00:00:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:56.000Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
00:00:59.000For personalized loan services, you can count on.
00:01:01.000Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
00:01:08.000Pedro Gonzalez was just on the ground in East Palestine, Ohio, and he has a lot to share with us about what he learned and what this means for our political environment and more.
00:01:23.000Pedro, what did you learn visiting East Palestine, Ohio?
00:01:27.000I went to East Palestine with a lot of questions that I hoped to get answered, and I left actually with just more questions because that's the reality on the ground for people who live there.
00:01:37.000East Palestine is a village of about 5,000 people, and they are essentially in the dark about what's happening literally in their own backyard.
00:01:48.000They do not trust the conflicting reports that are coming out of various environmental and health agencies precisely because they are conflicting.
00:01:57.000It seems like there is always a statement that is contradicted within a day or so.
00:02:03.000And they obviously have no faith in the railroad company, Norfolk Southern, and actually doing a good job overseeing its own and the cleanup of its own mess.
00:02:15.000That is where pretty much all of the anger is directed right now.
00:02:18.000There's also a lot of frustration with Governor Mike Dewine, especially because DeWine was really proactive, as we know with COVID.
00:02:27.000You know, he locked people in their homes and he was very, very aggressive when it came to COVID.
00:02:32.000But on this, DeWine has been noticeably kind of AWOL, you know, or at least his approach to handling this really severe crisis for a small town that's been economically depressed for a long time is really, really different to his approach to COVID in a bad way.
00:02:50.000I mean, and again, this is a quintessential Middle American small town.
00:02:54.000I spoke to a family that has lived there their entire lives.
00:03:00.000And the only time that the husband had left this town was to serve in the military.
00:03:05.000They both work at a factory at a ceramics factory with kilns that are over 100 years old.
00:03:11.000And they live there because it's home, not because obviously it's a thriving and prosperous town, but because East Palestine is home to these people.
00:03:21.000And right now they feel abandoned and isolated.
00:03:29.000Norfolk Southern is a railroad conglomerate.
00:03:33.000And I really have no dog in this fight at all.
00:03:37.000I just don't care much for big companies or big government.
00:03:40.000But let's talk about Norfolk Southern in particular.
00:03:43.000Do you think they've handled this correctly?
00:03:45.000Or do you think that this might be an example of big business and big government acting in harmony to cover something up?
00:03:55.000Yeah, I mean, that's unfortunately, this happens more than it should.
00:04:00.000This exact kind of scenario where a very powerful corporate entity will be somehow responsible for a catastrophe that affects a small community somewhere in America.
00:04:13.000And precisely because of this kind of revolving door and incestuous relationship between the government and corporations, the cleanup and accountability aren't what they should be in relation to the damage that it's caused in people's lives.
00:04:28.000And like I said, unfortunately, this happens way more than it should.
00:04:33.000And that's, I mean, that's why it's so frustrating for these people, because I think there's that kind of sense that I don't want to call it defeatism because that's not really it, but there's definitely a sense of we don't think we're going to get justice.
00:04:46.000We don't think we're going to get what we deserve.
00:04:49.000And we don't think that the people who should be held accountable will be held accountable.
00:04:52.000So I want to make a side point here, which I find to be interesting.
00:05:38.000It was, they were trying to unionize, and Bernie Sanders parachuted in.
00:05:42.000The point being is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders seem to just kind of be on constant tour, going from one labor fight to anti-corporate demonstration to the other.
00:05:54.000However, when eastern Ohio, the muscular class, middle class, Midwest, mostly white area, is legitimately attacked, or you could, let's be even more neutral, harmed by either negligence or just corruption.
00:06:14.000And there is an environmental component to it, which is one of the sacred gods of the modern American left.
00:06:22.000There's silence and there's almost disinterest.
00:06:32.000I mean, I think that's you hit on something.
00:06:35.000And I think that unfortunately, this is just the reality is that East Palestine is a largely white working class town.
00:06:42.000These are just not people that we, by we, I mean the American political establishment really cares about.
00:06:49.000They're just not people that capture headlines.
00:06:53.000And it's really interesting because, you know, in recent days and in the last week or so, there's been an army of reporters that are coming through and sort of getting the story and kind of trying to make this about basically everything except for the town itself.
00:08:36.000Is this some sort of cruel punishment?
00:08:39.000There certainly could be some of that.
00:08:41.000That's definitely a possibility that there's this kind of looking down the nose at people like this, right?
00:08:48.000The unwashed white working class who are somehow at the center of all of our social problems.
00:08:54.000One of the families that I spoke with, the husband who works at the ceramics plant, he switched.
00:09:03.000He was a Democrat voter, but he flipped for Trump.
00:09:07.000And so, I mean, again, it's the story of the Midwest, of these people who have been left behind by policies that have been promoted by both political parties.
00:09:17.000Economic policy, immigration policies, people whose jobs have been sent overseas.
00:09:21.000And the sad thing about East Palestine is that it was kind of on the upswing.
00:09:25.000There was this sense that things were looking up, but now there's this cloud of uncertainty over the town that is made all the more worse by the fact that, again, despite the constant press attention that East Palestine is getting, the people that live there themselves are still just kind of on an island.
00:09:43.000My recommendation to Trump and his campaign is they should go to East Palestine, not do a rally, just visit to a press conference, just bash on Buddha Judge, bash on Biden, say that if he was president, this would be a top priority.
00:09:55.000There is no political downside because obviously there's really nothing you could do.
00:09:58.000He could host a fundraiser, do relief.
00:10:02.000I just, I get so, I'm signed up for all these silly emails because I, you know, throughout the years, you get these, and I have an inbox dedicated to all of the solicitations I get for foreign charity crisis.
00:10:15.000I love, I think we should help people, but the earthquake in Syria and Turkey, I got a solicitation for that.
00:10:20.000Earthquake to help Ukrainian refugees, I got a solicitation for that.
00:10:24.000Haiti, I mean, it is relentless, right?
00:10:28.000I am wondering, and I'm just going to take a step back.
00:10:30.000If I get a single email solicitation from any major corporation or any influencer or any oligarch to try to have a dollar-for-dollar match to help our own American citizens, is you two going to be doing a huge Central Park concert with Bono?
00:10:45.000Like, tonight, we're going to raise $5 million for the citizens of East Palestine.
00:10:49.000And if you raise $5 million, we'll kick in $5 million.
00:10:55.000And I think that's another aspect of this tragedy, right?
00:10:58.000Because no one knows really how severe this is.
00:11:01.000And no one knows when we're going to start seeing like the really, again, we don't want, they're already scared enough, but that's obviously the concern is that there's going to be long-term health effects for the people that are there.
00:11:14.000But here's the really, really sad thing.
00:11:16.000Even if that was true, they can't leave because no one is helping them.
00:11:22.000And by the way, I have a strong opinion that has deepened and strengthened the last couple of years.
00:11:28.000You shouldn't have to leave your home.
00:11:31.000Forcing people into cosmopolitan urban environments is actually deeply unhealthy for the country.
00:11:37.000Pedro, it seems that there is this, there was this narrative a couple years ago that was really prevailing, leave your home and just go live in Chicago, New York.
00:12:04.000I mean, uprooting people is, I think it's difficult for us to quantify and really understand how much damage that that kind of a world and a way of living has done.
00:12:18.000We encourage people to just leave everything behind and to really have no meaningful connections in life beyond our employment.
00:12:25.000And obviously, employment is important, but that's not all there is to life.
00:12:30.000The point of life is not just to basically wander from one job to the next, you know, it's to grow roots.
00:12:36.000And places like East Palestine are that for, you know, for their residents who live there precisely because it's where they want to be.
00:12:46.000And the fact that we're forcing people like this, and we have forced them not just as a result of this crisis, but as a result of deliberate policy choices that we have to confront them with this decision, whether to stay there and risk the consequences or pack up and leave and go somewhere else, somewhere that you have no connection to.
00:13:10.000That is really traumatic and distressing for a lot of these people.
00:14:07.000Nikki Haley is the dying gasp of the neoconservative establishment to take all of its discredited and awful ideas and basically jam them into a skin suit with a mouth and vocal cords known as Nikki Haley.
00:14:27.000She doesn't have an original idea in her head.
00:14:30.000It's just, you know, it's like she was incubated in a Petri dish beneath Carl Rove's home.
00:14:38.000I really can't, it's difficult to actually put into words how much contempt I have for people like her, precisely because they claim to be sort of this next generation of leaders, but they're not.
00:14:49.000They're the dead consensus in this zombified form, except wearing high heels.
00:14:55.000It's really, in some ways, it's actually worse.
00:14:58.000Like, I think I actually have less hatred for like the neocons of yesteryear because they were kind of reacting to some things and they're at least a little bit more intelligent.
00:15:07.000Again, Nikki Haley really does strike me as just a kind of robot that's been programmed to conduct this kind of suicide mission to save neoconservatism from oblivion, which I think hopefully that's where it's headed for.
00:15:23.000We have Pete Buddha Judge, who is Marxist neoliberal chat GPT.
00:15:29.000And what you're saying is that the right has their own chat GPC as well.
00:16:10.000America has always been the world leader in invention, innovation, and technology.
00:16:14.000Now China is poised to take its place as the next world leader in technology.
00:16:19.000Don't miss the shocking new movie Innovation Race, available now at SalemNow.com.
00:16:24.000It exposes the truth: how China is exploiting weaknesses in our U.S. patent system, stealing our inventions and technology, and we are helping them do it.
00:16:33.000China could soon control all of our 5G technology, which will eventually control all of our devices.
00:16:40.000With the flip of a switch, the Chinese Communist Party could turn off our power grids, remotely drive your car off your road, or turn off your pacemaker.
00:16:49.000Innovation Race is a clarion call to action.
00:16:54.000Unless we take a stand, China will become the next world leader, threatening our economic and military security and the very idea of American greatness.
00:17:03.000In today's high technology world, there is no prize for second place.
00:17:57.000Now predatory, sick, mentally deluded men who have, let's just say, a fetish for dressing up like women are allowed to expose themselves to other women.
00:18:07.000And we're supposed to act as if this is progress and wonderful and normal.
00:18:16.000And someone who does have a lot of courage is somebody who has been speaking out to a great personal cost to her own comfort and safety, but she certainly has allies here on this program.
00:18:40.000She's a spokesperson with the Independent Women's Forum.
00:18:44.000And she has been sharing some news about the freak, Mr. Thomas, who should be arrested for voyeurism because of what he did to other women.
00:18:55.000Riley, thank you for joining the program.
00:19:29.000But someone actually sent me Leah's partner's Instagram page.
00:19:35.000And so I had a quick, quick look through all of this stuff.
00:19:39.000And I knew, of course, what the NCAA perpetrated.
00:19:45.000And allowing us as female athletes to share this locker room space was bad.
00:19:50.000When you did a deep dive on who Leah Thomas is as a person and what their own personal motives are, it makes what happened 10 times worse.
00:20:01.000The NCAA allowed us as female athletes to not even just allow, they encourage us as female athletes to participate in Leah Thomas's sexual arousement and Leah Thomas's fetish.
00:20:26.000You guys were competing against him in the NCAA championship, right?
00:20:31.000Yes, it was our NCAA championships out of nowhere, my senior year.
00:20:36.000And again, I graduated from the University of Kentucky.
00:20:39.000Out of nowhere, this person starts leading the nation in multiple events by multiple seconds.
00:20:45.000And I had never heard of this person before, which is a bit bizarre considering most top-tier athletes know each other.
00:20:53.000It was very quick for us to find out that this was prior to Leah, swimming in the women's category, this was Will, and he swam three years on the men's side at UPenn.
00:21:03.000The NCAA, three weeks before our championship meet last year, announced that Leah would, in fact, be competing with the women.
00:21:11.000So we knew what the competition piece would look like, but we had no idea we would be sharing a changing space with someone who was fully intact with male genitalia.
00:21:22.000And so that obviously made all of you uncomfortable.
00:21:24.000I just have to ask your fellow female competitors, did anyone say, hey, there's a naked man in our locker room?
00:21:42.000There were several girls who were put in that position who were victims of prior sexual assault.
00:21:47.000And so to be in that triggering environment where you are exposed to male parts while you're undressing, that was an extremely traumatic experience for some.
00:21:56.000And so we talked amongst ourselves and we talked to our coaches, but there was no one going very public with this.
00:22:02.000And so when this happened, I immediately went to the NCAA officials and said, hey, how is this allowed?
00:22:09.000Who put these guidelines in place that allowed this?
00:22:13.000And their response to me was that the locker rooms are actually unisex, which meant that any man, not even a self-identifying woman, could have walked into our locker room.
00:22:24.000A coach, anyone of the officials who was a male, they were putting us or they were allowing men to change in a locker room at the expense of us as women and the expense of our feelings, our mental health and our identity, which of course goes against everything that, like you said, these people who claim to fight for women's rights, this goes against everything that they have fought for.
00:22:52.000To be subjected to that by people who were supposed to protect you was just this feeling of, of course, utter shock, but honestly, it was a feeling of heartbreak.
00:23:08.000They platformed a biological male who won a national championship and then was allowed in incredibly disturbing detail to be around you and your fellow competitors.
00:23:19.000And again, I blame the decline of American men.
00:23:23.000This never should have been, you know, you should have, someone should have just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.
00:23:31.000But, you know, as you have testosterone rates go down and men start acting like women and they don't do anything, then, hey, who's to say?
00:23:40.000You're going to look, there are a lot of sick people in the world, unfortunately.
00:23:44.000And without the strength to go against them, the country is going to completely, totally fall apart.
00:23:51.000So I have to ask you, Riley, amongst your fellow competitors and other people, is there, I mean, what's the opinion of Thomas?
00:24:01.000First, of course, from the competition standpoint, it's not fair, but obviously that doesn't exist.
00:24:07.000Are people like fired up about this that are competitors?
00:24:12.000I just okay, so tell me more about that.
00:24:15.000I can tell you how just based off the conversations I've had from people at that meet, including parents at that meet who had to sit and watch this and know that their daughters were changing in locker room with a man, 99% of people share the same opinion as you and I.
00:24:31.000These girls, especially the girls who fall in the age range of 18 to 22 and are still competitively swimming, they're terrified to use their name and their voice and their face for this issue.
00:24:44.000A lot of these girls, just hearing their stories about what their universities are doing to silence them.
00:24:51.000I mean, obviously this is an issue within fairness and competition, but this translates far beyond that.
00:24:58.000This is an issue of freedom of speech.
00:25:00.000What these universities are doing to these female athletes is, I mean, it's criminal.
00:25:07.000Talking to Leah Thomas's teammates, I've talked to several of them to great lengths.
00:25:13.000One of them was filling me in on what they went through.
00:25:18.000Every week they had to go to LGBTQ mandatory meetings.
00:25:22.000When they sent an email to their university expressing their concern of the locker room, their university emailed back.
00:25:29.000And I swear I have a screenshot of this.
00:25:31.000I can't even believe this is in writing.
00:25:34.000But their university emailed back and said, if you feel uncomfortable seeing male genitalia, here are some counseling resources that you should see.
00:25:43.000So they made these poor 18 to 22-year-old girls feel crazy for being uncomfortable in a situation where they're un and a male is watching.
00:25:54.000They were told their school has made their stance for them.
00:25:56.000They were told that they will never get into grad school.
00:26:00.000All of these terrible, awful things that force them into silence and that quite frankly aren't true.
00:26:08.000Since I've become public with my stance and with so many other stance, it has been opportunity after opportunity.
00:26:15.000And I have been backed by so much support.
00:26:18.000I mean, tenfold than compared to anything negative, which I think shows how the true majority of this country and really how this world feels about this topic in particular.
00:26:28.000Yeah, I mean, look, Thomas should be institutionalized and should be given some help, obviously.
00:26:33.000You should not be exposing yourself to other women.
00:26:39.000And by the way, we know through some of his social media postings that his girlfriend has a fetish for dressing up like a woman and acting like women and getting people to go along with it.
00:26:51.000And instead of saying, okay, you have a problem, we're going to get you treatment.
00:26:54.000We're going to get you, you know, healed, which is the heart for all of us, right?
00:27:00.000We pander and we reconfigure all society.
00:27:03.000We remake all society to indulge in them.
00:27:06.000And so where we used to have a belief that women are necessary to be protected, I mean, obviously it's a moral promise of the West.
00:27:30.000This is a broken person with some probably chemical imbalances and probably childhood trauma that has been undiagnosed or not taken seriously.
00:27:39.000Instead, instead of giving that sort of healing treatment that is obviously out there, we are now saying other people must suffer because you have a lot of problems.
00:27:51.000It just feels like we are simply here to validate this dysphoria, this mental illness of a male, which, of course, when talking about Title IX, this goes against everything Title IX was created to protect.
00:28:05.000Obviously, it was supposed to instill equal opportunities for women.
00:28:09.000But when we allow men, especially men with this dysphoria, to infiltrate back into our sports.
00:28:47.000When Mike Lindell, great American patriot, invented My Pillow, had everything you could ever want in a pillow.
00:28:53.000But now, 20 years later, he discovered a new technology that makes it even better.
00:28:56.000The My Pillow 2.0 has a patented, adjustable fill on the original My Pillow, and now with a brand new fabric that is made with a temperature-regulating thread.
00:29:06.000For exclusive listeners, the MyPillow 2.0 is buy one, get one free offer with promo code Kirk and get your best sleep ever.
00:29:14.000My Pillow 2.0 temperature regulating technology is 100% made in America and comes with a 10-year warranty and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
00:29:22.000Go to mypillow.com and click on the Radio Listener Square to buy one and get one free offer.
00:29:27.000Enter promo code Kirk or call 800-875-0425 to get your MyPillow 2.0 now.
00:29:32.000That is mypillow.com, promo code Kirk.
00:30:12.000I'm wondering, more broadly, from just kind of the general college population, do most young people feel as if this is normal and okay?
00:30:24.000You know, I think this is where I struggle because I'm from Tennessee, which there's no one in this state who thinks this is rational.
00:30:32.000Truly, no one I've ever talked to here agrees with the opposition.
00:30:38.000And then I went to the University of Kentucky, which is also in the South.
00:30:42.000These people, we're not, at least the people I'm around, we're not dumb enough, which sounds sad to say.
00:30:52.000We're not dumb enough to think that women don't deserve equal opportunities.
00:30:56.000We see this gender ideology propaganda for what it is.
00:31:00.000But when I see TikToks and when I see YouTube videos and social media posts from these crazies in these super left-leaning states and these super woke universities of people my age, it just breaks my heart and it makes me lose hope for our generation.
00:31:20.000I feel like we should know right from wrong.
00:32:40.000And the narrative that it's a non-issue could not be further from the truth.
00:32:43.000I'm just curious, did anybody file an indecent exposure criminal complaint against Thomas?
00:32:50.000There have been people interested in suing the NCAA.
00:32:54.000I think it's taken some time to understand the process because again, we had no idea.
00:33:00.000I still am learning things every day about the process of this and how navigating this position works because this is, I was supposed to be in dental school this year.
00:33:09.000And so the trajectory of my life is not what I thought it was going to be.
00:33:13.000And so we actually presented the NCAA directly, personally, a legal demand letter stating that if they don't stop discriminating on the basis of sex, there will be legal action.
00:33:25.000The NCAA has a new president, Mark Immert, who will, I mean, not Mark Immert, Charlie Baker, who will take effect in March in place of Mark Immert.
00:33:33.000So we're hopeful that he will acknowledge this and treat it for what it is and make the right and ethical decision.
00:33:43.000And I mean, amongst other female athletes that see their life's work just kind of put into jeopardy, I just, my heart goes out to them, but boy, we need to make some structural changes soon.
00:33:56.000And we need to have the courage to call this out.
00:34:00.000Really quick, I'm sure you've been, you know, called every name possible and harassed.
00:34:05.000Just give us a little bit of a window into the cruelty I'm sure you've received.
00:34:09.000I mean, no one can dispute my argument because what I'm saying is my experience.