The Joyce Kaufman Show 1/13/26 - Google allowing 13-year-olds to turn off parental controls, The EPA slams the New York Times, Democrats leading the ICE rebellion, capping credit card interest

This is the Joyce Kaufman podcast, honest, straight, and unapologelic with your host, Joyce Kaufman. I'll tell you, sometimes when I think about how despicable the behavior of members of the fourth estate, you know, our job is to carefully track what's going on, not just in our country, but around the world, and let you know. In my case, let you know what I think about it, give you my commentary about everything. But a lot of people only get their information from these standard bearers, you know, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and ABC and CNN, blah, blah, blah. And yet another dishonest, fake news claim, courtesy of the New York Times. Yeah? The administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin. slammed the New York Times yesterday because they published a completely fake story. They said that the EPA had decided to stop calculating the health benefits of reducing air pollution and stop using the cost estimates of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean air rules. Under President Trump, the EPA plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter, and ozone. This is what the New York Times reported. This is a decade's old practice that apparently they're accusing the Trump administration of eliminating, allegedly eliminating. And what they're trying to say is, oh, you see, this guy assigns a dollar value to our lives. That's not true. The shift away from this actually would make it easier to repeal limits on the pollutants from coal-burning power plants and from oil refineries and from steel mills and all these other industrial facilities across the country. It's a false narrative coming out of the New York Times. It's like Pravda. It really is. The EPA will do no such thing. So in a statement published to social media, the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, called the Times report another dishonest fake news claim. Not only is the exact opposite of this headline, the actual truth, but the Times is already very well aware that the EPA will be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. The Times is supposed to have a commitment. to fair and balance journalism. Instead, they have a commitment to destroying journalism. And another EPA spokesperson, they also stepped up and said, this is just, it's not inaccurate. It's false. It's fake. And the EPA, like the agency always has, will consider the impacts of ozone emissions on health and all the rest of it.

They will not be monetizing the impacts at the time. In other words, they are the ones not assigning a dollar value. Not monetizing does not equal, not considering, or not valuing the human health impact. The EPA, the whole purpose of the agency is to be, the core mission is to protect human health and the environment. And the Times reporting also got a whole rash of criticism from Richard Grinnell, the Trump Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center president. Everybody knows their headlines fake news. Everybody. And yet they just continue doing it. reporting on internal EPA documents. Look at this. They double down. Now they're saying that reporting on internal EPA documents found that the agency is no longer calculating the health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter and ozone pollution when writing clean air regulations. Oh gosh. Save us. You know, save us. And it's really time for everyone out there to stop supporting these crap journalists, fake journalists. It's enough. I don't know why anybody would buy that newspaper other than to line your birdcage. But it's imbolic. Some of these stories, you read them and you know immediately, this is not true. And this doesn't make sense. But they get away with it. And unfortunately, I have members of my family who think that, you know, they're reading the gospel according to, I don't know who. Zohran Mamdani, maybe. You know, just horrendous. And many of us are really tired of it. I've been watching a number of things. I have some app, one of my grandsons put on my phone recently. It's called Threads. And I guess it's comparable to like a TikTok or, you know, one of these apps where people make a little video of themselves spouting off some ideas or whatever. And while that's not something that normally appeals to me or attracts me, for the last couple of days, I've just been checking it out to see what is the prevailing sound out there? You've got a media and a political class that's trying to recreate the George Floyd, the summer of fire. They're literally trying to recreate it in the same city, no less. And are people buying it? Are people falling for it? Well, guess what? According to these little videos that I'm watching on threads, and then I called a friend of mine who does TikTok, is a TikToker, whatever that means, and said, what are you seeing on TikTok? And you said, people are fed up. And she's not a conservative.

I wouldn't even call her a moderate. She's a lefty. And she said, people are tired. They're tired of, you know, Trump is bad, Trump is bad, Trump is bad, and information that doesn't even ring true. Like they know it's nonsense. And then you watch these, in my case, I was watching these women. They're all white liberal women. And they're all, you know, living their lives, their elite lives behind gated communities, you know, driving their Porsche station wagons. And they go crazy on these little platforms saying the stupidest stuff I have ever heard. It's just, it's embarrassing, you know. Then you have people who supposedly have some smarts like a Whoopi Goldberg. I mean, I'm not a fan of Whoopi Goldberg, but she's had quite an incredible career. She's a talented person. But when she goes on television and calls ICE violent criminals, you have to scratch your head and say, I'm tired of this. This just doesn't even approach reality. I don't want it. Even Bill Maher was laughing at all of the, you know, the pin wearing people at the Golden Globes, which, by the way, my thought of the day addresses that thanks to Brigitte Gabrielle. She had a brilliant piece. And, you know, you had Elizabeth Warren yesterday. This is a hoot, right?

Even before he had officially, you know, won his election for this second term, President Trump was meeting with all kinds of officials because he knew it was going to take a very large concerted effort to write this ship. And so he reached out to a number of congressmen, senators, people who have microphones, big platforms, and use them effectively. And so he apparently at some point reached out to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas. And after grandstanding during a speech at the National Press Club just yesterday, where she attempted to blame the state of the economy on matters like housing and credit cards after four years of Joe Biden's record-breaking inflation, she releases a statement reiterating her position and revealing that she had a phone call with Donald Trump. This morning, I gave a speech, noting how Donald Trump is driving up costs for family, sowing terror and chaos in our communities, and abusing his power to prosecute anyone who criticizes him. I also laid out an argument for how Democrats should fight back and win. In my remarks, I made it clear that despite promising to lower costs on day one, Trump has done nothing but raised costs for families. I said if he really wants to get something done, including capping credit card interest rates or lowering housing costs, he would use his leverage and pick up the phone. So he did. He picked up the phone and called her. And she acts like, you know, she did something incredible. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm beginning to feel the ship turning. You know how I always say America's a very large ship. and it takes a long time to turn a large ship. But it's turning. And a lot of the reason that it's turning more quickly than anyone could have hoped for is because the left has damaged their credibility so much. that people who never would agree with me or never would, you know, have a kind word to say about or any Republican or particularly about Donald Trump, they're now just closed mouth. They're not talking at all. They're ticked off. You know, they can see. They're not blind. They know that, you know, that law enforcement is doing what law enforcement does. And ICE, as so many of them will even point out to you, the deporter-in-chief was one Barack Hussein Obama, deported more people than anybody. But he got a pass. Why? Because he was a Democrat, because he was a liberal. So people see through that now. And they're just like, we're not buying it. So she says, Elizabeth Warren says, after by speech,

The president called me, and I delivered the same message on affordability to him directly. Oh, come on. Like you drank a beer in the kitchen with your husband, that stupid video you did. Just frustrating. You're as frustrated as I am, but you don't have a microphone, so let me vent for you. Don't forget to download that 850 WFTL app on your laptop or cell phone, wherever you want it. That way you could have already listened to my No Restrained podcast. You get all the breaking news and you can participate in our contests. And listen to everybody's podcast. You know, Stephen Deiner's got the UAP, the Unidentified Alien podcast. That thing is like, it's so popular. I mean, his numbers are incredible. A lot of people listen. So don't you want to be one of them? Download the app. I'm going to take a quick break. I'll be right back. Oh, boy, I tell you, you just keep trying to just drown out the bad noise because it'll confuse you. Because we're all very caring. I believe that America has some of the most decent, hardworking. you know, God-filled people on the planet. So you can really get under our skin if you talk about anything that we think would be unfair, cruel. You know, we are sympathetic. We are empathetic. But we're also fed up. And that makes it real interesting.

The Supreme Court today is under a bit of a microscope because the majority is conservative on the Supreme Court, which makes the left crazy and makes them want to add justices and all the rest of it. But that's the reality that the majority of the Supreme Court right now, I think it's what, six to three, are conservatives. Today, they're looking at a case that has to do with these transgendered athletes and whether or not they should be competing in women's sports, males, competing in women's sports, males, using girls' locker rooms and bathrooms. This is something that for someone like me, who's a compassionate, empathetic person, With plenty of friends and family members who lead lifestyles that you might consider alternative and who, you know, listen, there's nobody I know that doesn't have a family member who's openly gay. You know, it's no longer what it was like in the 50s. Now, how you feel about that is not what I'm talking about, but I'm just saying that when you have gay women today in front of the Supreme Court protesting against this transgender nonsense, you realize how far off the ledge the left has gone. You know, that would be, you would assume, their normal constituency. But no, because after years of fighting for equality, for fairness, for acceptance, which by the way, you can't legislate and you really can't mandate. But that was the big effort. After all that time, along comes this, I don't even know if you can call it a movement. It's more like a... a virus that comes in and suddenly infects primarily, you know, teenagers. and tells them that they're in the wrong body, whether they're girls in the boy's body or boys in a girl's body, whatever the case may be. That's the message that they're giving. So these lesbian activists are in front of the Supreme Court today holding hands with Riley Gaines and all the conservative girls who want to play in female sports against females. What a confluence, right? They probably don't agree on anything else or on very few other things. But the insanity of building movements around ideas that are a, they're not important to people. There's a very small handful of people.

who are actually gender dysphoric or transgendered. I believe there are such people. There was a gender dysphoria classification, you know, when I went to college. You know, I remember having a discussion in a classroom one time where I tried to get the professor to explain to me just how it would manifest itself. You know, we talked about the psychology and the discomforts. You know, it was a very interesting, you know, kind of subject, but it was nobody had ever heard of it. Nobody knew what we were talking about back then. And so. You know, I'm looking in front of the Supreme Court today, and I see the Riley Gaines movement, you know, all the girls who got jipped out of their medals and their opportunities to, you know, go to the Olympics. And because they had to compete against a boy and the boy won, I'm looking at them marching alongside of these gay women who say, enough is enough. We don't agree with this. We like Title IX. We like the fact that women are able to compete in sports and actually now have a pretty decent NBA league. All of that has been a positive movement in the direction that the gay community wanted to go. And then along comes this sort of, I really, I don't know, I can't call it a movement, this infection, this virus that says, oh, no, you're not gay, you're trapped in the wrong body. And they're telling you that. you better let your 13 or 14 year old kid decide whether or not to have body parts chopped off or take hormones which could preclude them ever being normal and having a normal sex life or having the ability to have children. You'll take all that away from these young kids, kids who you wouldn't allow to make the decision of what we're eating for dinner tonight. But we were told that if you didn't allow them to make that decision, they were going to kill themselves. Meanwhile, all the detransitioners talk about suicide because they didn't know what to do. Now they were trapped. Literally, now they were trapped in a body that they didn't belong in because it had been surgically altered. Because some marginal group of people decided. It was a good cause, you know, a sympathetic cause. I believe this is going to be a very important decision. And I think it's going to have a lot of widespread ramifications right now because I believe a majority of the Supreme Court wants to back state efforts to protect women's sports. So listen to me.

whether transgender status should be viewed as its own class, given the history of discrimination against these individuals. And some justices also questioned how any scientific uncertainty about athletic advantage of transgender athletes factors into the case. It's treating someone who is transgender, but who does not have, because of the medical interventions and the things that have been done, the same threat to physical competition and safety and all the reasons the state puts forward. That's actually a different class, says the individual. That, of course, was Ketanji Brown Jackson Ketanji Brown Jackson talking to the Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst. So you're not treating the class the same, and how do you respond to that? Ketanji Brown Jackson, when we asked you if you could tell us what a woman is, you said you couldn't. So maybe you should recuse yourself from this case since you don't know the difference between men and women. Do you want to know my definition of a woman? Yo mama. All right. Let me take a quick break. I'll be right back. Now, there's a whole other story out there that I'm not sure yet. I'm still researching and trying to figure out. how this is going to pan out and what really would be best for the average American. And it has to do with capping this credit card interest because I don't know if any of you even look at your credit card statements and... It is my hope that most of you pay off your credit cards when the bill comes and don't continue to carry enormous balances and then pay ridiculous exorbitant rates. But the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, had to try to apply the brakes to President Trump's proposal to cap credit card interest rates. And he literally told reporters today this morning that President Trump probably had not thought it through because there are going to be negative consequences for consumers. You know, this is Donald Trump, who's now touring the country, as part of his affordability push, he said. Or he floated. You know, he was kind of putting out a trial balloon to see what people would say that there should be a temporary 10% cap on credit card rates. I think he said it on Friday. And that he wants a freeze to begin for one year starting on January 20th. Now, he can't do that without congressional approval.

But according to the speaker, they're not taking up that legislation anytime soon. You've got to be very careful if you start messing with these interest rates. And trust me, I think it's usury what goes on. But it's technically not. So there could be very negative secondary effects. This, you know, I think Mike Johnson said it best. Donald Trump is an ideas guy. When you tell him, you got to focus for a while on bringing prices down, on bringing down the cost of living. You, he just starts rattling off, you know, things that he thinks will be helpful. And many of them may have unintended consequences. And Mike Johnson made it perfectly clear that capping interest rates on credit cards was one of those things. What some of the experts have said is that the problem is if you do that, then the credit card companies won't lend money. And they are going to cap what people are able to borrow at a very... low amount. So in other words, okay, if you're not going to let me charge these rates for lending, essentially lending people the money to pay for things that they can't really afford, then maybe we'll only let them borrow a third of what we used to or even less. And that's a pretty, for Mike Johnson to even challenge Donald Trump is rare. And I think that even when he is in disagreement with the president, he doesn't like to go out there and say stuff. And so this was kind of, you know, interesting. Conservatives and people who are in the banking industry, they don't want to see the capping of credit card rates. I can tell you that. And they would argue that it's low-income Americans having access to credit. that helps balance the economy somehow because otherwise you're going to have these people doing really risky things like the payday lenders. And evidence shows that a 10% interest rate cap would reduce the credit availability. And that would be devastating, especially for small business owners who literally rely on their credit cards. And if this were put into effect, the experts are saying the cap would only drive consumers towards much less regulated and more costly alternatives. You know, the Vig, the street lender. And the White House still not commenting or not responding to requests.

The guys who have always supported this are like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and then you have some of the populist Republicans like Josh Hawley. You know, they like that idea, that you cap these interest rates because it's exploitive, you know, these high interest rates. But guess what? If you don't want to be ripped off by a credit card company, don't buy things you can't afford. It's not like people go out and use their visa card, or at least most people. Don't go out there and use it for necessities. They're not doing their grocery shopping with it. And maybe we have to stop buying everything we want while there are economic... obstacles in any given family. The majority leader, John Thune, also, he said today that he is opposed to capping credit card rates. He said, I think a lot of people would not be able to buy things and credit cards would probably all have to become debit cards. So he's not advocating for it. But again, Donald Trump's an ideas guy. He throws this stuff out. Often it is exactly what the left wants just to see what the public response will be and what the political response will be. Because, you know, there's Elizabeth Warren bragging that she had a phone call from Donald Trump. Well, sure. He's talking her language. Why does he do that? I believe primarily to shine a light on the inanity or the insanity of some of their suggestions. So, you know, it is very interesting. It was interesting. I watched the, it wasn't an interview, and it wasn't even a full out presser, but Speaker Johnson was approached by members of the media. And he said that, you know. What was the one comment that I heard Donald Trump make yesterday? He was talking to a reporter and he was talking about, oh no, it was this morning. He was talking about Iran and he told them to keep protesting, help is on the way. Hmm. Okay. Apparently, over a thousand demonstrators are dead and thousands more are detained because security forces are, you know, doubling down on these protesters since I guess the end of December when this all started this time. The regime has responded with a lot of, with a violent crackdown on any political opposition. And they keep accusing Donald Trump and this country, our country, of fueling the uprising. So the president said on Sunday that we're ready to help. And then he took to truth social this morning and he said, help us on its way. Now, I don't know what that means. Neither do you.

But he's apparently been briefed on a range of covert and military options that can be used in Iran. And Khomeini has accused the protesters of acting on Trump's behalf and warning that the Islamic Republic would not yield. to what he described as U.S.-backed chaos. The great Iranian nation has asserted its resolve and identity in the face of the enemies. This is a warning to U.S. politicians. I love this so dramatic and so inept, right? Just horrifying. But we're used to it. Anyway, don't forget coming up after me is Guy Benson, followed by Will Kane and then Joe Pags, Lars Larson, the overnight guys, until 6 a.m. when Jennifer Ross and Stephen Dean are back with the South Florida Morning Show, followed by Brian Kilmeade. And at noon, Eric Erickson comes your way. Three o'clock, I get to come back. But I still have a segment left in today's program, so don't touch that dial. So, you know, I reported, I guess it was Friday, I think it was Friday anyway, that Google has now decided that at age 13, a young person, I would still refer to that as a child, can remove their parental controls. In other words, they're no longer required. to have permission to use certain content. So what that means to me is that the digital platforms that children are frequently on are exposing them to a bunch of weird stuff, sexual stuff, predators, extreme violence, and stuff that no responsible parent would ever knowingly permit. I'll give you a great example, Roblox, which is one of the world's most popular platforms for children. It sits right at the center of this. Now, I have one grandson out of all the grandsons. Actually, at one point there might have been two. But now there's one of my grandsons loves Roblox. I don't even know what it is. And so for a long time, whenever he wanted... to do to play it or you know he you need to have uh i guess you have to put money on a card i'm not sure but i went ahead and gave him some roblox money and now i find out that that very platform has all this child sexual exploitation and grooming and sexual role-playing and really hyper-violent simulations from, you know, from beginning to end. And the average age is like eight, six, seven, eight. And, you know, we've had all the assurances from these big tech companies that they were handling it.

But they're not. Not only are they not handling it, but this is a broad ecosystem, which is Google and TikTok, two companies that pretty much dictate what content is around, what's being promoted, and what's being normalized online. So they're kind of the cultural gatekeepers, and they're subtly guiding our children's attention. They're taking control out of the parents' hands, and even before a child reaches driving age, their algorithms are shaping every encounter they're going to have online with ideas. It'll influence what they engage with. It'll reinforce specific things through repetition. And it's pretty unsettling when you think about it. I mean, think about this. The school bell rings at 3 p.m. and children leave the building and they come to like a three-way fork in the road. One path leads to, I don't know, a church program, a youth program at a church. The second leads to a satanic temple. And the third leads to a pornography store where children are prayed upon by adults. And there are two men standing at the intersection, preventing kids from going to the Christian youth program, while beckoning them to come to the other two. Well, Google and TikTok are those two guys. And that may seem a little over the top. It's not my analogy. Brent Ducing, a tech executive came up with it. But that's what's happening. Because of the algorithms and because they're moderating all the content decisions, they determine what makes the cut and what gets pushed aside. Platforms like Roblox, they're downstream from these choices. So they are inheriting a digital landscape that's already warped by, you know, engagement first motives, money being the largest. And in these environments, kids encounter all kinds of anonymous interactions and blurred boundaries. I asked my grandson, I guess it was last year at some point, I said, who are you playing with? Because he was literally engaged in a game with somebody. And he said, oh, really? Does he go to your school? And he goes, no. I don't know him. Oh, swell. That made me feel great. And it forced me to evaluate how we try to believe that Google, TikTok, all these companies are going to look out for our kids. Forget it. They're not looking out for your kids. They're not. They're looking out for their bottom line. And the core issue here is not gaming. Games can be great. And, you know, the learning games that foster creativity and imagination, they're great. The real problem lies in the assumption that entertainment, which is intended for children, is morally neutral. Or that corporation that's primarily focused on, you know, how many people are, how many eyeballs, they're not good, trustworthy guardians of moral development for my children. And if you know that,

then we need to be much more discerning about our kids and grandkids' digital experiences. And I'm telling you, maybe it's about time to tell kids to go out and play in the yard. I don't get it. I see these kids there plastered to their screens. It's all they want to do. How about, you know, go build a fort? How about get your neighbor, kid, and, you know, play duck, duck goose or dodge ball or something? How about, you know, join a team, preferably one that you have the same gender as everybody else? Anyway, that does it for me today. I thank you for your time this time until next time. I've got a plan, and that plan is to be back here tomorrow at 3 p.m. If it be his will and he delays his coming. Remember that what lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. So wherever you are, just be yourself. Everybody else is taken. And then I pray you protect your kids and grandkids and that God bless you and God bless Israel and God bless the Supreme Court today. Make a good decision and God bless the USA. See you tomorrow. This has been the Joyce Kaufman podcast, available everywhere you get your podcasts.