Vicki McKenna Show - The Hong Heads

Good morning and welcome to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. Hopefully you heard your keyword. It's preset. That's how you can win $1,000 in our inflation vacation contest. Go to WIBA.com or the iHeartRadio app and play the contest. You have till 55 minutes to play. Again, the word for 9 a.m. is preset. This is the nationwide contest, and if you win, we'll call you. So we're going to cover a lot of territory today and give you an update on Madison Under Siege. Madison Under Siege. It's not going away. Not until it is no longer politically useful. So the Chaz. Chaz is a borrowed term from Seattle. meant Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. We should probably call this one the Fraz or the Fas, the Francesca Hong Autonomous Zone in Madison, because that's really what it is. It's not going anywhere because the city has no intention of doing anything to get rid of it. It is irrelevant, that it is bothering neighbors, that it is bothering businesses. It's irrelevant. The city is... claiming it's negotiating. Here's District 6 Alder, Davy Mayor, who represents the area, says, quote, he has received complaints from more than 100 neighbors and business owners since the intersection closed. Despite their concerns about the ongoing disruptions, mayor says those who contacted him remained supportive of the broader cause. So we're going to negotiate with these people. You see what I mean? You all voted for this. And so here's where the city is. The city is negotiating to pick up garbage from the chas. at Williamson Street and Baldwin. Yes, the city of Madison has gone over and talked to people from Milwaukee who are largely organizing this and said, would you like us to pick up garbage? Oh, you would? Okay, well, we'll do that. We'll pick up garbage for you. You're not going to be responsible for your own trash. That's the kind of stuff that's going on. Madison City Police Department. God bless the rank and file cops who are on the street. A lot of your liberals, though, too, and you voted for this. Remember that, as frustrated as you are, that your UNIC police chief now is essentially giving Milwaukee socialists and communist free reign over the city. And you can't do anything about it. And you're frustrated. It's your chief. Take it up with your chief. Madison Police Union, where are you? Oh, that's right. You're nothing more than an intramural softball club at this point. You're useless. Wisconsin Professional Police Officers Association, the WPPA, that would be the union that represents all cops in the state of Wisconsin. You need to step up. You need to step up. And the hundred or so neighbors complaining about the chas, you need to step up. Here's what you do. Just clear them out.

Clear them out. These people aren't from Madison. These people are from Milwaukee. They're yelling into bullhorns about how they know gangbangers from the hood in Milwaukee. In Milwaukee. All for Cory Ruiz. Nobody gives a damn about Corey Ruiz. We're not even talking about Corey Ruiz. Here is a breakdown of Cory Ruiz. This guy had over 35 serious misdemeanors and felonies. He did less than three years total. in jail, less than three years. The total amount of maximum available jail and prison time for this guy was 271 years. He did less than three. Less than three. You want to know why Corey Ruiz is dead? Because Corey Ruiz wasn't in prison where he belonged. Here is a quote in the David Blasca post, David Blasca.com. It's still up there on the front page from former Madison police officer and now works for himself. And he trains police officers and other tactical units named Adrian Allen. I could have looked at this suspect's record. and told you that one day he would be killed by police. He had countless arrests and convictions for resisting arrest, resisting arrest causing injury to officers, and threatening judges and officers. He had other violent convictions and was a prolific criminal. He had no respect for anyone in our justice system nor fear of consequences for his behavior. And why would he? The system reinforced his belief that fighting police was acceptable. It was only a matter of time until circumstances or his escalation resulted in police having to use deadly force. And that would be because he should have been in jail. He should have been in jail, but he was not ever put in jail for any length of time. The amount of offenses in 20 years would have netted him 271 years, and even if you were being generous. Even if you are being generous, and David Blaskin goes through this in his piece, being generous, well, if I'm being generous and I just knock it back to about a quarter of the amount of jail time he could have served 55 years, he'd still be in prison and or jail today. No one cares about this guy. This is not about Corey Ruiz, because he's an absolute piece of garbage. who did everything in his life to evade responsibility and put himself on a path to sustainable excellence. His sister said he was extraordinary. He was extraordinarily awful. He contributed not only nothing. He took from everyone. This isn't about him. This is about politics. But the city of Madison says, you know what, we're going to try to come to a peaceful and equitable solution to all of this. Here's Davy Mayor again. It's a day-by-day situation. We're looking for a permanent sort of memorial to Corey Ruiz. A permanent memorial! A permanent memorial! A permanent to a memorial to a guy who attacked a judge, attacked police officers, attacked his girlfriends, stole from the community. We want a permanent memorial to this empty vessel.

We're working with protesters to find a peaceful and agreeable end to all of this. No, you're not. You're looking for a way to drag this out as long as you can until it is no longer politically useful. Here is who is there organizing the chas and the rest of the disruptions in Madison. White liberals, wrap your arms and... give a big French kiss to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, that's a Marxist Leninist organization, the Communist Party of Milwaukee, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Milwaukee Students for a Democratic Society, Madison students for a Democratic Society, and the... Party for Socialism and Liberation from Minneapolis. Ain't Madison, you clowns. It's Milwaukee. There's a little bit of Madison there, but it's mostly Milwaukee and Minneapolis. You absolute buffoons. John Patterson, you absolute buffoon. You are letting. People outside the city of Madison occupy Madison on behalf of someone, nobody cared ever to put on a path to sustainable success. I'm talking about his family. And no judges ever cared to protect the community from. All why? This is. A primary op for Francesca Hong and the Hongheads. Most poor people on Willie Street and Baldwin who are upset about the noise and the trash. Don't you worry about it. It's for the cause, capital T, capital C. You voted for the cause. You're part of the cause. You support the cause. At least that's what the alderman of that district says you do. So stop making complaints. Stop showering and go join the revolution, all right? Go grab a sleeping bag and join the Chaz. You voted for this. We'll be right back. All right. Welcome back to the program. We're going to dive a bit more into the politics of the Chaz because we've got a big Democratic Party debate. That's tonight. Woo-hoo. Everybody gets psyched. I wonder if anybody is going to ask Francesca Hong about the chas or the fras, perhaps we should call it, the Francesca Hong autonomous zone, because all of this is for her socialism in Wisconsin. So a little bit more on that coming up later in on the program. We've got another big story that's going down the memory hole, folks, and that is the release. Well, there's two really big stories. One is the release of the Biden tapes where he's slurring and basically handing over classified information to his... to his biographer. And then the other one is the Anthony Fauci Diaries. Where are these stories? I've got to go hunting down X posts on this or watching direct comments from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., which no one's covering, to get much on the Anthony Fauci story. Rand Paul has been putting out quite a bit of stuff. But again, nobody's really covering that. And the Biden tapes?

Man, that's like it never even happened. Tim Graham from newsbusters.org and Media Research Center joins me on the program. These are both explosive stories, and I hate to give short shrift to either one of them. But, you know, the media is, I mean, it's like, okay, well, they got released. Let's move on. We were going to make a note of it, and then we'll move on. Yes, we got CBS did what you might call Post-it notes. 24 seconds. on the Anthony Fauci thing, you know, a little bit more on the Biden tapes. And even in that case, the only piece of the Biden tapes that gave you was that he told the ghostwriter he had classified documents, not anything about his cognitive decline. This is what apparently CBS News under Bari Weiss is in danger of doing. It's in danger of at least marking that this is a news story and not your crazy uncle's Fox News bilge. But that's it. But that's all she's doing. What else is she doing? So here's the, I think the bigger story, in terms of the, of the meat in the story is Anthony Fauci. Biden, it sounds like he's slurring. This is, you know, I've, what, 2000? 17, something like that. He sounds like he's, you know, it's already in full on dementia. He's divulging classified information. That's pretty much the story on Biden. You can go listen to it and just be aghast. But on Anthony Fauci, what do we have on Anthony Fauci? We have Anthony Fauci knowing the death rate from COVID was a fraction of what he said it was. We have Anthony Fauci openly saying, let's slow walk the, you know, the jab. because Trump might be able to take credit for, using, five months before the election, using COVID as politics. We have Anthony Fauci bathing, like drenching himself in the adulation, this just sort of sick narcissism. He admits that most of the scientists he was talking to believed it was a genetically engineered virus leaked from a lab in China. I mean, this is in his diary. This is a secret? I don't even know who the hell got it. God bless. But this is everything the crazy conspiracy theorist said turned out to be true as confirmed by Anthony Fauci's own diary. And they don't want to do this story because once they establish a narrative, they want it to stay forever. You know, we have this clip of Lydia Moynihan trying to bring it up on the Abby Phillips show last night. And that was not, they were not going to let that happen. Unbelievable. But. This is, this media elite who constantly suggests that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, he is nothing like the authoritarian that was Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci, using his scientific mantle, shut down schools, shut down businesses, shut down churches, shut down family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And knew it was crap. That's authoritarianism. We have never seen authoritarianism like that. No kidding. But he also knew it was garbage. He was schmoozing with Jake Tapper. He was having dinners and using Jake Tapper. He should be shamed out of media forever and ever. And he knew it was all bunk. He loved, I'm the most famous person in the world. This is crazy. Look at what the Washington posted to me. Oh my gosh, I'm global. I'm more famous than anybody on the planet right now and loving it and loving it. And as bad as this story is which basically proves the conspiracy theorist right, right? I said, and I got so much flack for it, the death rate from this virus is a fraction of what they are saying. Why? Because that's what the epidemiological numbers were suggesting. If you actually looked at the real numbers, but Anthony Fauci knew it. And what did we do instead? We promoted this idea like one out of every 10 person would die from COVID. It wasn't even close to that. He knew masks didn't work. He knew locking kids down didn't work. He knew all of this. We said it. We were locked out of X. We were locked out of Facebook. We weren't allowed to share ourselves. And some people lost their jobs because of it. Yeah. I mean, again, that's the other part of the authoritarianism I didn't get to yet, which was all the censorship by big tech. Like you can't have a counter narrative. Yours is misinformation. And so that's why this is explosive. And that's why they don't want. to touch it on the news media because it undermines the news media and their authority. They were there aiding and abetting everything Anthony Fauci said. And yeah, they were having cozy dinners while they were saying you can't gather at Thanksgiving. And that's embarrassing. You know, it's, it's, but I think if you asked Jake Tapper, shouldn't you be shamed out of media, he'd be like, we all did this. Right. And they all do this. These people, you know, it's like Chuck Todd and his wife, you know, having Hillary Clinton's communications director over to their house for dinner. This is what they do. They, we, I think, fail to understand how deeply, socially embedded and conversational they are. These elites are running the country. The media is running the country. The media ran this authoritarian regime. And then they have the audacity to come out and say Trump and his voters are the authoritarian. You got it backwards, pal. Every single story that we're going to reference in this segment checks that box where the media decides what the truth is going to be. So we mentioned Biden. They said Biden was sharp as attack. He was sharp as attack, right? They said everything, you know, they took every Anthony Fauci lie and they ran with it and they knew it. But then there's another story. We may not have time to get too much into this. Catherine Harage got this story.

And that is a CIA whistleblower detailing. And it still exists that the intelligence community is actively withholding information specifically from China to President Trump and the presidential daily briefings. And this has been ongoing since his first presidency. So we had that story. Trump knew about that story. Tulsi Gabbard released that. deliberate information about China, China compromising election integrity, China getting access to the voter rolls. That was not going to be included in the presidential daily briefing. Now we have Catherine Harage with a whistleblower who is saying it's still going on. They're still hiding this information from the president. Where's that story? Tim, I didn't see that one at all. Yeah, I think she talked about it on a news nation. And this is what in America today, if you want to be truly informed, you've got to go to Fox to Newsmax, to NewsNation, to stations that aren't somehow plugged into the governing elite. And yes, we have this shadowy intelligence bureaucracy that was constantly leaking against Trump in his first term and probably still is. And then, of course, some of these same people were the ones who signed a big letter saying Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, which was a lie. And, yeah, so that's the whole problem is in that case, in the case of the intelligence agencies, and in the case of the health bureaucracy, you sort of have this same thing. It's a shadowy governing elite, often hidden behind senior officials say, running the country with the media. Yeah. And if, yeah, if you dissent from it, you're a, you're, you're misinforming people. So, I mean, again, here's another story no one's heard about. And this was the result of a House investigation that released the information on journalists who were paid by the Chinese Communist Party to write favorable or provide favorable coverage or write favorable coverage. Ezra Klein, Matthew Iglesias. Stop me if you've heard of these people, Tim Graham. David Road, Jonathan Alter, David Sweeney, Daniel Gross. We got one of our very own here. Craig Gilbert, the former Bureau Chief Washington. Chief Director for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, you know, the who's who of journalism from Washington Post to NBC, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, broadcasting, New York Times, CNN, Vox, you know, and the list goes on like this. Where's that story? Totally compromised journalists being paid by China. They're directly paid by China. This is a House report. It's not me bloviating. And that's nowhere either. CIA is still trying to interrupt the authority of the Trump administration. We the people elected that administration. You've got a whole bunch of reporters on the Chinese payroll. You got Anthony Fauci's diary where he's saying, oh, yeah, you conspiracy theorists, we're right. And you've got Joe Biden slurring like, you know, like he just had, you know, a couple of shots of booze and disclosing classified information.

And you've got to be kidding me. And these are not even worthy of attention. Now, the Washington Post had a front page story the other day about how Biden's world is shrunk because he's, yeah, because his cognitive decline continues. He's going through cancer treatment. Somehow they're going to try to have a book tour with this guy after the election. I suppose the interviews will have 700 edits in them. between every sentence. We'll use his body. This is where you say, this is where you look at a story like that and say, you people thought he needed another four years. Yeah. You were willing to put that guy up for another four years. I think the first, the first recording on the tapes was 2017. I mean, my goodness. It was like, that was well before the 2024 election cycle. This is nuts. You just. And the thing that still galls me to him is that, okay, great, we've got Elon Musk, he bought X. And Mark Zuckerberg has sort of taken the handcuffs off people sharing. Of course, the algorithm doesn't get the right-wing stuff into anybody except other right-winger's feeds. But it's not enough. to, it's not enough to counter the overwhelming nature of government-supported media. And this is government-supported media with FCC licenses, with exclusive access, government-supported media. I won't say it's government-funded media, but it certainly is supported where the other entities, the other, you know, sort of outlets are not. Well, we did have government funded PBS and NPR until Trump got that stopped. But many states are still funding there. their own public broadcasting. And every blue state, they're still shoveling the taxpayer money into so-called public broadcasting because they are Democrat TV and Democrat radio. But even if it's broadcast. I mean, they're worse than that sometimes. Even if it's CBS, NBC, ABC, it's supported, it literally is supported by the government. It enjoys unique protections because of the FCC licenses that it holds. And, you know, I mean, I thought Brendan Carr was going to start dropping the hammer, but so far not so much. I do appreciate the time. Tim Graham, Media Research Center, and also newsbusters.org. Thank you. You bet. And we'll take a break on the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. There's an interesting report that was just put out by Wisconsin Institute and Law and Liberty talking about this weakness. that has emerged on the right. And the weakness on the right, which typically you could argue sort of broadly stems from economic pain, is providing an opening for the left to promote ideologies that...

are just fundamentally antithetical to freedom and free markets, real free markets, things like price controls, etc. But the economic pain that everybody's experiencing isn't being alleviated. And so what to do? So what I'm, we'll use two examples because the report used two examples, prescription drugs and energy. Will Flanders, who is part of putting this report together, joins me on the program. Will, if you look at prescription drugs and energy, you can pick either one of these. What you see is a rigged game, okay? And everybody sees the rigged game. Everyone sees that prescription drugs and their costs are being rigged, whether by PBMs, whether they understand the granular details of it or not. It doesn't make sense to them. They're angry about it. No one's doing anything to stop it. Same thing with energy. When you see energy costs continually going up, even though you have sealed your home, bought the new HVAC system, swapped out all your light bulbs, it's a rigged game and people notice that. And because no one's doing anything about it, when I say no and I mean people from the right are doing absolutely nothing about it, it provides an opening for the left to say, you know what we really need? prescription drug price controls. You know what we really need? We need fix energy price controls. And until I think the right responds with something that looks like action, we actually may slide into democratic socialism without even realizing we're going there. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So what we wanted to do with this new polling that we've just released is to take a look at the populist leaning wing of the Republican Party. We know that in the Trump era, that's become a pretty substantial share of voters that are more populous aligned, more MAGA aligned, and see what they think about a number of issues. And you touched on, you know, prescription drugs and energy prices. One of the questions we asked in this poll was how much... control do you think the federal government should have on these issues? And while there are a couple of things that we think are pretty good, a majority of folks in the swing of the party say that government should not have control of individual wealth or network, once you get to things like drug prices, once you get to things like corporate profits or credit card interest, then we drop below 50% where the majority of folks are saying that the government should have some level of control and a decent percentage over 25% in all these cases are saying. There should be a high level of control. And I think you're right. You know, it's essentially that there's a vacuum that's being filled with socialism. You know, you have to remember, if we go back to 2012, there is a share of the Trump vote that actually were Obama voters. You know, it's hard to believe, but there were some folks that are looking for someone who's promising to get something done. And conservatives haven't always been offering great alternatives on those topics particularly. No, conservatives have offered. I'm not individual conservative is notwithstanding. Ron Johnson notwithstanding, for instance, have offered nothing. That's the problem. This is why Trump rose to, you know, in the first place, because in the face of exploding prescription drug prices, the answer was nothing. When they had a chance to repeal Obamacare, which was part of this problem, now let's just go from prescription drug prices to health insurance.

The Republicans didn't repeal the law. They did nothing, right? You look at energy when Barack Obama said you can charge rate payers for projects, not actually generating energy, meaning you could build solar arrays, you could build wind farms, and you could charge rate payers for that. And rates started to explode. What do the Republicans do? Nothing. And see, that's where the opening is. And when populism broadly is a distrust of elite institutions, right? That's broadly what it is. I'm kind of there myself. Yep. But when the people, you know, who are in charge of the elite institutions that are supposed to resist progressivism, socialism, do nothing. Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in 2026 with a whole bunch of people saying, screw it, let's just do price controls? No, there was something with Obamacare particularly. There was like a dog that caught the car mentality, right? You don't know what to do now. We didn't actually expect to be in a position to get rid of this law. And there was seemingly no workable plan, certainly. And that's the case across a lot of issues. And I think what you see here again is that, yeah, these voters distrust institutions for a reason. It's not just because they're not following news. And they're deeply following the news. And every day confirms more and more. to the people in charge of the institutions either don't care or just don't have an answer. Right. And that's what we're seeing in this polling. And what you also see is that people, there's a really simple solution. And that is accountability. And get rid of the corruption. Stop taking the money under the table from the lobbyist. And that's almost too much of an ask. It's not hard, physically not hard, logistically not hard. But it's politically the hardest thing on earth. And so, you know, I think folks sort of innately understand that. And that simply swapping out bodies is not going to be the answer. So, you know, I'm not sure what the answer is unless we can solve the lust for greed and corruption in the heart of men. Yeah, it's sort of the problem of all of history, right? But I do think you're right when you touched on accountability and transparency. There are very few things, even among a subset of voters that you can poll where you'll get over 90% support. But, you know, we had over 90% support for more audits in government. That goes for things like elections, but also just sunshine in general across all of government. People want to see behind the scenes and know what's going on. That's a way you can, you know, one rebuild trust in institutions, which is a, you know, sort of law and policy center. That's something in general we're in favor of. But it's also a way to show people that you're action-oriented and you're actually moving towards achieving some of the things that they care about the most, is let people see what's actually happening behind the curtain rather than obfuscating and doing everything you can to hide the process. Yeah, and again, this poll suggests that we don't have to go down the road to socialism, but there's an enormous amount of frustration. on the right side of the ledger here, on the right side of the political ledger. There's a huge amount of frustration. And so, you know, I think there is room for government, but here's what the way I think about it. And I was reminded again when Dan Connoodle, Representative Connoodle, and you're going to be hearing from him on the show, announced plans to reintroduce a taxpayer Bill of Rights in Wisconsin, which is an artificial mechanism that

getting rid of the layer upon layer of regulation that only feed the corrupt hand of, you know, corporate lobbyists. That's not that hard. I think if you reset Wisconsin, for instance, like Florida is doing, if you reset Wisconsin like Scott Walker had done and he didn't have to do all of these other reforms because it wasn't clear, it's clear that we were having problems with it. For business, for success, for, you know, increased paychecks. People tend to just sort of go about their business and have a nice time and they don't get so frustrated. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And you've got to explain these things in a way that isn't getting into what I like to, which is like, you know, oh, Milton Friedman, you know, suggest this would work, right? What you have to do instead is explain it to people on the basis of their own pocketbook and how this will affect small businesses in their area, how this will affect their ability to afford, you know, groceries and childcare and, you know, get rid of sort of the, you know, Milton Friedman economics theory stuff that at least folks like me sometimes sort of go back towards and put it on to the terms that. Not necessarily the folks can understand, but actually are more relevant to them in their everything left for sure. You don't have to drag, you know, you don't have to drag people into, you know, your, you know, your 30-page blog post on Hayek. You can just simply say. we think this doesn't make sense. It obviously is corrupt. And we're going to stop it. And by the way, the Tiffany campaign can do that right now. They can do that right now. You can say, we are no longer going to allow ratepayers to be charged for stranded assets. We're no longer going to be allowed, going to allow rate payers to be charged for, you know, shutting down perfectly good coal plants and putting up solar facilities. You're not going to be charged for that anymore. If they want to do it and, you know, there's agreements. Go crazy, but ratepayers aren't going to foot the freight for this stuff anymore. Wisconsin can do this on its own. And even with the federal rules. And so you can do this with health insurance. You can say no longer are PBMs going to be allowed to change formularies and jack people's prices and steal people's drug coupons. You can do this in Wisconsin. It's so frustrating. You can roll back housing regulations that increase the cost of housing 20, 40, 30, you know, or 50 percent from where it was 10 years ago. And remember, you know, we talk about federal roadblocks. We've never had a better opportunity to get around the federal roadblocks than we have today across Medicaid, across any number of different federal agencies. They're really willing to accept, you know, waivers for creative solutions. We have a, you know, reform-oriented federal government under President Trump. So now is the time, and we can't use the federal government as an excuse in many instances like we could in other times. That's true, because they'll let us do it.

They will let us do this stuff. This is, you know, way, way back in the day, back when Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty first formed, I think it was, or right around that time, you guys put out a wonderful white paper called competitive federalism. And that's really what we're talking about here is states have an enormous amount of authority and freedom to experiment and do things that work and then stop doing the things that don't work. For some reason, we're all acting like, you know, like you can't repeal something that was awful. I appreciate the time on the program. This is a really interesting survey, but it ought to be a warning shot for the Republicans that sooner or later, people are going to get tired of hearing the rhetoric if it's not met, I'm sorry, matched with action. Absolutely. We'll hope folks take advantage of it, take a look, and apply it in a number of different contexts from campaigns to elected office. Tom Tiffany, call your office and, you know, tell your office to go find this report and download it and study it. We'll take a quick break. Willough Flanders, thank you so much. Thank you. Have good day. You as well, and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna show. Here is your word to win our inflation vacation cash contest. It's bonus. B-O-N-U-S. Go to WI-B-A.com to play the contest. It is a nationwide contest. You have till 55 minutes past the hour to play. You may also play on the I-Heart Radio app. and we'll call you if you win and we won't leave messages. So don't screen your calls. There you go. Bonus. All right. Just on the conversation I was having with Wolflanders right before the break. Healthcare. Let's stay on that for a second and corruption. Healthcare and corruption. I won't get too deep into the weeds. I promise this is really simple. But is, you know, it's the... The populist inclinations on the right react to things. The conservatives in government should respond not. lecture them, not tell them that their frustrations are unwarranted, not give them some kind of speech and primer on a free market, which basically doesn't exist, at least not at the higher levels. It's a rigged market. It's a crony market. Everybody sees this. But there are certain, so the response to their frustration should not be the Republicans caving and saying, okay, we'll just do price controls. We'll do price controls on health insurance policies. We'll do price controls on drug prices. But there are things government can do. And I'm going to give you an example of something easy the government could do.

The other day, I received a my chart notification. I've got to test a scan coming up because I was a 30-year cigarette smoker. I go and I get these low-dose lung CTs. And everybody should do this, by the way, because it can catch lung cancer way earlier than after you get a cough and go in for a chest x-ray. Okay, so do this. You should, you should, you should look into getting one of these. I do this like I do a mammogram every year. because I'm old and I smoked. So I have one coming up at the end of August and I get my chart notification saying new estimate. So I click on it. New estimate for what I'm going to have to pay for this low dose long CT scan at the end of August. $0.00. Excellent. I'm like, great. My insurance is going to cover this. I do something that most people don't do. I click view details. And then I clicked one more time in this tiny little horrible, unfriendly app called MyChart. It sucks. I click into another page so that I can see what my insurance company is being charged for this test. And I find out my insurance company is being charged $3,500 for this test. I'm going to pay zero, so I should not complain, right? I should be fine. Except that I have paid cash for this test in the past, so I know what it costs. It costs between $350 and $450. Cash price for this test is $350 to $450. But my insurance is being charged $3,500 for this test.

I immediately sent that information to Ron Johnson. I said, this is half our problem. You have no idea what things cost. I happened to know what this cost because I had gone in and paid cash for it before. So I happened to know. But if you try to find it, I grocked it. What is the new cost in 2026 for a low dust lung CT? UW Health slash St. Mary's. You could do this for SSM as well. They're the same damn company. Couldn't come up with a cost estimate for me. Cash price. You have to go into a machine readable file, which is almost incomprehensible, scan down and understand what the actual name of this procedure is in order to find the price. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. But my insurance is getting charged $3,500. Why isn't my insurance getting charged $400? So my insurance is going to look at this. And, you know, in the aggregate, all the people it's insuring, some of whom are going in for very simple procedures, maybe it's a mammogram. My insurance was charged $2,800 for a mammogram that would cost any woman, $300 to go get on her own. At a private stand-up clinic, it would cost $300. And my insurance, last year, was charged $2,800 for that. $2,800 for a test that costs around $300. So they look at this in the aggregate, the insurance company, the bean counters are looking all of these charges in the aggregate, and they're saying, we're going to have to raise your rates. Sorry, we're going to have to raise your rates next year. And my rates went up 21% year to year. From last year to my most current policy went up 21%. And it's garbage like this. Now what could the government do? Easy. Cash price is cash price. Whatever the cash price is that a person without insurance would pay is the price that you will charge the insurance company. The price is the price. It's not a sliding scale. It's not like, well, you can afford to pay more. That's called dynamic pricing. And that's what we have in insurance. Dynamic pricing. Have you guys been hearing about dynamic pricing? People have been noticing this, these new electronic tags at retail outlets. I think there was one at Walmart somewhere, not in Wisconsin that I saw, but it was somewhere at a Walmart. They had electronic price tags. They change. based on information from your smartphone about you. Oh, this person's high income. This person can afford to pay 17 cents more. Dynamic pricing. It's going on all over the place now. It's a thing. It should be banned. Dynamic pricing should be banned. It's basically saying you should pay more because you make more. That's stupid. The price should be the price. So there's something easy. Right there. No more dynamic pricing and health insurance. You're not allowed to do it anymore. That is nothing to do with pricing based on risk. That has nothing to do with pricing based on lifestyle. The insurance companies can still do that all day long. Get those actuaries in there and go, oh my gosh, she's 58 years old, blah, blah, blah. This is what her price is going to be based on risk. But they're also judging my price based on the dynamic.

pricing situation and the contractual agreements that are made with the hospitals and the insurance companies. How fast and how aggressively would prices fall for health insurance coverage if we did that? The price is the price. This all goes back to transparency. These are things that the government can mandate and should and should. Instead of saying, oh, let's put everybody on Medicaid because they can't afford their health insurance. How about we end this insanity of dynamic pricing? So that on no one's planet, does a test that costs $450 make sense to charge $3,500 for? Or a mammogram that costs $300, charge $2,800 for it? That's dumb. That's corrupt. That's what that is. It's corrupt. So there is a place for government. And it would improve conditions quickly. And by the way, Wisconsin could do this. There's nothing saying Wisconsin can't do this. Wisconsin's best effort last session was to tell health insurance systems to put up a machine readable file. Well, they already do that. It's already a federal law. They already have those. You can't understand them. I can't understand them. It's very difficult to understand them. Not as an individual consumer. It's very difficult. That's the best effort we put forward because a lobbyist. That's frustrating to people. But these are really simple things the government could do rather than slouch down the path of socialism and get us closer and closer and closer to Europe. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And let's talk about, I don't know, ignorance. I guess we can talk about ignorance because what the left has managed to do, I think, is take advantage of historical ignorance among particularly Christians to trap them in a Chinese finger puzzle. of moral dilemma. Bill Walton joins me on the program. We're going to talk about this. He's America's Renaissance CEO, also the host of the Bill Walton show, and has written extensively on the lack of our ability now to defend Western civilization, Bill. It's great to have you on the program. Yeah, great talking with you. I'm glad we're talking about this subject. Yeah, when I see Chinese finger puzzle, that's those woven puzzles. You stick your fingers, and if you pull, you break them. If you push in, that's how you get out of them. So we're going to talk about Western civilization. Immediately the left automatically goes to what about the crusades. I just had this happen to me, okay? I put up abortion killed 70 million people. I've got a picture of Margaret Sanger. It's just a meme I put up. You know, Hitler killed 10 million people, Stalin killed 26 million people, whatever. You know, leftism kills. That was the meme, basically. And some, some smarmy, you know, leftists said, well, what about the Crusades? What about the Crusades? So I leaned in, Bill, instead of pulling back and breaking that bond. So let's talk about this because we don't, our own people don't understand how to defend Western civilization the moment somebody says, what about the Crusades? Well, nobody, nobody, you and I understand it, but.

Mediterranean, which is what we think of now as Muslim country, until the year 600 was the center of Christianity and was, you know, great civilization. And Muhammad, who founded Islam, was born around 8,570. And he came on and he was originally tried to be a few of a... spiritual leader and that didn't work out he'd never read any books he was illiterate and then he became a political leader and then he found his true uh his true talent, and he became a military leader. And after he died, he had enough people in place in the Mediterranean, Muslims, who took up the arms against the Christians then and started systematically conquering country after country, Spain, Sicily, Egypt, obviously, the whole area. You just think if he had a map that just kind of... got bigger and bigger and bigger in terms of the Muslim territory. That's what happened, starting with about 630. And then that continued until at the time of the crusades, roughly two-thirds of what used to be Christian. Christian civilization was now taken over by the Muslims. And they kept being aggressive. The Muslims had, like with many of these things, they invented a new kind of sword, the scimitar, which was much more lethal military weapon than the Christians had. And so they just advanced. And so when the Western, you know, remember Christianity was divided in two pieces, Eastern Western. The Pope that was in charge of the eastern part was surrounded and in Constantinople and was tremendously, you know, prideful. But he finally appealed to the Western Church, went to France and the French Knights when they heard this story. So we've got to go do something. And it started chanting, it's God's will, it's God's will. And they were pushing back against an invasion. And it was a vicious invasion. And I just tell all sorts of stories about that. You can look this up. The Crusades wasn't one thing. It was over hundreds of years. It wasn't one thing. And by the way, my answer to the guy who said, well, what about the Crusades? I said, well, about a million people, best estimate, died. About 50% were Muslims. About 50% were Christians. And most of them died from disease. You know, most of them didn't die at the blade of a sword. But anyway. Put that aside. We're talking about...

a non-sequential series that isn't really well described as a series, but as mostly reactive actions by Christendom, however, you want to describe that, the Levant, whatever, and the Levant, against Muslim incursion. Jihad, since 700, was both military and spiritual, and as you had described, had taken over a significant portion of land. territory. This is, you mean, these are fights for land. And they were on the march. So this, I mean, if you, the best way you can describe this is, is kind of push back with a little bit of inner, you know, sorry, I guess intermural strife going on in between. Well, I mentioned Sicily and what happened in that part of the Mediterranean, but in 846. Muslim raiders, they sailed up the Tiber River in Italy and sacked loan. And they stripped silver from the doors of St. Peter's Basilica. And if you go to Rome today and you see the Vatican and you see those high walls, nobody, almost nobody realizes those walls were put up right afterwards to protect the Vatican from the Muslim attack on Rome. And so it was, you know, it was that. It was that bad, and they also, you know, it was sort of like those old movies in the 30s where you did not want to be captured by the Muslims because it was a fate worse than death. Well, that was true. Those movies were not based on a... on some people making it up. And I think we forget how hostile the Muslim religion was to Christians and has been since day one. So this is what's changed now. So you can go back and look up the crusades. It's really interesting stuff. It's not the crusades. It doesn't make sense to call it that, but that's what modern historians have decided to call it. And I think that perhaps was even a choice so that it becomes difficult to defend. Jihad never ended. The Crusades did, but Jihad never ended. Jihad never ended in the pure form of the crusade, the very first one. If they'd stop with that, I don't think there would be anything to really demonize the Western Christian culture about. But the later crusades got a little messy, got a little greedy, ended up not distinguishing themselves. And the details of that, you know, we don't have time being into. But there is some atrocities that, you know, and what happens is, of course, people pick an antidote and they say, well, that whole thing was about. you know, Christian brutality, and it was just the opposite. But we only pick the anecdote. We only pick the anecdote, one or two anecdotes, from the Christians. And we don't pick any anecdotes from, you know, 900-year jihad. I mean, that's the thing. So dismiss it. I would, my advice to people who are confronted with the Crusades is,

You know, just say, well, what would you have done were your homeland invaded? You know, I'm going to do a couple more pieces on this. I'm bringing it up to today because, you know, what happened, what's happening in Europe and now in the United States is that after Islam fell into, I guess it lost its dynamism and didn't keep coming after us, but just recently after World War II. during the 50s and 60s start people uh the Europeans started bringing Muslims in to work. And it became a worker's job. And then in 1973, the oil crisis happened. And they asked them to leave because the jobs were scarce in Europe. And they didn't. And they began colonizing. And they built things. And, you know, the Saudis built mosques. And now you go to Brussels. And it looks like a Muslim city. And so there's been a third way that's happening right now. And the reason we need to talk about, you can't get. You know, can't let people demonize Christianity because of the Crusades. It's happening right now. We're asked to abandon our culture. Of course, a lot of the West has already abandoned Christianity, which is, in my view, a tragedy. And we've got to stand up for Western civilization and what we've created. And increasingly, people are just giving up without not only not a fight, but not a word. I think that's true. I think people don't even want to, look, people don't even want to defend Jesus at this point. They don't want to just stand up and say, and say what they believe. Maybe it's because, I don't know. Maybe it's because they don't know why they believe what they believe. Maybe they don't really believe. Maybe that's part of the problem. I can't speak to that. But you do see it where Christians are easily cowed. Well, that's self-inflicted because the Christian churches, and as long ago it was 1893, there was a convention in Chicago where all the heads of the Presbyterian or Protestant churches met, and they declared there's only one great, one religion, and they're all climbing the same mountain, and they're all pretty much the same. I had a meeting with the head of the church, Episcopal Church. in D.C., National Cathedral about 30 years ago, and he told me that, oh, all religions are equally great. Well, if you look at the doctrines and the actions of Islam, that is not true. And, you know, they're still stoning women. And, you know, you've seen the recent photos of the woman being stoned in Iran. She's buried up to her neck, and they're getting ready to, you know, obliterator. We didn't see those pictures. That doesn't happen here, but it happens there. So why do you think, do you think that just lay people just started listening to pastors that had been infiltrated, that had been, that had been co-opted? How did we get to a place where we can't even say, like Medagorgia? There was just a fire, a terrorist attack there. And the response from a whole bunch of people, at least if you can judge social media, was, oh, there they go again. Oh, my goodness. And no outrage. I mean, some people were outraged.

But generally speaking, people were like, gosh, you know, that's a way over there. And what can we do about it? And there they go again. And this is terrible. But I'm just going to go about my business. Well, I can't, you know, the creep, you know, on another front, we have the Italian Marxist theorist, Ramshy in the 20s, was writing about how you need, you can't conquer a strong person. You can't conquer a strong civilization. Instead, you've got to take over the institutions. And so it wasn't necessarily in a religious front, but those kind of. social justice ideas, the woke ideas begin to infiltrate institutions in America, which, you know, which leads us up today where, you know, every big corporation during the Georgia incident declared black lives matter is the most important thing. And there was like a billion dollars from big corporations that went into that. And we know now later it was a fraud. So the people's minds have been. It's captured by ideas, and this is, you know, we're, so we've got a secular front and we've got a religious front. But, you know, my view is that we need, if you believe that this culture, our civilization has accomplished amazing things, and it has. And, you know, all the innovations in Islam really stopped about 500 years ago, and they lived living off ever since Western technology and Western ideas and Western. you know, wealth, you know, we've got a kind of, we got to step back and say, look, we created something really good and we're going to stand up for it. And I would start as an individual, just simply, you know, you're defending it. When your friends give you, when they bring up the crusade, it sounds like that was a conversation they didn't expect. And I've done that. And it makes you quite isolated. You bring it up and everybody starts looking at you like, you know, what are you saying? You mean we've got a civilization that's worth defending? And I say, yeah, let's step up. Right. Well, and, you know, civilization, even if you don't want to go and look up information and read about the Crusades, that's fine. You can still defend Western civilization. You can still defend Christianity. You can defend all of this against an incursion of a tyrannical totalitarian worldview. That isn't hard to do. It's okay to call it out. I don't know why people are so weak. I do think part of the reason is because the churches were infiltrated, Gramchie style, as you say, not just corporate institutions and government institutions, but also the religious institutions. It's explicit in documents that were captured from the now former Soviet Union that infiltration of the church, specifically the Catholic Church, was very important in order to undermine...

you know, people's understanding of Jesus Christ's, the idea of human rights as exemplified by Jesus Christ. And so I don't think this is all that difficult to do if you spend a little bit of time knowing what you believe and being willing to take the slings in arrows because they'll call you whatever phobic, Islamophobic, or whatever phobic. They'll call you all those names. And I think, you know, people are to the point where they just don't feel comfortable standing up for themselves and they're afraid of being called names. And I think that's just a really lame reason to give America away. Well, Islamophob has entered the same category as racist. And, you know, the racist word is uttered and everybody's supposed to fall back and retreated. And the Islamophob was put out in the same fashion. And, you know, people listening to this ought to just spend a couple minutes on one of your, you know, AI apps and look this stuff up. That's incredible. about our history and what has been retooled to suit the agenda of the left. And arm yourself out. Yeah, I think, I remember when Michael Knowles spoke. Michael is great. I remember when Michael Knowles from Daily Wire, I think he's still with the Daily Wire, it's been a while, went and debated someone on this very topic, on the Crusades, on whether or not anybody should continue to apologize. That was 1095 people. That was 1095, but whatever. And everybody was freaking out. How dare you, you know, how dare X host this? How dare YouTube allow this on there? You listen to it. And it was clear that Knowles had gone up against someone who had just, you know, digested the platitudes, did not know what they were talking about. And he wiped the floor with them. It was just easy. It wasn't even that he had, it wasn't some kind of scholar. He just knew what he believed in. and was willing to stand up and be righteous about it. And he was polite. He wasn't rude. He wasn't Islamophobic. He was just saying facts on file here. People stop asking me to apologize for something. I have nothing to apologize for. But anyway, Bill Walton, where can people learn more? Well, we're the Bill Walton show. We're redoing our websites. So probably the easiest place to find me is on YouTube or I've got a substack page that's, I guess we've got 275 shows. on it. And I've got a number of essays on Substack as well. It reinforces this. And, you know, I'm thinking we're living in an airless age where nobody knows what's true and what our direction should be. And I think that's if you learn a little history, if you just think about what we believe is true, is true and stands for something really good, then I think we prevail.

Well, I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of Substack. So let's send everybody to your Substack page because that's where you can find some of the most interesting writing and some of the most interesting stuff. Plus all your shows are linked up there. So Bill Walton, thank you so much. Bill Walton's show on Substack. I appreciate it. Great. Great talking about you. And we'll take a break on the Vicki McKenna Show. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And from advancing American freedom, I have Hans von Spakovsky. Hans also, he's not just an expert in election law, in election reform, but he's also someone who has been paying attention to and analyzing the lawfare that has been going on. Hans, thanks for joining me on the show. Well, thanks for having me, as always. So I want to start because we do need to talk about the law fair. Then I want to talk about some of these election items that President Trump referenced that have now just gone down the memory hole as if they never happened. But I do want to start with law fair. And I saw a press conference, and I believe it was a Louisiana, Attorney General. She had given a press conference, and she was just, I mean, talk about swinging for the cheapseeds. And as I'm listening to her, I realized that she had been indicted on the exact same fake, phony charges that the current Attorney General of Wisconsin is using to go after a private attorney named Jim Troopus. But they actually tried to indict a Republican attorney general claiming the same thing that somehow she had violated the law by telling people alternate electors were okay. Well, yeah, I mean, this is a little bit different, but it's the same kind of thing. The situation was so bizarre. I mean, I had a hard time believing. I wasn't reading a story in the Babylon B about it. The A.G. Louisiana sent a letter to the leadership of New Orleans, elected leaders. warning them that they were potentially acting unlawfully. They were upset that the state legislature had passed a law eliminating a particular clerk court position in New Orleans, if you can believe this. And so they were making efforts to keep this guy who's basically job had been eliminated by the legislature. basically give him a different title, but keep him doing the same thing. And she sent them a letter warning them. They couldn't do that. So what do they do? They convene a grand jury and indict her on 16 felony counts of intimidation of public officials and other just spurious stuff. The governor, the legislature, all these people got upset about it. And under all kinds of threats against them for misusing the law, the special prosecutor who'd convened the grand jury dismissed.

the 16 felony count. So it was public pressure and other pressure that led them to do it. But this was clearly a political revenge, misuse of a grand jury. And I got to tell you, I actually think the lawyer who led that grand jury and everyone involved in that, they ought to be investigated for potential criminal charges. So 16 fake felony counts based on things that weren't felonies. We've got 10 fake felony counts based on things that aren't felonies here in our state. So they're trying to rack her up on 16 fake felonies. Here we've got a lawyer in Wisconsin being racked up on 10 fake felonies. You just make it up. Just make it up. And you can get someone to go forward to allow those charges. In this case, it was a grand jury. In our case, it's a judge. That's allowing these charges to go forward, that no one is just saying, wait a second, this is bananas and throwing out the charges. So, you know, God bless that there was enough public attention in Louisiana to cut her slack and cut her loose. But that's not happening in Wisconsin. We can't even get enough attention on the Troopus case. Yeah, but see, there also was something else, which is that. Very quickly, the Louisiana Supreme Court told the local court and the special prosecutor that they didn't follow the proper procedures with that grand jury indictment. Now, the Supreme Court didn't throw it out, but they were extremely critical of the way this had been done. And it was only after that. Only after that the prosecutor involved dismissed the entire grand jury indictment. See, one of your problems is Wisconsin is, frankly, you've got a liberal-dominated state Supreme Court who isn't going to take actions like this because many of the liberal justices have expressed their delight at what's happening and have made very critical comments. about Jim Troopers, for example, that really... Any decent judge would remove themselves from the case. And, of course, they refused to do that. Yeah, that's a problem. So to your point, that Louisiana had a non, a non-irational Supreme Court. Maybe not a fully rational, but at least a non-irational Supreme Court. We don't have that. Right. We don't have that. So you have this, so that this is the lawfare. Fake felony charges. Put people, they wanted to put that woman in prison. She would have gone to prison. Prison. Felonies always, almost always result in prison time, unless, you know, you're checking the right oppression box. Prison is fake felonies to put people in prison. Of course, they wanted to do that to Donald Trump as well. And this isn't over. It isn't paying the dividends it used to pay for the left, but it isn't over.

it's still hard to find conservative attorneys or attorneys who want to represent conservatives in election cases or even in political cases at all hans and that's that's part of what they were going for right right and plus look i mean there's another issue here which unfortunately wisconsin doesn't have is that uh the republican governor of louisiana Jeff Landry came out and said that, I mean, he also criticized his prosecution and said that if it wasn't immediately dismissed, he was going to issue a pardon immediately to the attorney general for these malicious and false charges. And again, Unfortunately, you don't have a governor who's willing to do that either in Wisconsin. No. No, we don't. And if we don't have a Republican elected as governor in November, we will never. I mean, this case will go on indefinitely. I mean, just to the point where, you know, everybody involved is going to be so broke, they die poor. And that's good enough for them too. Because I don't, I mean, at this point, I don't even know if you could get a conviction. It's the charges in the process that are the punishment. I want to get back to something President Trump said and it went into the memory hole right away. Oh, he's crazy. And he's talking about the information that was made available to him that we do have. foreigners influencing our elections that China downloaded millions of voter registration or millions from the voter registration database, that they had an ID mill where they were providing Chinese citizens with phony IDs. We don't know if any of that was used to cast a vote. We speculate it probably was. We know from the Maduro raids that Venezuela prove that you can hack. online voting machines that are connected to the internet. No kidding, you can hack them. And then we learn from the governor of New Jersey that at least 6,600 people who were non-citizens were registered to vote. We learn all of this. And the entire press acts like it's no big thing. And I haven't seen a headline on this in a week and a half. Right. And those critical headlines from the media who just said, oh, this is just the usual stuff, those came out before any of those reporters even had a chance to look at any of the declassified documents and all this was based on. You know, anybody out there saying, oh, this is just the president making claims to get wrong. The White House, this was all based on declassified intelligence reports.

from the CIA and other agencies. You know, the president was simply relating what those intelligence agencies was saying. So, you know, anybody who just immediately criticizes this, you clearly haven't even looked at the underlying documents. No, that's the thing. This was intelligence. And we learned that the intelligence community explicitly kept it from President Trump. when he was president they explicitly kept it out of the presidential daily briefing there's explicit conversations that were declassified saying keep it out of the president's presidential daily briefing they knew that foreign countries compromised our elections it was in the russia stuff oh my gosh it was a pittance It was a pittance by comparison to what China and Venezuela were doing. A pittance. Russia didn't have an ID generating mill that was getting fake IDs to people in the United States. And instead of investigating saying, holy cats, a foreign country got access to our database, you mean to tell me that all of those people who said you could hack the electronic voting machines were right? Holy smokes, we better do something about this. Nope. President Trump's unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud again, election denial again. Yeah, I know. It's just so typical. But look, what do you expect? I would remind folks that both the Washington Post or the York Times won. Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the Russia-Trump campaign election collusion, which, as we all know, turned out to be a gigantic hoax. And neither paper, neither paper has given back that Pulitzer Prize. Yep. It wasn't a hoax. Right? They were saying it was, no, it's really Russia, Russia, Russia. No, what you should have said was China, China, China. That's what they should have said. But they wanted the hoax to catch on before anybody realized it was a hoax and that's all they needed. I do appreciate the time on the program, Hans von Spikoski from Advancing American Freedom. Thank you so much for joining me. Sure. Thanks for having me. Always great to have you and we will take a break in the Vicki McKenna show. That's it for me. For this two hours, we're coming back at two o'clock as well. There's a big debate. Nobody's going to watch it. I'm going to watch it. The Democrats are going to debate. So will they call out the Hong Heads? Will they call out the socialists? Will they call out the siege of Madison solely designed to boost one Democratic candidate? But Jessica McBride will join me on that topic coming up on the program. Everybody have a great lunch. In the meantime, we'll see you back here on the Vicki McKenna show at 2 o'clock. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. Welcome to hour number three of the Vicki McKenna show. That's right. I have two hours from 9 to 11. For those of you who didn't know that, you can always listen on the IHeart Radio app. This is hour number three. You have a chance to win $1,000. Your word for the 2 o'clock hour is credit. T-R-E-D-I-T. You know how to play, right? It's the inflation vacation slash sizzling summer cash contest. You go to W-I-B-A.com or NewsTalk1130.com. It's a nationwide contest. Enter your keyword you could win. Simple as that. Credit. T-R-E-D-I-T. We're going to preview the Democratic debate tonight. Don't worry. You don't have to watch it. We'll watch it for you. Jessica McBride is going to join me on the program. We're going to kind of blow a little blast from the past your way as well. On the program, Dan Canodal is blowing the dust off an old idea, but an excellent idea. called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Some of you may remember that. Some of you may not, but we will get into that on the program as well. Before we get into anything, I am just enjoying the occupation of Madison by the Hongheads way too much. I'm mainlining this stuff at this point. Who are the Hongheads? That's what they call themselves. I am not using a pejorative for Francesca Hong supporters. That's what they call themselves. The New York Times called them Hongheads. Hongheads are the people who have currently laid siege to the city of Madison, are currently in control of the city of Madison. They have a chaz or a fras, if you prefer, an autonomous zone. at Williamson Street and Baldwin, otherwise known as Willie Street. Let me give you a quick primer for those who are unfamiliar with Willie Street. There are two really famous places in Madison, State Street and Willie Street. Willie Street is the hippie street. Willie Street describes itself thusly. a distinctly eclectic, progressive, and community-oriented neighborhood. It's Madison's Bohemian or Hippie Street. We're proud of keeping things weird and independent, mixing longtime residents, artists, young professional, students, families, and a strong, inclusive LGBTQ-plus presence with our roots in blue-collar activist and urbanist history. That's Willie Street. That's what's occupied right now. Willie Street, the most radical left-wing, hippie, progressive socialist neighborhood in the radical progressive hippie socialist Madison, Wisconsin. It is socialism, radicalism, hippie, progressive, squared.

The Hongheads have occupied Williamson Street, Willie Street, and Baldwin. About two blocks worth. They are now irritating. All of those hippie, progressive, LGBTQIA plus plus plus plus residents and business owners. Yes, a little capitalism is being exercised and practiced in the Den of Socialism, in the Den of Socialism of Wisconsin. So the Den of Socialism of Madison in the Den of Socialism in Wisconsin. They're complaining. They're saying things like, as a resident trapped in the protest zone, I feel like the protest has turned into a very disrespectful occupation focused on punishing Willie Street. It's now a lawless zone and homeless encampment barricaded on all four sides by groups blocking local residents and businesses from surviving. The city's response. Send salt trucks and snow plows to functions as barricades for the autonomous zone and occupation, plus send porta-potties and trash pickup to the autonomous zone and negotiate with the occupiers, the Hongheads, who are now currently control of the area. That's the city's response. We're going to let them use salt trucks and snow plows as barricades. We're going to send them trash pickup. We're going to have porta potty service. Meanwhile, all the vagrants, all the drug addicts, all the ne'er-do-wells have started to congregate at the area because there's porta-potties and trash pickup. Oh, there's also mutual aid. That's what the left likes to call it, where people are running cases of water. Different types of food items to make sure the occupiers have a fresh supply of food, hand towels, water, you name it. It's now supported by the city of Madison. And by the other socialists in the city of Madison. Meanwhile, the people actually live there in this very eclectic, hippie, progressive, LGBTIQIA plus plus plus neighborhood. That's one of Madison's historic neighborhoods are frustrated. But I'm going to say this. You voted for it. You voted for it. And your girl, Francesca Hong, is going to be. participating in the Democratic gubernatorial candidate debate tonight. Remember, Madison, you voted for this. All of you voted for this. Willie Street, in particular, not that they're listening to me except to hate listen. You voted for it to the person who's frustrated that the Hongheads have occupied and now invited in all of the homeless drug users. You voted for it. That's why the city of Madison is providing.

Part of the mutual aid in the form of porta-potties and trash pickup. You voted for it. It's all you own it. It's great. It's marvelous. Enjoy yourselves. This is what socialism looks like. This is what you want. This is what you want to impose on the entire state of Wisconsin. So enjoy it. This is your utopia. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. So Jessica McBride and I are going to do something that other Wisconsinites won't do. We're going to watch the Democrat debate tonight. She joins me on the program. Yes, it's an hour long, five candidates. And we should learn so much, right? Except that you will see the moderators try to probably evade the critical questions, particularly to Hong about socialism. But in any case... All eyes are on Francesca Hong. They call themselves Hongheads, Jessica. Hong heads. Well, I don't think that's going to help her in Altoona or Lady Smith or Eagle River, right? I mean, she is playing. Yeah, she's playing BLM Agitator right now. And, you know, I guess she lives in her little Dane County bubble. the little Democratic primary bubble or maybe that will help her win the primary, but it's going to be a big liability for her in a general election if she went the primary. I think so, too. So, yeah. That gets us to the potential for what could happen tonight, but we don't know. So what is what is going on and it's clear. Democrats in Wisconsin, the establishment Democrat Party in Wisconsin does not want her. They do not want her. She thinks this agitation in Madison with this Corey Ruiz officer involved shooting, which by the way is right now putting a man at serious threat of, of, you know, death and great bodily harm, the police officer involved in this. But. It's for a political purpose, so who cares? Francesca Hong is using that to try to gin up enthusiasm for socialism, bring the old BLM band back together. In the meantime, you've still got this thing with David Crowley, or I should call him, Dirt McGirk, in the offing, where Democrats are not saying die on that campaign. And the one person no one wants for some reason is Mandela Barnes. Let's dive into this. Yeah, so the debate. I mean, I guess will it be like bumper cars, like watching bumper cars? I think the non-Hong candidates are probably going into this being told you need a moment and you need Hong to slip up. They need Hong to implode. They need to bring the crazy out of her. But I saw her at a forum, and I'll tell you what. She's pretty crafty. So she's going to be soft-spoken, kind of delicate, kind of measured in what she says, and she's pretty good at hiding the crazy in a forum setting. And so that will be interesting. Now, if they all start ganging up on her, I actually think with these sort of anti-establishment people already prone to her.

they're going to see her as kind of the victim of the establishment again, right? So in a way, the establishment candidates. have a pretty tough road, you know, to walk here in this debate. I'm going to watch it for the clown show. You know, I'm going to get out the Carmelcorn and watch it for the entertainment purposes. Because this Democratic primary, Vicki, is just an absolute train wreck. It is. You have now the Democrats who are trying to out Mandela Barnes as using his pack. to pay himself rather than do anything his pack was supposed to do. By the way, yours truly mentioned that on the air after I groked this question, does Mandela Barnes have a job? His job is getting paid by a pack to do absolutely nothing, I guess, except pay himself. So they're outing him on that. Like who cares if I say it? Now we've got a knife Mandela Barnes because we need David Crowley as the alternative to Francesca Hong. Enter the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with the apo piece on Mandela Barnes. But and notice, it was kind of a soft play on the Dirt McGurk story, which is the story of David Crowley having this anonymous social media account where he's. bashing on gay people and women. Oh, that was years ago and it was my dead friend who did it. Okay, move on next. We need David Crowley. And so they kind of soft-souled the Dirt McGirk story. Francesca Hong really hasn't been the subject of too much oppo, honestly. And I guess I'm wondering when they're going to drop the hammer on her. Well, you know, what's interesting is that the liberal media in the state, when it's When it's a Republican versus a Democrat, so once it's Tiffany versus a Democrat, they twist into pretzels to not do. any stories that make the Democrat look bad. You know, we saw this in the last governors and attorney general's races where they just censored so many stories that would have made Call look bad or Evers look bad. They would twist it into pretzels. But you have a different dynamic right now because the APO is being leaked to the liberal media against Democrats by Democrats. Right. So publishing the negative hit pieces about a Democrat helps another Democrat. And so they're doing it. And that's kind of changing the game here. You're definitely right that the establishment, they're pulling every lever they've got to try to get Crowley through. Now, will it be enough? I would be surprised. I think they're going to put millions behind the guy and, you know, get out the vote stuff that you and I aren't seeing because we're not targeted Democrat primary voters. You know, I'm talking about text messages, direct mail.

Robocalls, who knows, maybe negative hip pieces on Mandela, etc. And so, but they have a lot of ground to make up with Crowley. I mean, he was at 3% in the last poll. Now, tomorrow, there's another Marquette poll coming out, apparently, that is going to measure Crowley more recently. So we'll get a sense of where he's at, like, more recently from that. But they have a lot of ground to make up with that guy, and he hasn't had a good, like, first couple weeks back in or first week back in. It was kind of disaster. They tried? Originally when it was Sarah Rodriguez, they were trying to get people, they were asking WAC to let people get access to their absentee ballots to spoil their ballots. If they had voted for Hong or they had voted for Mandela or they had voted for Crowley. They're still at that, but it seems like what their game is, is take whoever was the Mandela, let's do a lot of hit, you know, a lot of negative on Mandela. I mean, you know, just having a scam pack and paying yourself. That's not new. It's not a new thing people do, but it's pretty sleazy. So we'll do the slams on Mandela. See if we can't add Mandela to native David Crowley voters already plus Sarah Rodriguez voters and see if we can cobble together something that can be a half a point. beyond Francesca Hong in this upcoming primary, which is 14 days away. In the meantime, all she's got to do is not mess up. There isn't a lot of oppo to put out on her, except that she had a fling with Mandela Barnes, but you're pretty much the only news outlet that's actually reported on that. And the other is to describe her what she is as a socialist, but that doesn't seem to have made a dent in support for her. Well, and I've advocated that people, maybe we shouldn't use the labels or sort of resort to the labels as much because I think socialist has softened in the public imagination since Bernie Sanders, and the media has tried to sanitize it by bringing up Frank Zidler and the sewer socialist of Milwaukee from decades ago. Whatever. So I've advocated that we start talking about what they actually want to do. And so Francesca Hong belongs to a national socialist group called DSA. She's a card-carrying member. They endorsed her. They're organizing for her. And if you go on their website, what they want to do is in writing. They want to abolish police, prisons, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court, capitalism itself, and the office of the presidency. They want to create a super singular congressional body that would appoint the president. Okay. And the ultimate goal of all of this is eliminating private property rights. Okay. And this can all be found on DSA's website and she belongs to DSA. One thing people forget is that Francesca Hong in a way isn't really a Democrat. I think they also want to abolish.

the establishment Democratic Party. They're hostile to the Democratic Party. So you have this insurgency within like the Democratic Party by this sort of rogue element that isn't exactly the Democratic Party. Yes. I think if she were to win, yeah, her allegiance would be to DSA. It wouldn't be to Wisconsin Democrats. So they have no idea what to do this. They're casting around. The thing that is bizarre to a lot of people is that they did go with Mandela for their establishment plot, and instead they went with Crowley, who was at 3% in the polls. He was lackluster even when he was in. He's an underwhelming personality. He wasn't catching fire. So everyone thinks, well, they must have something really bad on Mandela, or maybe there's a more nefarious motive that some people are trying to preserve their jobs in the governor's office or something. You know, so they're going with the guy that might keep them on or something because, you know, Mandela, as controversial as he is, was their best play, you know, two weeks out of the, from the election. He's the only Democrat in the polls who's been in striking distance of Hong. Well, and that's a weird thing. Battle. Yeah. Crowley sounds like, you know, Crowley sounds, first off, he's incompetent. He can't even figure out how to like pay attention to contracts and make sure people stay insured as the county executive of Milwaukee. He has overseen an absolute disaster when it comes to the criminal justice system in Milwaukee. There's been defer, I mean, all kinds of things that as an executive, he's awful. So there's Mandela without real experience as an executive. But that gives him more of a blank slate. He was basically, you know, the Armandhammer baking soda, the Ivers administration. He was there. He's working on climate change, you know, driving around going to clubs, which I guess is a scandal. But, you know, in this realm, maybe not so much. He almost beat Ron Johnson. He almost beat Ron Johnson. Now, it was a good year. But he almost beat Ron Johnson. So, I mean, why would you not want that guy who's got name-wide or statewide name recognition who is, you know, kind of a known entity, known quantity? We tried to find every piece of oppo on Mandela Barnes when he was running against Ron Johnson. I mean, I think we've wrung out the rag, right? So why David Crowley? What is, why are they knifing Mandela Barnes? I didn't put out the PAC story. in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. That wasn't me. I did that story two weeks ago. Nobody gave a damn. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel does it. Holy cats. It's all everyone's talking about Mandela Barnes is paying himself with a scam pack, yada, yada. Okay. He must be a problem for Crowley now because you want to add the Mandela plus Crowley votes together to see if he can't beat Hong. Well, and to be clear, if it was March, I would have argued their best candidate would be Joel Brennan. However, it's not March. And so this close to the election, I really do believe their strongest play, as problematic as he is, for all the reasons you articulated, would have been Mandela Barnes. Instead, they went with this guy who already quit, who's at 3% in the polls, who has all these management problems at the county, and apparently wasn't vetted very well because of his crazy old X-page.

And they're surrounding around him, creating a narrative of the establishment sort of plotting against Hong, which is actually growing her. And now they've set up a scenario where, you know, because Mandela's not getting out, where Mandela and Crawley just cannibalize each other, helping Hong get through. So it's crazy. It doesn't make sense unless they're sitting on Apo about Barnes. that we don't know about. That's so disastrous. They can't risk, you know, backing the guy. Or like I said, maybe there are people working the governor's office. This is one theory that someone alleged to me that, you know, they've clashed with the other candidates and they know they won't keep them on if they win. And so they're going with the guy who might keep them on. And it's a job security. and they're willing to sacrifice like the party for that chance, I guess. If you look at the DSA types out there on social media, not that this is necessarily scientific. They despise Tony Evers. They think he is a corporate Democrat. They think that he is part of the problem and why, you know, the great, you know. the DSA utopian vision has not already come to pass in Wisconsin. So Tony Evers does not cash the check like he used to as what amounts to the titular head of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. So his endorsement of Crowley isn't necessarily landing like I think they thought it was going to land. It might be helping Hong because it's playing into her narrative that She's this anti-establishment warrior princess or whatever. And, you know, there's now this nefarious establishment plot by shadowy Democratic insiders to stop her. Because there is. Growing her. It's building her. Because there is a nefarious insider democratic plot trying to stop. That's the reason why they think it, because it's real. Jessica McBride, thank you very much for jumping on the program today. Great to have you. Thanks, Vicki. And read the coverage at Wisconsin right now.com. We will take a quick break. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And I have state rep Dan Canodal standing by on the program. You actually put out a press release very recently that made me want to both hug myself and high five you, okay? I cannot believe that in all of these years, with all of these tax increases and massive government spending increases in the high times and the low times, Dan, no one's brought up taxpayer bill of rights since what, 2006? So let's talk about this juicy idea that could save us billions of dollars in Wisconsin. Yes, Vicki, and we certainly are past overdue on this type of effort, so I look forward to it. And, of course, a Republican in the governor's office would make all the difference in the world. But this is really a measure that can clamp down on spending, and if, in fact, we do have surpluses.

like we do now, that those surpluses would have to via constitutional amendment be returned to the taxpayers. Yeah, Tabor, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, that's what it stands for, T-A-B-O-R, T-A-B-O-R, taxpayer Bill of Rights. We talked about this 20 years ago in Wisconsin. And for some reason, it just could not get over the finish line. This is about putting a constitutional amendment to the people for ratification that would say government cannot grow beyond the rate of inflation plus. a growth modifier, whatever that growth modifier would be defined as. But it basically says government can't grow beyond the people's ability to pay for government. Yeah, that's correct. And there are inflationary effects. There's a population and growth. Sometimes there is via the federal government. There's a cost to continue increases. But those should be, again, as you just mentioned, reflected in people's ability to pay. And in fact, what we've discovered in Wisconsin for, well, 16 years now since we did tax cuts, beginning with Governor Walker and even some minor cuts we accomplished through Governor Evers, we have helped people with their affordability issues by keeping more money in their pocket. And in fact, our state revenues have actually increased. So tax cuts can lead to additional state revenues. So we have that growth in revenues to use, if needed, if approved, versus raising taxes. Right, but what we have going on simultaneously is you have the cost of everything else in Wisconsin goes up. So great, I got a tax cut, but my property tax bill went up. My property tax bill went up significantly. Awesome. I got an income tax cut, but my utility bill went up 47%. You know, all of the, and we just saw a record-breaking budget, and the expectation is there's going to be more taxation. And almost all of it was funded. through the surpluses generated from the initial tax cuts in the first place. So tax cuts, pro-growth tax cuts will create economic, an increase in economic activity. That generates more tax revenue, which generated the surpluses. And Tony Evers wanted to spend 100% of that. Plus, we had one-time money from COVID. And so we're going to, if we come into a downturn, it's tax-increased city in Wisconsin. Sure, and this would require that those surpluses are returned to the taxpayers. In this case, we wouldn't have had to even do that bill, the surplus bill that we attempted to do, which included some rebate dollars in other things. This would force the government to automatically return those dollars. Then it's not sitting there burning a hole in the pocket of government as the cliche goes, and the government's going to want to spend those dollars.

Every single budget, Tony Evers put forth, spent the surplus. Every single budget. And every single time, because it was divided government in joint finance at the end of the day, in order to get a budget, someone on the Republican side had to cave on spending. This would, they would take it out of the realm of that. So let's explain this because Colorado has had this in place since 1992. And I just looked it up. Colorado since 1992 has returned $12 billion in surpluses. They don't always have surpluses because there's downtimes, $12 billion in surpluses to the people of Colorado. Government has been restrained by inflation plus population, and then I think they have another modifier. I think it's new construction. So it was inflation plus population plus new construction. And that has resulted. in billions and billions and billions of dollars remitted back to Colorado taxpayers. Colorado, no one is out there saying, my gosh, the roads are falling apart in Colorado or government just doesn't have enough money in Colorado because that ain't true. And they're the only state that had the guts to actually go forward and do this. And that's 34 years ago. And that has remained in place since then and through really a shift in Colorado to the left and a much more liberal control in government. But because it's a constitutional amendment, it's not going to go away and it continues to work. And that is really the effort we should do is through via constitutional amendment. Well, and I remember, I don't know if you were in the legislature back then, Dan, but I remember the first taper was being proposed first as a constitutional amendment, but then it became a piece of legislation. It had morphed itself into just simply a piece of legislation. And that's when everything went sideways. When it wasn't a constitutional amendment, now lobbyists get in on the conversation, et cetera. And the whole thing fell apart. It was just, you know, nobody could agree on anything. You put it to the people, which is what Colorado did. That's why they can't repeal it. They might want to, but they can't. touch it. And that's the thing. No one, like I said, you don't drive into Colorado and say, what a, what a crappy state this is because they have artificial constraints. I think we should have this for the federal government too. That was Ron Johnson's idea of cut cap imbalance. It's very similar to Tabor, but it doesn't, it, at this time where we've got a 400 year property tax increase, that's jacking people's property taxes on average of 8% a year. And mine was more than that. Mine was 17. Some people had 50% increases. When you're seeing the amount of money that's going out of your pocket for no good reason, 47% increase in our utility bills and they go up every year, this makes sense because then we look at the state budget and we say, what are you guys doing? Why are you spending more money? We're dying out here. You've already got enough.

And that's right. And we can do this as a piece of legislation, and I look forward to doing that. A Republican and the governor's office would be key for that. And then ideally to get into the Constitution. So as in Colorado's situation, it's locked in. And there's not going to be any will from the tax-paying public to... to rescind something like that when they know it has kept their government in check and in fact even provided dollars back to them. that they had overpaid. Yeah, they wanted a court to overturn it, and they made a couple of runs, could not get a court to overturn it. By the way, there's a few, there's a number of things. Nobody wants to vote to repeal Act 10 in Wisconsin, which was even more aggressively, you know, pro-Wisconsin taxpayer than even a taxpayer bill of rights is. And so they're relying on the courts to do it for them. That's, I mean, the 400-year property tax increase, nobody really wanted to vote for that thing. And so the courts is where Tony Evers runs to to get that, you know, embedded permanently. And so, and the Republicans, because at the time, you can't, you know, you don't have a veto override for Tony Evers. All of your attempts to repeal that tax increase have just, you know, gone by the wayside. And so, I mean, that's, you know, relying on, if you got to rely on courts, you know, that's a lot harder. for a piece of popular legislation to get something undone than it is, you know, to try to put something forward that says, let's have a proactive tax increase here. And that's the thing. We're dying in Wisconsin because, you know, as pro-growth as it might be, big tax increases and high utility costs and an out-of-control government means people don't want to locate their businesses here like they did back when Scott Walker was governor. Well, absolutely. The tax climate affects everything. And you need those additional, those businesses to continue and to invest in Wisconsin. And if they're going to be successful, that's going to lead to increased wages and help people with their affordability issues. We do have a great opportunity this year in November on the November ballot to be a constitutional amendment to knock out the Tony Evers 400-year veto. method. So the constitutional men would say that a governor cannot create a new tax or tax increase via veto. Yeah, yeah. I should remind people that there are a whole bunch of reasons to vote this November. That's one of them. So that is one of them. That takes care of permanently takes care of those shenanigans. Something I want to ask though, and this is now, I mean, we need a Republican governor because the governor has been granted so much authority. by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Functionally, the governor can create law by assigning executive agencies to write rules, and you don't really get to say anything about it. And that's something that you have to understand that authority, taking it away from we the people, is the likelihood that that will be abused is high.

And so, you know, what can we do? I mean, if Tom Tiffany's governor, obviously, is it a legislative fix? What is it to turn back control over rulemaking to the people we elected to do it? Sure, and we did make efforts, our red tape review type package of legislation, which was vetoed. And so we'll continue to do that, to do legislatively everything that we can. As you mentioned earlier, the courts are against us and are now overturning some of these statutes or provisions. So the courts and the governor's office have continued and stepped up. their game to make the legislature irrelevant. Right. And that is what we're in, quite honestly, I've been in committee meetings where the Democrat representatives have gone along with that. And I've thrown it right on the table. So are you kidding me? You're dismissing and tossing away your own authority. They don't mind. So that we have work to do as well. Well, yeah, and the thing is, like I said, you can't like going to the people and saying, hey, let's repeal Act 10 and you guys all get a $33 billion tax increase. That's not going to happen. So use the courts. Use the courts to do it instead and say, it wasn't me. It was the courts. It was some outside group. It was the courts. That's the new thing. And that's, you know, nobody would vote to say, hey, let's take away the legislature's authority to govern rulemaking, which has the force of law, basically lawmaking. Nobody would vote for that. You know, nobody would say, oh, yeah, let's go on the campaign trail and say, I want to represent you so that you don't have any voice in the legislature. Nobody's voting for that. Use the courts instead. Again, why you want to embed things in the Constitution, like a taxpayer bill of rights, I think we should consider embedding Act 10 in the Constitution or embed in the Constitution, an absolute prohibition on a governor ever pulling a stunt like Tony Evers' 400-year veto ever again. But, you know, in the meantime, people have to be educated the importance of their representation in the legislature itself. Yeah, absolutely. That is we are the closest to the people. And we are the voice. That's what our representative republic is all about. So we'll continue the end. But it all comes down to elections, who is put into office to represent you. And we've got great candidates coming up. And I hope people will follow through. And like you say, to recognize the importance of those legislative elections. Yeah, we can't lose the... And we will try and make every effort to get our authority back that's been diminished. And constitutional amendment is one way to go about it. Yeah, and I'm for Tabor. Taxpayer Bill of Rights, people, look it up. It's awesome. Dan Canodal, thank you so much for joining me. Very good. Thank you, Vicki. So long. And we will take a break on the Vicki McKenna Show. That is going to do it for me on the program this afternoon. Tomorrow we are going to dive into the Anthony Fauci Diaries, the secret diaries of Anthony Fauci released for public consumption for the very first time. Senator Ron Johnson will join me on the program.