him an email that made it look like it was
from Google's saying somebody has stolen your password. You need

(45:33):
to change the password, click on the link. Everybody knows
this scam, but the guy did it because I don't
know why they scared him so much. However, they did
it into thinking someone had his email his email password,
so they send him a link. A link redirects them
to a page that looks like a Google page but isn't.

(45:54):
It goes through a process that looks like he's changing
his password but isn't. Instead, what he's really doing, he's
giving them his password. Then they log in to his email.
They scan through everything they can find. They look through
all kinds of things. Eventually they find this kind of
key to an online wallet. They use it to get

(46:15):
into his wallet, and they steal two hundred and sixty
three million dollars of bitcoin. I'm not sure if all
to sixty three was from that guy. I think it
was two hundred and thirty million from that guy, and
then they stole another fourteen million from someone else and whatever.
So they got the money. They kind of split it

(46:37):
up into separate accounts, trying in the stupidest possible way
to do something smart. But they did it very stupidly
and then this twenty year old starts going out and
buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis and BMW's and diamond encrusted rolexes
and going out to fancy nightclubs and spending half a

(46:57):
million dollars per night at night clubs. And it didn't
take the FBI long to kind of track all this down.
Who is this person spending all this money? They put
it all together and they've arrested the guy and he's
going to go to jail for a long time. There
are a couple other people they charged who are out
of the country and in places that don't have extradition

(47:18):
to the United States of America, So maybe some of
those people will never be caught. But the mastermind is caught.
And if he hadn't been such an idiot after getting
all the money, there's actually a decent chance.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
He could have gotten away with it.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
I'm not gonna say the guy was even very smart
to begin with. He's not just like a genius who
did something dumb. He's probably a modestly smart criminal who
figured out a way to scare somebody into giving him
his password. But it's a heck of a story. It's
Monday after a wonderful but difficult holiday weekend with all

(47:53):
the stuff that happened in Texas and difficult to talk
about as well. And I uh, I asked you going
into the break, and actually in the previous segment as well,
to send me your thoughts on a particular question. And
it's not a very specific question. It's more how you're feeling,

(48:15):
how you're thinking based on this news out of Texas
and specifically the loss of life of so many children,
and it's just a it's almost an unbearably sad thing.
Before I get to your text, I had I guess
it was America's newsroom, so Fox's sort of mid morning

(48:38):
show on It's Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer and and
Bill Hemmer was telling a story just it's hard to
it's hard to hear these stories, much less talk about
them without crying. And so apparently there were some warnings
and some buses and vans came to rescue kids from

(49:00):
some camps. And a bus and a van that were
affiliated with the same camp and were rescuing some kids
had some kids, I guess in the van. I don't
know if there's anyone in the by I don't know.
I don't know the exact details. In any case, they're

(49:23):
going wherever they're going, and I guess they drive into
some water, maybe not very deep water, but basically deep
enough water that the bus stalled and the van with
the kids apparently was behind it and couldn't get around

(49:47):
the bus because of wherever they were, and they all
got washed away. And there may have been again Fox
News reporting these stories may change. There may have been
like ten kids who they thought were rescued who died
because advanced a bus stalled when it got to some water.

(50:11):
Can you imagine the other thing? And I mentioned this earlier,
and this was just just like a knife in the
heart this morning this morning, because I didn't see the
update last night. But over the weekend there was a
story that two young girls were rescued. I heard it

(50:34):
actually on CNN, but it was everywhere that two young
girls were rescued fifteen miles down river, clinging to a
tree like thirty feet off the ground. And I didn't
see this, but on Sunday night, the congressman for that area,
who's Chip Roy, who's a fairly well known congressman nationwide,

(50:59):
tweeted that story is not true. That story is not true.
So and I just learned that this morning, just as
I was about to read or share the story of
these you know, sort of miraculous rescue. Although I have
to say, you know, thirty feet off the ground fifteen

(51:19):
miles down river. It didn't make that much sense because
the water's not going to be even if the river
goes up, you know, twenty five feet from where it
should be at that location, it's very very very unlikely
to be that high fifteen miles down river. So I,
you know, something didn't sound quite right, but still like
two miracle little girls rescued, and it's not true. It's

(51:44):
not true. Ross. I'm a female, grew up going to
camp and counseling at camps and retreats along the Guadalupe
and Blanco rivers. I was raised in Austin. I would
definitely look at floodpain plane maps before sending my kids
are grandkids because of this event. Investigations are going to
reveal that some of these camps build structures in one

(52:05):
hundred year floodplains. But this storm was a thousand year event,
and no weather model could predict the trillions of gallons
of water that the remnants of the tropical storm dumped
on the region. It's good to remember that many summer
camps have pools far more dangerous. But tragedies happen one
at a time, not in great numbers like this. That's very,
very true. There's going to be I'm going to come

(52:29):
back to more listener texts in a second. I'm going
to kind of interject some things as we will alternate
between texts and some of my commentary.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
So one of the.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Things that's already going on, and I suppose it's not surprising,
especially giving the time we live in now politically, but
I think even in less politically fraught times this would
probably happen is the finger pointing. And in particular, you've
got people on the left who are blaming the Trump
administration for having fired some people at the National Weatherservice

(53:00):
or an OAA or other places that you know, might
have been involved with forecasting or warning or stuff like that.
I think that's very much not fair. I will note
that the National Weather Service, you know, a couple of
days earlier, had said that maybe some rain. But as
they got closer and things started developing in a certain way,

(53:21):
as you had the moisture from a tropical storm coming
up and then mixing with moisture that was already coming
from the Pacific and creating this thing. The forecasters at
the Federal Weather Services basically got it right and far
enough in advance that if warnings were made, it were

(53:41):
made or heated, that people's lives could have been saved.
And in fact, there were some places where where that happened.
In fact, let me, let me just see if I can,
if I can find this particular story that I wanted
to share with you. But there was a there was
a camp. There was a camp where they heard these

(54:06):
warnings and they went and just took everybody out in advance.
Now I don't know that they were as close to
the river as the camp where all of these almost
all of these young girls died. And that was the
worst possible situation, right. You have a once in five
hundred years or once in a thousand year flood in

(54:26):
the middle of the night where you know, four in
the morning, let's say, when everybody's asleep, and you have
the youngest kids. And I don't think even an adult
would survive being swept away by water like that, but
the youngest kids who would be the least likely to
be able to survive were the ones whose cabins were

(54:47):
right next to the river. The older kids at that
same camp, their cabin was up up the hill. I
think it's called Senior Hill or something like that, but
up the hill, and the flood didn't reach them. It's
just this unbelievably terrible combination of bad luck. But the
National weather forecasters they got it right, and they did

(55:11):
get it right far enough in advance. So then the
next question is we're proper warnings sent out? And then
the next question, and I don't know the answer to
this thing. The next question is because I saw somebody
talking about this, I don't remember who, but they said, look,
you could be signed up for all of the early
warning stuff that you want, but if you're in a

(55:31):
place with no cell service, it won't matter. Now. I
don't know if that was the case here. I don't
know the founder of this camp. By the way, Camp Mystic.
I hadn't heard of Camp Mystic, but apparently it's a
very big deal, especially in Texas, especially among Christians to
Christian camp and I guess this camp has kind of

(55:54):
thought of as a rite of passage down there for
people in that particular community.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
It's been around a long time.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Actually, the guy who founded it, his name, I think
is Eastland, and he's probably seventy ish.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
Now I don't have that in front of me.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
He's dead. He died in the flood, apparently trying to
rescue people. So there's a lot. There's a lot of
finger pointing, and I think that we all need to
really hold off on that. There's also some real craziness

(56:29):
from the right with some kind of ultra maga influencers.
I know this is going to sound nuts, but this
is how nuts those people are pointing fingers at wait
for it now, Bill Gates. Because Bill Gates has in
the past talked about cloud seating, which is a very
interesting technology that we've talked about on this show that

(56:52):
really isn't done very much and had nothing to do
with any of this. And there's also been some talk
but nothing just a few very small, very very small
scale tests done in laboratories about stuff where you might
put something into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of
sunlight hitting the surface of the Earth if it's getting

(57:14):
too hot or you know, all this global warming nonsense.
And Bill Gates has talked about that a little bit.
That's not a thing that's been done on any scale.
Cloud seating has been done a little bit, but the
left is now, you know, not the left Ultramaga is
now looking to point fingers at Bill Gates like this
is how stupid these people. No, this is not how
stupid they are. This is how stupid they think other

(57:36):
Ultramaga people are that they can start posting stuff about
Bill Gates and this just ridiculous nonsense, and that it
will get them more X followers and social media followers,
and it will some of the Not again, they're not stupid.
They know what they're doing. They think you're stupid, and
so they keep saying this stuff and they accumulate hundreds
of thousands of followers by saying things that aren't true.

(58:00):
And it's pretty crazy and we need to just stay
away from that stuff and figure out what can be done.
There had been talk in Texas in the past of
spending more money on early warning systems because that area
of Texas is famous for being a flash flood risk. Right,

(58:20):
you get very hot, dry periods, the ground gets baked
and you might think, oh, it's so dry, even if
there's a lot of water, it'll soak in. It doesn't
work like that. The ground is so hard that when
the water arrives fast, it just flows over it. It
really doesn't sink in. If you had a slow, steady
rain that softened up the ground a little bit yet,

(58:40):
then it can absorb more. But not like this. You
might as well put it on asphalt. It doesn't matter
how dry it was. And there been some.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Talk, and I maybe the Texas didn't want to spend
the money.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
Again, I'm not pointing fingers here.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
There have been some conversation about more early warning stuff.
But you're talking about foothills and these rivers where the
water just gets funneled down from the foothills into the
rivers and then a once in a thousand year kind
of confluence of storms. It's just bad. It is really bad.
This listener says, ross these weather conditions are no longer

(59:15):
once in a hundred year condition occurrences. And that's not true.
That's not true. It's not just the weather condition. It
was the it was the confluence of the end of
a tropical storm hitting particular other moisture coming in from
another direction, and then stalling and I actually have this

(59:40):
up on my blog because you've got a bunch of
people on the left who, in addition to blaming Trump
or blaming climate change, I saw a New York Times
reporter talking about how climate change this and that in
relation to the flood, there is zero, zero, zero zero
data to suggest that there has been any change in
trans and in these kinds of big storms or flash

(01:00:03):
floods in Texas for a long you know, over the
long term. So claims that this has to do with
with climate change are nonsense. This particular area, I think
there was a big flood in nineteen eighty seven, but

(01:00:25):
even that, I'm not an expert on that flood, but
from the people I've heard talking about what just happened
was worse. As a listener just said, it was a
perfect storm. So going back to some of some of
your texts, you know, I asked, does this make you
think differently about sending your own kids or grandkids off
to camp? And I also asked, let me, you know,

(01:00:47):
let me know if you're a man or a woman
in your response, so I can kind of see if
there's any real difference between how men are responding and
how women are responding, and I will say there's a
very very little difference between how men and women are responding.
A listener text, I'm a man. This tragedy in Texas
has been very upsetting. Does make me think about safety
of my kids when going to camp. Very next, very

(01:01:09):
next text literally a few seconds later, I'm a woman.
My kids are grown, but I would hug my kids
harder just thinking about what the parents in Texas are
going through. Another text. Camping with my eight year old
daughter this weekend, we faced heavy winds and heavy rain.
At three am, the tent collapsed on my daughter and
I stood out in the elements, holding things together by

(01:01:31):
hand for an hour. Just came on the heels of
hearing about an eight year old girl camping with her
family and getting washed away by the floods in Texas
and dying.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
I'm a man.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
I'm filled with gratitude for my family's health and filled
with sadness for those who lost family members in these floods.
Another listener text, ross, I'm a man. It absolutely changes
the way I think. I'm scared every time I dropped
them off at school or let them go at the
mall with my wife. Thinking of school shooters and kidnappers,
and now I have camps to worry about. I think

(01:02:03):
I may be a helicopter parent, like an Apache, but
I don't know how else to think, meaning an Apache helicopter,
but I don't know how to thing. I don't blame you.
I don't blame you. I'm not a helicopter parent and
I'm not going to be one now. But also my
kids are older. It's easier for me to say. But
I never was a helicopter parent, and I never really
thought very much about the risks when they went off

(01:02:24):
to this camp or that camp. And I still don't
think that I would. And I think one thing to
keep in mind, and it was a difficult to think
thing to keep in mind. And I don't want to
downplay in any way the horrific tragedy that folks are
facing right now in Texas. So I promise I'm not
downplaying this. I'm not minimizing it at all. I put

(01:02:45):
it in the context of a plane crash, right. You
think about in obviously we've had some overseas, but you
think about that big plane crash by Washington, d C.
Where an airplane I hit a helicopter, A helicopter flew
into the flight path and and dozens of people died.
And there's a concept that you will learn about if

(01:03:08):
you read one of my favorite books of all time
called Thinking Fast and Slow, And it's a well known
concept in psychology recency bias. And what that means is
if something happened recently, you were likely to overestimate how
likely it is something happened recently. Let's say something hasn't

(01:03:30):
happened in a long time, and then they ask you.
Let's say something hasn't happened in twenty years, and someone
asks you how likely is it to happen in any
given year. You might say five percent. Hasn't happened in
twenty years. And then let's say it happens, so now
it's happened twice twenty years apart, and they ask you, well,

(01:03:50):
how likely is this to happen? And people might say
fifty percent, even though really it's five percent or whatever
the number is it, some small number like that. So
after a people really get afraid of flying. And I
get it. I'm not criticizing anybody, and I think it's
similar to this. Right after this just terrible tray. I

(01:04:11):
can't remember the last time, if ever, that I heard
about this many children dying in the United States at
one time, I don't think I've You tell me if
there's been another one during my lifetime. I'm unaware of
another one with this many kids dying at once, Right,
there have been some big disasters where a lot of

(01:04:32):
people died nine to eleven, it's not children. And so
as a parent, it's easy for me to say, although
my kid left for camp today. My kid's older, but
my kid left for camp today, and I gave him
a big hug on his way out the door.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
But if it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
Offers you any any comfort at all, and I don't
know if it will, remember that these things that are
once in a century or once every five hundred years,
So there are two things, two things. Just because it's
a once every five hundred year thing doesn't mean it
can't happen twice in a short period of time. It can't.

(01:05:15):
But it's not like I flipped a coin ten times
and it's come up ahead, so I'm due for tails.
Life doesn't work like that. Coin flipping doesn't work like that. Nothing,
nothing really works like that. But the odds of your
kid being hurt or killed at camp just so so

(01:05:35):
so low that I hope that if your kid is
at camp or it's going to camp, that you can
live with that little bit of peace knowing that knowing
that just because something terrible happened doesn't mean it's more

(01:05:58):
likely that something terrible is going to happen. Does that
make sense? I hope that makes a little bit of sense.
And I guess saying it, saying it makes me feel better.
Oh yeah, A couple people mentioned Sandy Hook, but I
actually don't think. I don't know. I shouldn't say, I
shouldn't say I need to look that up, and I oh, man,

(01:06:22):
who wants to look that up? I mean, that's just yeah.
So Sandy Hook was twenty So this is this is more.
This is more Hurricane Katrina. I don't think so Oklahoma
City bombing, No, I don't. I don't think so. There was.
There was a daycare center in the in the Federal building,

(01:06:43):
but I don't think it was this many. I don't
think it was as many kids. I think it was
somewhere around twenty in that as well. And again I'm
not looking to say, oh, this is worse. That's not
my point. It's all horrible. It's all horrible, But as
a parent, on the one hand, it's impossible to not
feel so sad from this story. But as a parent,

(01:07:07):
I also want to be reminded that the odds of
something like this are so vanishingly low that I can't
and I won't live in fear, and I hope you
won't either. I want to just respond. I got a
lot of very interesting listener texts, and I want you
to know I'm reading them. I'm not responding to them all,
but I'm responding to some, and just one quick listener

(01:07:30):
thing I want to respond to.

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
Hold on, where did this go?

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Ross? You can't say there is zero chance that climate
change contributed to the flood, So I didn't exactly say that.
What I said was, there's zero evidence in the data
that there have been changes in the kinds of weather
that causes floods or in floods themselves in Central Texas

(01:07:56):
over the last fifty or sixty years. There is simply
no change in trend, and yet you have reporters blaming
it on climate change. I didn't say it's impossible, although
I think it's unlikely. What I said was there is
zero evidence in the data that there has been a
change in trend which you would expect to see, you know,

(01:08:17):
in the last twenty years or something like that, if
it were a climate quote unquote climate change thing. So
there's that, all right. I want to do a couple
of more local stories with you. Still a ton of
stuff to do that I'm just not going to get
to all of it on today's show.

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
One.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
You heard this on our own Kowait newscast earlier in
the show today. But over the weekend, the union announced
the Supermarket Workers Union UFCW Local seven.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
They announced in a post on Facebook.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
On Saturday that they were going to stop striking on
Saturday and that the supermarket Safeway really the parent company
is called Albertson's, that they have agreed to bring all
the striking workers back to their jobs, and that they've
agreed to fire all of the temporary replacement workers. Now,
this still has to be voted on by the rank

(01:09:11):
and file, but I assume that it will pass. There's
gonna be a lot of stuff in the deal that
I haven't bothered to read.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
I don't care that much.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
Really. Our news partners at KATVR Fox thirty one say, well,
they say that. The union says that there are forty
five tentative agreements in the deal, including fully funded healthcare,
fully funded pension, strong wage increases, and longevity bonuses for
all associates with at least one year of seniority. That

(01:09:41):
seems like a pretty easy way to get a longevity
bonus with just one year. Hey, iHeart, can I get
a longevity bonus? Gosh, I've been almost twenty Oh my gosh,
have you got your longevity bonus yet? No? No, no,
So what else? The deal also includes an insurance there
will be no giveaways bargaining unit work to gig companies

(01:10:03):
like door Dash, and no diversions from retire rehealthcare, meaning
no cuts to retire rehealthcare benefits according to the union.
So anyway, it seems like they've reached an agreement. I
have no idea how much this is going to cost Safeway, Albertsons.
We'll see. And bottom line is, if it cost them
a lot, then the price your groceries is going to
go up even more. By the way, I was in

(01:10:23):
the supermarket a couple of days ago. I was in
King Supers and either is it my imagination or did
this Safeway strike seem to get a lot less attention
in the news than the King super strike down. No,
you're not wrong. I didn't hear about it at all. Yeah, So,
And I don't know whether that means Safeway's just smaller
around here than King Supers is, or whether we were
numb to supermarket strikes because we had one already. I'm
guessing it's a little both.

Speaker 6 (01:10:44):
And even so, we have a King Supers on one
corner and a Safeway on the other. I remember the
King Supers protesters, yeah, but I the strikers, but I
did not see at all any Safeway strikers out front.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
So, yeah, strange. And where I live now, there isn't
really a safe way near me. I was near one
over Friday, maybe, and I did see a few protesters
just sort of walking around in front of one, carrying
some signs, but they weren't even in a group. It
was kind of easy to miss them, you know, they weren't. Anyway, whatever,
it's done, and we'll just see. So I was in

(01:11:19):
King Supers over the weekend, and it's just it is
mind boggling how expensive food is now compared to just
you know, pre COVID. Basically, I mean, it's not. I mean,
and one example, there's a particular kind of chocolate bar
I like, and it's an expensive chalco. It's not the

(01:11:40):
super high end stuff, but it's a really big, thick
kind of chocolate bar. And I think it's called Tony's
and they have very bright colored wrappers and the chocolate
itself is probably half an inch thick. And I really
like it, and I buy one in it. It lasts
me a week, you know, I just a little bit
at a time, and I really like it. And for
a long time these things have been maybe maybe four

(01:12:01):
and a half dollars four ninety nine something like that.
They're expensive for especially for American chocolate. It's not some
super fancy Goodaivas something or other.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
It's pretty expensive.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
And then yesterday at King's or whatever it was at
king Supers, I see that they're now six and a
half dollars six and a half dollars. I'm not buying that.
I mean, I mean, even if they were buy one,
get one free, then at the sale price, they'll still
be like three quarters or eighty percent or something of
the original price. Pretty nuts, really, And then okay, so

(01:12:36):
I don't drink as much soda as I used to,
because not very good for you, but I do like it,
and I do like to have a little soda around
the house. So maybe once or twice a week I'll
grant grab a can of something.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
But I only drink healthy, like.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
Only the healthiest soda is like diet mountain dew, right,
which I don't think has a single natural ingredient in it, right,
Diet mountain dew is something that if you like, if that,
if I told you what were made at Chernobyl, you
would say, that makes perfect sense.

Speaker 6 (01:13:04):
That's gotta be one of the spotbusters.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
I only drink healthy diet mountain dew. Mm hmm. Or
you can send that to send that to AJ and
see if he wants to make the spotbuster that. But anyway,
so I'm I'm I'm walking down the soda aisle in
the supermarket day before yesterday, and I see that they're
on sale. Buy two, get two free, so that's half
price right now. Assuming you buy, you know, two and

(01:13:30):
get two free, you get four, so it's half price.
But dragon, do you you're not a big soda drinker,
but do you recall roughly the price of a twelve
pack of soda pre COVID, I couldn't even tell you, yeah,
all right, so they were. They were typically four ninety nine,
and then would sometimes go on sale buy one, get
one free, or or buy two get one free, so

(01:13:53):
they'd be a third off or a half off, but
list price was four ninety nine, and then if you
waited a little bit, you could you could always get
them for somewhere between two point fifty and three seventy five.
And for the name brand sodas, right, not the supermarket brand,
but for coke and mountain dew and pepsi and seven
up and all that stuff. So yesterday or the day

(01:14:15):
before there by two get two free, and the list
price on the tag ten dollars and ninety nine cents
ten dollars and ninety nine cents for a twelve pack
of soda, So if you buy two and get two free,
you're getting a half price. Half price is five and
a half dollars. So half price now is more than

(01:14:38):
full price not that long ago. And there is no
way their costs have gone up that much. There is
no way. The cost of aluminum cans, sugar for the soda,
and all the various chemicals that they import from Chernobyl
to make the soda. There's no way those costs of double,
but the price of double. And I mean, look at steak, right,

(01:15:02):
the price of steak.

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
Hasn't gone back down. You find a like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
A manager's special steak, and I always go, look there,
a manager's special ribbi will be fourteen dollars or something,
whereas full price a few years ago would have been
nine dollars. And I just don't know. I don't know
how people are managing this, even like I'm I'm negotiating
my next contract right now, and I'm you know, I

(01:15:26):
shouldn't say this on the air, but I will. I'm
almost certainly not going to get a raise and whatever
contract I signed, but I don't know, two years, three years, whatever,
I won't get a raise for any of it. And
I didn't get a raise for this year. And I'm not,
you know, bitching about my personal situation.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
I do, okay, But just I look at.

Speaker 1 (01:15:46):
These numbers out there, and I just think, how are
people surviving? How are people making it? How are people
putting food on the family. To use one of my
favorite George W. Bushisms, and I really do want I'll
mention a couple of things actually going on in the
stock market right now. So the Dow is down about

(01:16:06):
four hundred and sixty points, was down a little more earlier.
Why you ask him, by the way, I mean this,
be very careful with something here. You can always point
to a story, and often it can be partly right,
but sometimes also it's just sort of an excuse for
something that the market was going to do. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
So the Dow is down five hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
Points today ish, but it's still over forty four thousand,
and the S and P is down three quarters of
a percent today. It's down about fifty points, but it's
still over sixty two hundred. Right, there's some profit taking,
but I think the main thing because the market's been
up three weeks in a row, so, but I think
the main thing going on today. There's two things. One

(01:16:45):
is President Trump is getting started again with the trade wars.
And this is the very, very worst and dumbest of
Trump's policies. He announced twenty five percent tariffs today on
Japan and South Korea. So it's hard to think of
anything dumber than that. When it comes to economic policy,
especially coming from a Republican I usually expect policies that

(01:17:07):
dumb to come from Democrats, but this is coming from Trump,
who doesn't understand international trade. And you know, people will say, well,
it's a negotiating tactic.

Speaker 3 (01:17:15):
Maybe we'll see, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
He's been saying that for a while, and so far
we only have three trade deals and they aren't even
real deals. Most of them are just sort of frameworks
to say we're going to hold off from beating each
other about the head and neck and get to a
more a fuller conversation later. So he really doesn't have
any serious trade deals, so we'll see. So that's one
thing that's happening in the market today. The other thing

(01:17:39):
that's happening is more of a one stock thing, and
that's Tesla. Tesla is getting crushed today. It's down about
seven and a half percent. Why is Tesla down about
seven and a half percent today, It's because Elon Musk
announced over the weekend that he is starting a new
political party. And this is a conversation. It's probably worth

(01:18:01):
more time than I'm going to give it here, but
I'll just do ninety seconds on it here. So Elon
Musk announced, so first, what he did a few days earlier,
he went on X and he said, he asked people,
do you want a new political party? And of course
it's a self selected group that people are going to
respond to that are not only on on X, but
they are his followers on X. So he then he said,

(01:18:24):
after doing the poll by a factor of two to one,
you want a new political party, and you shall have it.
When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft.
We live in a one party system, not a democracy. Today,
the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.
So you know, we'll see. The guy obviously has the money,

(01:18:44):
and I'm sure he can raise more money.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
But one of the interesting things to keep in.

Speaker 1 (01:18:49):
Mind here, and I think this is really important and
I actually think it's tactically sound, he added another post
on X and it's set. One way to execute on
this would be to laser focus on just two or
three Senate seats and eight to ten House districts. Given
the razor thin legislative margins, that would be enough to

(01:19:12):
serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that
they serve the true will of the people. So I
have a couple things to say about that. First, smart right,
it's smart to not try to jump into the presidential race.
No way a new political party, even with Elon Musk's backing,
would be prepared to jump into a presidential race in

(01:19:33):
just a few years.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
The other thing is given the people.

Speaker 1 (01:19:37):
Given who the people are who support some of Musk's
goals like reducing federal spending, okay, like doge. The people
who would find appeal in this are much more likely
to be people who otherwise would vote Republican than vote Democrat.
So if Musk jumped in with this particular party in

(01:19:58):
the presidential race, odds are quite high that the result
would be to elect a Democrat. Now, it could be
that the same thing might happen in House seats or
Senate seats, but the dynamics there are very very different,
and you might even end up in a situation where
a Republican might say, I'm not even gonna run. It's
depending on the House district. Probably not. In the Senate,

(01:20:19):
you probably have a Republican running. But anyway, it's a
very interesting thing to see, and Elon Musk is not
wrong about just how bad Republicans have been, not just
Trump and not just during Trump, but going back even
to George W. Bush, even George HW Bush with the
read my lips no new taxes and then he implemented

(01:20:40):
a higher tax rate. Republicans been bad for a long time,
and Musk is absolutely right to be pissed off about it.
Absolutely right. In fact, Musk.

Speaker 3 (01:20:49):
Added another post on X what the heck was the point.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
Of doge if they're just going to increase the debt
by five trillion dollars? So Elon Musk is looking to it. Well,
he's says he has started a new party. I think
it's smart if they don't get involved in the presidential race.
And this is why Tesla stock is getting crushed today.
Partly that because people think if he's going to be

(01:21:13):
taking on Republicans, Republicans are going to be even more
aggressive in doing things to cut green subsidies when they
get to their spending bills later this year. And also
now that this so called big beautiful bill has passed
and signed into law on Friday on July fourth, there's
a lot of stuff in there that will be bad
for electric car companies, including Tesla Metallica. At the Ozzy

(01:21:36):
Osbourne Black Sabbath thing, Yeah, what do you think I
appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, did you think there was
going to be like a moth in there or something?
When you first got an email from me?

Speaker 6 (01:21:44):
I had to cover my mouse over the the RL Jessica.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
Yeah yeah, but I mean what did you think of
the Did you watch any of the other videos, you know,
Ozzie or any of that, And.

Speaker 6 (01:21:56):
I watched Ozzie come out on stage, and I was.

Speaker 1 (01:22:03):
It made me sad. Yeah, so for those who as
much as you describe what Ozzi how Ozzy was on stage.

Speaker 6 (01:22:10):
But we knew he was going to be performing on
a throne and he wasn't going to do much, and
he hasn't done much four years, right, he's been been
standing there and yeah, you know, singing the songs. But
I mean he raised up from the floor in his
throne and then they wheeled his throne back and handed
him a microphone on a stand and yeah, I just

(01:22:31):
you don't it's like your parents. You don't want to
see them get old, you don't. You don't want to
acknowledge the fact that they're getting old. Yeah, and you
know he's you know, battling.

Speaker 3 (01:22:41):
Parkinson's.

Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
Yes, that's it. Yeah, I think I don't it hurt
and it made me sad, and I was like, God,
I can't watch anymore. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't watch
a lot of I didn't watch a lot of any
of it. I saw different videos and stuff, So I
fully understand what you're saying. I did not feel that
way about the other bands. I did not feel that

(01:23:04):
way about Metallica, Like they're older, but they're still moving. Yeah. Yeah,
and and just you know, kicking butt. And I mean,
obviously you know that you just saw him two concerts.

Speaker 3 (01:23:15):
Did you go to both?

Speaker 1 (01:23:15):
I did, get so. Yeah, I think I didn't have
quite that same reaction of sadness because I haven't been
quite as big a fan as you, and I've never
seen them live before enough, But still seeing a guy who,
I mean, truly one of the great rockers of all time,

(01:23:38):
right uh. And but he's sitting.

Speaker 6 (01:23:41):
And I'm not sure if I's similar to what Axl
Rose did. Axel had a throne when he broke his leg,
and he was still moving around and jiving a little
bit in the chair, saying with Dave Grohl when he
broke his leg, when he fell off the stage, and
it's like they're still moving, They're still active, but with
Ozzie just sitting there holding the mic on azzy stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:24:00):
Yeah, I hear you, I hear you. I think again,
I'm I'm not the big I like, I'm the guy
who likes listening to Crazy Train when it comes on radio.

Speaker 4 (01:24:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
I think I own a Black Sabbath album or two,
but I don't know if I've ever played it. You know,
Diary of a Madman. Yes, I play that, but so
I kind of like it. But I wouldn't call myself
a huge fan. So for me, it wasn't so much
the sadness as cool. I get to see him one
last time, and I'm I'm kind of glad even if

(01:24:33):
he has to sit that he came out of retirement
or you know, be I don't think he's been on
stage for six years or something like that. So I
thought that was I thought that was all right.

Speaker 6 (01:24:43):
And I mean this with the best way that I can, Yeah,
with not harsh at all. But my rock stars are
supposed to die before they get old. Well, I mean
as he's gotten Hold. No, it's true.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
And back in the day, back in the day when
when rock stars had a little bit more care for
what their listeners wanted, right, they would oblige us like
Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, who else? Oh, everybody

(01:25:16):
in the twenty seven club. So yeah, right, everybody in
the twenty seven club. And I think at least two
of those, maybe all three are in the twenty seventh club.
So in any case, yeah, back back when they had
better manners, they would they would die younger so that
we could appreciate them, appreciate them, and glorify them for

(01:25:38):
the rest of our lives.

Speaker 3 (01:25:39):
Remember, we would remember them that way.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
That way, yeah right, And I will say that the
sad part of that is, you know, my brother died
when he was thirty five, and for me, he'll always
be thirty five, yeah right, And and my brother would
be in his fifties now, right, but but he'll he'll
always be He'll always be thirty five.

Speaker 3 (01:25:56):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):
I don't know how we how we got to that,
all right, So let's switch gears. You know that wolves
have become a big issue in Colorado. We've talked about
it a lot on the show. You know that my
massive frustration is that there was even allowed to be
a vote of the people on whether to introduce wolves
into the state of Colorado. We should not do biology

(01:26:20):
by ballot box, and we certainly should not do biology
by ballot box where people will not be impacted or
likely not be impacted by the results of the decision.
Get to vote on whether to impose that on a
smaller population that will be impacted. So you have all
of these people in Boulder, Denver for Collins, you know,

(01:26:44):
who think, oh, that's lovely. Wolves are beautiful creatures. Let's
vote to bring them back into Colorado. Or actually there
were some in Colorado already, but let's vote to massively
increase the rate of reintroduction of wolves into Colorado by
having a government program to do it, rather than by
just letting them go of their own free. Wolf will
crossing state borders, which they seem not to recognize very

(01:27:05):
well as they as they feel like it, and it's
become a thing. And it passed narrowly. I suspect that
if there were another vote, if the vote were held
again today, I think it wouldn't pass. There may yet
be something on the ballot. But actually a lot of
the people who were very very much against it and

(01:27:25):
are suffering from it right now, have been saying that
a vote now to ended is problematic in its own
different way.

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):
We won't get it. We talked about that on the
show several months ago, so I won't go back.

Speaker 1 (01:27:37):
To that now. So what I want you to be
aware of a couple of things. So the Fort Collins No,
The Colorado Sun had a really interesting piece yesterday and
updated today by a reporter named Tracy Ross, entitled wolves
are killing cattle in Colorado. Feeling cut off from wild

(01:28:00):
old life officials, ranchers seek their own solution. So there
is a very long, in depth reported article, a really
good article, and just because it's so long, I'm not
going to share very much of it with you. But
there are a couple things to know. One is that
there's this particular wolf pack called Copper Creek and it
came from Canada with a lead female wolf that was

(01:28:23):
known to be a predator of livestock. And so they
brought it in and as I understand the story, they
brought it in, it did it killed some livestock. They
captured it, this pack and relocated it within Colorado, which
apparently is a violation of Colorado Parks and Wildlife's own plan.

(01:28:46):
They violated their own plan for some reason. And so
one of the interesting things about this article is the
ranchers who are dealing with this stuff. Ranching, unless you're
really enormous, is a fairly low margin business and it's
a lot of hard work. I am not expert on this, okay,

(01:29:07):
So I'm just going from what I read, and you
are welcome to text me at five six six nine
zero and tell me what I have right and what
I have wrong. But ranching is incredibly hard work. You
get up at the at the crack of dawn or earlier,
and you're out there doing whatever you're doing, you know,
on the ground on your horse, getting dirty, working hard,

(01:29:31):
for very little net profit unless you're enormous. And there
is a certain extent to which some of ranching has
become the province of people who have lots and lots
of income or just wealth, but income from other things,
so they can afford to support their ranching habit. Now,

(01:29:52):
most ranchers, especially people who have who own ranches and
ranching businesses that have been in there family for generations,
they do this because they love it. They do this
because it's a tradition for them and it ties them
to the land into their history and to a business
that they grew up from the time they were three
years old putting on their first cowboy boots. Right. They

(01:30:14):
know this and they love it, and it's in their blood,
and they don't want to be chased out of business
by Boulder and Denver rights voting to impose wolves in
their neighborhood. And so one of the things that they're
talking about is and you know, sort of out of

(01:30:35):
the box thinking because at the state level the plan
is already way over budget because the wolves have killed
so many more livestock killed and injured so many more
livestock than you know, Jared Polus and his husband who's
really kind of one of the leaders of this thing, Marlin,
who is a very very aggressive, you know, animal rights vegans,

(01:30:57):
you know, such and such campaigner. And I say that
as I know Marlon and I like him, but he
is really really on the fringe on this stuff. And
they pushed for this, and there was a particular budget,
and they underestimated, as people always seem to do, the
cost of a particular government program, the cost of how

(01:31:17):
much you have to pay the ranchers. And now there's
all this stuff going on do we pause, do we
move this Copper Creek pack again? Do we kill them
because they're too dangerous? Because they just keep going after livestock.
But one of the things the ranchers are looking at
is since the state is so far out over its

(01:31:39):
skis on this thing now and maybe out of money
for this project, what about this is their question? What
about partnering with deep pocketed nonprofits that support the reintroduction
of wolves? What about partnering with some multi tens of millions,

(01:32:03):
multi hundreds of millions or billion dollar foundations environmental groups
along the lines of, well, you, if you want to
keep the wolves here, you pony up an amount of
money where no matter how much of our livestock gets killed,
we get paid for all of it, for every bit

(01:32:24):
of harm, so that your wolves cannot harm us financially
even a little bit. Now, it's still not great. You know,
if you're a rancher and you've got a calf or
a yearling that gets killed and you get a check
from somebody for it, you don't really feel whole. You
feel like this thing that you worked on, right, You're

(01:32:46):
not a really rancher's not emotionally attached to animals, but
it's their living, it's what they do, it's how they live,
it's what they are. And these wolves are attacking not
just their animals, but in the sense it's attacking what
these ranchers are. So you get a check and you
don't feel fully made whole, but at least you're not
going out of business, so we'll see. So the reason

(01:33:07):
that I wanted to mention this to you is, I
think right now, actually, there was a special meeting called
it's either right now or forty five minutes from now,
I don't remember. It's eleven thirty or twelve thirty. But
today there's a special meeting called of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Now it's twelve thirty today of Colorado Parks and Wildlife

(01:33:28):
to talk about wolves. So I don't know if I'll
have more information out of the meeting tomorrow, but I
just wanted to share that with you because it really
is reaching a point where something has to change, all right, dragon,
do we still have that thing going over there? All right?
So at the beginning of the show, I shared with

(01:33:48):
you some of a press conference being given locally in
Texas updating information about the flood and rescue and recovery
activities and all that. So now at the White House
Press Secretary Canroline Leavitt is covering the same information. Let's
see what she has to say.

Speaker 4 (01:34:04):
I want to start by addressing the devastation.

Speaker 5 (01:34:07):
With the letters and them lives there right in the
previous office.

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):
I have the signed letters that went out to both
South Korea and Japan.

Speaker 3 (01:34:13):
Today.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
Oh, it looks like that jumped on us in time.
So that was she she was talking about all the stuff.
I don't know, Dragon, if you can get it back
to there, because we paused her. She was to be
talking about the flooding, and then something happened there with
our with our playback, and it jumped ahead to her
talking about tariffs, which I don't really need to hear

(01:34:35):
her talking about. So Dragon, if you can get that back,
then find uh. And if not, that's okay and not that.
But in any case, the federal government is is, you know,
talking about their part and this mostly these things are
generally state issues. But one thing that is coming up
that she definitely is going to talk about is the
National Weather Service and accusations that the National Weather Service

(01:34:56):
didn't do their job, which is which is not true.
The Nation Weather Service did their job. They you know,
they got their forecast right soon enough that there could
be warnings, and some warnings were heated. So in any case,
there's that and if we can't get to get back
to it, it's not that big, not that big a deal.

(01:35:18):
I want to spend a couple of minutes on a
story from last week, and at the risk of you know,
rage blading, baiting or trolling for clicks or something, I
really I wanted to talk about this last week. It's
been talked about so much already to whole issue and
that is biological men competing in women's sports. But I

(01:35:39):
just want to very very briefly touch on a story
that you might or might not have heard last week.
So the University of Pennsylvania, which was kind of ground
zero for this, because the University of Pennsylvania is the
is the school that had a former mediocre male swimmer
named Will Thomas decide to identify as a woman. And

(01:36:03):
let me just state for the record, I take and
change from a male named Will Thomas to a female
named Leah Thomas. And I'm not looking to debate with
people whether you can do that. I'm just telling you
that's what happened. This person went from being the male
Will Thomas to identifying as the female Leah Thomas had

(01:36:23):
a very mediocre at best male swimmer to a champion
female swimmer. Because men and women have different bodies, in
different strength levels and different bone structures and all kinds
of things, and so Leah Thomas was on the University
of Pennsylvania swim team then as a woman, including by

(01:36:44):
the way, being in the locker room with actual women,
biological women. I'm not again, I am not looking to
demean whatever Will or Leah's Thomas's psychology is. Life choices are. However,
however that person wants to live, and I'll say her life,
that's okay, that's fine. Live your life. I have nothing

(01:37:08):
whatsoever against trans people. Please live your life and be happy.
There's no butt, okay, I mean it. Live your life
and be happy. I am not critical of transgender people.
I don't go down the road of the people who
have all kinds of terrible things to say about trans folks, all,
you know, insulting things about I'm not even gonna say it.

(01:37:33):
I think that's nonsense. Live your life, it's okay, it's okay,
but it is not fair for somebody who has the
physiological benefits of going through puberty as a male to
compete against women. It's never been okay, And it's got

(01:37:54):
to be okay for libertarians and liberals who are in
favor of so called gay rights and all this stuff.
It's got to be okay for everybody to say it's
not right to destroy the hopes and dreams of dozens
or hundreds or thousands of young women who have spent

(01:38:15):
their lives being the best that they can be in
a particular sport, in this case swimming, and force them
to compete against a man, or against somebody who has
all the biological attributes of a man. So that's all
been going on for a while, and I think it's
pretty obvious, and I think it's an eighty twenty issue
in America, eighty percent of people on my side twenty
maybe fewer, saying that biological males should be able to

(01:38:39):
compete against women in sports. But what I wanted to
get to with the University of Pennsylvania thing. So, the
University of Pennsylvania announced, after getting a letter from the
Department of Education, the federal Department of Education being led
by Linda McMahon, and I'll share this with you. This
is from the New York Post. And again this is
five days old now, but I didn't get to it.

(01:39:00):
Transgender swimming champion Leah Thomas will be stripped of University
of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed
to pressure from the Trumpet administration. The university will also
issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost
out to a transgender competitor. Following an investigation by the
Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. The probe found

(01:39:22):
that University of Pennsylvania violated Title nine by allowing a
male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female
only intimate facilities. Can you imagine what kind of person
is so woke, so out of touch with reality that
they think it's okay to allow someone who is biologically

(01:39:45):
male with all the male parts to use female's dressing
room and get naked next to actual females. You really
have to be a special kind of stupid to tay
that's okay. You have to be the kind of stupid
that only the highest IQ people can be to rationalize

(01:40:10):
something like that. And what I wonder about all this
is that it is why the University of Pennsylvania and
other places needed to be threatened in order to do
the right thing. To me, obviously, it's disappointing that they
did what they did to begin with, but it became

(01:40:33):
so clear that they were destroying the hopes and dreams
of not just the female swimmers in their own school,
but female swimmers in every competition that their school swim
team would compete again compete in. They are destroying the
hopes and dreams of hundreds of young women in order

(01:40:55):
to protect one young biological male who again wants to
identify as female. And I take Leah Thomas at her
word that she perceives herself as female, and I don't care,
and I don't mind, but you cannot steal the hopes
and dreams of all these other girls. And again the
reason that I just wanted to share this with you

(01:41:17):
because it's kind of story that's around a lot. It's
not exactly a new kind of story, but is that
the heart the center of this travesty. The University of
Pennsylvania is now doing the right thing, but only after
being threatened and I do really wonder why did it
have to get to that. Have a wonderful rest of

(01:41:37):
your Monday. I'll talk with you tomorrow