Vicki McKenna Show - Fails to Meet Expectations

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broken knee out for what seven weeks something like that so then you get into a fender bender but then you get into another fender bender and now you have completely crushed your cell phone and cannot access your email or work account any information so all right you need to play the contest because i have this theory that you know if you're in a streak of bad luck When it breaks, it breaks hard in the opposite direction. So I'm not sure you're allowed to, though. We're not supposed to tech, but you know what? I won't tell anyone if you play. I won't tell anyone. But we employers are supposed to play our own contests, obviously. So I was trying to test the word once and I accidentally entered the contest and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get fired. I just, I didn't, you know, we're not allowed to enter the contest, but I was just, somebody told me the word didn't work. And I was just testing it on my phone. I'm like, holy smokes, I just accidentally entered the contest. All right, but anyway, you've got your contest word where, you know, Brandon, I don't know, something. Pick up a scratch off ticket today on your way home. Because I have this thing, like when you have a series of bad luck events, when it breaks, it breaks hard in the opposite direction. So, and I've been there myself. And I've also noticed that when it breaks, it breaks hard in the opposite direction. Folks, I hope you are not having a bad luck day like Brandon is. By the way, if there is ice this weekend, if we do get a cold snap or anything, I want you to be really careful where you walk. Have yak tracks now. You bought yak tracks. That was my recommendation. You actually took my advice. My parents bought it for me. Yeah. That was nice of them. Those are the best. Or knockoffs of yak tracks. Those are also good. I'm not like pitching a company or anything, but you put them on your shoes and you can walk on ice. And they don't look like, you know. mountain climbing cleats or anything like that. So, as I said, Tom Tiffany is coming up on the program. We've got Robert Spencer coming up in the program. A live report from COP 30 in Brazil. Sheriff David Clark on the program, a really important piece of legislation that's stuck is also. I want to get to that PBM legislation, pharmacy benefit manager. People are getting screwed by pharmacy benefit managers in Wisconsin. And if we could only get this piece of legislation over the hump. It would be a dramatic improvement for a lot of people, a lot of just normal, regular Wisconsin people. But here's the problem with that legislation. It doesn't have a lobbyist. There's no pro we the people lobbyist plying the palms of legislators on this legislation. The lobbyists who are applying the palm of legislators don't want the legislation. That's the insurance lobbyists. They don't want the legislation. And so right now they're winning the day because they almost always win the day in the Wisconsin legislature. The lobbyists almost always win the day. I wish we had a we the people lobbyists. But are we the people lobbyists are supposed to be.

the people we elect to represent us. Unfortunately, contract lobbyists go in with bags of money to the people who represent us, promise them money to do things that are against our interests, but in the interest of the lobbyists. Let me give you another example. So we've got PBM legislation stuck because the lobbyists have gotten it stuck. But we have this other piece of legislation that would... unconstitutionally green light online sports betting throughout Wisconsin with total control in a monopoly fashion by the tribes of Wisconsin. Nobody wants it. No one's clamoring for it. No one's begging for it. But lobbyists want it. And so that is, these are two things that are existing simultaneously right now. A really good piece of legislation that would help people and we can't get it over the finish line. And a really terrible piece of unconstitutional legislation that will no doubt get challenged in the courts that has lobbyist money behind it. And so there are backroom deals going on. And that one's probably going to get passed. This is what happens when there's a vacuum of GOP leadership. And what do I mean by that? When Scott Walker left the East Wing, when Scott Walker was no longer governor, then it was left to Assembly and Senate, quote, leadership. When you don't have an executive who can direct legislation, legislative policy, set the tone, set the narrative. When you don't have that, you get what we have now. Which is a legislature that is, by and large, beholden to lobbyists. Because there's no executive driving the bus. There's no CEO. This is another reason why we need Tom Tiffany or Josh Schoeman. We need a Republican to set the narrative, the policy agenda, and reign in the lesser angels of people who have been sitting in the legislature for a very long time. And when I say the lesser angels, I'm talking about the one, the devil on the shoulder that says, take the lobbyist money. Take the lobbyist money. Kill the good piece of legislation. Pass the bad piece of legislation money, money, money, money. Versus the better angel, which is saying do the good stuff, do the right thing. It's... It's human nature what's going on in Wisconsin, but it ticks me off because a really good piece of legislation. I'll talk more in detail about that PBM legislation a little bit later on. Is languishing? It's just stuck. It's stuck because there's a Senate rule that says we don't pass anything without 17 Republican senators being in support. Unless, so there should be an asterisk by that rule. See the asterisk. Unless lobbyists pay us to.

go find Democrats to pass bad pieces of legislation. Because that's what they're doing with the sports book bill. That's what they did with the wedding barn bill. They use Democrats to pass it. But there's a rule. But there's a rule that says you can't do that. That's a rule in the Republican Senate. Oh, you missed a little asterisk, didn't you, Vicki? Anyway, we will talk more about that on the program coming up on the show. Congressman Tom Tiffany, hopefully one day maybe governor. Tom Tiffany is going to join me right after the quick commercial break. Don't forget your word to win. Your word to win is Bills for this hour. And I hope you do win. And Brandon, if you do enter the contest, I won't tell. We'll be right back. And welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. I've got congressman and perhaps soon to be governor, Tom Tiffany, standing by on the phone to talk about a whole bunch of different things. But it's good to have you back. Thank you for joining me on the show. Good to join you. What do we want to go for first? Do we want to go for health care costs or do we want to go for the DPI again hiding the failure of Wisconsin schools or do we want to go for, you know, bad backroom deal legislation in, you know, instead of trying to help people with health care costs? I'm going to let you pick. Well, the DPI story is huge. I mean, isn't it just the same old, same old that the Wisconsin educational system has failed us, the Department of Public Instruction has failed the students and parents here in the state of Wisconsin that's proven once again with the data that has come out. And it's time to fix it. It's time to have set higher standards, not lower. It's time to have honest report cards. We need to make sure if any more money goes into the educational system, that it goes to parents and families, that it go to good teachers in the classroom, and that we make sure that there's accountability. And that's ultimately it. There has got to be accountability in the system. There's not at this point. No, there's none. And I'm going to ask you how to do that in a moment here, but I just want to share some. I mean, this is shocking. So these are the report cards. This is what DPI issues is whether the school is failing, is the school doing well. So they use these, you know, fails to meet expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations. I'm looking at 9% reading proficiency. In 10th grade at Bradley Technological High School in Milwaukee meets expectations. Here's Maple Tree Elementary with 12%.

exceeds expectations. Here's Bruce Elementary with 19% substantially exceeds expectations. Clemens Elementary with 7% exceeds expectations. I mean, how does this happen? So this is what you get as a parent. Oh, my kid's school exceeds expectations. So my kid's school is doing well. Your kid is probably illiterate. And, you know, this just keeps, we just keep kicking the can. Change the cut scores. Your kid looks less than illiterate. You know what I mean? And this is how we've been doing it in Wisconsin for quite some time. Yeah, well, I mean, just think about the verbiage that they use exceed expectations and stuff like that. The thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to A through F. I think people understand a score A through F. That's what they've always been the standard in education. Let's go back to the basics and once again teach our kids rather than indoctrinate them. I mean, at the core of this, Vicki, is the whole social engineering that has gone on that justifies failure. We're not going to accept failure anymore when I'm governor. We are going to get results. And the way we do it and we change behavior by DPI as well as the schools of teaching here in Wisconsin is we use the state budget. So how do you do, well, first, we got to stop using race and poverty as placeholders for success. So you can be a horrible school, but if you have a lot of kids who are black or a lot of kids who are very poor and you get very bad scores, we're going to mark you up because you have black kids or because you have poor kids. Why would you do that? How does that tell us where we need to focus our attention? How does that tell us where the holes in the system are if you're saying, well, It's okay if you feel because you're black or it's okay if you feel because you're poor. It is amazing that they use that because, I mean. Couldn't you actually say that that's racist? You're saying that minority children cannot learn. That is absolutely incorrect. In fact, I just went to a dinner last Saturday night at a school over here in Milwaukee where these kids are performing at the highest level and they're primarily minority kids. Stop the excuses. We're going to have a merit-based society. Kids of all racist credence colors, they can learn. And that should be the expectation. And by the way, If I'm governor, we're going to reward good teachers.

Good teachers that do a good job in the classroom, we are not going to reward bloated administration. We're going to reward administrators who actually get results in their schools. And that's how it needs to work because we've not been rewarding the right people through this whole thing. And by the way, and I'm going to push on parents. I know how important it is to have an engaged parent with kids. Parents got to get engaged with their kids' education also. It is going to take everyone. with virtually a Marshall plan here in Wisconsin to turn this around. But what's going on is unacceptable. It will take something akin to a Marshall Plan. What do you do with funding? How do you deal with funding? Funding right now, first off, we know the legislature never even looks at a spreadsheet of where the dollars go, and that includes in DPI. It wasn't until Bill Osmulski at McIver Institute had produced a spreadsheet that they even had one. So now they have it, though. So how do you deal with the funding? How do you use the money to say, we're not going to tolerate this any longer? I mean, it's easy to change this. this school report card thing, use A through F and you get rid of race and poverty as placeholders for success. And now we get real numbers, right? But how do you improve the conditions using the dollars when you have an entrenched political, you know, constituency in the form of the teachers' union and in the form of, you know, what amounts to, you know, urban Democrat machine politics? How can this work? I think people have... I think people have accepted failure. I mean, that's the ultimate problem here. In particular, the Department of Public Instruction, they've simply accepted failure. And so it starts with leadership and saying, we will no longer accept failure. But then you have the money go to where the results are being got. And that can be done. And when people are incentivized for the right things, they will do the right thing. Okay, so would that change the funding formula? Would that take an act of God to change the school funding formula in Wisconsin? Because that convoluted mess is constantly manipulated in order to, you know, game the system to get more money for failing areas under a claim of we don't have enough, you know, property value to, you know, to run a school system. $1.1 billion, by the way, is what Milwaukee spends for this failure. Yeah, no, you just make sure that money goes to those schools that are performing, and it's going to be, as you cited, with the work that Smolsky did, you can identify who these successes are and you make sure that you incentivize them. And then you make sure that you use the carrot and the stick. If you're failing, you've got to change how you're doing things. There's a second thing here that also is really important is that our schools of teaching. are not teaching literacy correctly here in Wisconsin. They have to get back to where there's a phonics component, because that's where the failure in reading is going on, where one and three fourth graders can read at grade level in fourth grade here in Wisconsin. And we have to get back to teaching literacy properly, and it has to have a phonics component to it. We are going to incentivize our colleges of teaching in the same way. You got to teach reading correctly to these new teachers or else.

you're not going to get the money. I nominate Brittany Kinzer as your readings are. If you win the governor's seat, she's got a brand new organization. She's going into places like this and trying to identify kids and give them those basic building blocks of reading, which is building blocks of critical thinking, which is building blocks of how you understand the world around you and affect it positively. Let's get to health insurance here, if you don't mind. Real quickly, we have a crisis. It's thanks to Obamacare. You know, Scott Walker wisely did not take the message. Medicaid expansion here. Tony Evers undid an awful lot of that. But we have people in Wisconsin who are looking at $15,000 deductibles, who are looking at $1,000 a month insurance policies because of Obamacare. We blew up our high risk pool here in Wisconsin that was working so well. Is there anything you can do as an executive or the legislature to make it easier for people to afford to insure themselves in our state? Yeah, the simple question is the system working? You know, as I think we go, as I go back to Washington, D.C. today to vote on this continuing resolution. And next, or one of the next things we're going to deal with is the Obamacare subsidies. I mean, think about it. They're enriching the health insurance company. What kind of logic is that on the part of Democrats you want to enrich the health insurance companies? And they want to undo the provision that we put in a couple months ago that says we're not going to give free health care, free health insurance to illegal aliens. They want to undo that. They're making all the wrong requests on the Democrat side. What we need to do is give more choice, competition, and transparency. And it starts with transparency. We need to. What other thing do we consume in our lives, Vicki, that we do not know what the cost is, like health care? And that is the first step to having an effective system. And then we need to allow more choices. Because what Obamacare has done is it's created less choices for people. We're all individuals. We have different needs. We should be giving people as many choices as possible to get their health care. Because remember, Health insurance does not equal health care. Now, health insurance is important for a lot of people, and we should try to make it as affordable as possible. But our ultimate goal should be to have affordable health care regardless of how people get it. Oh, I don't disagree. Off exchange, how come off exchange plans are 60% less than on exchange plans? You're not getting subsidies, right? But you can purchase an off exchange plan for significantly less than an Obamacare policy. Those subsidies have to stop flowing into the pockets of insurance companies because what they have done is rig this system because the government told them, feel free to rig the system. What they have done is absorb the printed dollars in subsidies.

Then you get in trouble. Then the fourth hammer would fall on your head, Brandon. Maybe you shouldn't break the rules. Okay. Curtis Howe, managing editor of NewsBusters, is standing by in the program. For weeks, six weeks, I have listened to lies from the media. I have listened to lies repeated to me from the media by neighbors of mine. who just can't understand why those alpha Republicans would want to, you know, stop food from flowing into the refrigerators of poor people and want to wreck the insurance, you know, the health insurance costs of millions and millions of Americans. Curtis, I've been listening to that. Repeated to me for six weeks and now all of a sudden, oh, I guess. It's not those awful Republicans' fault after all. You got a new study out saying when the game was over, the media just started to admit they were bamboozling people the whole time. Yeah, Nikki, this is like Joe Biden, you know? The truth can now be told. Right. You know? He has dementia. No, he's sharp as attack. He's completely on the ball. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like that. It's just like that. You know, there still be some true believers or true idiots out there like Corrine Jean-Pierre, you know, that still insist he was fine. But. Yeah, the media more or less have given up the ghost on this. I mean, it doesn't mean that they're not happy about all this. They're still quite upset. They're rather peeved. But, yeah, I found that particularly amusing because this shutdown, Vicki, was different than other ones than 2017 into 18, 2013. This shutdown was entirely created by Democrats. And therefore, usually there's two things in shutdown coverage you look for. Who's caused it and what are the effects of it? And in this case, the media leaned only into the effects of the shutdown, which is still worth covering, you know, our air traffic control system. flights being canceled, people not getting paychecks, that kind of thing. But who was responsible for it? Because it was the Democrats that kind of backed away from it. Another study by my colleague Bill Diagistino that found less than 20 percent, so less than one-fifth of all shutdown stories in the month of October on the network evening newscast brought up the fact that it was Senate Democrats. Well, except three, who have been voting or were voting consistently against a clean continuing resolution. Never got coverage of it. Tammy Baldwin voted against the shutdown, reopening the government, making sure people got their EBT benefits, making sure air for traffic controllers got paid. Tammy Baldwin voted against it 14 times. I don't think a single story was generated in the state of Wisconsin.

over Tammy Baldwin. However, multiple negative stories generated against Ron Johnson because he was there voting to open the government. Amazing. Against Obamacare subsidies, you know, and that's the other thing that is missing from all this, Vicky, you know, these particular subsidies that were talking about, A, they were created by Democrats during Joe Biden's inflation boondoggle, okay? So that was only Democrat votes. But the other thing was it increased the subsidies for those eligible to have help paying their health insurance to as high as 400% above the poverty line. Oh, higher. It actually, there was no income limit. There was no income limit on this. Yeah. You would think we'd want to talk about why people well above the poverty line are getting help with their health insurance on the marketplace. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it's the system. That is the issue. The ACA, the Affordable Care Act is not so affordable, but a loss, you know. We can't really get into that because Obama Jesus did that. That the people who were below 400% of poverty were getting their subsidies. They were going to see a slight increase in the amount they were going to pay per month. And that is because the cost of the insurance policy itself was going up. Media never reported this. So bigger subsidies actually flowed into the Obamacare marketplace, the exchange marketplace because of the one big, beautiful bill for people who are poor. The subsidies got bigger. But their insurance premiums went up because the insurance companies suck. That's why. But nobody wanted to tell that story. Instead, we focused on this 1.6 million people who were wealthy, getting subsidies, didn't need the subsidies, and how they're not going to get their subsidies. They promoted that bogus Kaiser study. Over and over and over and over again, like some poor lady who can barely afford to feed her kids was going to pay $1,000 a month for her health insurance. That just was never going to happen. Well, and I'm so glad you brought that up about, you know, the anecdotes. I mean, you know, the one thing that's really important for people to take away from the shutdown, it's perhaps one of the best reminders that seemingly average Americans that ABC, CBS, NBC, and the like are able to find. They're not so seemingly average. Most of them aren't. You know, unless you're going car to car at a food bank. interviewing people. A lot of the time when they go to visit people at their homes and they have a nice background behind them when they talk to them, these are partisan activists. Their local union put them up, an interest group put them up. They may have been partisan activists themselves. Always. Their struggles may not be real, but, you know, when it comes to transparency, the thing that drives me up a cliff the most, this isn't just a political biased issue. This is a transparency issue.

Okay. This should be something that people left and right can agree on. The media demand transparency of us, the utmost transparency. Fine. Okay. But then when it comes to us asking transparency from them. Hey, that's a bridge too far. Yes, it should be Joan Smith activist for the local teachers union is our guest today on enhanced Obamacare subsidies. You should let people know that you have selected a person to tell this story. I mean, this is always the case. It's just simply true. It doesn't take much time. Yeah, and someone's reacting to that. So, or you get a, you know, hey, you want to talk to my friend. She's, you know, She wants to talk about Obamacare subsidies and you happen to be a Democrat Party activist in Milwaukee County or some such thing like that. And it becomes national news. I want to go back to something else about the shutdown. That's air traffic control. They platformed Pete Buttigieg. Pete Buttigieg, who spent more time fake chest feeding the infant he bought. than he did actually trying to improve air traffic control and airline safety. They platform him because he was taking pot shots at Sean Duffy and Donald Trump. So the media platforms Pete Buttigieg, perhaps the least competent man ever selected as DOT Secretary, in order to bash the Republicans on the shutdown. You know, air traffic control, your flights are delayed. It's all Trump's fault. It's all Ron Johnson's fault. It's all whoever's fault. It was... galling to see the lies. And again, you know, I had people repeat them to me, but how can you explain this? And I got to tell them everything they've been told is a lie. And Curtis, how many people believe everything you're told is a lie? No one. No, and I'm glad you brought that up because, again, what qualifications did Secretary Boot Edge have here? You know, he was ubiquitous on cable and broadcast news and on podcast during the Biden administration talking about how he was improving our infrastructure. Okay, well, why do we still have dangerous shortages of air traffic controllers? Why did it take? President Trump and Secretary Duffy, including money in the Big Beautiful bill, to increase pay and further attract talent to the academy. Maybe you should have done something about that. Yeah, but that's not what it was. It was busy raising the children that he bought. Yeah, exactly. that media says it has a rule and here on shutdowns here's the rule if the republicans cause a shutdown it's the republicans fault if the democrats cause a shutdown it's the republicans fault that's the rule now to have them you know so mad that they had to let the cat out of the bag although they tried to hide it in your study if you take a look at newsbusters that org and go take a look at your study

You know, they kind of catch themselves doing it and then try to redump the blame on the Republicans. As they're seething mad at the eight Democrats across the aisle to agree to the compromise on this, which, by the way, was a total capitulation. It was a total capitulation to the GOP. And that was also not being reported. They're not reporting it as a total capitulation. They got nothing out of it. No, yeah, no, no, they don't get anything at all, although I will say this is laying the groundwork for another shutdown in January. when the government runs out of money. And in this case, the Democrats are going to be able to keep this draft going for a lot longer because food stamps are going to be paid through the end of the next fiscal year. So at the end of September. So if a shutdown happens again, they will not have that in their quiver to talk about all these people, food stamps, and everything else. But, you know, they'll be more inclined to continue this shutdown, maybe next time if they don't get what they want with Republicans caving. You know, we'll see what happened. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that they're going to be as charmed this time around. And they enjoyed relatively stable poll numbers until about, you know, three and a half weeks in. And then, I mean, it really started to tube and people were just getting annoyed. Their own people were getting annoyed when the largest employees union came out. And that was three weeks into it and just started swinging at the Democrats. That's all of a sudden, they decided they were not going to be part of the. narrative protection scheme that the media was running in interference for the DNC and Chuck Schumer. You know, it remains to be seen. The whole purpose of this shutdown was politics, right? And suffering is part of their political gambit. It remains to be seen whether or not any of these people will actually talk about that, that this was a political gambit. The pain was worth it. Yeah, the pain was worth it. But especially as Chuck Schumer now has to face whether he's going to have a mutiny in his caucus, and they are edging toward it because they're all asking Zohran Mamdani about Chuck Schumer. They know. They want to go down the road on this story. They're just not sure whether it's the time is right, because then, of course, you and I will come back on the air and say, see, they knew it was Chuck Schumer's politics this whole time. Right. Yeah, we'll see. You know, notice how, like, all these Democrats that voted are, like, seen as traitors, like, to reopen the government, you know, whereas Republicans, anytime they fold, you know, John McCain does the thumbs down. Dick Cheney, right before he dies, says, screw you to Trump and the Republicans and vote for the Democrats. You know, these are statesmen, Bickey. They are statesmen. They put country over party, whereas, you know, these eight Democrats. It's, you know, the media are like, what's wrong with these people? Yeah. They're not rebels. They're not mavericks. They're not statesmen. They're not courageous. They're horrible people who sold out to the Trump MAGA agenda. So, you know, these are people who just, to quote Angus King, who I don't quote very often, it wasn't working.

We didn't get anything out of this. It just wasn't working. Kind of really just bluntly. It was an amazing statement. We got nothing out of it. So we decided we were going to end this charade. Curtis, thank you very much for jumping on the show today. And newsbusters.org is always fun. Everybody should bookmark this and sign up for the emails. Thank you so much. And we have an app on Google and Apple Play. App? I didn't know you had an app. All right. Well, there you go. Getting your app right now. Thank you so much, Curtis, for joining me. Take care, Becky. Middleton Ford, thank you as well for sponsoring our hotline. We will be right back on the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. So I'm going to talk a little bit about controlling the process of things and how that results in... predictable outcomes. We'll get to that in just a sec. And I'll use Zohran Mamdani as an example of that. Before we get to that, we have another chance for you to win $1,000 in our nationwide fall fortune cash contest. And your word for the 10 a.m. hour is credit. C-R-E-D-I-T. You will go to W-I-B-A.com. or the iHeart radio app to play the contest. Now, if you're playing on the app, just navigate to one of our radio stations. We recommend 1310 WIBA. But it is at our radio stations. pages on our app that you are going to be able to find the contest link. So if you're wondering where it is because you opened up your app and it's not there, just navigate to our radio station and you're going to find the contest link. No worries. Piece of cake. Brandon, I just wanted like double check this time. This is like finally the last week of this contest. Okay. So for sure, we've confirmed that last week of this contest. That's what Sean said. Okay. That's what Sean said. So if we come back in week eight with more keywords, we blame Sean. That's time we blame Sean. We don't blame Vicky. We blame Sean. Right. Last week we could blame Vicki. But this week we're going to, if it changes, we're going to blame. All right. Understood. Understood. I like to spread it around. You know, it's kind of collective blame. It's very equitable, et cetera. All right. I want to get to this idea of process. This is why when you see the Republicans like Scott Kroog in. the legislature, partner with left-wing groups to give the Democrats a piece of legislation that they want, it should make you tear your hair out. Because what the Democrats do is use the process. It's the process. Over time, you make the process work better for you. You will get better outcomes from the process. So here in Wisconsin, I mean, I don't even have to use Zohran Mamdani, but here in Wisconsin. We had COVID as an excuse to put hundreds of ballot drop boxes, unmonitored ballot drop boxes that allowed ballot harvesting in Wisconsin. And now we can't get rid of them. We had the Supreme Court weigh in, doesn't matter, got a new Supreme Court. We're going to undo what the old Supreme Court did, reining in the dropbox abuses. Now we have drop boxes again. Process. It was a key piece of process.

that motivated the left to make sure liberals took over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Process. It's why blowing up Act 10 is going to be very important for them because, again, it is enhancing their power through the process. It uses the process to enhance government power. That's more in the weeds. Okay. In New York, what they did was they changed the rules, the Democrats changed the rules, so that ranked choice voting was used for the primary. But ranked choice voting was not used for the general. Why? Use rank choice voting for the primary. You use the process, which is complicated, to get a leftist through the primary. And it's a complicated explanation on how that happens, but it always happens. But you don't want rank choice voting in the general, because if you had it in the general, then the exact same process could be used by the moderates to take out the left-wing candidate. And this goes on. They change the rules on campaign donation and public matching funds in New York in order to enhance Zohran Mamdani and disadvantage Andrew Cuomo. And disadvantaged Eric Adams and disadvantaged Curtis Sliwa. They looked ahead and they saw what they needed to do in process to enhance their possibility of winning elections. And it worked. So in some very real ways. The worry of the Zohran Mamdani victory wasn't so much that a whole bunch of people have now just decided to fall in love with communism and, you know, central casting Hollywood jihad. That isn't the best takeaway from the Zohran Mamdani victory. The best takeaway is that they controlled the process to get it. And if we do not work on the process, so Scott Krug do not give the Democrats the Monday count of absentee ballots. Don't do that. They want that because that's part of the process that they now control. And by the way, why do you not want Monday count on absentee ballots? Because it gives you an idea of what kind of numbers you need on election day. That's why you don't want it. It gives you an idea of the numbers you need on election day. How many knock and drag operations do we need to do? We don't take that information and use it as how many knock and drag operations do we need to do because we don't have knock and drag operations to get out the vote on election day. They do. How many vans do we need to rent? How many places do we need to target? How many bodies do we need to put into buses and bus to the polls?

Don't do it. Don't give them any opportunity to control the process since we were so mad that there were Republican lobbyists on the ranked choice voting bill in Wisconsin. We were mad about that because are you nuts? This gives the left more opportunity to control the process. Why is Gavin Newsom having, you know, why did he rig an election so he could take out all the Republicans in redistricting in California? Why is he doing that? Process. When you hear that Kansas isn't going to take up the exact same process, which is a red state, right? You're like, are you out of your mind? You're stupid. We never want to... bother with those things those things are boring to our voters those things are boring to our people they're boring to the donors our donors big republican donors do not understand the importance of spending their money on process They don't get to see the results of their money in a campaign ad. And we do nothing to educate them on why those dollars are better spent on process than on advertisement. So anyway, I wanted to throw that out there as I'm looking at some of the numbers coming out of the Zohran Mamdani race. You know, I mean, he didn't win by a landslide. He didn't. He won, you know, by a comfortable margin, but he didn't win in such a way that made you say, okay, everybody in New York now is a commie jihadist. You looked at the process on how he got to where he got. You look at then the failed process to draft any candidate who was. Not insane. And you look at how they rig the primary. They rig the general. They rigged the campaign match. They rigged the public donation. They rigged campaign finance. So I shouldn't say rigged. They manipulated the process in such a way that it enhanced the results for Zohran Mamdani's victory. The people who supported the leftist. The hardcore Dem base were in control of a significant portion of the electoral process. I shouldn't say rigged because it's maybe not fair. They changed the rules. They changed the process. Can't really call it rigged because it's all legal. We'll take a break, though, and come back. I want to talk a bit more about the shift. in the Democratic Party, the hard left shift in the Democratic Party. I mean, that's real. That's real. Could we blunt that shift by having some kind of idea that we should maybe get involved in fighting for the process? Yes, we could. But it is very real. The shift, the hard left shift to kami jihadi. We'll be right back.

So how did we become a country that has a minority, but a significant minority of the population enthusiastically fist pumping for a communist jihadi? We should probably ask that question. The author of the book, Intifada on the Hudson, The Selling of Zohran Mamdani, who also has a very interesting piece today at frontpagemag.com. Robert Spencer joins me on the Middleton Ford Hotline. Middleton Ford Family Owned, Your Good Neighbor, Ford dealership for nearly 75 years. Mr. Spencer, thank you very much for joining me on the show. Always good to talk to you, Vicki. Thank you. So let's just go with that question. How did, admittedly a minority, but a significant minority of the Democratic Party become obsessed to the point where they would cheer on an obvious communist jihadi, who is not hiding from what he believes. And this seems to be. You know, the modern young left seems totally enamored of it. What the heck? Not that long after 9-11 that this happened. Well, you know, the groundwork for this has been laid for years. The Democratic Party has been leaning farther and farther to the left until you had open socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders being very prominent in the party. And so Zohran Mamdani is an open socialist, that was not a problem. And the fact that he is an immigrant. and non-white and Muslim, it was all marks in his favor for the identity politics obsessed Democrats. They all, they thought, oh, here's just the guy for us because he shows how committed to diversity we are and all that. And so they really, the things that they have told us matter, which are race and ethnicity and things like that and not. what you believe or how good you will perform for the American people as an elected official. Now it's all come together in Zohran Mamdani. And we have this guy who is clearly, as you said, clearly a communist, although he denies it. And his agenda for New York is clearly straight out of the Marxist playbook. And the people on the left have been conditioned for years. to think, this is just great. We're going to get robbed. We're going to be in a high crime area, and we should be...

happy and thankful about. His supporters are openly cheering on the Declaration of Sharia in New York. I mean, they're not shy about it. They're all over TikTok. They're all over Instagram. They're saying Sharia is coming. There are women who are filming themselves dancing about the excitement. We're talking Western women here, not, you know, not, not, you know, immigrants. Western women dancing on TikTok, which, of course, you're not going to do if Sharia is imposed, but dancing on TikTok and how excited they are about having. Muslim rule in New York. It's bizarre. You know, I spoke last week, mid-last week with a man who was talking about a red-green alliance. So communism and Islamism, I guess, you know, political Islam, whatever you want to call it, that somehow this developed. And it seems like our... policy on Islam in the United States is to say, don't talk about it. You're a bigot if you do. The only problem is we got all these poor, poor Muslims, you know, who are out there. And if only they had access to the Western culture and Western civilization, they would change. It seems like the exact opposite is true, is that the West exposed to these concepts like them a lot. Yeah, absolutely, because they've been taught, you know, all these non-Muslim women on TikTok and everything else, they have been taught all these years that Islam is a religion of peace, that Western culture is rotten, that the American founders were all racist slave owners, and that Islam is full of people who are noble and tolerant and so on. And so it's no wonder that they're celebrating. the idea of Sharia. They don't have any idea what Sharia is, and they think this is going to be great. This is going to be so much better than our terrible corrupt American system. This is the fruit of leftist indoctrination. So we also now have some people on the right who mock the worry about, you know, I mean, I don't know why. I mean, look at Dearborn, look at Minnesota, some places in Minnesota, particularly Minneapolis, that we would have to ever have to, you know, have to fear sort of a communist Sharia rule. I guess I'm trying to figure out how people on the right got hijacked as well because there is these not. large but mouthy contingent of people on the right who seem to be kind of okay with Zohran Mamdani Yeah, well, I think that that's all part of the phenomenon that we've seen since the October 7th jihad attacks in Israel, of people on the right like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, most prominently, but many others as well, along with Nick Fuentes, who's been doing this all along, saying Israel is the real problem, Zionism is the problem, the threat to America. Islam is not really a threat to America. It's been exaggerated by the Zionists.

to manipulate things for Israel. Now, this is all a lot of nonsense, but there are a lot of people on the right who believe it. And consequently, they see somebody like Zohran Mamdani, and they think this is no big deal. The trouble is really just all hysteria from Islamophobes. So the trouble is hysteria, and this is not really a threat. And I've seen this, too. The real threat is Israel. There's, you know, I mean, you can complain or disagree with our policy toward Israel or Israel's government. That's not what they seem to be doing. They seem to be doing exactly what you say, which is to say, Islam is not a threat. In fact, Tucker Carlson, who I used to really enjoy watching, giggles when he talks about Sharia law. He just actually giggles. And it's really off-putting and kind of weird. Red Green Alliance. Okay. I mean, let's just for a second pretend that Sharia is just totally nothing you have to worry about. But that red part of that red green alliance. The Muslims in the United States have joined hands with the communists and the democratic socialists in the United States. If you don't fear one, shouldn't you at least fear the other? The rise of Islamic politicians in the U.S. is not on the right. They're not free marketers. They're communists. They want the system. They have in their mind that we're going to have, you know, a dialectical Marxist system. And whether that works. socially or economically, they don't care. So wouldn't you at least be worried about that? Maybe we should talk about that. Just saying as a country. Well, yeah. I couldn't agree more. But this is where we are now that people like Tucker Carlson have convinced a large number of people that it's really just because America is over in the Middle East. and we're over in the Middle East because Israel told us to be, and they control everything. And if we just get out of the Middle East and break with Israel, then everything will be okay. Now, this completely ignores the expansionist, aggressive, supremacist, and violent aspects of Islamic law, although we see them acted out by Muslims every day all around the world. And Zohran Mamdani is an exponent of that. He's a 12 or Shiite, which is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we should remember that the mullahs in Iran have ordered their people to chant death to America in the mosques every Friday. And they do this as not as the supreme leader of Iran has said. It's not just a slogan. It's a policy. It's the goal of our whole regime. And that's the ethos that Zohran Mamdani is going to be bringing to New York City. And to note, and I didn't even know this until last week that the Muslim Brotherhood not only was Islamic, of course, but also communist, and minimally Marxist. So go back to people who say, if only we changed our attack toward Israel and we stopped marginalizing the Islamic countries. Didn't we try that under Joe Biden? We did, didn't we? We gave Iran. Didn't we try that under Brock?

Obama, we gave Iran a whole bunch of power. We thought Iran was going to be the stabilizing force of the Middle East. We, you know, we did a whole bunch of things. We set money to Afghanistan. We empowered the Taliban. We did all sorts of things. It doesn't seem to have improved conditions, you know, to such an extent that we have all of these, you know, new modern Muslims who are here embracing Western tradition and Western culture. Seems to me like it only made things worse. Yes, you're right. We gave $20 billion, $20 billion under Biden, to the Iranians, which means that we were essentially financing the war against Israel because it was Iran that funds Hamas and Hezbollah. And so we were fighting against ourselves in a certain sense, helping Israel on the one hand and helping the jihadis on the other. And the betrayal of Israel during the Biden administration was on many levels, and they were having to stop in Gaza from their defensive actions because we were withholding weapons they had already paid for, and bought and paid for, withholding them from them. And it didn't do a thing. It only emboldened the Giadi. Yeah, we've, I don't know. I think the total was over $180 billion going back 20 or 30 years that we have funneled into the Palestinian Authority. you know, ostensibly for food support or medicine or infrastructure improvements doesn't seem to have done anything except just empowered and emboldened, you know, people who have global hegemony as their goal with our money. You know, and I was, very recently, I was reading a book that was written by some of the GWAT guys who are still in contact with their contacts in Afghanistan, who are saying, look, you know, the various different factions of Islam have. in many ways come together in agreement through intermarriage, through other different things. They're very, very wealthy. And they are harnessing, you know, USAID and other types of USAID that flows into the Islamic poor countries in order to, you know, target Western civilization, Western cities in the United States, in Germany, in Great Britain. And maybe that's, maybe they're wrong. I don't know. But it seems to me that. That should be something our intel agency should be paying attention to. And the rise of Zohran Mamdani suggests that they have made some pretty deep inroads into the United States. Very much so, yeah. And nobody seems to be aware of what the implications of his victory really are because we've been conditioned all these years to think it's Islamophobia to worry about Islamic jihad or the spread of Sharia. Yes. And now, you know, unfortunately, we have people on our side giggling, giggling about the imposition of Sharia law and people. That just blows my mind. Robert Spencer, the new book is called Intifada on the Hudson. He's talking about the rise of Zohran Mamdani. The selling of Zohran Mamdani is the subtitle of that book. Robert Spencer is the author. And there is a really great piece at front page mag today, frontpagemag.com. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you. Great to have you. And we will take a quick break on the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. Mark Morano from Climate Depot.com and Seafact is in Brazil. At the COP 30, I can't believe you haven't been arrested yet. It's great to have you on the program. I can't wait to have you give us all of the exciting news on how clear-cutting 100,000 Amazonian rainforest trees for a highway is going to save the planet from climate change. But do share. Well, it's going to say a very simple answer based on UN and Brazilian environmental monastic logic. It will save the planet because it's allowing more private jets, more corporate CEOs, more billionaires, more celebrities to come in and have a great flow, have SUVs and limousines, and they have all of that. now because they have a four-lane highway of eight miles that they just added, clear-cutting it, and now they can showcase to the world how well they've saved the rainforest. That's what the environmental minister actually said here in Brazil. By the way, kudos to the BBC for breaking this story originally. They had the exclusive about how Brazil literally clear-cut this forest for this summit. And the sad thing is... This city of Bilem, probably about 1.2 million people, very small by Brazilian standard. cannot handle any of this. They had to bring in cruise ships to accommodate people. So we were just talking to Irish reporters who were out of, put people up for rental hotels, is bigger than flying and hotels combined for people. So they're bringing in massive carbon footprints. The highway wasn't even enough. And this city, 80% of the residents don't even have access to modern sewage. And if you walk the streets, you see crumbling walls, you see piles of trash, you see craters that look the size of the UD on the moon. The place is a depressed, poverty-ridden city, and yet they're bringing in all the billionaires and corporations and U.N. officials. To brag about progress on fighting climate change. Wow. So you're in a poor city. You've decided to take all of the, or Brazil decided to take all of the investment and clear-cut 100,000 rainforest trees so billionaires and fancy people can get their jets in.

And they can, and they're going to be saying on cruise ships because it's too dumpy in the city, and the city can't accommodate them so that they could all talk about how great they are and how they're going to save the planet. You know what I did for fun, Mark? I looked up the investment, the total global investment on renewables since 2005, okay? And it's a very large range. It's three to eight trillion dollars, okay? Let's go with three. Wow. I'll go with a low end. $3 trillion since 2005 in fighting climate change. And I see on climate depot.com your website that global carbon emissions are up. That global carbon emissions always go up. With $3 trillion, they couldn't manage to do anything except, I guess, clear-cut Amazonian rainforest so billionaires can see how pretty the Amazon is. Yes, and you can go back 32 years to the very first Rio Earth summit. And you can look at the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. At every UN summit, they continue to go up. Every UN climate treaty, they continue to go up. With every net zero pledge, carbon dioxide continues to go up. 80 plus percent of global energy still comes from fossil fuels. There is no measure by which you could say, success, we're making progress, nothing. But leave it to the Associated Press and Seth Borenstein. and UN officials to come up with a claim this week, fresh off the presses, that because of all these climate summits and the Net Zero agenda and pledges, we've staved off the worst effects of global warming. You know how they come up with that? They're now downgrading future catastrophe. You think that could have something to do with the fact that the number one donor to the climate movement is now saying there's no climate doomsday, and he's pulling back his alarmism, and that would be a one Bill Gates? I think it has a little something to do with that, yeah. I don't want to be a cynic. I don't want to be a cynic. But yes, I think it has something to do with that. 80% of fuel is still fossil fuel. The other percentage of it is likely nuclear. Then maybe a little hydro. And then maybe we're talking about the intermittent sources of energy, wind and solar and biofuel. But this is to the point of stupidity. And yet, and yet, we are still looking down the pike. of a demand that our airlines pay a green skies tax in order to fight the climate change that $3 trillion over 20 years couldn't solve. And by the way, to get to net zero, it would be $3 trillion a year, a year. And so we're still dealing with this insanity because the UN is still trying to demand that we have basically what amounts to an airline tax and everybody, I guess, except the billionaires with private jets. The airline tax, they tried to do the shipping tax. They're not going to give up. And here's the thing. Now, I'm in a battle right now, a personal mono-e-mono battle with Governor, California Governor Gavin Newsom. I was on Fox News on Sunday morning, and they declared me the carbon envoy, the unofficial U.S. representative, because for the first time in 33 years, there's no official U.S. representative here.

Well, that was Fox News. Politico last night declared that Gavin Newsom was the unofficial climate ambassador and envoy here to the UN, representing the U.S.'s real view that climate is dangerous. So now I'm in a battle because the dueling unofficial delegations. Is America going to recognize me in climate skepticism, or are they going to recognize Gavin Newsom? We'll see how this plays out. We may have an online poll about it. But what's interesting about this whole thing is China, China, China. And we went into the conference first thing yesterday. The first one's in. You walk into the main entrance, and the first thing you see is this China delegation. Giant Chinese flags up. They have Gigi Ping copies of his book all over the table on display. I actually asked if I could have one, and they said they're not for sale. They're just for display purposes. They had standing room-only events at these conferences. China is now considered the hero of this event. Why? Because when Donald Trump... gave his speech before the General Assembly, and we basically called it a cult scam and fraud, the whole UN agenda, and said they were all wrong and been wrong for decades. The Chinese leader went up and spoke and said, we are going to double down our commitments in the future. We are committing ourselves to net zero. So China is the environmental hero, not for anything they've done, but for promises they're making decades into the future. Trump is the villain, of course. Okay, so China, in order to continue to fund its economy, needs to have coal and natural gas and nuclear. That's what they need. And so that's what they're using. What is China's promise on net zero is just that we're going to do it someday. Yay! Didn't they say that in the Paris Climate Agreement? We're going to do it someday. Yeah, I do it someday just don't hold us to any specificity. Yes, and they just kept, you know, they said, we will commit to some date at some future time when our emissions will peak and then go down. And then people have looked at it and they said, well, usually when you have a developing economy, usually you do reach a peak emission and you level and you start to decline. And that's all trying to ever originally pledged. Now they're trying to up that pledge basically as a way to get ingratiated with the UN. But it all comes down to this. And I'm trying to get to the Chinese delegation. I'd like to ask them this question at one of their press conferences. Will they now admit publicly that Donald Trump's 2012 tweet about global warming, benefiting China at the expense of the rest of the world, was 100% accurate? Does net zero? Is China the only beneficiary of net zero? And how does that work? Are they willing to admit that that they have a self-interested, they're self-interested lobbying here at the U.N. because the more these nations commit to net zero. The more they commit to rare earth mining, the more they commit to half a million pounds of material being dug up to make one EV battery, the more they commit to all the rare earth mining for solar and wind. And China, of course, has the national security. The U.S. has a national security problem with China. When you control these rare earth mining materials, you're beholden to another country. We used to do 90% of our own.

Now China is doing about 70 to 90 percent, and then you have the processing of it. We're completely dependent on them. We have literally just destroyed ourselves with this. But our big problem is, and this is the key point, and I'm sorry to filibuster here, but 1992, George H.W. Bush gets us in this. I am employing the Trump administration. I went on Fox, and actually Donald Trump on Truth Social, posted my video, which I'm very excited about because in this segment, I publicly called on Donald Trump. Mr. President tear up this treaty, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit Sustainable Development Treaty, that got us into this whole net zero sustainable development agenda 21 mess. If Donald Trump vacates that, it makes it very hard for future president Gavin Newsom or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to get us back in. Yes, that's a good point, Mark. That's actually, and I think a lot of people have forgotten about this. Who got us into this mess in the first place? Republican George H.W. Bush. Republicans got us into this mess in the first place. And we have spent the last, however many decades, that has been now three, trying to, trying to un- 32 years. Yeah, trying to un-f the, you know, the rigged game. And so, you know, again, though, in 33 years, I should have actually gone back to renewable spending since 1992. I didn't even think to do that. Yeah. Because I'm sure it's even higher than that. Because after all of these years, all of this money, all of this, you know, stripped resources from the U.S. energy economy, transferred to China, all of the inducing of U.S. manufacturers to move operations to China. All of that has produced zero. reduction in carbon emissions. Zero. Less than zero because it's gone up. They failed. They failed. And their number one funder now says, oops, I was wrong. And he sounds like Donald Trump. There's no catastrophe. We can handle this. We should get people out of poverty instead, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I'm sorry, Bill Gates said what? Bill Gates has hated at this conference. A lot of people upset with what he said, led by Michael Mann, the climate gate professor. He's really upset at Bill Gates. So we need to have Donald Trump undo maybe the dumbest act by a Republican ever. Maybe that might, I actually think that that might be bigger than Nixon opening up trade with China. Undo this treaty. Rip it up, toss it out. Does it require Senate action to undo the treaty? No, that's the beauty of it. Now, keep in mind, I'm relying on legal analysis, which is the same as relying on economic analysis. You can get 100 economists in a room, and they're all going to give you different. But basically, there's a very strong component of legal analysis of constitutional law that says... If the president withdraws from this treaty, vacates the treaty, he has the power to do that himself. And then it becomes, in order to have a new, like say Gavin Newsom's elected and he tries to get us back in, because we vacated it, the theory is you have to sign a new treaty and have the Senate ratify it. Now, another legal scholar said, no, because there was a previous precedent, we can go back to the previous ratification. It would become a Supreme Court case, probably, but it would tie it up potentially for years.

So that's the first thing we need to do. We may end up being prevailing on that and force them because all they needed was that stupid 1992 treaty that was ratified by the U.S. Senate, and they've been able to justify almost three and a half decades of terror and war on America. Just look at America in 1992 when we got into this mess, Ricky. Let's look at our manufacturing base. Let's look at our immigration policies. Let's look at our energy. Let's look at... And what they've done to the heartland of America is they've gutted it out. Let's look at our corporations. We now no longer live in a capitalist system. And what I mean by that is... It's no longer the small business. I was watching, and this is getting a little bit off topic, but I was watching at Kojak. And there were all these, this Kojak TV series, 1970s, everyone's mom and pop small restaurants. And I started looking at the stats for today. The mainstream economists claim there's more small businesses today in America and it's more successful. But if you look at it, every McDonald's fast food franchise is considered a small independent business. I'm sorry. And that includes everything from all the corporate retail chains. If you don't own the land, if you don't own the menu, if you don't own the COVID lockdown policies and vaccine manage, you are not the owner of that restaurant. You are not the same as America of old when you were a small business entrepreneur, when you're just nothing more than a little outlet for a corporate giant. So that's what's happened to America. And, of course, that was happening before this, but it helped accelerate these trends. And we're gutted our industrial base as we've empowered China. Well, I am hoping you bring this level of aggravation to all of the people at cop 30. I'll be looking for your dispatches at climate depot.com. Mark, I also hope you have fun. Enjoy yourself. Let me know how beautiful a clear-cut Amazon looks, please. Put some pictures up if you can get there. Well, I will. Thank you. I just came back from the Amazon Jungle Tour, and I was actually held a perantula spider that was in the jungle. Apparently, they're very tame and their sting isn't worse than a B thing. So anyway, thanks a lot of it. Better you than me. Better you than me on that one. We'll take a break in the Vicki McKenna Show. That was Mark Morano from Climate Depot. Thanks, Mark. Good afternoon and welcome to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. All right. We're going to check in with Tom Tiffany on the show. We're also going to talk about a really excellent piece of legislation that is languishing. in the legislature because it doesn't have deep pocketed money bag lobbyists trying to push it over the line. But it's very important and you can help on this one. So that is coming up on the show. Before we get to anything, here's your chance to win. Your word is money. M-O-N-E-Y. That is our nationwide fall fortune cash contest keyword for the 2 p.m. hour. Money. Go to our websites, either newstalk 1130.com or W-I-B-A.com. Or you can also play the contest on the I-Heart Radio app. If you are going to play on the app, navigate to one of our radio stations and you will see the contest link. Simple as that. You have until 55 minutes past the hour to play. We'll call you if you win. You will not leave messages. Be mindful of that. So I was just cruising through my true crime stuff.

You know, I save that and I read it all at once. You know, I kind of bookmark a story and then I read it later. So I saw this story yesterday and bookmarked it. And I just read it today. This is the story of Tremonte Kirk. Tremonte Kirk. Who is Tremonte Kirk? Well, he is a 17-year-old Milwaukee lad. who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for being a serial rapist. Yes, 17 years old. His record of sexual assault goes back to when he was 12 years old. Multiple serial sexual offender, going back to the age of 12, and he was finally sentenced to 35 years after raping a stranger in an elevator twice strangling her, torturing her, stomping on an injured leg she had, and threatening to kill her leaving her for dead. Finally, he gets a proper sentence because when he committed that act of violence, He was on an ankle monitor from the juvenile system, an ankle monitor. But that's not why it's a story that's one for the books. Here's the story on why it's one for the books. Because Tremonte Kirk, I'm going to read here from the Channel 58 story at CBS58.com. Prosecutor said Kirk was diagnosed with a conduct disorder in a previous mental health evaluation. You see, ladies and gentlemen, a serial rapist had a conduct disorder. So I read this and I'm thinking to myself, what in the ever-loving, blank, blank, is a conduct disorder? Would you all like me to share what a conduct disorder is with you? Because I'd be delighted to. I had to look it up. I had no idea. A conduct disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis in DSM-5 given to children and adolescents under 18 who show a persistent pattern of behavior that violates the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms and rules. That's a conduct disorder. You're a juvie thug. You have a conduct disorder. We'll give you a mental health evaluation and send you back to school. A conduct disorder. You show aggression. You bully people. You threaten. You intimidate others. You initiate physical contact and fights. I'm reading here. You use weapons that can cause serious harm. You're physically cruel with people and animals. You steal. Stealing. Oh, yes. You deliberately set fires or otherwise vandalize or destroy other people's properties. You break into cars. You lie to obtain goods and services. You stay out at night despite, quote, parental prohibitions, and you're truant from school. So what do you think that describes in terms of percentages of the average student body of MPS? They all have conduct disorders.

So if you're 12 years old and you get a diagnosis of a conduct disorder and you've raped four women, including an elderly woman, you get an ankle monitoring bracelet. No, no, no. You have to nearly kill the last one before the justice system is going to take it seriously. You have a conduct disorder, you poor thing. By the way, what's the medical cure for a conduct disorder? You ready for this? Therapy. Yeah. Send them to the school counselor. Send them to a therapist. So medical diagnosis can somehow be cured by a therapist? Oh, no, I can't. It doesn't work. Conduct disorder. Remember that the next time you hear about a juvenile thug murdering someone. It wasn't crime. It was mental illness. We're going to take a quick break on the Vicki McKenna Show. And welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. I've got Congressman and perhaps soon to be governor, Tom Tiffany, standing by on the phone to talk about a whole bunch of different things. But it's good to have you back. Thank you for joining me on the show. Good to join you. What do we want to go for first? Do we want to go for health care costs or do we want to go for the DPI again hiding the failure of Wisconsin schools or do we want to go for, you know, bad backroom deal legislation in, you know, instead of trying to help people with health care costs? I'm going to let you pick. Well, the DPI story is... Huge. I mean, isn't it just the same old, same old that the Wisconsin educational system has failed us, the Department of Public Instruction has failed to students and parents here in the state of Wisconsin that's proven once again with the data that has come out, and it's time to fix it. It's time to have set higher standards, not lower. It's time to have honest report cards. And... We need to make sure if any more money goes into the educational system, that it goes to parents and families, that it go to good teachers in the classroom, and that we make sure that there's accountability. And that's ultimately it. There has got to be accountability in the system. There's not at this point. No, there's none. And I'm going to ask you how to do that in a moment here, but I just want to share some. I mean, this is shocking. So these are the report cards. This is what DPI issues is whether the school is failing, is the school doing well. So they use these, you know, fails to meet expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations. It substantially exceeds expectations. I'm looking at 9% reading proficiency. In 10th grade at Bradley Technological High School in Milwaukee meets expectations. Here's Maple Tree Elementary with 12%.

exceeds expectations. Here's Bruce Elementary with 19% substantially exceeds expectations. Clemens Elementary with 7% exceeds expectations. I mean, how does this happen? So this is what you get as a parent. Oh, my kid's school exceeds expectations. So my kid's school is doing well. Your kid is probably illiterate. And, you know, this just keeps, we just keep kicking the can. Change the cut scores. Your kid looks less than illiterate. You know what I mean? And this is how we've been doing it in Wisconsin for quite some time. Yeah, well, I mean, just think about the verbiage that they use exceed expectations and stuff like that. The thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to A through F. I think people understand a score A through F. That's what they've always been the standard in education. Let's go back to the basics and once again teach our kids rather than indoctrinate them. I mean, at the core of this, Vicki, is the whole social engineering that has gone on that justifies failure. We're not going to accept failure anymore when I'm governor. We are going to get results. And the way we do it and we change behavior by DPI as well as the schools of teaching here in Wisconsin is we use the state budget. So how do you do, well, first, we got to stop using race and poverty as placeholders for success. So you can be a horrible school, but if you have a lot of kids who are black or a lot of kids who are very poor and you get very bad scores, we're going to mark you up because you have black kids or because you have poor kids. Why would you do that? How does that tell us where we need to focus our attention? How does that tell us where the holes in the system are if you're saying, well, It's okay if you fail because you're black or it's okay if you feel because you're poor. It is amazing that they use that because, I mean. Couldn't you actually say that that's racist? You're saying that minority children cannot learn. That is absolutely incorrect. In fact, I just went to a dinner last Saturday night at a school over here in Milwaukee where these kids are performing at the highest level and they're primarily minority kids. Stop the excuses. We're going to have a merit-based society. Kids of all racist credence colors, they can learn. And that should be the expectation. And by the way, If I'm governor, we're going to reward good teachers.

Good teachers that do a good job in the classroom, we are not going to reward bloated administration. We're going to reward administrators who actually get results in their schools. And that's how it needs to work because we've not been rewarding the right people through this whole thing. And by the way, and I'm going to push on parents. I know how important it is to have an engaged parent with kids. Parents got to get engaged with their kids' education also. It is going to take everyone. with virtually a Marshall plan here in Wisconsin to turn this around. But what's going on is unacceptable. It will take something akin to a Marshall Plan. What do you do with funding? How do you deal with funding? Funding right now, first off, we know the legislature never even looks at a spreadsheet of where the dollars go, and that includes in DPI. It wasn't until Bill Osmulski at McIver Institute had produced a spreadsheet that they even had one. So now they have it, though. So how do you deal with the funding? How do you use the money to say, we're not going to tolerate this any longer? I mean, it's easy to change this. this school report card thing, use A through F and you get rid of race and poverty as placeholders for success. And now we get real numbers, right? But how do you improve the conditions using the dollars when you have an entrenched political, you know, constituency in the form of the teachers' union and in the form of, you know, what amounts to, you know, urban Democrat machine politics? How can this work? I think people have... I think people have accepted failure. I mean, that's the ultimate problem here. In particular, the Department of Public Instruction, they've simply accepted failure. And so it starts with leadership and saying, we will no longer accept failure. But then you have the money go to where the results are being got. And that can be done. And when people are incentivized for the right things, they will do the right thing. Okay. Would that change the funding formula? Would that take an act of God to change the school funding formula in Wisconsin? Because that convoluted mess is constantly manipulated in order to game the system to get more money for failing areas under a claim of we don't have enough property value to run a school system. $1.1 billion, by the way, is what Milwaukee spends for this failure. Yeah, no, you just make sure that money goes to those schools that are performing. And it's going to be, as you cited, with the work that Smolsky did, you can identify who these successes are and you make sure that you incentivize them. And then you make sure that you use the carrot and the stick. If you're failing, you've got to change how you're doing things. There's a second thing here that also is really important is that our schools of teaching. are not teaching literacy correctly here in Wisconsin. They have to get back to where there's a phonics component, because that's where the failure in reading is going on, where one and three fourth graders can read at grade level in fourth grade here in Wisconsin. And we have to get back to teaching literacy properly, and it has to have a phonics component to it. We are going to incentivize our colleges of teaching in the same way. You got to teach reading correctly to these new teachers or else.

you're not going to get the money. I nominate Brittany Kinzer as your readings are if you win the governor's seat. She's got a brand new organization. She's going into places like this and trying to identify kids and give them those basic building blocks of reading, which is building blocks of critical thinking, which is building blocks of how you understand the world around you and affect it positively. Let's get to health insurance here, if you don't mind, real quickly. We have a crisis. It's thanks to Obamacare. Scott Walker wisely did not take the Medicaid expansion here. Tony Evers undid an awful lot of that. But we have people in Wisconsin who are looking at $15,000 deductibles, who are looking at $1,000 a month insurance policies because of Obamacare. We blew up our high-risk pool here in Wisconsin that was working so well. Is there anything you can do as an executive or the legislature to make it easier for people to afford to insure themselves in our state? Yeah, the simple question is the system working? You know, as I think we go, as I go back to Washington, D.C. today to vote on this continuing resolution. And next, or one of the next things we're going to deal with is the Obamacare subsidies. I mean, think about it. They're enriching the health insurance company. What kind of logic is that on the part of Democrats you want to enrich the health insurance companies? And they want to undo the provision that we put in a couple months ago that says we're not going to give free health care, free health insurance to illegal aliens. They want to undo that. They're making all the wrong requests on the Democrat side. What we need to do is give more choice, competition, and transparency. And it starts with transparency. We need to. What other thing do we consume in our lives, Vicki, that we do not know what the cost is, like health care? And that is the first step to having an effective system. And then we need to allow more choices because what Obamacare has done is it's created less choices for people. We're all individuals. We have different needs. We should be giving people as many choices as possible to get their health care because remember. Health insurance does not equal health care. Now, health insurance is important for a lot of people, and we should try to make it as affordable as possible. But our ultimate goal should be to have affordable health care regardless of how people get it. Oh, I don't disagree. Off exchange, how come off exchange plans can, you know, are 60% less than on exchange plans? You're not getting subsidies, right? But you can purchase an off exchange plan for significantly less than an Obamacare policy. Those subsidies have to stop flowing into the pockets of insurance companies because what they have done is rig this system because the government told them, feel free to rig the system. What they have done is absorb the printed dollars in subsidies. And...

Increase everybody's health insurance prices while vertically integrating with PBMs in pharmacies themselves, raking in unbelievable profit increases, all the while other people can't afford it. Yet you go on the non-exchange marketplace and you're saving, you know, and I mean, I work with an insurance broker here on the air, 30 to 60 percent. And I checked that claim. It's true. It already works. When you get rid of the subsidies to the insurance companies, things start to improve drastically. Yeah, it's important to remember that. It kind of dovetails to our last interview a week ago. The government is the problem. because it's the government mandates that are on these health insurance policies that keep many of them from being affordable. You have to get rid of the mandates and let people choose what policy works best for them in their life. And the more choices we have without the mandate. people are going to be happier with the coverage that they get. Yeah, and without the hiding the ball, that's what these subsidies do, and that's what this lack of transparency does, to your point. There is no other product we purchase, we don't know the cost of, zero. I mean, nobody has any idea, for instance, you can get a cash price on an MRI at $700, or your insurance company can charge $4,500. You know, I mean, those are things that people don't actually know. You know, well, I'll close with this. I was speaking with Senator Ron Johnson, and he said one of the ways... they held the Senate together on this continuing resolution and not caving on the Obamacare enhanced subsidies was because a whole bunch of people walked into a room and gave them the information, the transparent cost information, and taught a whole bunch of Republican senators that this was, you know, just simply hiding the ball in a rigged game to enrich insurance companies at our expense. And it worked. Start with education, maybe. Start with education. Always seems to be education, doesn't it? Critical thinking, those kinds of things. Congressman Tom Tiffany and candidate for governor, Tom Tiffany, thank you so much for being on the show today. Have a great day, Vicki. You as well, and we will be right back. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And I am delighted to have back on the show. Bill Schmidtick. Bill is a dad who has... taking it upon himself to shepherd legislation that would help so many people in Wisconsin. He took this on himself. It's the PBM reform legislation. And I've got Bill on to talk about it because we're running out of time to get this past. The time, the clock is ticking on this. So Bill.

First off, if you don't mind sharing the reason why you just decided to set everything aside and just fight for this legislation in Wisconsin, which will, as I say, help so many people in our state. Well, thank you. Thank you, Vicki. Yeah. Well, this legislation is actually named Polz Act, and that is after my son, Paul, who passed away in January of 24 after he was denied his medicine or prohibited to get his medicine by a crazy price. I can go over the story a little bit here today, just to let you know the details of it. And my son walked into a pharmacy, a chain pharmacy, up on January 10th of 2024. He was getting his routine asthma medicine. He had been on it for many, many years. It was not an abnormal thing he was doing. When he got to the pharmacy counter, he asked for his prescriptions and was told that his inhaler, his rescue inhaler, was $5, but unfortunately that his steroid medicine was no longer covered. If you wanted it, it would be over $500. My son that night made a decision to choose rent or his medicine, and he chose rent and walked out of the pharmacy. Five days later, he suffered a massive asthma attack that led the cardiac arrest, and he died on January 21st of 2024. You know, and that changed.

That changed our life. My wife, myself, Cole, was gone. I mean, obviously, our families are devastated, everything like that. It took a little while to let the death settle. But after that, I was met by an independent pharmacy owner in Wisconsin. He kind of opened the Pandora's box a little bit. There was another incident where I had to get my medicine and was denied. That was the first box that opened. But really, when I met with this gentleman who owns the chain of pharmacies in Wisconsin along with pharmacists, he told us. what the problem was, and that was the top pharmacy benefit managers. And from that day forward, that was about April of 2024. I did dedicate my life to getting justice for my son Cole and making sure no one else gets hurt or dies from these tactics of the top pharmacy benefit managers. So pharmacy benefit managers, which started out as a good thing. I mean, I think that most people agree, have become a way for insurance companies to essentially control and restrict what drugs are covered based on benefits that they receive from companies. And they are, and you're stuck with them. If that's your benefit. If your benefit manager is under your insurance company and typically they own the benefit managers, you have to get the drugs that they have negotiated deals for themselves. Those are the drugs you get. And if they didn't negotiate a deal like they didn't on Cole's asthma medicine, then your kid doesn't get that asthma medicine or you don't get whatever drug your doctor told you you needed because your PBM and your insurance company decided they weren't making enough money off of you with that drug. Yeah. Well, and I'll just touch base real class. It's vertical integration at its best is what it is. The health companies, insurance companies own the doctors. They own the purchasing agents. They own the manufacturers in some cases. They own the PBMs. They own the mail order pharmacies. And they own the brick and mortar pharmacies. They control it all. So when you're like you said, when your doctor says you need this, somebody at the other side of the same company is saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. We get a rebate on this one. We're going to do this one better because we make more money. And by the way, no one told Cole that there was maybe an independent pharmacy he could have gone to or he could have found, you know, a cheaper cash price for that drug. Because that's also not allowed because of the contracts that are signed with the pharmacists in order to get your insurance reimbursements, you've got to make sure that you follow their rules, right? So no one could just say, hey, Cole, you know, maybe we can find you a place where you can get this cheaper and then you can have a conversation later with your insurance.

company on this there's been known that contracts are written that way 100% they're called like gag clauses essentially I mean it falls under that realm and that's a theory that a lot of independent pharmacies have been more vocal on I can tell you that's the independent pharmacies in Wisconsin and across the nation aren't caring about that clause anymore. They're taking the repercussions from the top pharmacy benefit managers and speaking out because of, I mean, Cole Story is one of many in this country, but Cole Story broke the camel's back, honestly, because you're right, there was no notice on his switch. It was a non-medical switch, and there was no notice from his PBM that they were switching the medicine. Yeah, so no one said, hey, buddy, your medicine's going to cost $500. You know, maybe call your doctor. Here's another option. Or your doctor says, well, I'm going to find you samples until we can figure out how you can afford to pay for your medicine. This is, by the way, a really standard medicine. We're not talking about some rare, brand new thing. It's an old medicine. It should have been covered. And someone should have helped this young man. And the legislation essentially does that. says, you're not allowed to do this to people any longer. You can't just negotiate deals for yourself and leave people hanging. How does it specifically improve the process? Well, first off, it's going to put some meat into the notification of switching, like a medicine. It's also going to limit the amount of switching of your medication that can happen throughout your benefit year. So they're not going to be able to just like, oh, we've got a rebate better on this one. Let's switch it next month. Oh, a different one next month. They have to lock that sucker in until benefit time. The other really big thing is it puts a fiduciary responsibility back on the PBM. Because right now. The P.DMs make these decisions, and the self-insured employers, for example, are left holding the bag when consequences happen. And they'll say, hey, they made the decision, not us. And that happens all the time. And that's part of the whole game that they play. This is so deep. But, I mean, like, the fact that what we're talking about is. My son's medicine, I can tell you, it costs $1.76 to produce. He was told it was over $500 at this chain pharmacy after his PBM. changed the prescription coverage. Yeah. That's $1.76 and he was being charged $500. I would like to know where they get any kind of argument to charge that boy $500 for $1.76. Maybe you mark it up twice, 100%. You mark it up 100%, and you're still under $5. You know what I mean? That's what so... That's why, I mean, I...

God bless you for being able to channel what has to just be outrage into activism like this. But my goodness, no one just could have told him, here's your cash price. If you come in and just don't put your insurance card down, just come in and say, I want to pay cash. Here's what we're going to charge you. Because if he runs it through his insurance, that's what they're going to charge him. The insurance makes $592. Yeah. I'm sorry, $492. Yeah, $4.992. It was $538.19 is what he was told. He had to pay $538.38. That's the reality of what he was told at that counter that night. That's insane about it. And it used to be like 35, depending on the part of the benefit year, maybe up to $60. You know how that fluctuates with your deductible. But that's one of the games we played. I mean, like, it is so deep. I mean, like every angle you're looking at. And there was actually a viable option he could have had that. Well, he could have had access to, but it needed a prior authorization that night. That was a nighttime. And prior authorization is a whole other story. There's no way he could have got a prior authorization in time to even make anything change. Because it was going in, it was a Wednesday night, get back to your doctor. He submits the prior authorization. Now it's got to be approved by the PBM. And it was too late because much. Why should a PBM have to have to decide whether a doctor's recommendation is acceptable for a patient? But this is going on across the country. 89% of PBMs are vertically integrated with the insurance companies themselves. That blew my mind. Oh, yeah. I mean, they cover, I mean, like, 84 to 89% of Americans use one of three top PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers in America. That is factually proven. to the tune of about $500 billion in profit to the healthcare company. And that profit goes up every single year. Yeah, yeah, it does. It does. Well, the other side of this thing is, though, I've been a just quick, just really fast touch on this. How do I know had he, he could have been offered something? Well, I had the same asthma. I went presented my prescriptions at my pharmacy a couple weeks later, and mine was denied the exact same way. I had the exact same insurance, but guess what? I was at an independent pharmacy, and that pharmacist would not let us leave the pharmacy until she found an option. And even worse, after finding that option and getting it to us before we left, she lost money selling it to us. Truly. I mean, that's the other game that they play because they need to get rid of their competitors and their vertical integration. So they underreimbursed the independent pharmacies. And that's part, there's some portions of this legislation that'll take care of that too a little bit. You know, it's like, this is all encompassing is what this thing is. It goes over to the co-paid game that they play. You know, you use good RX, you hear good RX all over the TV and everything. But as soon as you do that, it doesn't apply towards your deductible.

So you have to pay more to the insurance company and buy it from good R.X, blah, blah, blah. Yep. Like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this PBM reform bill, SB203 or COLS Act is a powerful PBM reform bill. And I believe that totally leads into some of the stuff that we're having happened to us and not getting it passed immediately. So we have to get this pass. So this is now a process that's been going on for almost two years. Representative Todd Novak is the author of the Assembly version of the bill. He, as I understand, just submitted it for hearing in the Assembly. It looks like it's already got the votes to pass in the Senate. It just needs to be scheduled. This needs to be scheduled. The hearings in the Assembly need to be scheduled. The vote needs to be called. The Senate needs to pull the bill forward for a vote. And it's bipartisan. I mean, nobody disagrees with you on this except lobbyists, right? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, like right now, if you look at the brass tax of this, we have 20 senators that say, let's do this. And we have 13 that just haven't committed to it yet, essentially. So, but the 20 is enough to pass it. 20 is enough to pass it. I mean, come on. And it is bipartisan. It's 11 Democrats and nine Republicans for crying out loud. I mean, like, it's not like it's so terrible. I mean, like it's, ugh. Well, actually, I think if you, if, you know, that you've got these noncommittals, I'm guessing more than 50% of the noncommittals are probably absolute yeses on this bill. So just pull it. It's called Coles Act. Here's what we want people to. do because it's because it's such i mean it's it's it's a it's a people positive piece of legislation it's not a rigged game piece of legislation there's no poison pill in it it's it's a purely people positive piece of legislation and so we want people just to make a call to their rep right or their senator democrat or republican and say please support coles act if if you're making a call to an assemblyman say you know the author just asked for a hearing please commit to supporting coals act Yeah, and to the assembly, it's AB 173. So SB 203 for the Senate. AB 173 for the assembly, but otherwise known as Coles Act. C-O-L-E-A-Postrophe S Act, Coles Act, AB-173 in the assembly, SB 203. The clock is ticking on the session. And so we need to have people start acting on this now, whether you've got to start all from scratch again. And that's just not fair. It's not fair to you, Bill. It's not fair to anyone. Well, Vicki, and if I can throw one more thing out there, I am making this easy for people at my website. It's really simple. Click a couple buttons and we'll help you write the letter, give you the phone numbers. If you would go to patient protector.us, patient protector.us, two words, dot us. Click on Support Coles Act. When you get to that page, it's right at the top. There's a...

selection there. You just fill out a little information. It's like if you want to send an email, make a phone call or post on Twitter, and it'll generate your letter. It'll generate your phone script and give you your direct numbers to your legislators. It takes two minutes. Patient.Protector.u-Patient with no s.protector.us. Thank you so much, Bill, for coming on the show today. Always wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. And we will take a break. That was Bill Schmidtick. I will be right back. That is going to do it for me on the program. Coming up on tomorrow's program, more on conduct disorders. You know, juvenile delinquency, redefined his mental illness. We'll get more into that. I've got Sheriff David Clark on the program to talk about that and some other things as well, but also that sleazy, smoky backroom deal to try to give the tribes cartel control an expansion. of gambling in Wisconsin in violation of the Constitution. I've been talking about this. It's so much worse than even I thought. So we have more on that as well on tomorrow's program. Everybody have a great afternoon. We'll see you back here on the Vicki McKenna show tomorrow. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 racing. Another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chumba. Jump in at Chumbacasino.com. Let's Chumba. No purchase necessary. VTW Group. Boyd were prohibited by law. CTNCs, 21 Plus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. Trade screen time for race time at Virginia International Raceway. August 21st through 23rd, IMSA's Michelin GT Challenge brings some of the coolest cars to VIR for an unforgettable family weekend. Explore, meet drivers, see race cars up close, and experience the thrill of racing from every corner of the track. It's more than a race. It's a memory waiting to be made. Kids 12 and under getting free. Get your tickets at VIRFam.com. That's VIRFAM.com. Hey guys, Lady Luck here. Are you going on any road trips this summer? I know I'm going to be going on a bunch of road trips. And being that I'm going to be passenger princess, I love playing on SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest has all of my favorite slot games, live blackjack, live craps. Head on over to SpinQuest right now and get yourself a $30 coin pack for just 10 bucks. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Avoid where prohibited. Visit spendquest.com for more details. Saturday, July 25th. I know I will be the best welterweight in the world. An undefeated phenom. Bad man is a rising star. And a frightening force. What a win for Shalmila. Ascend on the nation's capital to fight for gold. Thad, the silverback jeans. Silverback Nation makes them noise. Versus Shemil Musayev. All it's over! For the PFL welterweight world title. Unreed!

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