DOJ Investigation

A lot of calls early, and I love that. Keep it coming. Let's do Al from Portland. Al, how are you? I'm great. Thank you for taking my call. I would never not take your call, Al. I would never not take your call. I'm happy with the Department of Justice going to step in on this men and women's prisons. It's funny. I was going to do that story after Joe joined us, but why not now? I love it. This is something that really, you know, I know that I'm stuck on this issue, but my God almighty, if you would have written a story about this a few years ago, you'd have had to sell it as fiction because nobody would have believed it. So I beg of you, Maine, please, vote Republican. Oh, well, I know it's going to make you cringe and everything, but we have to make Maine sane again. Restore us to sanity. Please, God help us. Thank you, Matt. Peace pot, Microdot. I've got to go wake and bake right now. I'm going to take a little health walk. You have a good day. Thanks, Al. Have a good one. A great call. A great call. It is amusing, too, to listen to Al over the years and his political choices. I would never have foreseen him saying, you should go vote Republican a few years ago. But alas, that's where we are right now. You know what? Let me give you one really good reason. Setting aside all partisanship of myself here. This is just maybe a blanket recommendation in general to America. One party states are bad. They just are because they're not kept honest. There's nothing that keeps them honest, right? You should live in a healthy fear of your own people if you possess power in any way, whether it's a town or a state or the federal government, right? You should be afraid of your people a little bit. And it's hard to be afraid of your people when you have uncontested control and nobody really can stop you from doing anything. So that's a pretty unhealthy environment and yet that's where Maine has been for the last eight years. They've had, you know, I think one single party in control of all of state government. And it has been unbroken control, and it's been comfortable enough control that they haven't had any trouble doing basically anything that they want. And it has led to hubris. It has led to arrogance. It's led to the abuse of the minority party. It has led to a lot of crazy bad policies. And again, nothing has been kept honest, right? The best parts of representative democracy are that various groups of people that are elected by a broad electorate have to get together to do something. And that means...

God, there's the dirty word, but compromise. They have to find some way of incorporating what those people over there say into our overall plan over here and then coming up with something that maybe I don't think is perfect, but, you know, is more broadly acceptable to everyone. That's not something that happens when you have a one party state. So, if there is any one reason outside of just because I think you should. because, of course, I do. But a more nonpartisan statement, if there's one reason why you should vote Republican this year, it's largely just to send a message that you can't just get away with doing that forever and have no political consequences to you. You can't just make all these decisions by yourself and not incorporate anybody to shut people out and just go crazy all the time without something pushing back. You should send that message. The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday. that it has notified Maine and California of its plans to investigate whether the state's housing of transgender women and women's prisons is unconstitutional. The investigation continues the Trump administration's efforts to bar transgender women from spaces designated for women, which the administration defines exclusively as those whose sex was female at birth. Quote, Keeping men out of women's prisons is not only common sense. It's a matter of safety and constitutional rights, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, in a news release. The Trump administration will not stand by if governors are facilitating the abuse of biological women under the guise of inclusion. A main law, which was passed in 2021. And I'm sorry, this connects to my prior rant, I have to say, keeping parties honest and the... the dumb and silly things that come from one party rule. This was a law that was passed in 2021, and there it is, my friends, required that corrections facilities have prisoners consistently held gender identity respected and acknowledged, irrespective of anatomy or physique. Maine has won women's prison. the main correctional center in Wyndham. Last April, the Trump administration pulled non-essential grant funding from the facility because it had permitted a transgender woman to be incarcerated there. The Department of Corrections appealed and the federal government reinstated the funding in June of 2025. Jill O'Brien, Director of Government Affairs for the main Department of Corrections, said that the reversal was never explained. The woman used to justify the initial funding cut. Andrea Balker was convicted of a double murder in 2018 when she was six weeks shy of her 18th birthday. She stabbed her mother and father, Alice and Antonio Balker, to death as well as the family dog. Later told a psychologist that she didn't believe her parents would accept her as a trans woman. And that led to the slayings. Recently, the Sun Journal reported that a number of inmates at the Maine Correctional Center have accused a bulker of harassment, including groping and offering to impregnate them and said that their complaints have been largely ignored. O'Brien said that the Department of Corrections takes resident safety concerns very seriously and investigates any acts of physical violence or harassment that are reported to staff. Now, let me use this briefly, and then I'll go to break afterwards, but...

Let me use this briefly as a moment in time to pause and ask anyone who's listening to me in the audience right now, do you disagree with the Trump administration's push here to protect women in women's prisons? Do you disagree that it is inappropriate for a biological male, whatever they call themselves, to be inside that building with the other prisoners housed in the population? I would love to hear from someone who does disagree with it. But my suspicion is that no one really does. So here is a test case for you, friends. Here is a test case for you in terms of the Trump phenomenon. Trump, it's impossible for one person to be wrong about everything all the time. But if you think he is because he's Satan, he's Hitler, he's a Nazi, he's a dictator, he's whatever. You kind of constantly say that he is, whatever he thinks, I think the opposite, right? Is that true of this? Can you say that this is right? Can you say that this is correct? Because I don't know any quality argument against. I'm sorry that your self-identification as whatever you want to be is not reflected in where you happen to be in prison, but it shouldn't be because the safety of everyone else. should be paramount. I mean, I hate to say it because, you know, you're in prison, so I'm not sitting here saying, let's do favors to people in prison. But I also think that there is a duty of a society to, as someone is incarcerated, to ensure that they are not victims of crimes along the way. And this kind of thing is multiple complaints about this individual. Um, they are in the population with the rest of the prison. Uh, and it is 100% in violation of the biological, um, assignment. I'm not even, I don't even like using that language, but you know what I mean? That that person is. And it's, I just, I don't know of a single argument that would suggest that this is wise, that this is wise. Let's go to the phones, Dave from Biddeford. Nice enough to hang on through that break. Dave, how are you? Good morning. How are you? Morning. I'm good. So I got just a couple points. One is that when you commit a crime and you go to prison, you have no more rights as a, you're a felon, like this guy that killed his parents because... Um, he, they weren't, he didn't think they were going to accept them. Um, as, and then he, and then all of a sudden he says, he claims he's a woman. Now he goes into a woman's prison and he's basically threatening all the other girls in the prison. Um, if he was so worried about his parents not accepting him, why'd he kill the dog, you know? Yeah. Another thing and I'll get off is that they're trying to make it so that if you claim that you're transgender, excuse me, that you have a mental illness.

which I totally agree with, I mean disagree with, because if you can classify people with transgender syndrome as having a mental illness, then they're going to be free and clear to commit any kind of crime they want and get away with it because they're going to be able to hide behind that. Oh, I'm mentally ill. And it's going to be a swamp. They're going to be able to do whatever they want. And then they're not going to be held responsible criminally because they'll be able to hide behind that. Like, oh, well, the law says that because I'm transgender, I'm mentally ill. So thereby, I'm not responsible for my actions. And they're already committing enough crimes as it is. So that's my take on the whole thing. Well, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it. Good call. So let me address that last part first for just a moment. I actually, I understand why I think that. But I would disagree with it for a couple of reasons. The first is that actually until quite recently, if you didn't know this, it actually was classified by psychologist as a mental disorder. That's a fairly recent change in how the psychological community has treated it as a thing. I mean, I don't... I am not really highly qualified to describe to you the process by which those changes and decisions were made and whatnot. But for, I mean, even homosexuality was until the 1970s viewed as, you know, deviant sexual behavior and in many respects a mental illness of sorts. So like it has been before and that wasn't a get out of jail free card then is kind of my point. But the other angle to this is there is a lot of mental illness in America. And, you know, everything from bipolar to clinical depression to there's many, many things that classify you as having a mental illness and it does not provide you with an excuse to not to absolve yourself of a crime. Insanity does. That's the old law and order, you know, episode trick, right? It's like, I'm pleading guilty by reason of insanity. And that's my, I'm not responsible for my actions kind of thing because I wasn't coherent enough to be able to decide to do a crime or not do a crime so I can't be held responsible for it. It's unbelievable, I'm unbelievably rare to actually have that as even, frankly, a proposal in court, but certainly to actually work. It's very rare. I mean, it does happen. It literally just happened the other day. I saw a story about somebody actually winning with that argument, but it is still quite rare. My point is only this. The judicial system, I don't think, has to, if you classify anything as a mental health issue, it does not somehow resolve any kind of responsibility for you. Now, the first thing, of course, that you were talking about.

was, you know, the crime itself and the person being being thrown into jail, what they did and what they claimed and whatnot. I mean, ultimately, it's pretty simple to me. And it looks like the world is starting to fix this rather insane... you know, flirtation that they have had with this type of ideology. I mean, the Olympic Committee just came out, I think, yesterday or the day before and said that for the purposes of international Olympic competition, transgender athletes are not allowed to compete in the sport opposed to their biology. So whatever you are, you've got two X chromosomes, you get an X and a Y. That's, that's it, my friends. That's what you are. According to the Olympics. And that's, of course, rational. There's nothing wrong with that. And you're starting to see that kind of thing happening. I mean, the prison thing is an obvious, stupid policy to allow this kind of thing to happen. And it will change. Whether they like it or not, it will change. Once enough people who oppose this stand up and say so.