Lars Larson Northwest Podcast 2026-08-14

Hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. Are you ready? Friday, Friday, Friday. Welcome to First Amendment Friday on the Lars Sons show. Friday is for everybody. Today, Lars puts you in the driver's seat. You talk about what you want to talk about. Government is the problem. No topic is off limits. They look like the Canadians are here. Call 866. Hey Lars. That's 866. Hey Lars. Thank you. Friday. Happy Friday. This is. This is. It is. First Amendment Friday with Lars Larson. Funding you. You're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. Imagine this. Your family has been in the ranching business for many decades. You own a large amount of land. And, of course, on that land, you have places where the stock can get water. stock ponds or stock provisions for being able to supply water to the animals on your land. And then along comes the State Department of Ecology to some extent backed up by the federal government and says, you know, you're breaking the rules and you're doing it enough. We might have to find you so much that you'll end up handing over your entire ranch. That is the situation, I believe, of Wade and Teresa King. John Stoll Miller joins me now, who's the executive director at the Washington State Water Resources Association. John, welcome back to the program, and would you mind telling my audience about the plight of Wade and Teresa King? Yeah, thank you so much for the chance to be with you today, Lars. So really short story here. It's been a long time and running. But so back, it's been, gosh, four years now, I think, total. And the King's got notice from ecology that they had done some activity, which was a normal ag practice that the Natural Resource Conservation Service considers a natural practice, which is stock pond, digging out stockponds. So Wade and Teresa got this notice. They got this fine. And actually, when they found out the fine and the media coverage happened about the same time. So they got blasted in the media by ecology saying these ranchers did these horrible things to the environment. And so Wade and Teresa have been fighting back on that since then. So the core of the issue is they have historic, we call it stock ponds, but really they're just.

You dig a depression in the dry country. This is country of three to five inches of rainfall a year, not downtown Seattle, right? So there's a very light rainfall. And so obviously for cattle operations in particular, you need water, as you had mentioned. And so there's a practice called dugouts. And so they get depression, water catches, maybe get some groundwater too. But it comes up, makes a pond for the cattle to drink out of. They've been doing this. for literally, well, 50, 60, 70 years. And all of a sudden, when they did the clean out in the 2022, ecology said, oh, this is violations. These are wet ones, and they're a distinct one. And so that's where it sits is ecology came after them, 200, I forgot, 270,000-ish fine. And criminal charges were potentially going to be brought into the mix. And that's what the Kings have been fighting back against. Okay, and are the kings literally at the point where if the fines were successful, the state of the federal government ends up owning their ranch? And they have quite a large ranch, don't they? They do. They do. They operate on well. It's smaller now because of the grazing lands of the Department of Natural Resources were yanked out from underneath them, the leases for that, that ground. But they have, I can't remember the acreage, but it's in the tens of thousands of acres that they run the cattle on. And so there's an estimate of repairing the ground, you know, for that, taking it back to original condition or whatever. And it's very significant. Well, well more. It's millions of dollars, isn't? Correct. And so that's in the mix now. And so they're pushing back against that notion that, you know, one, these ponds do not meet the definition of a wetland in the first place. And so then the law has been inappropriate applied. But yes, so if it sticks and they don't get relief. they could they would be broke yes and by the way when you said they got the dnr the department of natural resources lands yanked out from under them was it because of these fines and they yeah so yes absolutely directly from um as as the media campaign by ecology and those fines the ecology put pressure on dnr and said you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna stop those leases to this perpetrator. And so in the end, ultimately, the department said, okay, we can't have this. So they basically complied with ecology. So they basically decided that Wade and Teresa King are guilty, and they will be punished. And yet, has there really been any kind of formal finding? Have they had a chance to have their due process before the state imposes a punishment? No, no, and it sits there. And they were judged pretty harshly in the court of public opinion, you know, with the articles that ran by the Department of Ecology. And that set the stage. It said everybody on edge. So if you read those articles, you'd say, boy, these are rotten ranchers. They need to be, you know, strung up because of what the awful things they did. But the facts never really backed it up. The natural resource conservation service, the federal agency.

was even considering removing them from the farm program because of this. And they have since backed up. And if you've followed the media, the federal agencies are sort of backing, not sort of, they're backing the Kings and saying, let's get some due process into this mix. Well, and not only that, but John, tell me if I'm wrong, if you go out in the eastern part of the state of Washington, and it's dry out there, and you create these stock ponds that are available for your livestock, they're also available to every bit of wildlife that's out there as well. So they have that side benefit that doesn't cost anything, and it benefits the wildlife, too, doesn't it? Absolutely. You see animals as well as the, you know, waterfowl enjoy these ponds and there's no harm done to the environment because they're in a confined space. They're not, you know, it's not like they run the spoils from it, runs down into a stream or whatever. These are perched areas and they're, but they provide wildlife benefit as well as stock benefit, yes. So what's the damage supposed to have been that the king's engaged in that justifies this kind of action against them? So it's, that's the right question. The Department of Ecology is saying that they went in and they disturbed wetlands in doing their stockpunt, in just cleaning out their stock. It's just cleaning out historic. depressions that were stock bonds. They silt in over time, right? They get foliage and whatever. Well, of course, I mean, if they're full water, they're going to get mud, they're going to get stuff, you know, dropping off the sides of the bank, and it's going to fill it in. So if you don't dig it back out, the pond's going to eventually disappear, isn't it? Absolutely. And so that's it's a standard practice. Like I say, the department or the federal natural resource conservation service has a practice. It's actually an ag practice that is related to the stockponds. And that's what the Kings were doing. That historic is what ranchers in the dry country do all the time. How soon are we going to find out what the ultimate decision is going to be on the Kings, John? Oh, man. You know, it's what, what are we four years-ish into this so far? And no particular movement for the Kings. There is, in the next short period of time, they're seeking to have a trial by jury rather than by a court of public opinion, frankly, right, or just the agency going after them. So there's... there's some movement, there's some activity that Kings have been bringing legal action backwards. Well, let's hope that they get some action. And I'd love to see him show in front of a jury in eastern Washington and have them decide that decision. That is John Stoll Miller, who is Executive Director of the Washington State Water Resources Association. Back in a moment, you're listening to the Lars Larson Show. And you're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show.

Hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. Speak now. Your piece. 866, Hey Lars. That's 866 Hey Lars. Now, back to the Lars Lars-Larsen show. You're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. You know, whenever I talk about a subject where you might accuse me... I'll tell you what, in the interest of full disclosure, I was born overseas because my dad was deployed overseas. Now, that was a long, long time ago. And my mom had already got out of the Navy, but she was pregnant with me, and she went over to join him, and so I was born overseas. Now, that's not the kind of deployment we're talking about that really takes a toll on families back home. More often and more recently, we've talked about people deployed to Afghanistan, people deployed to Iraq. And so there's a concern about that. Well, there's a brand new app out there that is called Brave Connected that aims to help spouses and kids stay connected during those long separations. And I thought we'd talk about it with Madeline del Seuss, who is the new or the co-creator of this new app. Madeline, welcome to the program. Hi, Lars. Thank you for having me. And you're from a military family, aren't you? Yes, my husband's a first sergeant in the Army National Guard. Is he deployed right now, or has he been deployed? He has been deployed, but he's not right now. Very good. So what is it you intended to do with this that makes, or without it, makes connections so hard to maintain during these long deployments? So right now, all of the current tools available usually require you to be online at the same time. So FaceTime and calls. And what makes us special is you can pre-record video voice and text in advance and deliver it at a certain time for families. So you can record a bedtime story. You can record a good morning message. or just a check-in when you know you won't be able to be available for your family. You can still show up. And part of that probably accommodates the fact that sometimes the people who are on these long deployments are on the other side of the planet, and they're 10 or 12 hours off the clock their family is on back at home, right?

Exactly. Yeah, time zones are a major problem for the current communication tools that are out there. Well, and in fact, Madeline, I have to tell you a few years ago, I mean, when we had people in Afghanistan, I kept getting emails from a gentleman, and I said, where are you emailing from? He said, well, and he named the town, and it was in Afghanistan, and I said, I didn't realize you were there. He said, oh, yeah, I said, well, how do you listen to my show? Because it's on the other side of the clock. And he said, oh. He said, I have to do PT every day. So while I'm asleep back here in the United States, having done the show, he's listening to the podcast of the show in the middle of his day in Afghanistan. And that was one of the nicest compliments I'd ever had. But you realize that if you're a family and you want to reach out to dad by FaceTime, even if he's within some kind of internet availability, it might be wake the kids up at 2 o'clock in the morning so they can talk to dad or mom. Exactly. And that's the hurdle we're trying to help solve. It's, you know, we're hearing that families are going days and weeks with no contact because these are the only options. And we're just trying to offer something, a real readiness solution that will help bridge that gap. Was this tough to put together technologically? Because I don't know that I could create an app like that. I'd have to rely on somebody else who knows Internet and apps a whole lot better than I do. That's exactly what we're doing. We've hired a reputable development firm here in Oregon, and they know what they're doing. Their privacy and security are top of mind in every future that we have. So we're really relying on them to help pull this together for us and make it everything that it needs to be. Now, from our end of the connection, it's not as big as security concern, but I would imagine did you have to work at all with the U.S. military to make sure that if you created this app, that the messages that were being sent could actually be viewed by the service member on the other end when it gets through all of the security that they're up against on the Internet? Yeah, we have met with the National Guard here in Oregon, and we're working to make sure that everything is exactly how it needs to be for those security purposes. And so, yeah, that's the main issue for us. And so they've been really supportive with helping us to know what needs to be done to roll us out to family. Okay, so how do people get a hold of Brave connected? So if you want to get a hold of us to support us in any way, our website is the braveconnected.com. And you can find out more about our features. You can watch our campaign video or you can contact us there. Okay, so what does it cost? I mean, do you mind saying? Oh, no. So the goal is to really make this free for military families. Oh, good for you. That's really, thank you. Everything costs money and have something as honest God free, especially because military families aren't always, you know, long in the paycheck department, are there?

Exactly. No. And so, you know, we want this to really be an asset for them and something they can rely on and a source of support before they deploy for the entire family. And so we're really seeking sponsors and partnerships that will allow us to bring this to life for military families at no cost. And so in order to do that, That's what we're seeking, and that's been a challenge, just getting those introductions right now to make this available. But it will be on the app store. I'm sorry, Madeline, go ahead. I was going to say that if it is on the app store, it's $9.99 a month for a military family. Okay. And if people reach out to us and say, hey, I might want to help sponsor that, what would their involvement be? We would love to partner with organizations that have a shared mission and we can explore what that would look like, but we just want to make sure that we can work together in a way that suits our mission, which is to have no ads on our platform and make it a child safe environment. Yeah, and that's a challenge too, because you want kids to be able to reach out to mom or dad if they're in the military, but you don't want to expose them because the Internet, unfortunately, is also a place where an awful lot of perverts and bad people congregate. Exactly. And that's, it's one of the main problems with the communication tools that are out there right now. They're not designed for children. There's algorithms, ads, and just it's not a safe place to be. And so that's top of mind for us, is to make this a very child-centric platform. Very good. And then, and then the recorded videos, how long, I mean, are they limited in size or anything like that? That is one of the challenges and what makes these platforms so costly is the video storage and all that on the back end. But we do want this to be someplace where the family knows, like, this is where I want to upload my video. This is how I get it to my family. So we really want to eliminate those types of constraints. Madeline, tell people again how they can get a hold of Brave Connecting. If you'd like to learn more or support us in any way, our website is The BraveConnected.com. Very good. Madeline Delsuz, who is the co-creator of a new app called Brave Connected to connect deployed moms and dads with their family.

Portland's News, Traffic and Weather. Have something to say, but don't want to talk? Email Lars and talk at Larslarson.com. Now, back to the Lars Larson Show. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm glad to get to your phone calls and email. So the Supreme Court has weighed in, and they struck down a crazy California law. Now, that's not exactly news. California has lots of crazy laws. The Supreme Court lately has been called upon over and over again to bring us back to something like common sense. So let me sort this out because an awful lot of the headlines when this story broke about the Supreme Court's 6 to 3 decision. have to have double or almost triple negatives in them so california has a law that says if your kid is going through a sexual transition you the teachers are not allowed to tell the parents and then the supreme court comes in and says i think properly You're not allowed to have that law. Now, if I've outlined all that accurately, if I haven't, Corey DeAngelis, I'm sure we'll be glad to correct me. Corey is an education research fellow at Heritage. Corey, welcome back to the program. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Hey, I'm glad to see this decision come, but it just seems like common sense to me. How dare the schools keep secrets about kids from the parents of those kids? Yes. Totally crazy. This has been going on for years. There were some conservative school districts, actually, in California, like Chino Valley Unified School District, for example, they were trying to pass some simple policies years ago to have some transparency that said, you know, if the child changes their gender at school, maybe the parents should know about that, and how about we go ahead and inform those parents? That was some form of local control. You had some conservative school districts doing this in California. And then their attorney general, Rob Bonta, laid down the law from the state level, subverted local control, and went further, tried to wedge himself between the parent and the child relationship, and basically tried to take people's kids away from them by trying to say, you know what, we're going to keep secrets from these parents. And, you know, the federal judge, even before it went up to the Supreme Court. had ruled on the side of parents when he said that this caused a trifecta of harm. Keeping secrets of parents obviously conflicted with the rights of the parents to direct the upbringing of their child. That's a 14th Amendment violation. But it also goes further than that. When you're keeping secrets from parents as a government entity, you're also harming the teacher because the teacher might not want to to play into the child delusion. That could conflict with their First Amendment right to free speech, and also their right to freely exercise their religion if their religion is in conflict with changing your gender on a whim. By the way, and by the way, I think Rob Bonta is a real piece of work is the best way to describe it when keeping it clean enough for the radio. But this bizarre idea.

And it seems to come from one side of the political aisle. I know there are people who want to have moral equivalents. Well, both sides do it. No, you only find Democrats standing up like, who was it, was it McColliffe back in the Commonwealth of Virginia saying, you parents have no business telling us what we teach your kids about. And that attitude does not seem to get corrected, even when they get decisions like this one saying, you're not allowed to do this to an entire state like California. That's a good point. And even though we wanted the Supreme Court yesterday on this issue, it should have been unanimous. I don't know why in the world. We have three. crazy liberal justices who, well, one of them doesn't know what a woman is. Well, I was going to say, well, you know, poor Ketanji Brown Jackson is not a biologist, so she can't tell you if a man with breasts is actually a man or not. I just suggest if he doesn't have clothes on, look down below his belt buckle. I think you'll be able to figure it out without the biology degree. But she seems to come up with excuses all day long about why she doesn't know stuff. Exactly. And, Lars, we've seen this movie before last year. We had a Supreme Court victory called Mahmood v. Taylor, which allowed parents to opt their kids at a gender, transgender insanity in schools. If they want to, you know, not read a certain book or if the kid wants to get out of a certain lesson because it conflicts with their religious values, we won on the Supreme Court on that issue 6-3 as well last year. But then you already have other states. They're already issuing these ridiculous opinions saying, well, you know, they're splitting hairs. They're saying, well, Well, in this one particular instance, this school district is using materials that have to do with gender identity, not gender ideology. And so they're doing this thing to try to – it's this ping pong back and forth between the Supreme Court and all these activist judges that were basically put into office by teachers' unions going against the will of the parents. And so – I bet you you're going to have some more problems. This isn't the end of the story here in California. You know there's going to be some rogue districts who try to still keep secrets from parents. But that's just, you know, parents' eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. They need to make sure they're continuing to pay attention and don't believe that just because we won at the high court that, you know, the whole game is over and we can take our football, go home and call it a day. We still have to pay attention. Ask your children what's going on at school. Make sure you're still involved so that you can hold them accountable if they run afoul of the wall. By the way, Corey DeAngelis, the gentleman I'm talking to, is an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Here's where I see something that I think is an even deeper, I guess, indoctrination of the kids. We were all kids at one point. Did our parents tell us, don't lie to me about things? And they did. and did some of us tell lies or fibs are big or small to our parents, probably, about all kinds of things. You know, did you do your homework last night? Did you go to bed on time, et cetera? But here we've got a government institution that is telling the kids it's not only acceptable to lie to your parents, and we will participate in a lie, but we're going to tell you that for the teachers...

it actually may be a punishable or fireable offense if they don't support you in that lie. Imagine kids raised with that understanding. I can lie to my parents. The government thinks it's okay. And in fact, they've told the people hired to be my teachers that if they don't participate in the lie, they're going to get fired. That is bizarre and toxic, isn't it? Yeah, and there's that trifective harm. The parents' rights are being subverted. The teacher's rights are being violated, and the kids are being actively harmed, too. They're young and impressionable minds, and they don't know what's going on at a very young age. And you have government agents basically putting their thumb on the scale to try to pressure them into transgender insanity that's going to hurt them for the rest of their lives. What if they go transition through surgeries? Those are irreversible procedures, even when you're just using puberty blockers. A lot of that is irreversible as well, and it harms those children for the rest of their lives. There's even lawsuits in states like New York that just came out where the jury actually awarded the victim, the child, who's now 22 years old, $2 million in damages. And they found the psychologist and the surgeon. liable for the damages that they did transitioning a young child. And so I think we're going to see some more lawsuits like this. That's the only way. organizations start to back off where it hurts. Absolutely right. That's Corey DeAngelis from Heritage. This U.S. Supreme Court is now struck in California's law that told teachers to hide the gender identity of children from their parents. And it was a six-three vote. Again, Ketanji Brown Jackson on the wrong end of that one.

Hold in your home. Hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. Lucky Hands. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just games, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. ago, can't listen to Lars Live? No problem. Get the podcast 24-7 at Larslarsen.com. Now, more with Lars Larson. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson show. It's a pleasure to be with you on a Monday and live on the Radio Northwest Network now. I understand this is going to sound terribly old-fashioned to you. But I'm one of those people who thinks if you had hundreds of millions of dollars missing from some state-sponsored programs, that means the hundreds of millions, is taxpayer money that may now have been flushed down the drain or literally put into the hands of thieves and criminals and fraud artists, you would think... That's the kind of thing that an attorney general in a state would say, we're going to go after those dollars, we're going to find the people who took them, they're going to go to prison, the dollars are going to go back to where they originally belong. Except that right now, it sounds more to me like the attorney general of the state of Washington is running interference for child care fraud. So. I thought I'd get on T.J. Martineau, who's an author, writer, and award-winning reporter. TJ, it's good to have you back on the program, although I understand you have another hot story. If you want to mention that, feel free. Yeah, I just dropped a story about records I obtained of communication between the Attorney General's Office of Washington State and state lawmakers on how the new millionaires tax is intended to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that does not allow progressive income tax. So they're trying to overturn centuries worth of legal president so that they can impose a progressive income tax on pretty much anyone they want.

If we're going to stick with that for a second, TJ, is it the job of the Attorney General to say, let's see if we can create new, I guess, law, I guess case law is what you'd call it, because statutory law is kind of the legislature rights. Case law is when the courts make a decision. He's saying you're running up against 100 years of case law, but maybe we can get it overturned, and the Attorney General is going to play a role in that? Yes, they helped craft the bill so that it would specifically force the court if there was a lawsuit that got to the Supreme Court. They would have to take up this 1933 case. And so they said, you know, make sure to call it a millionaire's tax or an income tax. Don't call it an excise tax because then the Supreme Court can get it, avoid dealing with it. And they also wrote legal memos that I obtained. One was sent to the governor's office explaining why they believe that the 1933 decision was wrong and here's, you know, what could happen. So it's the Attorney General's office also the Solicitor General was the one who advised or recommended or just pointed out putting an emergency clause in the bill so that it would prevent a referendum this November so voters couldn't vote on it. So they did it not because they can't exactly say we have to have an emergency clause on it because it's an emergency because they aren't even planning to get money from this for another three years, are they? So you can't exactly say it's an emergency, so we really need the money three years from now, but it's an emergency right now. So you can't allow a vote on it because that would allow people to vote on it. So they just want to find an excuse for why they should lock the public out of voting on it? I mean, that raises a question because if there's an initiative that voters end up, there's enough signatures for an initiative and it is upheld and then challenged, the Attorney General's Office is going to be the one that's going to be defending an initiative that's going against a law that they help craft. So. It's, for, you know, for some people that this all might be a little confusing, but it just raises a question of whether or not the Attorney General's office should be advising legislators on how to get Supreme Court rulings overturned. And also, the purpose of the bill should be to raise revenue, but instead its primary purpose, according to his emails, is to get around. a 1933 Supreme Court decision that if they want to do a progressive income tax, they're going to have to go to voters and they're going to have to get a constitutional amendment put into our state constitution that allows it because we passed an amendment back in the 30s that said that all property has to be taxed the same rate based on class. and income is considered to fall within the definition of property in our state, and it's defined as all things tangible and intangible subject to ownership. What they're trying to make the case is that your income is not your property under the Washington State Constitution, so this doesn't apply to that. That's what they're going to try. So in other words, when my boss writes a check to me for my every, you know, twice a month paycheck, it's not actually my property when I get that money? It doesn't belong to me?

That is what they're trying to make the legal case for in these memos. And they know that other states don't treat income as property, but the problem is that our state constitution has one of the broadest definitions of property you could possibly imagine. And that was noted in the 1933 decision that there's no way that income does not fall under this definition. And every single Supreme Court in our state since 1933 has said the exact same thing. So that's where we are. Hey, before we run out of time, I'm talking to T.J. Martin L. from the Center Square. Tell my audience what the Attorney General is also doing to try to shield the folks who are committing fraud. Why in the world is he doing that? Well, so what's interesting is I got a record back. It was this email that was sent by a former federal, regional manager for the Office of Child Care. And he was writing to somebody in our state of Train General's office last December when the Somalian daycare fraud allegations were arising. And he openly says in the email that fraud in programs like child care is common. Like, this is a common thing that goes on. And so that's the interesting thing is he's openly saying that fraud is common. And so it raises questions as to how the Attorney General's office reacted to this message. Yeah, because you'd think if it's common and you're taking the taxpayers money and you're doing two kinds of harm, you're taking money the taxpayers gave up, which was allocated to a problem. And it's not going to the problem, it's going to the fraud artist. And every time a dollar goes to the fraud artist instead of the cause that lawmakers put it to, then that's cheating the people who are intended to be the beneficiaries of this. They're losing out so the fraud, the fraud artist can win. And now the Attorney General's office is saying, yeah, we don't care that this is common. We're not going to go after it. Well, that's the question that we're going to be finding out. The Attorney General's Office, to be fair, doesn't investigate child care fraud. But this email came out the day after Nick Brown put out a statement criticizing independent journalists who were going to these alleged daycare centers and finding no kids. And some of them didn't even look like anybody. You know, it just looked suspicious. And the reaction was, you know, don't go to these places. And the other thing is that. State lawmakers and a lot of other state officials sought to basically say that there's no fraud going on, and that DCYF had safeguards in place to prevent this. You have a former federal official of the Office of Child Care saying it is common. And in fact, he said it's not just Somalian daycare centers, it's just everybody. So implying that the problem is much bigger. Exactly right. That is T.J. Martineau from the Center Square. He's a great award-winning reporter from the Seattle area.

The Lars Larson Show. FM News 101. Morning people wake up for peace and quiet. McDonald's breakfast people? We wake up for the sweet rush of getting that warm, delicious breakfast right before it ends. Hotcakes, sausage patty, hash browns, scrambled eggs, biscuit, real butter and syrup. You know how our big breakfast got its name, and you know where your whole family can share one for just $6. McDonald's. Limited time only, price and participation may vary cannot be combined with any other offer or a combo meal. Welcome to First Amendment Friday on the Lars Larson show. Friday is for everybody. Today, Lars puts you in the driver's seat. You talk about what you want to talk about. The government is the problem. No topic is off limits. They look like the Canadians are here. Call 866. Hey Lars. That's 866. Hey Lars. Thank you. It's Friday. Happy Friday. This is... First Amendment Friday with Lars Larson. Farm that you are. You're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. I think there's a case to be made, and the perfect man to make it is Reagan Dunn, that Seattle has set itself up, like all the other sanctuary cities that have chosen to be sanctuaries for illegal aliens. They have set themselves up to be very much at risk when it comes to the threat of terrorist acts in their cities. And Seattle's a great example of that. So I thought I'd bring on King County Councilman Reagan Dunn. Councilman Dunn, welcome back to the program. How are you? Lars, I'm good, Lars. Thanks for having me on. And by the way, would you mind telling my audience about your background in anti-terrorism activities? Because it really positions you better than probably anybody else in King County to comment knowledgeably on this. Sure. I was at the U.S. Department of Justice served as a federal prosecutor in several places working anti-terrorism cases and had top secret security clearance and also Iran President Bush's national effort to fight gun violence. And then somebody elected me and here I am in a sanctuary county. Yeah, and this is, do you think your fellow council members agree and admit that they have put themselves at risk by having policies that say, not only are we not going to help out ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies, but we may actually actively work against what ICE and those other agencies are doing? I think it's... They're blissfully naive about the very real security threat that they have put 2.4 million people in by continuing to push sanctuary policies at all levels, including just yesterday, deciding they're going to put a moratorium on any kind of jail use or building at all, including ICE facilities. And so, yeah, they're putting people at risk. I don't think they think they think about it and what I'm trying to stop.

is them being forced to think about it because some kind of a domestic terrorist-related situation here in the Pacific Northwest. I mean, one of the latest things I saw was that Washington stayed along with Oregon and about 20 other states have actually filed amicus briefs. And they're actively working to say, we don't want to cooperate with ICE. In fact, we want to work at CrossPurps. This city of Seattle just voted unanimously to tell their police to start tracking ICE down and see if they can find the ICE or CBP agents breaking any laws. So I guess they envision the day where Seattle police would actually take ICE agents into custody, slap on the handcuffs, and walk them down to the jail. I mean... How do you correct that kind of nonsense? Well, tell them first to read the Constitution and laws of the United States, which say local government don't have any oversight into federal border security related matters. ICE and CPB being two of the late agencies in that area. They don't have jurisdiction. You want to do that, go run for Congress. They don't. And sadly, you know, first of all, it needs to be held unconstitutional. by the U.S. Supreme Court, we're going in that direction. But in addition to security threats, right, where, you know, they're just putting a big flashing neon sign on the space needle saying, hey, everybody from out of the country, whether you've broken a law or not, come here, we'll pay for everything. We won't check your criminal background, come illegally, and you can be safe here. In addition to that stupidity, it's also costing taxpayers in King County. tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars every year and services that they have to provide to support these folks that come here to take advantage of that flashing neon sign and the sanctuary policies that exist. I'm talking to Councilman Reagan Dunn from the King County Council. And this thing is not going to be short term. It's not as though Trump is going to change the policies that he ran on the first time, ran on the second time. Americans voted for explicitly the second time when he said, look, I'm going to have a mass roundup of illegal aliens. And Americans voted. And that was his, I would argue that was his biggest single issue. Well, he had others like tax cuts and things like that. That was his signature issue. And Americans said, yeah. that's what we want. Is King County in our cities like Seattle just not paying attention to what the citizens are saying? You know, it was the, I agree with you, it was the key issue that Trump won on. It was securing our borders the way Biden had handled just open borders policies and the drama that it was creating inside the United States. I think what happened is, and it's interesting because Kristi Noem was let go today and a great guy. Mark William Allen. Yeah, Markwayne Mullin, who is a guy I know who supported me in the past. A nice guy, Senator from Oklahoma, is doing it. But I think we were winning on that issue, and we still are generally securing the borders. I think the Minneapolis thing maybe started to take that issue away from us a little bit. They're focused on that, but that is old news now. We are now in an armed conflict with Iran, the single greatest state sponsor of terrorism.

They're playing for keeps, and I don't want to panic people, but they have every reason to create domestic terrorism action inside the United States to try and erode support for the war. So, you know, the liberal Democrats in downtown Seattle, the progressors on the King County Council, it's still a losing issue for them. It's a losing issue nationally. And, you know, if they want to keep fighting that, but unfortunately, it's someday. So in one of these cities, and it could be in the coming days or weeks, you're going to see the effects on a national security-related level because of those sanctuary policies. Well, let me ask you, Counselman Dunn, do you suspect that that's exactly what we saw on a relatively small scale when apparently an unhappy Muslim who had come into the United States and been made a citizen showed up at a bar in Texas and murdered a bunch of people? and wearing a shirt that says property of Allah. I mean, I don't think he could have transmitted his grievances more clearly. Now, it could turn out to be a giant, you know, coincidence, and it was actually a romantic entanglement of some kind or whatever. But that happened the day after the attack started on Iran. Yeah, Lars, he had a shirt of the Iranian flag underneath that sweatshirt. So, yeah, that is what we call in the business a lone wolf actor for whatever reason. He was, of course, in the country. He'd come into the country from another country. Yeah, and that's the kind of thing. You know, I worry about the lone wolf actors. I worry, you know, and again, I don't want to panic people, but I worry about a coordinated... multi-front attack at the same time where public centers and multiple jurisdictions are attacked at the same time, the people create, you know, panic in hysteria. Those are the kinds of things that I worry about. That's why, you know, paid to worry about those things, even as an elected official. So, yeah, I think we've already seen it. Well, we'll probably see it again. Reagan, are we just waiting to have one really big, bad incident like that before everybody says, oh, the light bulb went on. Now we realize we've got a problem. Is that what is going to take? Yeah, that or the U.S. Supreme Court addresses this issue squarely and stops this nonsense. Local jurisdictions do not have the ability to make federal immigration policy. I need to stop trying soon as the Supreme Court rules. But yeah, the other thing is to just dramatically shift public perceptions on the issue. Let's pray that doesn't happen, but domestic... security issue would certainly lead to that public opinion changing real fast. I think you may be right. That's Reagan Dunn. He is a member of the King County Council, and we're always glad to have him on the show. You're listening to The Best of the Lise Larson Show.

America's 250. Hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. Lucky hands. Lucky hands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. Lucky hands, sweeps coins all through the lands, calling now come join the No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. National, Lars, has you covered. Call him from anywhere. 866, Hey, Lars. Now, back to the Lars Larson Show. You're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. I want to make this clear to you. I think the public school system that is run by the government is a failure. And the government refuses to admit that it's a failure. But one of the biggest failures is that they can't plan ahead to make sure that the needs of all the kids are met. And I've got a perfect example of that right here. Bruce Anderholt joins me now, who's the parent of a flex child. And Bruce, welcome back to the program. You've been on before. Would you mind telling my audience what a flex student is? Yeah, it's a pleasure to be back, Lars. Flex is just a small school of choice. It's actually a comprehensive college prep, public high school, but it's self-selected group of kids. They only have 80 to 90 kids, and they're there for a reason. Typically, they chose the school because it's small, because they need a structure and a consistency that they don't get at those large format high schools. They've been very successful, but they're trying to close it down. And a college prep... school, meaning that the kids there are serious students, and they want to make sure that they are qualified to be able to go on to college when that's appropriate, right? Exactly right. Yeah, it's a six-period comprehensive high school. We had a disagreement with the district initially because there's laws that surround the closing of a public high school, and I think the district wanted to avoid that by saying it's simply a program that's located at what they call the Lewis and Clark campus. So what are they doing tonight that's so significant? Well, tonight is the formal hearing where they're actually going to discuss the closure, why the closure is necessary. They're going to listen to public comments for the first time. They have to listen to our comments. So tonight it's on the agenda. We've never been on the agenda before. We're excited to have this opportunity, but we are concerned that they made this decision basically in December. And you think they made the decision already and that this is just, what, public relations to have the hearing tonight? We've obligated them to follow the law, and the kids were told to pick a new school as early as January. They had a deadline, we talked about this last time, they had a deadline February 23rd for the schools of choice. Basically, this whole time the district has encouraged our kids to pick a new school before they've ever voted to close the existing school. And it's very important because about 50% of these kids are in special ed, and there's very specific laws regarding changing the placement for these special education kids.

And in fact, if you don't have a clear plan for special ed students, meaning IEPs, individual educational programs, then you can't do that under the law, can you? That's exactly right. In fact, specifically, that change of placement requires an individualized analysis. None of that happened. Bruce, did they think we can just get away with this because nobody knows the law or nobody pays attention to it, so we'll just do it. And if we're not challenged, then it'll just, you know, it'll go right on by and nobody will know that we've broken the law. I think the school is small enough that they figured we might complain, but it wouldn't be sufficient. We formed a parents group. You can Google Save Flex Academy. We have a GoFundMe, also Save Flex Academy. And we've pushed back. It's a core group of about 30 parents. We've made a lot of noise, we made a lot of T-shirts and signs, and we push them to this state where it matters. And we want them to know that our kids, especially those special needs kids, can't just be tossed into the wind. We have to know that there's planning for them to succeed. They're not just choosing from 12 different programs. It's not like a buffet or a menu. Well, the other piece about this, Bruce, that I don't entirely understand, and I'd be the first to admit it. I mean, I hate to say that, but on a show where you're supposed, I know my audience sometimes thinks I'm omniscient and I know everything. But when they say we need to cut costs, how much do they actually save if all they're doing is moving the kids from the flex program into what? The general population of students. Is there any meaningful savings at all? The school's actually... going to stay open with a different program. The kids are all going to be accommodated someplace else. They said specifically they're not laying off any of these teachers. We don't think that there is much savings. They said 850,000. Our analysis is closer to 500,000. But a lot of those costs are just transferred to other schools and or it's going to be a lesser quality of service. Less opportunity for these kids to get the one-on-one instruction that they need. And why do they need to have this savings anyway? Because, Bruce, I'll tell you, south of the Columbia River, in Portland, they've, they have this phenomena where they'll sign off on a union contract to the teachers. And at the time they sign it, they say, we don't have the money. We know we don't have the money. It'd be like somebody agreeing to rent an apartment for $2,000 a month, and his friends say, well, you don't have $2,000 a month. How are you going to do that? He says, well, I'll figure it out when we get to it. And then they get to it, and they say, oh, gosh, now we're going to have to hurt the kids to pay the teachers what we promised to pay them, because we knew at the time we agreed to pay them this money. And in the case of Portland, it was $130 million shortfall that they created for themselves that they then turn around and impose on the kids so the teachers can. remain harmless. Is that the kind of thing that's going on in the Vancouver schools? That's exactly the case. The largest part, I think it's 85% of their entire budget is compensation, and they did make an agreement to increase compensation, you know, significantly. About three years ago, and I got a dog in his fight large. I got to tell you, my wife is a special education teacher. She got a raise.

And the para-educators are paid her money. But they also talk about declining enrollments. They talk about kids who have moved outside the district, many of them for homeschooling or private schooling. They have a decreasing footprint. They have fewer kids each year, and that's where the revenue comes from. If you've got fewer customers and you have less money and you have to save money, then you don't promise raises. Or you find other ways to get it done. Because, I mean, every single private company out there, Bruce, every single family out there has to do the same kind of thing. We have less money. We have higher expenses. Let's figure out how to solve that. Instead, the schools say, well, let's kill the Flex Academy tonight. And that vote is tonight. Are they going to actually take the vote tonight, Bruce? I think they have to read it twice. I think tonight is the first resolution, and then they'll vote on it 90 days later. I agree with you, Lars. The reality is they're making decisions that should have been made, you know, 12 to 18 months ago. They actually had to get a loan from the Clark County Treasury just to make payroll. They're in dire shape. They drop down to $400,000 cash before they got that loan. I mean, they begin to sound like that person who's always running up against the NSF fees on their checking account. You say... Is this an organization run by professionals who have accountants and who have, you know, who keep track of things? Or you're running this kind of flying by the seat of your pants. Like some, I mean, I would have done. I did that in my 20s. I ran up against the limits on my checking account all the time. And why? Didn't have much money. But if I was running a multi-million or multi-billion dollar operation and then you say, yeah, but we can't, we can't be bothered to actually plan ahead, that doesn't make any sense. That's Bruce Handerholt. is a flex parent, and as he said, he has a dog in the fight wife, who's a special ed teacher. But does it make any sense that we run major institutions that we're told, these are some of the most important things we do? We've got to make sure the kids get educated. And then they run the organizations like it's some kind of fly by night where the checking account is always threatening to go dry. How about a little bit of planning down the line and then say, if we can't afford it, we don't make promises, even if we have to break those promises to the George Lawson Show. Portland's News, Traffic. Portland's News, Traffic, and what?

the Lars Larson Show on X at Lars Larson Show. You never know what he'll boast. Now, back to the Lars Larson Show. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson show. Welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you, and a real pleasure, I think, for the first time, to welcome Congressman Brandon Gill. I don't remember that we've had you on before, Brandon, but welcome to the program. It's good to have you on the program, sir. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's good to be here. Youngest member of the United States Congress who is a Republican, and I wanted to talk to you about this extension of protections for Haitians living in the United States. Can you explain that one to me? And should the Congress and not the courts be deciding who actually gets to stay in America and who has to be given a quick trip back to their original home? Well, absolutely. I'll give you the context here. Last week we voted on to extend temporary protective status for Haitians in the U.S. Now, this was a program that was originally started in 2010 that would allow Haitians who were fleeing a disastrous earthquake to come into the United States temporarily, hence the name temporary protective status. and then they could go back into their country. And since then, the program has been re-uped and re-designated over and over and over again, to the point where it's just become de facto amnesty. In the House, just last week, with every Democrat voting for it and a few Republicans voting for it, voted to extend that temporary protective status. Now, let me tell you one thing about where we're at with that. There's about 350,000 Haitians who are covered under this. Because it's been extended so many times, 69% of the Haitians covered under temporary protective status came in under the Biden administration. In other words, they weren't fleeing anything. They came in here under the massive waves of illegal immigration that was pouring across our border. 91% of those who are covered under TPS came into the United States illegally. So this is just an amnesty program for Haitians. And it's something that... Every Republican ought to vehemently reject. Congressman Gill, doesn't this basically spit in the face of all the people? I tell my audience roughly a million people, just over a million people, who do it legally. It's time-consuming. It's expensive. It requires a lot of hoops to jump through. And then you say, oh, you could have just come in under TPS because the Democrats will give it away to anybody. Oh, of course it does. It's offensive to every American, especially, by the way, in the context of an election cycle, which we just ran on about two years ago, that was all about illegal immigration, where the American people were screaming, secure our borders, deport illegal aliens, and then to turn around. and vote for an amnesty bill, I think is a total rejection of everything the American people had been screaming about for so long in our country. You know, the core question we ought to be asking with immigration, and especially in this instance, is does mass migration from Haiti benefit the American people or not? It's a very simple question. And the obvious answer here is no.

65% of those who are covered under TPS, which are non-citizen Haitian-headed households, are on welfare in the United States. That does not make our country stronger or more prosperous in any way. Well, in fact, Congress, I'm talking to Congressman Brandon Gill, who's from, you know, he grew up in, he was in New Mexico, and then he went to Texas, and grew up on a ranch and went off to college and became a financial guy and then started a newspaper. You've worn a bunch of different hats. But when you do that and you say, we're just going to let people come into the country without any benefits of the country, don't our existing immigration laws say... To be able to immigrate legally, you've got to show you're not likely to become a public charge. Nobody can guarantee that they won't end up on welfare. But this is saying, we're going to bring these people in and put them immediately, and I guess for a lifetime, to be on welfare forever. So that takes the existing immigration law that says, no, we want you to be unlikely to end up as a public charge, and it turns it on its head. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, American immigration policy has always been predicated on two key ideas. One is that you couldn't be a public burden. And that's something we've moved away from, especially under Democrat administrations. But it's a common sense idea that you can't come into the United States and expect the American people to pay for your food and your housing and your health care and your education and everything else. You have to be a benefit to the American people. And nobody should be coming in expecting free handouts. But the second part was it was cultural assimilation, which is something we've also moved away from. And the reality is that the majority of patients who came into the United States didn't speak English very well, didn't even speak our own language. So those are two key principles we have to get back to. And we undermine our efforts to do so by giving amnesty. And by the way, Amnesty is something that Republicans for decades have rejected outright. It has never worked out well for us. We tried it in the 80s. It didn't work out well, and we should reject it now as well. Well, and I reminded my audience just before you came on, Congressman Gill, that I said we were offered amnesty. I mean, this is when I was pretty young, but 1986, Reagan called it one of the biggest mistakes he'd ever made. The Congress is the one that passed the law, and they said, let about a million people come in, and then we promise cross our hearts and hope to die. We'll safeguard our borders after that. And they let more than a million people come in and get amnesty. and it went on because of the courts for decades of saying, well, you ought to be covered under it too. And we never enforced the border. I mean, until recently, until Trump.

That's exactly right. And that's something Democrats always want to do. They want us to trade amnesty for border enforcement. They say, well, if you give us amnesty, then we'll secure the border. And they never uphold their end of the deal. And, you know, in this case, they're not even giving anything. They're just asking for amnesty, which is even worse. But you're right. What we ought to do is make sure that the border is secure. We need to codify the president's border security policies. into law, make them permanent, and make them permanent in such a way that it's extremely difficult for a Democrat administration to try to circumvent the law and reopen up the borders because we know that they're going to try to do that again as soon as they get power. And I don't think that we should be talking about amnesty at all because effectively what it does is it codifies past open borders, you know, it sort of codifies the repercussions of past years of open borders. So Congressman Gill, why do we see Republicans, a few of them at least, getting behind this crazy Dignity Act? Or am I wrong to call it crazy? Because it sounds like we're snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, where we have the victory. Americans voted for Trump. They backed his mass deportation. He's done as much as he can with all the headwinds of the media, the opposition party, the Democrats, and even some Republicans. And now there are Republicans pushing the Dignity Act. Yeah, you know, it's a big problem. And you're exactly right. The Dignad Act, the actual title of the bill is the Dignad Act. It's written in a foreign language, by the way. It is an amnesty bill, plain and simple. I mean, what it says is that about 12 million illegal aliens who are in the country right now. can stay. They're given amnesty outright. And then it makes it harder to deport all of the other illegal aliens who run the country. And then, according to the Dignad Act, if it were signed into law, some illegal aliens who have already been deported can come back into the United States. Unbelievable. Congressman, I've got a break. We're up against the clock, but that's Congressman Brandon Gilley's fighting a good fight on Capitol Hill, and you've got the Lars Larsson show. You're listening.

There are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. Lucky Hens. Sweeps coins all through the lands. Calling now come join the fam. Lucky Hades. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at luckyhands.com. Your luck is in your hands. I don't know. Take a peek inside Lars's studio. Follow him on Instagram at the Lars Larson Show. Now, more with Lars Larson. You're listening to The Best at the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson show, and I know everybody's ready to celebrate because tomorrow is tax day, and I hope you have your taxes done. I've got some good news when it comes to your federal taxes at the very least, and that is the amount of time that Americans spend complying with your federal. taxes has actually gone down fairly substantially and estimated one billion hours of save time. And it sounds like we're getting more money back from the federal government, although that can be a little bit tricky to do as averages. So I thought we'd talk about it with Damian Brady, who is vice president of research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Damien, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me on. And taxes is so much more than what you end up paying on April 15th. There's a lot of time that goes into it. All the paperwork and collecting all the information that you need to file, reading those forms, reading those instructions, and trying to make sense of that. So we track all the time that goes into that over the years. And as you noted, we did see a decline this year, but it's still, collectively, Americans are spending nearly 7 billion hours. complying with the tax code, getting ready for tax day. We need a system that does better, so that way people can spend their time more productively or at leisure if they desire. Hey, Damien, do you think there's ever a chance we could get down to a simple enough tax code? People have talked about filing your taxes. I know it's old school, but on a three by five index card or a three by five postcard. Could we ever get down to the digital equivalent of that? Well, it would take a lot of work to slim down the tax code that we currently have, which announced over 4.26 million words plus thousands of pages of regulation that the IRS and the Department of Treasury write to help implement those laws and all the guidance that they write on a weekly basis to help further interpret those regulations and deal of questions that come up. So we have a long ways to go to trim it down from 6.9 billion hours or something that's less burdensome on taxpayers. I mean, because for 2023, I mean, that was incredible. 7.93 billion hours estimated time spent complying with the requirements of the tax code, dropping from 7.93 to 6.93, a billion hours saved. That's a considerable savings. How did that come about? Is there a simple way of explaining it?

Yeah, so there's a couple of factors that work here. We saw a lot of an increase in complexity and the number of people filing taxes during the pandemic because there were basically rebates and refundable credits available to people who normally wouldn't file, so they filed so that they can take advantage of that. So that added to the time burden that we saw reached the recent peak in 2023 of 7.93 billion hours. Since then, some of those. COVID-era tax provisions have gone away. They're winding down. And then on the other side of it, the other factor is that the IRS has done a better job of estimating the paperwork burden imposed on people. They get feedback from taxpayers that help them improve their methodology. So some of it's on the back end. You know, and we had one of the biggest time savings that we've seen for people was enacted in the 2017. Trump tax cuts, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was a near doubling of the standard deduction, which is a really... simple across-the-board tax relief for people that saved. We're seeing 30 or 40 million people doing that, taking advantage of that rather than itemizing now. I mean, just to make that one easy to understand, Damien, because I'm not a tax account either. But it basically says a single individual, what, $12,000 is exempt in a couple, it's $25,000 of income. Do I have the numbers right? Yeah, it sounds like it's in the ballpark, and it's just a really simple provision of the tax code that just provides a safe harbor for low-income people and across the board for everybody. So we did see some new tax breaks for the one big beautiful bill acts, which is the Trump accounts and the deductions on tips and overtime income, which are targeted. So that adds a little bit of compliance burdens. People need to... understand those laws, understand their eligibility for those deductions, and it makes sense of that. So that's sort of a temporary increase in some time burdens of people learn how they work. It becomes easier and not as time burdensome down the road, and plus those are set to expire down the road. So, you know, and those are targeted. So if you're looking at, you want broad tax relief, the better thing to do is provides things broadly, such as the standard deduction. The more targeted provisions you have, the more complicated things get, and the more compliance burdens you have. And it's also administrative burdens on the IRS to try to make sense of all the paperwork that flows into them. Well, tomorrow is Tax Day, April 15. Damien Brady is with me, Vice President of Research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. I get some people who disbelieve me when I say to them. If one big beautiful bill had not passed, if we didn't have the extension of the Donald Trump tax cuts from 2017, taxes would have gone up this year. How much less would people, the average person, have received back in tax refunds if we had not seen the extension of those tax cuts?

Oh, we did a report on that in advance of, you know, while everyone was debating the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the average across the country was a couple thousand dollars in tax heights. And plus all that the standard deduction would have gone back to what it was. So then that's more time itemizing. You're making sense of all that. So it's a big relief for taxpayers that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. extended and locked in those good provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Well, and what I keep looking forward to, Damien, because I use it just to a tiny degree. But if you buy new equipment and things like that, the fact that you can expense it all this year means it's more likely that people out there working almost any kind of job, if you've been waiting for the boss to replace that vehicle or that piece of equipment, whether it's a computer or some other kind of machine, the boss has a bigger likelihood of doing that because he can write all the cost off this year instead of having to spread it out over. several years. Is that the case? And that's a tax provision. You know, not only does it save you time from the really complicated schedules and rules that otherwise existed for business expenses like that. It's also a pro-growth, and we want to see policies that let people keep more of their money and let people invest more of their money and help grow the economy. Well, I think that's what everybody would like, but it means that even if you say, well, I already have a job, I'm paying fewer taxes or fewer dollars in taxes and the boss is more likely to buy more equipment so I can be even better at my job. That's Damien Brady. Damia is the vice president of research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, and we always appreciate his insights. The Lars Larson Show. I don't know.

Hey there. FM News 101. Hey. There are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. Lucky Hands. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just games, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. Welcome to First Amendment Friday on the Lars Larson show. Friday is for everybody. Today, Lars puts you in the driver's seat. You talk about what you want to talk about. The government is the problem. No topic is off limits. They look like the Canadians are here. Call 866. Hey Lars. That's 866. Hey Lars. Thank you. It's Friday. Happy Friday. This is. First Amendment Friday with Lars Larson. You're listening to The best of the Lars Larsson Show. Welcome back to the Lars Larsson show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. Now, imagine this. Imagine President Trump depicted in artworks as a pig or a KKK member or a clown, and then imagine that all of that art is being done by high school students guided by public school teachers paid from taxpayer money. I thought we talked about it with Brandy Cruz, who found the story. Brandy is an independent journalist and the host of the Undivided Podcast. Brandy, welcome back. It's been too long. It has, Lars. Thanks for having me. So tell me about this. What is going on in the Puyallup School District with a student art project that I think it's fair to say uniformly depicts President Trump in a very negative way, I mean almost a horrendously negative way, a pig, a KKK member, a clown, references to the assassination attempt on President Trump's life. I mean, and apparently guided by an art teacher who pulls a public paycheck. Yeah, this is wild. So a student sent us this. You know, it was disturbing to them as it was to us when we got it. And it's basically this big montage on a wall in this art class at Puyallup High School. And as you said, it has a bunch of different depictions of President Trump in various forms and has that reference to assassination, which is written on a flag with a question mark. And there's some stuff in the image we can't quite make out. Like there's a couple pictures of nooses and we can't read the text. that's there from the picture that we received. And so we, you know, obviously we were disturbed by it, reached out to the school district and wanted to know, was this something the teacher did? Was it something students did? And what exactly was the assignment? And after a couple days, the Puyallup School District got back to us and said that they removed it. So as of today, it's not on the wall anymore. And they told us it was a student assignment.

But wouldn't define for us what the assignment was, which is what we keep asking, specifically how were the students prompted? in order to create that kind of work. I mean, because the thing I wonder about Brandy is, imagine going back in time a year and a half, and imagine that Kamala Harris had not wasted $1.5 billion, and she'd actually somehow, God forbid, been successful in being elected as president of the United States. Do you suppose that if this same art teacher in a public high school had said, let's do some art about President Harris, do you imagine that it would have had the same negative character that it did with... Donald Trump there? Because my guess is that it'd be very difficult to find such an art teacher that would teach the same way about Kamala Harris as she did about Donald Trump. Well, and if there was, that would be wrong, right? We would all condemn it. But the other thing is it would be up for five seconds before someone at the school took it down. And our understanding is this had been up for several days at least. And it's just become acceptable. You know, if it's some sort of hatred against Republicans in public schools in Washington State, it's perfectly fine. And, you know, I mean, we've done a lot of stories about this particular school district lately that have been quite disturbing. It's also concerning to me that the school won't just come out and say, here's what the assignment was. You know, they gave us a vague response saying, oh, it was, you know, kids were doing art based on, you know, current political, whatever. And it's like, okay, in order to get art like that, it had to be something like, you know, share your depiction of President Trump or something that led to so many. And it's also concerning. I mean, look what these kids are thinking about. A lot of it was very violent. And clearly, it's stuff. being put into their heads by adults. And so it really has me worried about the future generations of America. Well, when you mention the possibility of nooses and things like that, if you're going to do that kind of thing, and that is the way you're going to run art classes, then fine. But I have this deep suspicion that they only run this way with conservative figures, Donald Trump being an extreme example, perhaps. But do you imagine that the students pick up very quickly on where their teacher is coming from politically, and they decide I'm going to make art that makes Mrs. Johnson or Mr. Smith happy as a... to stuff that's going to anger Mrs. Johnson or Mr. Smith.

Oh, exactly. You're not going to do something that you think. And if the teacher was opposed to it, the teacher would have taken it down. And you might say, all free speech and art, it's about expression. But no, even the school district acknowledged in their message to us that, you know, free speech to a point in public schools, but it can't interfere with other people's ability to learn and their ability to feel safe and whatever it is in the environment. And there's no doubt. I mean, there's a reason someone snap the picture and send it to us. It made them uncomfortable. And it hurt their ability to learn in the school. And you can't have that. You know, just to pair this with another story we did on our show yesterday, you know, yesterday at a school district north of Seattle, so opposite direction from Seattle, but also what had traditionally been a very conservative area, Mount Vernon, Washington, there was an after-school protest sign-making competition being sponsored at the school. and being sponsored by indivisible, far-left activist group, and the local Democratic Party. And they were giving out prizes for who could make the best protest sign. And they were talking about it on the morning announcements. And so that's the level of indoctrination that Democrats are engaged in, because they would never allow that if it were pro, you know, make a sign for a pro-Trump rally. It would just never be allowed. And so they're really, I mean, they're trying to get to them and indoctrinate them early. And it's working, I think. Well, it's funny because, Brandy, I was just telling my audience earlier today, there's a brand new survey out where they wanted to ask. They said, are you as parents, are you in favor of having big guardrails against activism by kids in school? And most of the people who have kids in school say, no, I don't want my kid involved in activism at all. And that's not just among conservatives. It's conservatives and liberals say. Teach my kid the things he or she needs to do and leave the activism for later. And only about 10% of the survey was parents who said, oh, no, I want my child to be involved in activist activities. That it's apparently a very narrow group of parents or voters who want that kind of thing. Yeah, but then you see it so widespread in a state like Washington. And the real culprit, as you and I both know, is the Teachers Union. The Washington Education Association is responsible for so much of the indoctrination and the political messaging and things that happens in our schools and then protecting teachers that get caught engaging in it. And so to me, you know, the downfall of the Teachers Union would be not only the best thing to happen for students in states like Washington, but also the best thing to happen. for politics at large in Washington because they also control so much of the narrative around taxation and, you know, they benefit from bloated government. So teachers union is the culprit that's doing this in our schools.

Well, it also tells me that if you happen to be that conservative young man or woman who's going to high school and you realize I'm in a class where if I show my conservative bona fides in a piece of artwork, I'm not only going to get a bad grade, but I'm probably going to be disparaged by the teacher and humiliated in front of my fellow students. So you end up taking people who are 14, 15, 16 years of age and putting them under a tremendous amount of pressure to try to conform to what the... teacher wants them to say and what their fellow students want them to say. That's Brandy Cruz. Brandy is the host of the Undivided podcast, and Brandy found the story that we've just talked about. A school district where a student art project depicted Donald Trump in insulting ways as a pig, as a member of the KKK, although KKK, that's the Democrats and a clown with references to assassination. Brandy, thanks very much. Back in a moment, you've got the Lars Larson Show and the Radio Northwest Network. Thank you.

And Lorden, Oregon or Washington. Hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. Lucky Hands. LuckyHands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands. Your luck is in your hands. This is your home for honestly provocative talk radio. The truth. Every day. No. Back to the Lars Larson Show. You're listening to The Best of the Lars Larson Show. Welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails in a moment at 866. Hey, Lars, that's 866 439-527. Send your emails to talk at Larslarsen.com. I honestly, as much as I know that liberals and Democrats support illegal aliens being in our country, and I know that they oppose the idea of actually enforcing America's immigration. laws that have been on the books for decades. I never thought we'd get to the point where law enforcement would actually voluntarily give up a very effective form of catching the bad guys because the liberals believe, but you're catching the illegal aliens too, and they're not really bad guys. So I thought we'd talk to Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank, who joins me now. Sheriff Swank, good to have you back. Well, thank you. Now, there are a couple of different issues I want to ask you about, and there's another one in a second, but what in the world is going on with the either flock cameras or automated license plate reader systems? Why are these being turned off? And I want people to understand they're being turned off even though they work very, very well for law enforcement. Is that fair to say? That's very fair to say. They're being turned off because of legislature passed legislation in Olympia that says... that ALPR cameras cannot pick up any license plates within 500 feet of a hospital, for instance, or a school, and there's some other protected areas there. And we don't have the technology or the capability to geo-fence or, you know, that's a technical term to make it so that the cameras won't work in a certain area, and the camera companies, they don't have the ability to do that. To prevent our deputies from getting charged with a gross misdemeanor crime of reading any license plate, a gross misdemeanor crime for each license plate that picks up within these restricted areas, we had to turn our cameras off. Well, and they're talking about some fairly stiff penalties for each and every violation of the law. If they happen to pick up that license plate, that prohibited license plate, how much are they talking about hitting you with? Well, it's a gross misdemeanor crime for the deputy, which is up to one year in jail. So that's what they're hitting you with. And then there's a fine. You can fine yet to $5,000 for gross misdemeanor crime. So it's a...

It's a serious deal, and we just can't jeopardize our deputies there. And I just want your listeners to know and the people to know we will solve less crimes. We will find less missing people with dementia that drive off in their car. And I want you all to know you heard from me. That's going to happen. I hope it doesn't, but that's the reality of this world we live in. Well, and Sheriff, I want to make this clear, because this seems especially egregious, that they say turn it off near hospitals, schools, and other protected areas. Sheriff, if there are perverts out there that are intent on kidnapping kids, say, for all kinds of horrible purposes that we don't need to go into, but everybody can use their imagination. Don't you think those are the very places that those perverts may go to get access to kids is hospitals and schools and other protected areas? Isn't that right where the perverts are going to go? Absolutely. It's exactly where we need to have our cameras at so we can go through the area and see if there's a vehicle with a warrant associated with it so that we can arrest these offenders and get them out of our communities. I know you probably can't call them perverts. I call them perverts. I call them perverts. I call them sex offenders, whatever. Yeah, I can call them that. Yeah, I don't want to dignify them with anything better than that. And I guess the other piece to this is We're talking about real-time situation. So let's say with the ALPR's turned on, you get a report that somebody's car has been jacked. And the woman who's in a panic is saying, my little girl, my little boy, is in the backseat of the car. I just got car jacked. You've got to find that vehicle right now. You don't have hours. You don't have days to find that car. It's not just a missing car. It's a missing car with a kid in it. You need to find it immediately, right? Absolutely. And then we would saturate the area with our patrol vehicles that will be reading hundreds of plates a second or a minute, and we'd be able to locate it and get a hit on it. Yeah, so this is, I became a cop in 1990. We didn't have computers then. Well, we just started with computers then. So we had to run around with the, we called it a hot sheet, a piece of paper with license plates written down on it. You cannot find a vehicle like that when you're driving around. looking for a suspect and a kidnapping like that. So it's really just going to harm safety of our communities. I mean, because from the victim, you might well get the make and model of the car. You'd get the license plate of the car, maybe the color of the car. But the license plate, these ALPRs, would tell you, and the car was on Main Street headed west, or, you know, it was on First Street headed east. It gives you at least a running start in going after the bad guy. Yeah, the flock cameras help that out, but then our ALPRs right in, our patrol vehicles itself can be reading the place and say, oh, my gosh, the suspect just passed me southbound, right? You can flip around and get it after them, man. So that's what's really important about it, right? So you've got to have not just the fly cameras turned off, but the ALPRs that are inside the police cars, and that tool is now denied to you, not just for illegal aliens, but for everybody else.

Yeah, so let me clear it up. We don't have flock cameras at Pierce County Sheriff's Office. We have ALPRs in our cars, and those are the ones we have to turn off. So we have no cameras there. Other jurisdictions have flock cameras, and then we can share information. And I don't know if they're turning them off, but probably all license plate readers in patrol vehicles will be turned off statewide so that we don't jeopardize our officers and deputies facing a crime. Hey, any idea for Pierce County alone? How much technology are we talking about that's now just a boat anchor in the trunk of that car and won't be ever used again? How much money are we talking about? A lot of money. I don't know the numbers. I'm still going to include my budget people about it because we signed a contract, right? But the company is good. They're saying we'll put up things on hold. But ultimately we owe the money on a contract for, you know, several years. And if we don't turn them back on, I know we won't be able to turn them on at least so next legislative session if there is even a fix then or political pressure from the, you know, citizens of Washington State. Did you ever think we'd get to the point where we'd protect illegal aliens to the point of turning off law enforcement tools like this, Sheriff? Of course we get to that point because Democrats, they want to keep violent illegal aliens in our community and they are against the citizens and the citizens in our communities. I don't understand how you can think that way, but they're that way. And last, I just want to say that they try to say it's for privacy. Anybody's been around Democrats at all. No, they don't care about privacy at all. This camera thing is all designed to sort ice. Keep illegal aliens in our communities and just say the big FU to President Trump. That's what it's all about. There's no doubt. That is Sheriff Keith Swank. He's from Pierce County, Washington. Sheriff, thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Back in a moment, we'll get to your phone calls and emails at 866. Hey, Lars. That's 866 439-277. You're listening to the Radio Northwest Network and the Lars Larson Show. The Lars Larson Show. The Lars Larson Show.

Portland's News Traffic and Weather Station. Lars Larson show today? Find Lars's thoughts and get the podcast right now at larsson.com. Now, here's Lars Larson. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson show. Welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you. High schools now say that marijuana is showing up much more so than it ever has before. It's showing up in bathrooms, hallways, even in classrooms. And it seems to me that part of that is because of the growing popularity of legalizing pot in America. There are a number of states, 24 states, in which it's now legal, at least for recreational use, but it's not legal for kids. It's certainly not legal for high school age kids. So I thought we'd talk about that with Anne Schlafly, who is chair of the Eagle Forum. Ms. Schlafly, welcome back to the program. Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure. Well, by the way, it was always a pleasure to be able to talk to your mom, and because she did yeoman's work for the entire country for a long, long time, and you're carrying on that tradition, right? Yes, she was a wonderful voice for liberty and sensible laws, and marijuana, the legalization of marijuana is destroying our communities, and we have to push back. Okay, persuade my audience because I'm not a user of this stuff. I don't like it. I've not liked the legalization of it. I think there are concerns about creating psychosis in individuals, which regular use of pot does do. And I was worried all the time when every state has talked about legalizing it. They say, but it's not going to be legal until you're 21, like alcohol. And then all of a sudden, a lot more teenagers were using pot because once it became legal for adults, it became far more accessible for the kids. overstated that? What happens with legality is it gives a veneer that it is okay and safe to use. When marijuana was illegal, everyone recognized the dangers of marijuana, but now it's legal and they pretend it's medicine. And although you say that it's illegal under the age of 21, There's a workaround on that. If you were 18 and you want medical, so-called medical marijuana, you can get a scripted 18 to go get medical marijuana. So the 18-year-olds have easy access to it. Now, is it time to start reversing all that and is society ready to reverse that? I keep having people ask me, well, when is Congress going to take it off the schedule of drugs? And I said when you get to 218 votes and you're about maybe three quarters of the way there, even if you count all the Democrats and some of the Republicans voting for it, you still don't have the country convinced that that's the right way to go.

I actually believe this is a bipartisan issue because I think parents have seen the tremendous damage that marijuana has done to children. And, you know, tobacco was first sold as a medical product. And then it took many generations to realize that they were just profiting off addiction. The same thing with the marijuana. They are profiting off addiction. And what is happening is that the children are getting lifetime injuries from the marijuana. You mentioned psychosis. It's also schizophrenia. And, you know, these, you will never be right again with this marijuana use in a certain percentage of users. And part of that is because the marijuana today is such high potency. It is not your parents' marijuana. The other problem with marijuana is that we have to explain to people that no amount is safe for pregnant or nursing mothers. Well, in fact, I've had people say to me, oh, but you can't get addicted to it. And I said, hey, I've talked to the treatment people. Of course, alcohol seems to be the number one for self-referral where people walk in. I don't mean when the judge tells you to do it, but when people walk into treatment centers and say, I'm addicted, get me off this stuff, the number one problem is alcohol, but number two is marijuana right behind it. If you are using marijuana every day, you are addicted to it. And, you know, they're more daily marijuana users than there are daily alcohol drinkers in America today. Where do you get that stat? Do you know? Well, it's in my book. And my book is Throwing Children Under the Cannabis, Available at Eagleforum.org, and I've got all the references to where these stats come from. But yes, more marijuana smokers than alcohol drinkers. So how do we get people to accept this? Because I can anticipate that 10 or 20 years from now, we're going to hear a hue and cry to raise a lot of taxes to go out and pay for treatment for something that people voluntarily turn themselves over to. Well, I think first you have to have public service announcements. You have to have, you know, this is your brain on drugs type of advertisements. You have to have parents who are adamant about saying no marijuana in my house, no toleration of marijuana. You have to, you know, you can't tolerate marijuana in your community. I mean, I live in Missouri, and we have free, we have recreational marijuana all over the place. And the number one complaint in my community is the smell. And so first we have to start to get rid of the growing and the cultivation that is producing such obnoxious odors that's affecting everybody. Yeah, it's funny because when I used to go on drug raids of the cops, I'd say, how do you find a marijuana grow typically? And they said, you walk down the street and you can smell it. They can literally smell the pot growing in somebody's basement.

and usually large quantities of it. I don't think small quantities were detected that way, but they said you can smell the stink of the skunkweed a long ways away. And the other problem for children is that the vapes have made it very convenient to smoke marijuana. So it's not like they have to roll a joint anymore. And the vapes come in candy flavors. So you always cook children on candy. Yeah, and then in that case, are you going to smell that characteristic odor of pot? Well, no, the candy flavor is designed to mask the smell. And, of course, make it more palatable. So that means that you can do it more surreptitiously than you would have been able to back in your parents' day. And that's been the problem for schools. Actually, in that one article that you referenced at the beginning, they talked about how the vape cartridges were plugging up the plumbing because of all the smoking going on in the bathrooms. Yeah, because the kids don't dispose of them in the trash. They dispose of them down the toilet, and then that jams everything up. Well, they've got to hide the evidence. Unbelievable. Well, maybe we can persuade America to go back the other direction because I'll tell you, I felt badly for people who got addicted to things like opioids and that sort of thing. And then we said, now we have to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to get them off the drug. And I point out, this was all voluntary use at the beginning. I think we're going to have the same kind of problem when it gets to marijuana. We're going to say, well, what do we do with this person who's addicted? We should pay for their treatment. Well, the problem is... the treatment may or may not be successful, I do know that it's automatically very expensive, and if taxpayers have to fund that, that's going to be another enormous burden on American taxpayers. That is, Anne Schlafly, who is chair of the Eagle Forum, carrying on the tradition of her mom, and we're always right to talk to her back in the day. Glad to get to your calls in a moment at 866. Hey, Lars. That's 866 439-2-27. Send your emails to talk at Lars. You're listening to the best of the large lesson show.

Instead of wondering, hey, there are people winning real cash while they're sitting in traffic right now. Luckyhands.com. No trip to a casino, just gains, daily rewards, popular fish tables, and a chance to redeem real cash prizes. Get a 300% welcome offer bonus when you use code Clover. No purchase necessary. 18 plus void where prohibited. Full terms apply. See what everyone's talking about. Play today at lucky hands.com. Your luck is in your hands. Lars Larson wants to hear from you, even if you disagree. Naysayers get to cut the line at 866. Hey, Lars. Now, here's Lars Larson. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson show. Welcome back to the Lars Larson show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails in a moment. But Portland's Fire Department has announced they will not respond to homeless fires unless they spread. As long as they are contained, it's okay. So understand. not only the threat to life and safety of saying when the fire department is responding to fires, 50% of them have been started by people who are living in homelessness. And you say, So they're allowed to have fires any time of the year. They can have them in August. They can have them in July. They're going to have them in January. They can have them when it gets cold. And you have to let them burn things. And the fire department is now saying, because half of our calls are to go put out fires that have been starved by homeless people, we're going to simply ignore them as long as they're contained. Now, imagine this, too. Let's say you're a homeowner. And you say, hey, I'd like to burn up a bunch of yard debris in the back of my house. Well, guess what? They're going to say, oh, no, there are all kinds of restrictions on that because you live in a house. But if you were homeless, you'd be allowed to burn anything. And one of the most amazing videos I've seen was produced by Kevin Dalgren, who sat there and talked to a homeless guy. I'm basing that, Kevin, based on how he, say, presented himself, that he looked like a homeless guy to me. And he had started a fire. in a giant metal looked like a metal trash can. And he was burning plastic pallets. And you even asked him, you're going to burn all those plastic pallets? And he said, yeah, it burns longer. Am I right, Kevin? You are right. He was homeless. You know, it's kind of just a free-for-all. You can do whatever you want. No consequences. No rules. I mean, not even any sort of. respect for environment, assuming that he was freezing, they'll just burn whatever he wants because he knows nothing will happen. Okay, so how did we get to this point where the homeless really are first class citizens and everybody else who actually goes to work, pays their bills, and makes their own way through life, we're all second class to the homeless people. Yeah, another way I put it, is they're a protected class, which makes it even more difficult to even criticize what they're doing because that makes just a bad guy.

You know, I think this was by design over the last decade plus. to turn the homeless into a protected class. And therefore, you know, once people thought of that, this is where the billion dollar budgets came in, you know, came in tell. As far as the fire issue, the fire department, I totally understand why they have to take the stance. 50% of all their calls are homeless related. They finally were just like enough is enough. We can't just spend all day long doing this. But that's also very concerning because I've now never seen more fires on the streets. They're just on all the sidewalk. It's wild. Well, it is funny because, Kevin, look, when I've had to do with permit issues or things like that, they'll say, oh, if you're going to put natural gas in your home, you've got to follow all these rules. If you're going to use propane, you have to follow all these rules. If you're going to have a backyard, say, a burn pit or a fire pit, you know, you have all these rules. You have to follow them. Boy, if you step out of line, they're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks. But when it comes to the protected class of the homeless, all of a sudden it's no holds barred. Go ahead, do whatever you want to do. And in fact, the fire department won't even come after you as long as it appears that your fire is contained until, I guess, until the fire is not contained, which does happen every single summer. Exactly. And, you know, this is why I want change. And, you know, change starts at the top, you know. It's why I'm really obviously you and I and many others are pushing for a new governor. You know, it's just that's where change is going to happen. Co-Tech, Governor Co-Tech does not seem to give a damn what actually happens. She loves spending more money on the problem, but more money on the problem has actually made the problem grow, hasn't it, Kevin? Yeah, and it proves that if money was a solution, we would have solved it by now. What we need is a governor that just sort of understands that this is an addiction, that's a health crisis, not an affordable housing crisis, and to have stricter rules and to pivot to a recovery model to actually get these people clean and self-sufficient. Yeah, and Kevin, I'm completely in favor of that. When they said, well, how would you solve the problem? I said, enforce the rules. Yeah. And I proposed this as long ago as 20 years ago and said, how would you go after him? I said, when somebody uses drugs in public, arrest them and charge them. and then offer them a choice, treatment or jail or a felony conviction. It has worked in the past. It should work in the future. And every other thing they do, whether it's defecating on the street, having an unlicensed dog, having unpermitted fires, you say, well, you shouldn't make them follow those rules. Kevin, how do they explain letting a whole category of people just simply ignore the rules that apply to everybody else?

I mean, it was just this, it's almost like we were all slowly brainwashed to actually believe this. And now we just have to kind of break that cycle once and for all and just do something different. Right. I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous. And I'm just so fed up. I'm so done. And this is why even today I'm in Eugene Oregon with Chris Dudley running for governor. He's gone out with me more than any candidate I have ever even met, and I respect the hell out of that. And, you know, we're just here trying to understand the homeless crisis where Eugene has one of the highest per capita rates of homeless in the country, which is just absolutely ridiculous. Well, in fact, I've talked to Dudley on the air. I've talked to him the first time he ran. I've talked to him this time when he's running. We've got a good crowd of people who are running, and the Democrats have apparently decided we're not that crazy about Kotech. So all the people you'd expect to endorse her, like the teachers, unions, and others have said, we don't want to touch her. On the other hand, the Republicans have at least half a dozen really decent candidates for governor. Yeah. I would see we have a better chance now than we've had in 20 years. to switch parties and get someone in there who just gets it, who can restore, reclaim Oregon. Now, I've asked Chris about this. What is Chris's prescription for solving the homeless problem? Well, my understanding, again, I've gone out with Chris. I gosh, at least a good 10 times now. This is my fourth state I've been with him, you know. He, like me, agrees that this is an addiction issue. This is a mental health crisis. That affordable housing, that is a small piece of it, but that's not the high percentage that people have led us to believe. And that's why we have to just rethink our approach, reallocate funds towards actually helping these people get clean and become self-sufficient. That is how we're going to end this crisis once and for all. I'd love to see it happen because, Kevin, I think there's a solution. And the solution is not three-quarters of a billion dollars spent by one county. I mean, Puget Sound has the same problem. They're spending about a billion dollars a year, and they're not making the problem smaller. They're making it bigger. They are, and enough is enough. I'm tired. And so, you know, just fingers crossed. People go out and vote and vote for the right person. And, you know, and we could just see some change once and for all. That is Kevin Dahlgren. Kevin is an independent journalist. He's been reporting on homelessness, addiction, and the homeless industrial complex. You're listening to the best of the Lars Larson Show. The Lars Larson Show.

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