Vikci McKenna Show - Government Ran Grocery Store in Wisconsin

Good morning. Welcome to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna show. Another opportunity for Democrats to pay the TSA employees, but they chose not to. And so what has happened today, ICE agents have been deployed to 14 airports. 14, you're thinking, but there's lots more than 14. They don't need to be deployed across the country to airports. They may add additional airports to dispatch ICE agents to additional airports to try to run, you know, cursory security, do crowd control, et cetera, and assist in ways that make the lines shorter, move faster potentially. But that's the whole idea behind putting ice there. The Democrats, for reasons that are only explained. politically, have decided that it is far more important to keep 20 million illegal aliens in the United States than it is to permit the smooth processing of people's transportation. It's harder now at certain airports to get through transportation security than it is to sneak into the country illegally. Think about that. Think about that. It's harder for Americans to fly from Chicago to Orlando than it is to get into the country illegally. The reason the Democrats are doing this is because they somehow think they're going to be able to hold out for defunding ICE. ICE is already prefunded. ICE is prefunded. So that's why ICE can be dispatched to the airports. Those guys are getting paid. because it's that important to have illegal aliens voting in elections. It's that important for them. That's why this is happening. Period. That is it. There is no other reason. Now, for those of you traveling, if you look, there is an app you can get. Hopefully you already know this, but if you don't, the app is called my TSA. Get this app. And it'll at least give you a ballpark idea of what your wait time is going to be in security. People are missing flights at the bigger airports. It's typically better at smaller airports. So I looked up Dane County Regional. It's normal at Dane County Regional. If you're using TSA pre or global entry, you know, at most airports, you're going to be in a relatively, by comparison, short line to get through security. If you don't have those programs, it's probably too late to get those programs. to try to solve a short-term problem. But those are good programs to look into. They allow you to skip lines when those lanes are open. Now, at Chicago, the TSA pre-line is not open. Yeah, they decided to shut that one down. But at a lot of other airports, it's still open. I also looked up General Mitchell in Milwaukee. Weight times are pretty normal there too. So this is not a nationwide issue. This is an issue at larger airports. So think LAX. Not at San Francisco. Why? Because San Francisco uses private contractors. So that's another thing. And I don't know why no one's talking about this.

There are currently 24 airports that use private security contractors. At every single one of those 24 airports, there are no problems. Because the private security contractors are not bound by government shutdown politics. They're already paid. They're paid differently. And so all of their employees are working. All of their employees are being paid. So they're all showing up for work. So if you're lucky enough, unfortunately in the Midwest, unless you're going through Kansas City, you're not. lucky enough. But if you're lucky enough to be able to board, if you have to board in a larger city or you're boarding at an international airport, there are some that are using private security contractors and there are no problems. In fact, again, I don't know why this is not just a call to say, you know what? Every airport is going to have private security contractors, every single one of them. By the way, it's not a cost savings to do private contracting because it's still governed. by the Department of Homeland Security and all of the rules, et cetera, that we got imposed upon us after 9-11. And part of the reason why these lines are so long is because Richard Reed tried to light his shoe on fire in 2001. So whenever he did that, maybe it was 2005. A guy tried to light his shoe on fire. Allegedly it was a bomb. There's still a question of whether it was a bomb or he was just trying to light his shoe on fire. But that's why we're taking our shoes off. The speculative theoretical conversations that took place 20 years ago about binary bombs, that's why. Everything gets checked. All your liquids get checked. That's why they're in clear bottles under three ounces. Because 20 years ago, speculatively, it was potentially possible for someone to have a binary bomb that they could have mixed using two different liquids. You know, so a lot of this is theater. And a lot of that theater is more easily processed through private security contracting because while the transportation security agency is responsible for the regulations, the execution of those regulations typically are not done through CBA's collective bargaining agreements because only about 40% of those private workers are in fact unionized. And so there's a lot more flexibility. with how to manage the requirements from the Department of Homeland Security. So that's something that I don't even, I mean, this has been weeks going on now and people have been miserable waiting in lines if you're stuck in Chicago. But again, if you're flying out of Mitchell, you're flying out of Dane County, you're not, your hell is, it's really not hell.

It might be a little bit more annoying in high traffic times, but other than that, it's still kind of normal, at least according to the MyTSA app. So why not just use this opportunity to say, you know what, we're privatizing the rest of the security contractors. They do it better. They make fewer mistakes. They're not bound by shutdown politics. Air traffic is or air travel is too important in the United States. to allow the Democrats to try to hold people's travel hostage because they need 20 million people to turn out at the polls and the midterms or they don't think they have a prayer of winning. Now, we're going to take a quick break on the Vicki McKenna show. But again, I do recommend that my TSA app, if you are flying, just even in these lesser affected areas, because it's just useful. And the other thing, you know, it just makes sense in the future to get those pre-check programs, sign up for those pre-check programs. The best thing I ever did was sign up for global entry. It just... Except at O'Hare. It's the only airport. They don't make it easy except on your return flight from a foreign country. Except at O'Hare. It's actually a wonderful program. So anyway, you've got to go to the Transportation Security Administration for TSA Pre, and you have to go to the Customs and Border Patrol website for global entry. They're both good programs. Check them out. We'll take a quick break. Glenn Rothman's going to join me in just a moment. And welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show.

Can't explain. Glenn, you better not be using this as a theme song. Just saying, good to have you on the program. I just caught the song you picked. Yeah, I was like, is that, is that a, are you telegraphing with this conversation is going to be on the air today? I don't know, Vicki. I can't explain. I can't explain this stuff. It sounds crazy. It's just crazy. All right. Congressman Glenn Grossman standing by on the program. Let's first, Glenn. Get to the TSA shutdown. DHS TSA. What we're noticing is TSA. We're not noticing the DHS employees who can't be doing the intelligence work on illegal immigrants in this country who may be plotting terrorist attacks. We can't see. what happens when they don't get paid. We can see what happens when Transportation Security Administration doesn't get paid and what ends up happening our six hour wait times at Atlanta airport. So how close are we on this? First of all, I want to point out that I don't know what's going on in Atlanta, but there are a lot of airports. Don't worry. You know, I happen to have a thing I've got to be at today. I fought in Milwaukee twice in the last week. Both times I walked right through. I was in Washington last week when I flew back out of Washington walked right through, like nothing. So I think they're trying to. You know, what they put on TV does not necessarily reflective of every airport. Well, I think what they put on TV are the worst, most dysfunctional airports in America, and we should be talking about that. They're putting Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago and Newark. Those are the ones, I mean, and those are the ones that are notoriously dysfunctional, by the way, you know, with or without a halt in funding to transportation security. They're horrible airport. Horrible! airports but you're right i just looked on tsa uh the tsa app and it says Milwaukee um you've got about a 15 to 30 minute wait depending on what line you're in right right and if you if you get in the southwest side you walk right through boom so um But you're right. I felt for a long time now that one of the fundamental differences in this country, it's not something people talked about in the last election, but it was going to come to a head, is the Democrat Party does not like immigration laws. They would prefer immigration laws never be enforced. And this has been going on for quite a while, and because it hasn't affected people on a day-to-day basis, I don't think they've given it enough. priority and how they decide which party to vote for, right? This goes back about eight years ago when every Democrat in a debate said that they thought we ought to be giving free medical care to every illegal.

who are taking advantage, by the way, 60% of aliens of born and born in the United States use welfare programs, taking advantage of American taxpayers and driving up our debt. This is a no-brainer. It's a 75%er with Americans, so why is this so hard? They should have talked about it more in the last election. We have to just talk about it in the next election. My only concern is when you talk to people about these issues, they don't believe the Democrats are that bad. They think I'm making it up. Yep. That the Democrats really don't want to have an immigration law and that they don't want to enforce their immigration laws. And they don't want to have people searching for these people. They just want everybody to come here. But that is the official position right now of the Democrat Party. And I think a clear majority of people who vote, not all, but the majority of people who vote Democrat today. don't understand why you can in some polyanish view of the world, just let everybody in here. But that is what they will do. I'll tell you why. And you're right. Because they live in Sheboygan, because they live in West Bend, because they live in areas that are not touched on a day-to-day basis by the problem. They see it. Maybe they read about it in the news, but it's Milwaukee. You know, it's Wawatosa. It's Madison. It's Beloit. And they, and they. You know, they just assume that's just big city problems, not their concern. When things get bad, they move. They take their stupid politics with them. They end up voting in the same catastrophe wherever they go. But they've never processed that their policy positions are wrong in the first place. Well, right. They believe we can operate forever without an immigration law. They believe. I want to just share this. I watched a panel of young people, young women, who were describing how evil the Republicans are. And these young women, all right, welcome back to the program. That was weird. Just got blown out. Right in mid-sentence, right now was a mid-rant. Well, Glenn Grossman decided to be kind enough to just stand by for just a little bit of time here to finish up our conversation. So, Glenn, I don't know how much of it got on the air before I got blown off. But, you know, in listening to those liberal women. Yeah, there's these liberal women who believe all this. I mean, they literally believe that all SNAP benefits have been cut off. For instance, they literally believe that illegal aliens, even though they are wildly disproportionate in our prison system, given their population, are way more law-abiding than the average American. All of this is a lie, but they believe it. Yeah, just so you understand or share listeners understand, because they will again and again hear from liberals. Liberals are more law abiding. The people who broke the law to come here are more law abiding than native born. That is not true. The problem is, believe it or not, we have no idea how many illegal aliens are in our prisons or in our jails because people don't keep track.

Okay, I've toured the Oxford Prison, which is a little bit north of you guys. And if you ask them how many people in this prison are illegal immigrants, they say, we have no idea how many are because we don't keep track of that, which is ridiculous. So because they aren't keeping track, they are able to say, well, illegal immigrants aren't committing any crimes. And we know that's not true. We know just subjectively it's not true if you talk to people. But that is where that statistic comes from. We don't contract. And I remember this had to be almost 20 years ago. And I think it was you. It was either you were with Senator Steve Noss when you were in the state legislature tried to get the state of Wisconsin years ago just to mark. whether somebody in our jail or prison system was here legally or illegally. And we couldn't even get that basic information. I remember when Brad Schimel was the Attorney General, I could not get the Department of Justice to give me that information, even when I asked for it and then had to file an ORR. I got virtually nothing useful because we in Wisconsin do not track that information. If we don't do it in Wisconsin, they don't do it in Illinois. They don't do it anywhere. Right, right. So that's why. Common sense will tell you, when I think if you talk to law enforcement, they will reinforce it that the people who broke the law coming here disproportionately commit crimes. You're right. Many of the modern public benefits. And worst of all, if we don't kick them out there here forever, and it permanently changes America. And it's amazing the number of... Just naive, polyanish people who think we don't have to enforce their immigration laws, and America is not going to change overwhelmingly, but it will. So again, this is Democrats need, this chaos is, and I mean, I'm trying to figure out why it somehow is beneficial for them to destroy all urban areas, because they're doing that in pursuit of this lie, that there is no immigration law that never needs to be enforced. But they need the voters. They need the census. And they need the voters. They need the voters in 2026. And they need the upcoming census in 2030. Or they're going to lose representation in states that they have come to count on like California. Right, right. That's exactly what's going on. And it will permanently change America. And, you know, America is going to become very different. Our less government culture, which I think still exists among a majority of Americans, will disappear. Because most people who come here from other countries, they will vote for the same type of politicians that screw up countries all around the world. That is, they'll just vote for the politician who promises them most. Yeah, they'll vote for the people who give them stuff. And they'll vote against the people who take the stuff away. I do appreciate the time. I do apologize as well, Glenn, on the hiccup that we had there. But thanks for standing by and have a great afternoon. I appreciate it. Thank you much, Ricky. And we're going to take a break. We'll come back with Will Flanders. I'm going to try to catch up. I ended up costing myself some time. I'm not going to give Will Flanders the short trip here. But I am going to take a quick break so we can catch up a little bit. And we'll come back and talk about education in Wisconsin.

And welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna show. All kinds of technical difficulties here. Wow. And I apologize. There's not much I can do about it. But Will Flanders from Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is standing by. So see how we're trying to catch up here? Brandon and I are trying to do our best to catch up on time, even though it's really hard to catch time. But Will is standing by to talk about what is effectively a lie. And the lie is that graduation rates say... And yet 37% of Wisconsin students are proficient in reading or math. Now, I know that DPI put their thumb on the scale and just added an extra 12 points for everyone, but that doesn't change the reality that less than 40% of kids are actually proficient in reading and math. But, Will, we have a 90% graduation rate. And I just saw a story last week, big story, how proud Boston was that they increased their graduation rate substantially. But it's essentially irrelevant, isn't it? Yeah, good morning. And we've seen that here too, right? I think Milwaukee public schools put out a press release about a higher graduation rate. Still in the 70s, by the way. It's not really something to be too proud of. But statewide, we've seen DPI trumpeting the increase in graduation rate. And you're absolutely right. You know, in a vacuum, you know, that might be a great thing. We'd love to see more kids graduating from high school. But you have to go beyond that. And what are these kids actually know when they graduate from high school? You look at data from the UW system about the number of kids that are needing remedial classes. That's still very high and increasing over time. You talk to folks in the workforce about people that can't even read the applications to apply for jobs or read the basics of the work they're going to be doing. It suggests we're graduating kids from high school that really shouldn't be doing so. And you're right. Trumpeting this number by itself is really quite empty. Yeah, and it's amazing. And I was actually looking as well at some information on advanced placement and on the ACT. And they've actually dumped down advanced placement and the ACT. And so now you're not even getting a good bead on what the quality of education is. If you're looking at high performance stuff, so you're looking at people who take the ACT, those are people who are supposed to be college bound. And our ACT scores are not great. I didn't realize they'd actually dumb down the test, and we're still not doing that great. Advanced placement has just gotten easier so that more kids take it and more kids can get the credit for advanced placement. So you add all these things, it's a big head fake. And we do not have students that are smarter than they were 20 years ago or even know as much as they did 20 years ago. No, you're absolutely right. And I never would have thought we'd see today. We'd dumb down the AP test, right? That's one thing we thought we'd at least keep to a high standard. But you're right, there was news last week that the standards have been changed there. What we're seeing across the board is, and it goes through college, really, but particularly the K-12 level, it's just an assembly line to get kids through. And, you know, what actually has learned along the way doesn't matter. Now that colleges are seeing declining enrollment, again, we're seeing the same thing there.

A college degree is even getting devalued because we sort of have to push kids through the system there as well. So it's an assembly line. We're not worried about the quality at the end. We're only worried about the number of outputs. And, yeah, kids are falling by the wayside. And it's really a problem across the board because... It's actually, this is one area where it's challenging for schools to make changes because nobody wants to see their kid held back, right? Nobody wants to see their kids fail a graduation test if we had one like they have in some other states. So it really takes a concerted effort across the board to make changes here because parents aren't always the driving force to make things more challenging there either. So it's just amazing to me. So you take the kids who are supposed to be tracked into the more high performing area. So advanced placement, that's AP. AP is artificially increasing passing rates. And I'm not sure if they're actually taking the material and making it stupid, but they're increasing the passing rates artificially. And so, you know, literally two years ago, you only had less than half of kids taking AP classes. We're getting the three or higher. It's on a five-point scale. In 2025, 75% were getting three or higher. What changed? The only thing that changed was the way the material is scored. It seems to me. And so now I don't even understand how you can sustain this. And at the same time, this is going on. We have what we know is the breakdown in the classroom. There was a wonderful story that was done a couple of weeks ago by Badger Institute. They looked at Beloit, largely at Beloit and lacrosse, I think, and why teachers were leaving the profession. There was just a national survey done that had over 75% of teachers saying they were completely dissatisfied with their jobs. And the overwhelming majority said it was PBIS, behavioral modification programs that do not permit them to discipline and get kids to focus and teach. Everyone's saying it's smartphones. It's not. It's the fact that they cannot discipline and teach. Yeah, we're turning our classrooms into essentially just a babysitting service, right? And teachers are fed up with that across the board. You see data from Wisconsin, too, where I think it was from MPS, where over 40% of teachers said their reason for leaving the classroom was due to behavioral issues. So it's a national phenomenon. We're not teaching kids in school, and we can't be teaching kids in school because the discipline problems are too great. So teachers, again, are just babysitters sort of. doing their best to maintain control with no support from the administration, you know, no support from school districts in many instances that just want to see few kids suspended and everybody graduating from high school. And if we keep those numbers looking good, then there's not going to be a huge amount of complaints apparently is what teachers, or is what the incentive structure we've learned to create here.

I think that's true, though. What we see is that if you just shine people on, they believe your BS. They believe that it means something when you say, you know, we had a 90% graduation rate in Wisconsin. That's utterly meaningless. That basically says illiterate people are being allowed to get a diploma. That's what it says because only less than 40% are proficient. And if you are not even proficient at grade level reading, you're functionally illiterate. You're going to have a problem holding a job. And so we know that parents buy into this stuff. You know, we had the highest ACT scores in all of Wisconsin. Yeah, well, your high ACT scores still look pretty below average if you take a look over time at what high ACT scores were supposed to be. At the same time, we have fewer kids in school and we have more money going out the door. Yeah, at some point, right, there is a sort of realization that maybe I haven't learned enough along the way. Maybe it's when you get to the workforce and you can't suddenly have an extra hour to complete your work. You actually have to complete your work on time. Maybe it's when you get to a job interview and you can't read the application. But there is a point where we're actually harming the kids. There was another recent study that showed teachers that just passed kids along actually hurt students' lifetime earnings in the long run because they can't. make the grade when they get to the places where ultimately you do have to perform. When you get on a job, again, no one's giving you the extra time, no one's coddling you, no one's dealing with your behavioral issues, you're going to be out the door. And it used to be, maybe you get to the university, and that's where you sort of realize, oh, I need to, you know, I need to shape up if I'm going to do well. Now we get through the college environment in many instances without having that realization, but the workforce is changing in that regard too much. So what did Mississippi do that seem to turn around their school system? And what other school districts, what other states, I guess, you know, manifestly refused? What did they do that made them successful? I think in this context, the most important thing is that there are a reading test that you have to pass to move on to fourth grade. And again, parents don't always like to hear that their kid is going to be held back, but in the long run, they benefit from learning the material before they're moved on. You look at other states like Florida, they have actual graduation tests where kids have to demonstrate mastery of the material before they can graduate from high school. So, you know, we don't have that in Wisconsin. We have the citizenship test that student has taken. That's great. We should maybe consider having a broader graduation test because obviously schools aren't getting the job done. The other thing is to sort of change the incentive structure for schools where you don't really get credit for graduation and for getting kids moved on, but maybe you get some financial incentives if the kids are actually not taking those remedial classes in college. There's some tangible result that they're actually having more success in the workforce. So those are some things we should look at going forward for sure. But the system we have now... is again letting us whistle past the graveyard like we do in all of our education. Yeah, I mean, you know, Milwaukee public schools have, you know, an 8% reading and math proficiency rate. It's insane. It's how bad it is. I mean, I don't even know how you pay. How would you spend a single dime for something that awful? And yet the answer, of course, to the teachers union is to file a lawsuit and have an infinite amount of money that would be spent on education to do what?

I mean, we're spending 20 grand per kid as it is. Mississippi spending $14,000 per kid. We're spending 20. They're getting kids proficient in reading. We're not. Florida, I don't know what Florida spends per student, but they're a far better system. So, you know, if the answer is simply getting rid of this PBIS, which, by the way, was this crazy idea that was in the 90s, you know, it was kind of. It never really caught fire. It was essentially universally instituted in 2015 with the Barack Obama Department of Education threatening to sue school districts if they had, quote, disparate impact on discipline, black versus white kids. And so now this is everybody. So it seems to me that it's pretty simple. Teach kids to read, get rid of this ridiculous system, and don't use social promotion. to advance kids from grade, you know, grade four to grade five or grade eight to high school, right? Those are the keys. And by the way, we have the, you know, the Trump administration right now who, in Trump's first term, he repealed those regulations about disparate impact. So, you know, there's no reason from the federal level to be afraid right now of intervention if you implement discipline in an effective way. We have a friendly administration that will back you up. But what they did, and I think this is just probably the Obama administration knew this was going to be true, they use it as an excuse. Oh, the federal government's telling us to do this. And that's why we've got to completely blow up, you know, the discipline procedures in our school districts. Once that goes away, notice you haven't seen any school districts say, oh, thank goodness, we're finally able to get rid of this awful system that every teacher hates. Every teacher hates it. Yes. One last question. What happened to the $50 million to teach kids in Wisconsin to read by using phonics? Yeah, so, you know, school districts are dragging their feet. It'll be interesting to see in this year what actually happens. And hopefully we'll see some tangible results. But it's still up in the air as to where all that money is gone. So hopefully there'll be some change. I'm not counting on it. $50 million. The complaint was always, well, we can't change the curriculum because it's going to cost us money. So the legislature says, here's $50 million. And oh, can't do it. Sorry, because it still hasn't happened. It still hasn't happened. Will Flanders, thank you very much for joining me on the program. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Next time, folks, you see someone bragging about graduation, understand that is so fake that you are an idiot to believe that that means anything important. We will be right back. And welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. If you go to my Facebook page, you will see. I can't play it. It's too profane. You will see a video of a professor, a film professor. He's just a film professor. I mean, film class, no offense. If you're a film school teacher, piece of cake. At least if it's the film appreciation class. Anyway, a film professor in a...

basic film class, like appreciation of film. Let's see if we can discern the subtext of movies. This is not deep analysis, folks, asks his students to watch the movie Zootopia. Now, I don't know if you've seen this movie. It's a kids movie, but it has a little bit, not super deep, but it has a bit of an adult subtext. So adults tend to enjoy this movie as much as kids do. Kids watch it for the fun little cartoon characters and the story. And then the adults watch it for the criticism, the social criticism that the movie provides. So. He assigns his class, this really simple movie. So if you were going to do a film that you would give, say, like sixth graders to try to ease them into film analysis, you might give them this movie. Because it's fun, it's simple. This is a college level class, and he expects all of his students to handwrite their essays. They have to handwrite their essays. Why? Because it's too easy to cut and paste. Chat GPT. or it's too easy to cut and paste, whatever, clawed. So he makes them handwrite it. And what he got on an analysis of the movie Zootopia went a little like this. Zootopia is about animals. Some of them are fluffy. Some of the animals are nice. Some animals are mean. The nice animals win over the mean animals, which is, you know, basically true about the movie. The nice animals versus the mean animals, et cetera. Okay, if you're like seven years old, that was a college level essay from somebody in a film class who's going to college, who's no doubt got a student loan to go to college. Let's go back to what Will and I were talking about. When you... socially advance illiterate people who have no mastery of basic skills. And it's a basic skill. I don't even blame the student. I blame the education system and I blame that student's parents. Like last week when we were playing the man on the beach audio from the dingbats who could not answer basic questions. Like what continent are you standing on right now? We spend in Wisconsin $20,000 per kid on average. And you can't get someone to perform exceptionally at an eighth grade level most of the time. I'm not saying all the time. Some kids are great. But most of the time, a kid with all A's, 4.0, a kid with even some AP. classes behind them who is definitely going to graduate and for sure is going to college can't write an essay by hand about a simple kids movie that has an adult subtext can't even get the kids part cogent enough to even make sense never mind then dipping into the fairly mild adult subtext that's in that movie

I don't understand. I don't, for the life of me, get it. I don't. This has been true for years. And it's getting worse. The same people who are doing this, who are the kids in these classes, are the people who are coding AI. I mean, so they're clearly not dumb. Because they're the ones who went into coding, particularly the young men. They went into coding, and they're the ones that are creating the thing that will replace humanity. And the thing that will suffice for all knowledge, AI. And they don't know what continent they're standing on. And they don't know how to understand a really simple story. And they don't know how to express themselves in a written format. But they're the ones who are going to decide for us what our future is going to look like. Let's talk about this when we come back. And so I'm focusing on the deliberately taught ignorance. But let's come back and talk about what else happens when you deliberately teach ignorance. People come out the other end of the sausage-making factory left wing. So let's come back and talk a bit more about AI. It's going to be here. We're going to have to contend with it. And the risks of having the people who are in charge make the decisions of what the base of all knowledge will look like is a terrifying proposition. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the program. This has been going on this problem with people getting dumber. And I mean, IQs are dropping, but people getting dumber with each successive generation. And that has, you can actually mark the time this began to happen. And it was 2009. It was the implementation of No Child Left Behind, which obliterated any of the modest accountability mechanisms in. education through the Bush administration. Those were pretty weak. And then every child succeeds act, which of course weaken them even further. We end up getting PBIS implemented wholesale. Smartphones became ubiquitous. Online learning became ubiquitous. You saw... drastic declines in proficiency and literacy beginning in earnest in about 2013, a couple of years after the 2009 implementation of most of these changes. But these are the people who are going to be coding AI. These are the people who are going to be the ones who are going to be determining what the knowledge base of humanity is and how we are going to perceive the reality of the world around us. Winton Hall has a whole book. on an AI, the unavoidability of AI, but also the fact that whoever codes it gets to decide. And who's coding it, Winton, thank you for joining me, are people who can't write complete paragraphs about simple children's movies or remember what continent they are on. It is good to have you. Thank you.

Oh, it's great to be with you, Vicki. Yeah, no, there's no doubt. The whole reality of LLM's large language models is it is a function of the way that they are wired for woke, as I say. And when you look at the way that you train these based on Wikipedia, when you look at it from Reddit, the Common Crawl, which is a large public data set, and then a lot of left-leaning academic peer-reviewed research. you get predictable results. And so it's garbage in and garbage out. And it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be positive uses there. But the political research on this from the scholarly research on this is... very, very one-sided and very clear that modern LLMs have a very strong left-leaning political bias, and that doesn't come as a shock to most conservatives. But the problem is going to be how young people, as you've got your finger on the pulse there with it, are going to perceive that because of something called automation bias, which is where we defer to a machine because we assume that it must know better than us. And when you have young people with moldable minds and not a lot of back history and knowledge of other contexts, That is a recipe for disaster. All right. So if you type into Google, which now summarizes all results in an AI format, so I'm assuming it's using Gemini, and you type in the question, is Trump a fascist? The summary tells you Trump is a fascist. So that to your exact point, Trump is a fascist. What are they using to declare Trump as a fascist? Number one source is Wikipedia. Wikipedia, which is a left bias, hard left bias organization. But that's what Gemini has listed as its AI summary. It's the main source of the AI summary on the question is Trump a fascist. So, you know, put aside hallucinations of large language models and how vibe coding is causing company databases to be just completely deleted. Put aside that dysfunction, just on the information, on what is truth and what isn't. This is where my biggest fear comes from. It isn't even that somebody's database is going to be deleted. It is that someone is going to look up the question and the answer is going to be wrong, but it will be authoritatively wrong and they'll trust it because it's a machine. It's a computer. It's exactly right. And so this earlier this week, We set up a firestorm on Capitol Hill. As part of the code read book launch, I released a deep research using Google Gemini. Interesting, you brought that up. And I said, assess the current 100 senators and determine from their public statements who is in violation of your quote-unquote hate speech policies. You'll be shocked to know, Vicki, that... Seven senators, current senators were named. All of them were Republicans. And then, just for fun and good measure, it hallucinated and thought that JD Vance and Marco Rubio were still current senators and threw them in for number eight and number nine. This has a real impact. There is a ton of political science research that shows that this kind of seemingly authoritative, again, that automation bias function response.

can move public attitudes for middle-of-the-road people who maybe are not very coached up on politics or maybe they're new to voting and they're easily easy to sway. It's very different than a Google search because a Google search gives you at minimum, you know, different links to choose from. This, again, gives you one whole answer. This was a 3,400 word granular, deep research, Google Gemini response. And then what I did was I went through its chain of reasoning, which is sort of a fancy way of just saying how it arrived at this answer going back through the LOM chain of reasoning log. And... I wanted to know how did it arrive at this conclusion that essentially Republican senators are bigots and all Democrats are clean as the driven snow, and it was not shocking. The material that they were using to base this conclusion on was the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, Glad, and the Human Rights Watch, and Wikipedia. And so, again, when you decide. to code an OLM and make as sort of the governing source code that you're going to default to left of center or far left sourcing, you've already put, you know, the referee in charge, and so the outcome is going to be very predictable. And it's very serious. That's why it's literally the first chapter of Code Red. Code Red is the name of the book. It's available now, as I understand, correct? It is, yes. We are out, and it is doing very well, and so we're very grateful for that. Anything that has been censored. So think about, you know, back when you couldn't type the name Eric Charmella on social media, who is the guy who leaked information and teed up a Trump impeachment, or Russiagate, or COVID. All of the stuff that had been censored or had been endorsed, the censorship had been endorsed and the lies have been repeated by, quote, you know, mainstream outlets or or well-known left-wing NGOs. All of that bias is baked in. I don't care what AI you're using. You can use chat GPT. You can use GROC. Elon Musk likes to brag about how GROC is oriented toward truth. Not really, because the same censorship and the same sources for that censorship are still at play when you ask very blunt questions. And here's one that, you know, you can ask all day long. Did the COVID-Vax cause cancer in vulnerable populations? It did. We have data. You can't get an AI to spit out that answer. It just won't do it. Ask about Russiagate. Ask about the 2020 elections. Very contentious. Maybe there isn't an agreed upon answer to that. But you don't get that sense from AI. They just say, you know, Donald Trump was an election denier, et cetera, et cetera.

That's exactly right. And it's even worse than that, because this is as good as it's ever going to get for conservatives. Why? Because Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. And these big tech companies, the AI architects, know that they have to play along to get along with regulatory approvals for massive AI data center buildouts. But you don't just go build an AI data center in the middle of a cornfield that's 20 football fields big. You have massive approval process. So they know they have to bite their tongue. They know I have to wait their time. But the control grid that they created is already there. The toggle switch is ready to be flipped back on. I mean, we all remember what they did with the disinformation index, the global disinformation index, which demonetized, delisted, de-platform, completely muzzled, conservative media, and right-of-center media under this auspices of fact-checking, quote, unquote. hate speech and, you know, safety. So scan and ban technology in AGO. The ability for you to be able to scan massive information and be able to sensor, you know, within a nanosecond, is already there. That control grid is there. And so what they're doing is they're running out the clock. They're continuing to build and get bigger and stronger until the power, if and when it switches back the other way. And then they have the ability to do a lot of the things that I lay out in here. including a global economic reset. Why do you think we hear so much about AI job displacement and replacement? It's because Sam Altman, in 2016, six years, Vicki, six years before ChatGBD conducted the largest universal basic income study, UBI study in American history, $60 million study. Now, why is Sam Altman, who's a technologist... doing wonky economic longitudinal policy studies in UBI six years before chat QBD. It's because, again, we know exactly where these donations have flowed. We know the ideology that underrides Silicon Valley, as was famously stated, it's a one-party state. And we know that 85% of all political donations routinely go to the democratic side of the ball. So this is AI is not just a tool. Okay, we hear that all time. It's a tool. It's just a tool. It is a tool, but it's not just a tool. It's political power. Yeah. And that is what this whole book is about. It's unearthing and showing you how it can indoctrinate or educate your child in AI in education, how it can erase or create jobs, how it can determine who comes alive and dead off of the battlefield in the AI warfare space. And on and on, I go through human relationships, AI girlfriends, religion, God. It's going to remake everything. And so I spent two years deep diving into this world, this has 80 pages of end notes, 850. I was a former professor, very, very old school journalistic facts. And I wanted people to know what is about to happen so that we can get prepared. There is going to be upside, but there's going to be a lot of downside. So I wonder, and I know this is a really big question. I don't know if you can answer it. Is there anything we can do? Is, I mean, the media landscape, the information landscape, the internet landscape is so controlled. Is there anything we can do? There is a lot we can do. And it's a great question, Vicki. I think the left would love nothing more than for conservatives to unilaterally disarm and go the way of the Luddites and just say, well, it's all over. Let's just, you know, pack it in. There's a lot we can do. And in fact, what I wanted to do was not just write a doom book where you just feel like it's an apocalyptic end at the end of it. Each chapter I lay out.

very specific things, both personally and politically, that can be done as solutions so that we're not just bringing up the problems for bringing up the solutions. In the media space, there's going to have to be a watchdog function. We're going to have to really have our donor class on the right side of the ball really understand that what has happened is that media companies are a feedback loop with these LOMs. They buy the training data of 20 years or 50 years of some left-leaning magazines archive. Use that words to feed into... to the LOM that bakes the bias in, but then it subsidizes that publisher. Now they've got $20 million for their payroll. Meanwhile, conservative publishers have to scrape and call just to stay afloat. So we're going to have to really get coached up. We really have to know the information so that we can stay ahead. And that's why I call the Code Red moment. It's a double meaning. A code red and alarm and alert, but also a code set of principles for the red political side of the world, political view, so that we can battle through this AI revolution. Outstanding ratings so far, by the way, of people who have already read the book. It is available on Amazon Code Red, the left, the right, China, and the Race to Control AI by Winton Hall. Get this book. It's available. It looks like on every single format, Kindle, audiobook, and hardcover. We always recommend the hardcover because they could change the Kindle book. Winton Hall. Thank you so much for coming on the program today. I appreciate it. Oh, pleasure to be with you, Vicki. Thank you so much for what you do. Thanks so much. And by the way, rave reviews from Peter Schweitzer, Senator Marsha Blackburn, fabulous investigative journalist Michael Schellenberger. Everyone has read this book and said, get it. So we will take a quick break. This is the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. One of the great things that is going on right now is the collapse of myths. And the myth goes like this. We can live without oil and natural gas. We need to extract no more oil and we need to extract no more natural gas. We can, quote, power the world on wind, solar, not nuclear, not nuclear, but wind, solar, and whatever else. So this is, so first off, it's so dumb that it should have never actually been taken seriously. But for the past 20 years, people have been behaving as if somehow this is reality. Bonner Cohen. from CFAC and National Center for Public Policy. Joins me on the program. How you doing? I'm doing very well, Vicki, and I hope you are too. So I'm glad to see the myths falling away. So one of the myths that we learned was that sea level rise and increasing temperatures were all based on bogus data that was estimated using computer models, not using real measurements, not using real science. So that's one thing that's fallen away. We've also got, you know, temperature records that suggest... Nothing bad is happening, but Bonner. It was Trump's aggressive check all boxes on fracking, natural gas extraction, oil extraction, putting the United States in the driver's seat of world's leading exporter that started to make people ask this question. Well, what else is oil and natural gas used for? And the answer is pretty much everything.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And we can be very thankful, particularly given the international situation in which we find ourselves, that the United States is the world's biggest producer of oil. It is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, and it is also the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, LNG. This puts US in a position where we can't really be blackmailed by unsavory governments, be they in the Middle East or in the Far East or wherever. At these myths, I suppose future... generations will look back and say, how in the world could anybody have taken this climate nonsense seriously? Well, sadly, for a long time, people did. Policies were implemented at the federal, state, and local level in the U.S., and in many countries around the world. These were energy suppression policies. They amounted to, particularly for those of us in the West, to... unilateral industrial disarmament to the benefit of, among others, first and foremost, the People's Republic of China. Now, you can't power a full-time economy on part-time energy. And wind and solar are part-time energy always have been and always will be. Let me interrupt for a second. For fun, just because you mentioned China and China has been exempted from this whole thing. So while the entire West is chasing net zero and trying to shut off the ability to extract oil and natural gas, all right? That's what the West is done so that we rely on other people's oil and natural gas. But what is oil and natural gas besides end-use energy? It is plastics. It's synthetics and textiles. It's pharmaceuticals and medications. It's greases. It's industrial greases. It's asphalt. It's rubbers. It's solvents. It's all chemicals. It's all personal and household care products. It's the stuff they use in hospitals. It's PVC. It's detergents. It's industrial coatings. It's flame retardants. You name it. Everything that makes modern life possible. is from oil or natural gas as the main feedstock of the product. And so China has been fine, you know, and because they don't impose these ridiculous restrictions on themselves. They use sanctioned products, sanctioned oil, sanctioned natural gas. They get it for basically free. No wonder they can undercut U.S. manufacturing. No wonder we rely on them.

for so many of our basics. Yes, and the Chinese were clever enough to take advantage of our own stupidity, and they became the world's chief supplier of green energy. That includes solar panels and the ingredients that go therein. That includes wind turbines, particularly the raw materials that go into the wind turbines, and that includes the batteries. The batteries that are used for backup when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, as well as batteries in electric vehicles. which, despite the best efforts of the Biden administration, today account for a grand total of 6% of U.S. automobile sales. But the Chinese took advantage of this. They made what looked to be a good bet. If these people are stupid enough to impose these restrictions on their use of energy. and to forego the advantages that geology has given them, well, certainly here's some solar panels, and here's some winter. We'll sell a team cheap. They're like, they're like, we're not going to get rid of hydrocarbons. We need it to make plastics. We need all this stuff for our manufacturing base. If you're stupid enough to want to, you know, essentially make yourself completely dependent on us, fine by us. We'll also make it cheap for you to buy. the seeds of your destruction by transforming your actual end-use energy into these unreliable intermittent sources. And idiots, I mean, every single gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin is jumping up and down with the pom-poms on this idea. Yes! Let's have China completely in control of all feedstock products using oil and gas and we'll buy... all of our wind and solar from China so that we're 100% dependent on China. I mean, this is people, I don't know if you can blame this on Common Core, but this is the logic that's coming out of institutions of higher education. Although we're beginning to ask ourselves just how high is this higher education because. Sadly, so many people have been systematically indoctrinated K through 12 and under college and what have you by the nonsense that they had been fed from teachers who were also fed the self-same nonsense. And the Biden administration said it had an all-of-government approach to climate change. Actually, that was understating the reality.

reality was it was an all-of-society approach to climate change. In other words, it wasn't just the government. It was the private sector. It hasn't been but a couple of years since Ford and General Motors enthusiastically endorsed electric vehicles. Hey, you know, we're going to go along with us. We're here for a clean planet. Ford Motor Company admitted last year that it was losing $50,000 for each EV it sold. Now, how long do you think that was going to go on before lobbyists for Ford and Washington got a hold of members of the Congress and whichever administration happened to be in power and say, look, unless you bail us out for taxed theirs money, we're going to go belly up very quickly. And that would have happened at the Trump administration. not had before sight to do away with regulations imposed by its EPA that would have effectively mandated the use of EVs by imposing regulations that made it impossible to produce gasoline-powered vehicles. That's the game they were playing. The idiocy just knows no limit. So by the way, it was really interesting to see Greta Thunberg, who is out there saying everybody should deindustrialize and abandon all hydrocarbons, including all of the biofeeds or the hydrocarbon feedstocks for all of the products we use and we rely on for a modern life. Now she's saying, how dare you cut off oil to Cuba? How dare you do that? By the way, Code Pink goes to Cuba. They're in a national blackout. Code Pink goes to Cuba. Their hotel gets a generator. Everybody else, including the hospital, is in 100% blackout in Cuba. But as you were talking, I was looking this up. Could you commit the entire arable land of the United States that is currently farmable for some kind of crop? Could you commit 100% of that to plastics and at least replace the plastics and the polymers and the different things that are, you know, that are the like resins? With this. And the answer, according to Grock, is no. No. You couldn't even, you wouldn't even land a glancing blow on the amount of necessary production capacity if you dedicated 100% of our food land to plastic production, Bonner, using bioplastics. I mean, this is how, this is, God bless Trump, because even though he's not explaining it very well. He's reorienting the energy sector and structure so that, you know, I guess we can argue about this for years to come, but at the very least the supply is going to be there for us. Yes, it will be. I can't help to be amused by Greta Thornberg. Shouldn't the Cuban people be?

thanking Donald Trump for keeping oil away from them, according to the ideology that Greta has embraced, Trump's doing the Cubans a big favor by sparing them the humiliating indignity of having to use fossil fuels. Well, of course, Cuban people see that quite differently. They have been getting oil virtually for free from Venezuela. until Trump put a swift into that. Of course, we all know what he's aiming for here. He's aiming for regime change in Cuba. And by the way, I'm sure he'll get it sooner or later, probably sooner. So, yes, we have turned the ship of state around, and we have done that in a remarkably short period of time. Turned back the clock 14 or 15 months ago. And with the exception of a couple of Supreme Court decisions that reigned in the EPA, but we were still headed full bore down the path to green energy to the benefit of the People's Republic of China and to the detriment of all Americans, save for a narrow slither of the population that was actually benefiting from green policies. Everybody else was being royally screwed by them. Again, Greta Thunberg, you know, I mean, China can send them solar panels. There's a lot of Sundays in Cuba. The average number of Sundays is significantly higher than you could put up lots of wind turbines there. Same with Iran. Same with Iran. You know, I mean, don't worry. We're all going to net zero. You guys can just put up some wind turbines and some solar panels. You're going to be good to go. Your economies are going to be booming because that's what they've told us. They told us that you can completely go to net zero and you can choke off all of these feedstock, you know, basics. And everything's going to be fine. And we're going to save the planet and people will love each other and it will be kumbaya and utopia. Except that that was never true. It was dumb to even say it. A whole bunch of people believed it because we don't educate people any longer. But unfortunately, Bonner, that still is, it's still motivating because there's so many hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars behind the lie. And that's the thing that I think we're going to have to be shouldering that burden and unburdening ourselves for years to come because the lie, those dollars need that lie. That's right. It's important for everybody to realize that that's exactly what it was, a pack of lies from the get-go. Yes, there were people who were brainwashed and were swept up in it, but the people pulling the strings. Be they in past administrations, Obama administration, Biden administration, be they at the World Economic Forum and some of the idiot governments in Europe who did the same thing to their people. A lot of them knew exactly what they were doing. And they don't care about ordinary people. They never have and they never will.

I wish it had been in time. You know, here in our state where, you know, half the year, it's dark. And just because it's winter and it's dark, we now have solar farms popping up all across Wisconsin. All across Wisconsin, you are going to see your utility rates go up. Solar, which is not going to produce any amount of electricity, even to be bothered with. All it will do is cause your rates to go up based on this lie. A whole bunch of people are being hurt by this lie. And with the second highest utility rates in the Midwest to have this stuff still going on here, especially as the myths start falling to the side is infuriating. There was, however, some divine intervention in a close neighbor of yours in Indiana. Last week, a small tornado struck down and hit a gigantic solar farm and tore it to pieces. There was absolutely nothing left over. Now, think of the millions and millions of dollars, including taxpayer subsidies, that went into the solar farm. Along came a tornado, destroyed it in a matter of a couple of minutes, completely. One can only hope that future tornadoes will be as targeted as that one was, and that certain one would get rid of it. Golf ball-sized hail would be acceptable as well. Oh, absolutely. That will do as well, golf ball-sized tail. By the way, how did the solar farm not stop the tornado? Remember that? It's amazing because it was going to change the planet, right? I was going to save the planet from extreme weather events. So what happens? An extreme weather event came along and destroyed the solar far. I love it. There is justice occasionally. Yeah, I love it when the truth is not relative. Good to have you on the program, Bonner, as always, C-Fact, which is, what are we calling C-FAC now? I only go on. Get the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, C-FAC-com. Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Bonner-C-C-Morrow. Cepact.com. Committee for a constructive tomorrow. Bonner-Cohen, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. And we'll be right back. Good afternoon and welcome to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. We are going to jump in and talk about the government running grocery stores. Yeah. Tony Evers rejecting some of the most mild regulatory reform. I mean, when I say mild, the red tape reset was mild.

I think it was designed to be mild because Tony Evers was expected to veto it. You might as well have made it, you know, really hardcore. But it was mild. And he couldn't even find his way to signing that piece of legislation that would have just simply required the legislature to look at regulations if they were seven years old or older and then decide whether or not they should continue. I mean, that's pretty mild. We couldn't have it, though. Tony Evers said no. By the way, there is a bill sitting on his desk that would require elected sheriffs in Wisconsin to cooperate with ICE on immigration detainers. The expectation is he's probably going to veto that as well. But we'll get into that. Coming up on the program, also the ins and outs of political scorekeeping, despite the media. And there are endless headlines. There's no division in the Republican Party. There's no division in MAGA. I was telling this to people at the Sheboygan Falls Lincoln Day dinner. We keep hearing about there's all this division. There's division in MAGA. You know, Republicans are mad at turning point. Turning points mad at Republicans. Magas is mad at regular. None of that's true. Just not true. So we'll chat about that on the program as well. I want to start here, though. This is Wisconsin Public Radio has put out this piece on Chris Taylor, who is running for his Supreme Court. She wants you to know that she is an advocate and an activist. And that's her most important qualification for Wisconsin Supreme Court. And she's an advocate and an activist. An advocate and activist for what? Well, for abortion. for the living wage to end Act 10, unlimited spending to K-12 and climate change. There are cases that are going to come before the Wisconsin Supreme Court on abortion, unlimited spending to K-12, Act 10, and climate change. Does she think she should recuse herself if any of those cases come before her? She was the policy director for Planned Parenthood. She's totally impartial. She's an activist and an advocate and cases are going to come before this court. And she says she shouldn't recuse herself because as an advocate for one side, she can be totally impartial. This is where we are. There should be, this should be a layup. for the conservative candidate to win this upcoming Supreme Court race. And it will be if people recognize that there is an election going on. Now, write these dates down. March 24th. When is March 24th? Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow in-person absentee voting starts. Also known as early voting tomorrow. March 24th. You can vote for Maria Lizar tomorrow. Vote for Maria Lazzar and against the planned parenthood whack job Chris Taylor. You can do that starting tomorrow. If you want to know what the hours of your in-person absentee voting are, you need to go to myvote.w.wI.gov.

Find your polling location or the address of your clerk in your town and call them up and ask when our early voting hours. That's in-person absentee. You can also obviously send in your absentee ballot, request and send in your absentee ballot. Again, myvote.w.w.w.gov. If you are just too lazy to drive the ballot in or go drive in and then fill out a ballot and vote in-person absentee. or April 7th, that's election day. And you'd have to show up on election day and vote for Maria Lizar that way. Because otherwise, we're going to have an advocate activist who is happy to describe herself that way. She wants to bring her advocacy and activism to a court with specific cases that are going to come before that court that she would very, very much like to weigh in on. So we can avoid that, ladies and gentlemen, if tomorrow, starting tomorrow, people realize, okay, it's in-person absentee voting. I'm going to go to my clerk's office. I'm going to go find my in-person absentee location, and I'm going to fill out my ballot and get it off my table. Or... I'm going to sign up and get my absentee ballot sent to me and then I'm going to lick a stamp and I'm going to mail it in or I'm going to circle April 7th on my calendar to make sure I vote for Maria Lizar. And if you would like to tell your friends to vote for Maria Lizar, that's a really good idea. And if you can't find a yard sign for Maria Lizarre, here's what you do. Get a piece of cardboard. and write vote Maria Lazar on it and stick it in your front yard. Otherwise, we're going to get a lunatic elected to this court. All right. I got to take a break. We'll come back and talk about government grocery stores and all kinds of other insanities when we return. This is the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. One of the, you know, I guess I shouldn't call it the dumbest, but it's up there ideas that the Democrats coughed up last week was taking a page from, I guess, the enthusiasm that everybody has for the disaster of New York City in the election of Zohran Mamdani. A whole bunch of Democrats, including Francesca Hong, who is running for governor. would like to take $100 million of Wisconsin taxpayer money and start running grocery stores. Government grocery stores. So we're going to dive into this topic here with Kyle Keenan from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. And then it probably segues us into Tony Evers veto of the red tape reset because this, you want to talk about some red tape? that's going to be required for this. Holy smokes. Good to have you, though. By the way, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Vicki.

All right, $100 million. They want $100 million. This is a piece of legislation, $100 million so that the government can run grocery stores in competition with privately run grocery stores, presumably because they're not doing it right, or obviously they wouldn't have bailed on the north side of Milwaukee or other high crime areas in cities in Wisconsin. Let's start with that premise. Yeah, $100 million is an absurd amount of money for an initiative like this. Let's start with that. You look at, you mentioned Zohran Mamdani in New York. I think their plan was originally to be $60 million. Of course, they have cost overruns, but we're talking about spending. far more than even New York City was talking about for a state that's, you know, half the size. So I think that's that's a good place to start. And it's also clear that this is just like a signal, right? The, this bill has no chance of passing. The legislature's on a session, but I think it sends a signal to voters that. If these folks get to take over the legislature, we're going to have a much larger role, the government role in our economy here in the state, and I think that's concerning. Yeah, well, they want $100 million. So to your point, $40 million more than even New York wanted to set aside. We already have an experiment going on in the state of Wisconsin, and that is in Madison. Madison decided they were going to build a grocery store and run a grocery store on South Park Street. And it's directly next to a privately run grocery store. There are already $9 million in. They have no idea how to get this project to completion. So this is just getting the store up and running, getting the HVAC, getting all of that development done, 9 million in. So imagine if you can't even get the whole, you know, building HVAC system mechanicals, all that. in under $9 million. How far do you think $100 million is going to go? But they put it right next to a grocery store, Kyle. So presumably, I guess the idea is to make a one and a half percent profit margin store fail by putting a government subsidized store next to it. And I think that's the key point here. These government-run stores are unfair to private business, right? Private businesses, and a lot of them are mom-and-pop, you know, grocery stores. You go to Pigley-Wigley's out in Wisconsin. Those are often run just by families, right? But what you're going to do is prop up a network of government-run grocery stores that will inevitably need subsidies to continue operating that will compete against these local stores that, like you said.

operate on razors and margins, you know, one to three percent, I think, is what I've seen for what grocery store margins are. And to be clear, we have a very competitive grocery market in Wisconsin. I know within a five-minute drive of me, I have about six different stores I can go to, and that's good competition to help lower prices. But what's going to happen as these government stores grow, they're going to put the private businesses out of competition or out of business, and they'll have less competition and higher prices. Well, then you'll have poorly run stores. You'll have bad stores as well. Because what I was looking this up on Friday, if you have 2% or greater theft loss, so that's shoplifting. If you have 2% or greater theft loss, that is enough to make a store fail. So if you're on a 1 to 3% profit margin and the average nationally and the average in Wisconsin is 1.7%. I looked it all up. If you have 2% of your inventory and theft loss, that is enough to make it untenable to continue to run the store. And that's not just losing the product and losing the money on the product. That's what happens to your insurance policies as you see an increase in theft. And when you're looking at those stores in Milwaukee, the north side of Milwaukee, which, you know, this is well, they're leaving Milwaukee, pick and save left, you know, north side of Milwaukee. That's because the store inventory walked out. That's because so many people stole so much stuff they couldn't keep the store open any longer. And so that's the excuse for the government to take over grocery stores. How about maybe you do something like arrest shoplifters? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We're treating the symptom and not the cause, right? petty crime and theft is one of the big things. I think another aspect of this, too, is it's hard to recruit employees in some of these areas where they don't feel safe going to work because your doors getting robbed or having this petty theft all the time. I think it's also important to note, if you look at the northwest side of Milwaukee where a lot of these stores are closing was really the impetus for this bill. There also have a big depopulation happening there as well, right? There's a lot of people moving out because of the rampant crime and issues with the schools. You're going to have less people to shop at these stores. And like you said, these are operating on razor thin margins. You can't. You can't. keep operating if your product's walking out the door. So I got to get to the red tape reset. The government, Tony Avers has said to veto this piece of legislation, and it would have essentially been a modest attempt to remove access regulations in Wisconsin. These people want to somehow master the logistics of running a business. Any business has complicated logistics, but a grocery business? Holy cats. And they want to do this with the existing Byzantine business regulations that increase the cost of employing someone anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 per business. Unbelievable. But this is with the backdrop of Evers vetoing that legislation.

Yeah, I mean, affordability is all the buzzwords right now, right? This is a package of bills that would have helped address a lot of these issues. So I'll just go over a couple of the bills that were in the package and remind the listeners. But one of them was a seven-year sunset review. So all that would mean is regulations that are on the books. have to get reviewed every seven years to see if they still make sense. A lot of them would probably stay on the books, but we hopefully get rid of some of the ones that are unnecessary and are holding our state back. The second one was a regulatory budgeting bill. And what this said is if you're going to pass a rule that's going to impose costs on the public, then you have to offset those costs somewhere else or the legislature has to vote on it. That's real accountability. So instead of having a faceless bureaucrat in Madison, making these decisions, then creating new laws, it actually goes back to your lawmakers who are, you could hold accountable. You can't hold a bureaucrat in Madison accountable in the same way. That was it. Those are the two pieces of legislation. It's amazing. No, we're not going to review anything. Nope. Now, there's no ever any reason to ever review regulations. Never. Nope, none. And, you know, who cares if it smacks the public upside the face? Nobody cares. Nobody cares if the businesses are overburdened. No one cares. Oh, by the way, let's run grocery stores. This is, I can't even imagine. the kind of outlay we would have to have. You can't actually make it more agreeable to open the business in Wisconsin. And at the same time, Wisconsin wants to take away business opportunities from people by thinking they can do it better, do it better. So what do you think, going back to the grocery store, I mean, $100 million in seed money, what do you expect the actual, you guys got to do the analysis on this? What would the cost be? I tried to grok it and they said, maybe you could open up 10 stores if you have real good people opening them for you who know what they're doing. And we don't. So, I mean, and they will require ongoing subsidies because there's no profit model in place here. Yeah, I think the authors of this bill had a very rosy, optimistic view of how many stores they could do with this. I think it was around 20 or 30 is what they thought they could do. I think that's completely unrealistic. But I think you're right that this one-time money is going to turn into an ongoing appropriation because... The experience all around the country of places that have tried this, and it's been done in rural areas, it's been done in urban areas, they always fail or require ongoing subsidies of taxpayers because they don't work. The economics don't change just because it's a government-run store.

No, and the reason, I mean, again, let's go back to the profit margin in a state that it's already hard to open up a business and run a business because of various different types of regulations you have to comply with. Like I said, to put an employee to work, a full-time employee, it's anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000. That's before all the regulations or federal regulations kick in as well. So that's just to get your business going. You're looking at that kind of commitment. Now on top of it, we just had the imposition of new building codes, which are insane, all of these green requirements and obligations that, you know, brand new buildings are going to have to meet. So that's just building codes, never mind other types of regulations, be it, you know, you have to have an impervious surface mitigation. You've got to have stormwater runoff, whatever that is, Kyle. that's what the 1.7% profit margin has to cover in Wisconsin if you're a grocery store, right? That's, you know, you got a, you get 1.7% and that, and you can still manage to stay in business with all of the compliance costs. And somehow the state of Wisconsin thinks it's going to do it without breaking the bank. Yeah, it's why those vetoes are so disappointing. I'll just give you one example. Virginia has done kind of a top-to-bottom review of their under Glenn Youngkin. He just left office. Over his four years, they cut over 30% of their regs in the state. And one of the real consequences of that is they're able to lower the cost of building a new home by about $24,000. You talk about building codes. They're able to reform a lot of that to make it actually cheaper. And that's the sort of thing we're missing out on. with the vetoes here because that we could have done reviews that got rid of unnecessary regulations that make the cost of building more expensive. And it applies to this grocery situation, 100%. And this was, again, it was a review. It wasn't an automatic sunset. It was just a review. And then it was new regulations. If they're going to hammer the public, you need to find a way to offset the impact of that. So we didn't sunset. We reviewed. And you didn't stop regulations. You just required offsets if they had an undue burden on the public, right? It wasn't even that, it wasn't even that aggressive. Yeah, 100%. I think it was a starting point to get this process started. Make sure we're taking a look at like the lowest hanging fruit. We have regulations on the book that are probably 50, 60 years old that have never been looked at. That's really low hanging fruit of where we can start here. But we don't even get to do that with this process because of this veto. No, we can't, we're not even allowed because Tony Evers said, no, we cannot review things. We're not permitted to review things and to heck with the public. All right, I can't wait to be shopping at my picked over completely decimated food stock from theft when the government decides to run my grocery store out of business. It's so wonderful to have you on the program, Kyle. Thank you very much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Vicki. Have a good day.

And from Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, that was Kyle Keenan, and we will take a break. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show, and I'm pleased to have back on the show from the conservative caucus, Jim Path to kick around a whole bunch of different things. But here's where I want to start. And I want to make the first part of our conversation about this specific issue, the left wing press and a small but loud. contingent on the right have claimed that there is this giant riff in MAGA. Gigate, you know, Trump going into Iran. That was the, that was it. That was the last straw. There's this huge rift in MAGA. And the left wing press has been cheering this on. And they're putting Marjorie Taylor Greene or whoever else on their programs to talk about it. And it's not true. Period. There is not only no rift in MAGA. It's literally zero. An NBC poll late last week. had MAGA support of President Trump at 100%. So let's start there on this bogus narrative. Yeah, listen, you have to, you cannot underestimate how completely and fully the supporters of Donald Trump are. really supportive of him because they actually do see even even though they might have this or that small disagreement on one thing they have confidence that the guy is going to carry out what he says he's going to do you may not think he should go to iran and and and go after iran but certainly anyone in maggot and as we can now find out zero think that His motivation is evil and false, as we've seen time and time again in previous administration. Even the Bush administration, by the way, which lied about the war, lied about the Iranian enrichment in Iraq or any such program, but they also lied about airport security. They blamed in part airport security for 9-11, and then they created the TSA. Well, that was a lie. Airport security couldn't have stopped anything. government could have, and they didn't do anything. So they believe Donald Trump is of the sort to understand how evil government has been towards us in these last 50 years and the necessity, and they stick with them because of the necessity to get out of that problem. Agreed. By the way, going back to 2001 in the creation of the TSA, blaming air travelers and blaming security at airports, the problem, and I think Trump could, especially as we get...

you know, throughout the summer, make this case, it was an immigration problem. And it was a corrupt intelligence problem. But it wasn't, you know, because we're not taking our shoes off and having people feel us up at the, as we're going on to planes. That's just dumb. You know, or taking our laptops out of our bags because there could be a bomb in there. That, that, I mean, that's just theater. And I think Trump could have a heyday. I think he could seriously weaponize what the Dems are doing with TSA and DHS. But let's put a pin in that and come back to that in a sec. I don't want to miss the opportunity. There is a contingent of podcasters, online influencers. Let's call them influencers podcasters. And they are, and they're saying the same thing. because they are of the same ideology. And that, so I'm talking about Tucker Carlson, some of these ex-influence like Mario Nafal, you know, some of these people like that. They weren't, I mean, they're out defending China. Tucker Carlson was out over the weekend saying, we need to do what China wants us to do. It was literally saying this, that China is a bunch of good people and the government is perfectly awesome. And we should share power and, in fact, let China have more power. So they've ripped their mask off on what they really are at this point. The idea that we have to pretend. They are part of MAGA is dumb. They're telling us they're not, and everyone's starting to see that. And I don't even think they're going to be a problem going forward in the next couple of months. I have tried to get a little bit of the benefit of the doubt to Tucker Carlson over recent months. as all this has been unfolding until he said that we have to share power with China. And so the absurdity of that statement is unreal. And the intellectual dishonesty of it is unreal. Because what China does on the international states, like when Tucker Carlson asserts, we need to share power with China. He doesn't point out is that China's not willing to share power with us. They've been manipulating the system from the very beginning. Of course, we allowed them to do that. My organization, the conservative caucus, Howard Phillips, was still running at them, me independently working in politics. I agreed with the stance that we were against giving China most favored nation status in 1998 when this went through the Senate. Republicans were saying at the time, if we do this, then it's just going to, you know, advance the opportunity for China to become a free nation and break away from communism. You don't do that in this way. Communists are liars and thieves.

they will manipulate the system. So for Dr. Tucker Carlson, not to have the intellectual honesty to recognize that, and also the honesty to know that China's been twisting and manipulating the system for every decade since then is absurd. You have to compete on the international stage. And one of the things about economics, I'm for free trade as free as we can make it. What I'm not for is giving that the countries that are bad actors. by oppressing their people or manipulating the system internationally when you do engage with them. And I think you have to, particularly the United States, has to use its power. And we're an example for the world when we do so. So Tucker Carlson has lost his mind when it comes to that. I think as I think back on it, I think he lost his, started to lose his mind somewhere around 2019. But, you know, that's between him and God. But it's not going to be between him and MAGA or him and Republicans any longer. Because he simply isn't a Republican. He isn't a conservative. He is not MAGA. Doesn't want to make America great again. He wants to make America disappear. He believes in multipolarity. Or he says he believes in multipolarity, which means we should share power. But to your point, the people he wants us to share power with, Iran and Russia. And China don't want to share power with us. They want to destroy our currency. They want to control access to all of the world's natural resources. They want to make us economic dependence on them. And he seems perfectly fine with that. Okay, you, Jeffrey Sachs, whoever else is out there, Medea Benjamin Netanyahu, Neville Roy Singham, George Soros, the whole lot of him, Carl Schwab. That's what they want. So that's what he is. Now, I don't know if he changed, if he got... you know, he's an alcoholic. I don't care. He isn't what he purported to be before the 2024 election. And I think that. It's not, I think that is, he's going to self-marginalize because of it. And so are the people who have hooked their coattails to him as well. I think they will self-marginalize because what Trump is doing, and let's just look at this, Jim. I know that Iran is like, you know, last on people's list. It's like right there with climate change on the war. They're really not dialed into the war. So when Fox goes 24-7 wall-to-wall in the war, people turn it off. They turn on something else. Because they're not as interested as everyone thinks they are. But here's what he's done. He takes out Venezuela. He's about to take out Cuba. He has taken out Iran. He's marginalizing China because of all of the cheap discounted oil they got to use their manipulated currency, Venezuela and Iranian oil. So he's putting pressure on China, which now is having a workforce problem. There is complete chaos in their administration, their government administration. Bricks, at least for the near term, is no longer a threat. The idea that the petro dollar is at risk and there could be a replacement global reserve currency bricks, that's no longer a threat. The things that we thought we were going to have to contend with.

are not things we have to contend with any longer because of President Trump. And a lot of people see that and say, you know what? It feels good to have someone who wants the U.S. to be a big dog again, and it's looking very much like we could realize that in short order. Yeah, this is where people like Tucker Carlson have totally lost the connection with reality. Because for whatever faults you can point out toward Donald Trump, and you can find some. The fact that he understands that you need a strong America on the international community because even with our faults, we're still a good nation that has good people in it that typically get it in the long run and who don't have designs on the rest of the world. But when you've got actors like China out there and most of the BRICS nations, not all of them, India. is part of that and i think that they're friendly but still they bought into it they think that they can uh subsume authority and power that we've been able to exert on the international stage, when for the most part, these are countries that are bankrupt morally. They twist reality in every way they can. We're fighting that enough here in the United States, but it hasn't overtaken us just yet. It could, but it has not. And Donald Trump... For all of his faults, is a guy who understands what America is really about. And because he is unflinching, even in the face of political pressure that is overwhelming and political risk, that he sticks with that, this is why the MAGA base is not abandoning him, because they understand that he has courage and that he can express proper authority in what he's doing. Because it's founded on something. And I have these arguments with conservative friends even that get negative from time to time on Donald Trump. Because they still cannot deal with the fact that they sometimes don't like his manner and sometimes don't like the fact that he's not an ideological geek. He's not a conservative ideologue. He's just a guy who's an American. you know, absolutist. And I think that there are positives with that if we can carry on the construct of who we are as a nation. And we'll have to build on this once he's gone. Yeah, and I'm not sure who builds on that once he's gone. There was some speculation over the weekend that JD Vance may not run for president. He is citing his family. And that could be perfectly legitimate.

That could be a perfectly legitimate reason. And so, you know, I'm not sure how it carries on, but he is, he's an American chauvinist. For the first time since Reagan, we have an American chauvinist in the White House. No, you know, people out there, you know, obsessing over what he said about Robert Mueller, nobody cares. Nobody actually cares about that stuff. What they care about is. Are we going to stand strong as a nation? We have so much debt. By the way, going back to currency, had we let our currency be undermined, our debt would have been called. Our economy would have been inverted. So you don't think Scott Bessent was tasked with doing everything under the sun as well to protect the global dollar? Give me a break. You know, the idea that Trump doesn't see all of this stuff, you know, oh, he's just happening into this stuff. He's shooting from the hip. Look who he put in charge of Treasury. Look who he put in charge of the United States Department of State. I mean, the key people, and I wish he would swap out Pambandi for somebody else, but the key people, when you're looking geopolitically, that he has put into power as his proxies are just the most nut-cutting, just badasses you could possibly pick, Jim? Yeah, he gets an A-plus. I mean, I always felt that Ronald Reagan had one of the best, you know, cabinets. in American history, and it was a pretty darn good one. Even the moderates among them were good because they did what he said. Donald Trump, I think, has surpassed that. And with the noted exceptions, I agree with you on Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem was just a nightmare. And to be honest, I'm not very excited about the Markwayne Mullin pick. That's a... discussion for another day. I'm hoping he's just a boxout baking soda right in the refrigerator. That's all I'm hoping he does. He's a great spokesperson, and if he does what Donald Trump says, then fine. But it's a long story. But the point I want to make is that with some exceptions that you can make, he's nailed it in almost every place. And even amongst people that I wasn't sure would be great, like Scott Bessent, I didn't know what to expect there. Man, the guy's a rock star. So this actually puts us in a proper, in a proper secure place, at least as it comes to the executive branch. That is good, and that makes it good for America. And we are strong on the international stage. And by the way, the Robert Mueller thing, I don't care what negatives you say about people. who were crooked in what they did. Robert Mueller doesn't deserve a huge amount of respect. We all, before God, need to recognize that we're as guilty before God as everyone else. And so we need to have that humility. But that does not mean that we have to praise people who do harm to the country. And Robert Mueller did harm to the country.

Period. And did personal harm to President Trump and a whole bunch of other people. By the way, I noticed there's an enormous amount of attention on President Trump's comment about Robert Mueller, and there was zero attention on President Trump's gracious statement about the passing of Jesse Jackson. None. No coverage. None. When it comes to, right? Jim, I wish I had a bit more time. Thank you so much. The conservative caucus.com is where you can find more. And you can also sign up for their alerts. Thank you so much, Jim. Thanks, Ricky. Great to have you. And we will take a break on the Vicki McKenna show. Coming up on tomorrow's program, Judge Maria Lizar is going to join me. We are going to talk about activism and advocacy and what the proper role of the court is. Again, that election is coming up on April 7th, but early voting starts tomorrow. We will talk to Judge Lizar tomorrow. Have a good one.