BENSON BYTE: "ABSOLUTE LUNATIC BEHAVIOR" - Mary Katharine Ham Dismantles Liberal School Board's Latest Move

This Memorial Day, as America approaches the 25th anniversary of 9-11, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation paid off the mortgages on 26 homes for Gold Star families and families of fallen first responders across 13 states. In tribute to the 343 FDNY firefighters lost on 9-11, Tunnel to Towers has committed to delivering 343 mortgage-free homes this year. Their courage will never be forgotten. Join us. Donate $11 a month at T2T.org. Now it's time for another Guy Benson, Bensonvite, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit Guy Benson.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. A with us now best friend of the program, Mary Catherine Ham. Fox News contributor, outkick columnist, co-author of our book, end of discussion, at M.K. Hammer on social. Hey, Mary Catherine. Hey, how's it going? So someone close to you told me that you were doing headshots today. Some new official Fox News headshots. How did it go? Are you looking cute? I'm looking pretty cute. You know, they always do a good job with hair and makeup over at Fox. And, you know, but it's a little nerve-wracking. You get in there and you've got to, like, try to look your best, but also casual. Like, you're not really trying. I don't like it. I don't like it. Because I'm like, you're going to take literally 300 photographs of me, and I'm going to like perhaps six of them. Yeah. not to be too picky about it, but yes, I just kind of keep smiling. And I don't think I have, I don't think I'm giving them much variety like they do on America's next top model. That's probably a dated reference. But you know what I'm saying? I'm not given a lot of different looks. I'm just smiling camera like I always have. Any costume changes along the way, like different color dresses? Yeah, we had several color blazers. We're doing blazers now. That's the era that we're in. Who aren't we fancy? Yeah, but it was nice. They let me play whatever music I wanted. I didn't know that I had that choice. It was a vibe. Could you sort of like sashay away from the camera, then quickly turn and they take a photograph? No, we didn't. really um zoolander it up too much it was mostly the standard stuff blue steel blue steel i will say i've had a few people tell me that i should go get new headshots to reflect the facial hair so i've had the facial hair for a while and all my official headshots are clean shaven i don't know i don't know I think it would be a good look, but you know, you've got to go through the whole rigmarole. Now, less for men, right? It's not as much prepped. That's definitely true. That is definitely true. All right, let's turn to some news of the day. Mary Catherine, Nick Minnock from ABC 7 and D.C., I call him the only reporter in Virginia. Because I don't know anyone else who's covering any of this stuff. He got this scoop about...

Once again, Loudoun County, Virginia, just outside D.C. The wealthiest county in the country has gotten very, very blue with all the Chardonnay, you know, resistance moms. This place used to be like pinkish red. Now it is solidly blue. And some of the very worst excesses of abuses when it comes to woke stuff and DEI in schools, attacking parents and parents' rights. It's like... The epicenter so often is in Loudoun County, Virginia. I'm not sure why. I don't know what's in the water out there, but it is wild. Here is the latest scoop about what happened in Loudon via Nick Minow cut 57. We learned a few weeks ago the day that an LCPS employee struck and killed. A student walking to school, the Loudoun County School Board held a closed meeting. Not to talk about student safety, not to talk about how to improve student safety and school zones, but to talk about how they can protect themselves. According to the school board agenda, they discussed how to respond to terrorist activity. So what did this include? Well, this was a closed door meeting, and I spoke to some sources who were inside the room. They told me the school board brought in around 30 actors and portrayed themselves as parents. These actors sat in the gallery as a parent would at a school board meeting. And the simulation entailed these actors pretend parents attacking the school board. So that was the terrorist activity that the school board was preparing for. And I've spoken to a lot of folks in Loudoun County, parents especially who are concerned about this. They're upset that they're being labeled as terrorists. and also that the school board decided to talk about terrorist activity in protecting themselves rather than improving student safety on the day a student died. I don't even know where to begin, Mary Catherine. I'll just point out this apparently happened several weeks ago. So this had been before a bunch of the schools in D.C. and Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland shut down for a week or more because of a modest snowfall, which wasn't properly cleared, which was another government failure. And they had the kids home for five, six, seven school days. That was before any of that happened. But this is how they view parents. terrorists. This goes back to the Biden administration and that Department of Education memo that radicalize, I think a lot of people seeing how, frankly, these Democrats view parents who want to have a say in their kids' education. They called this a closed-door meeting with the agenda item preparing for terrorist activity. And the anti-quote terrorism. that they did, like their little war game was they hired actors to be angry parents. It's, it is, I would say this is made up, except it's all too real. Yeah, I mean, this is absolute lunatic behavior from public servants, from people who are supposed to be public servants. I mean, their greatest fear.

is parents who speak at public meetings, right? That's what they've turned into the boogeyman for themselves. And as a mom in the area told me, yes, these are professional victims and now we get to pay for their war games against their made-up enemies. But this is what they're doing, right? Who knows how much those actors cost, for goodness sake? Also, your school board doesn't need to have closed meetings. Like, your school board is not doing anything that you can't see from the outside, right? But this is what they're obsessed with. They're obsessed with themselves. They're obsessed with their own victimhood. They're obsessed with ideologically indoctrinating as many students as possible, which is why they don't want parents to come and object to what they're doing. And in the end, they don't teach. It's things. That's why so many people have left these blue areas and these blue schools in particular. These are the guys, by the way. They can't put together a product. It's this district that's been like covering up sexual assaults because it was going to interfere with their gender politics, you know, priorities that they had. It's been one scandal after another, right? The trans student filming boys without their knowledge of permission in a locker room and they suspended the boys. because they were expressing out loud that they were uncomfortable seeing a female, biological female, in the boys' locker room. They suspended and punished the boys. That's all Loudoun County. Parents, of course, get upset the one famous father whose daughter was raped by a trans student, and they covered it up, and they transferred him to another school where he struck again. He was convicted, by the way, on those. That guy became the poster child of terrorist activity where the Biden people got the FBI involved. They actually view angry, I would say, righteously angry parents spouting off at a public meeting as terrorism. And they're hiring actors to sort of like go through what like hostile media training? And it would be crazy to me to be doing this under any circumstances, but to me, the worst aspect of it is labeling it. terrorism. That tells you everything you need to know about the mentality. It also tells you the inversion the left has, right, where speech is violence and violence is speech, because I guarantee you if you interviewed every member of the LCPS school board and asked them whether they thought, I don't know, violently confronting law enforcement in the streets of Minneapolis was speech. They'd tell you, oh my gosh, yes, that's protest. Yeah, we're storming the church. It's set aside. It is important work. But if you're a parent who comes to a meeting where you are designated, you're a designated place to speak to public officials, they're like, looks like terrorism. Terrorism.

Terrorism. Let's bring in some actors so we can figure out what to... It's part of the job. You shouldn't need actors to come in and simulate. How about make some better decisions? Maybe a lot of people would be less angry at you. But even if they are angry, many of them have very good reason to be. Take your lumps. Show up. Listen to them. And if you want to ignore, fine. And maybe the people of Loudoun County, the parents of Loudoun County are like... Great, we love this. Call us terrorists and throw boys' and girls' locker rooms. We love it. I don't think that's true of many parents. I think it might be more true of a lot of single people who get to vote. But it is astounding the people who are running that school system, which for a long time was considered one of the best school systems in the country, Mary Catherine, and they have really earned themselves a brand new reputation over the last half decade. It really... Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FNRadio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order. Please drink responsibly. able to surprise me, but it continues to surprise me how bad they are. Yeah, especially because they did the terrorism training about parents, literally the day that a kid was killed in their district. I mean, you'd think that would be the thing you'd want to be concerned about. Yes, no, we're going into private session. We're going into private session. Oh, is it about what happened to Jimmy? No, no, it's about something else. It's, um... The priorities speak for themselves. And if the people of Loudoun County are comfortable with that, I mean, go for it. But I would not be surprised to see a bunch of other people if this continues to happen heading for the exits as so many people are doing streaming away. And the thing is, before I turn to this Kamala Harris story, Mary Catherine, I have to tell you, I was texting with Adam earlier what the Democrats are up to in Virginia. the social experiments, the hardcore California-style left-wing policy, the tax-increased proposals as far as the eye can see, and they seem very emboldened to do all of it, try to turn the congressional maps to 10-1 blue. I mean, they are going like Seattle and Tifa left in Virginia. And I'm like, listen, if it gets... bad enough we have to start thinking about what the backup plan would be and i i don't think it would be driving in and out of west virginia every day that's such a long commute it would be like do we start looking at nashville or dallas or florida i mean at some point if the governance gets hostile and bad enough you know you leave yeah

It is worth contemplating. I mean, they are the raft of insane and or just idiotic things that they're trying to put through the Virginia legislature, which, you know, of course, with the Abigail Spanberger leading the charge, we were told was going to be, you know, a moderate group of folks. Now, you and I knew better, of course. And the people in charge of the Virginia legislature now as the Democrats are the actual crazy people. I mean, the. Twitter accounts say it all. It's amazing stuff. But they're just, the new thing they're doing with the redistricting is like, yeah, no, we're just going to make it a 10-1 state. We don't care that it's purple. This is gerrymandering, get on board. And Abigail Spanberger, famously moderate, as you know, guy, was like, I don't know, maybe a 9-2 would be better. And her folks in the legislature are like, nah. No. You'll listen to us, ma'am. Yeah, she, like. Kamala Harris won 51, 52% of the vote. And they're like, let's make it 10 to 1. This woman's entire mantra in the campaign, Abigail Spanberger, was affordability, affordability. And I saw it looks like some of the first bills that are going to come to her are gay marriage, which is like settled by the Supreme Court and by Congress already. But I guess they're like, oh, we'll do it. Abortion, making abortion even more abortiony in Virginia. Right. Because it's quite... available with some very small limitations at the end of pregnancy, and they don't like that, so they're going to apparently just do all the abortions all the way until birth. That's one of the other things that they're prioritizing, and then changing the maps from six to five in a closely divided state to 10 to 1, while in the pipeline are a ton of tax increases. Sounds like a focus on affordability. Well, and it'll be interesting because this is going to the Virginia Supreme Court, this redistricting attempt because they've tried some squirly ways and I think violated their own laws repeatedly trying to get this on the books before the 2026 elections. So it'll go to the Virginia Supreme Court, which is interesting because when Virginia passed nonpartisan redistricting by 70% on a ballot measure a couple of years ago. then the Supreme Court, when it got deadlocked, when that bipartisan group got deadlocked and couldn't choose maps, the Supreme Court was the one that made it happen. So it's going to be interesting because they're going to go to the Supreme Court and tell the Supreme Court its map is bad. We need a new one, and we broke a bunch of rules to make it. Yeah, your own map is not good. And the people of Virginia had this put in front of them just a few years ago and overwhelmingly said, yes, let's do a bipartisan commission, not the politicians. And all these politicians like Abigail Spanberger were in favor of it because that's what the left thought they wanted for their own power at the time. Now, like, never mind, let's completely redo it. Looks like they're doing it in an illegal way, by the way. in terms of the process here procedurally. So they very well might lose on appeal. I hope that they do. Someone, of course, involved in all of this is the Attorney General, Jay Jones, who famously made his bones fantasizing about the murders of Republican politicians and their young children and got elected anyway. I did notice that in one of his initial first...

announcements that he made on social media, he had misspelled attorney general. It was a Tony general. They forgot the R. And I said, well, he does love killing ours. So, I mean, that's at least on brand there. I mean, we laugh if only to avoid crying because this is what the Virginia Democrats have done in just a handful of weeks. And God knows what's coming next. Meanwhile, very quickly, Kamala Harris, her Kamala Harris. Q. X account and other accounts had been dormant for many months, but then they started percoling, like, ooh, something's coming, something's coming. And then it arrived today. What is it, Kamala Harris? Cut 27. Madam Vice President, what's going on with Kamala Harris? Well, I'm so glad you asked. I have good news. So Kamala Harris is turning into headquarters, and it's where you can go online to get basically the latest of what's going on, and also to meet and revisit with some of our great... Courageous leaders, be they elected leaders, community leaders, civic leaders, faith leaders, young leaders. I'm really excited about it. So stay engaged and I'll see you out there. Thank you. Okay. So apparently this is going to become a Gen Z focused account. And I've seen some of their tweets already. It's just like, snark and making fun of Republicans or whatever. Fine. It's now rebranding. It's Kamala Harris. Now it's headquarters, and their handle, by the way, includes 6-7 because the kids, Mary Catherine. They're so cool. They're so hip. Six-seven, like that's not played out. And then just a perfect Kamala Harris little performance there. I have no notes on any of this. No, I... can't imagine being less compelling. Like, do tell. I can go online to see the latest of what's going on and stay engaged with leaders of all kinds. That sounds fascinating. Thank you, Kamala Harris. She is so uncompelling. And by the way, there was a poll out today of the Democratic side for 2028. She's like at 34% leading all of the other people, which has got to be humiliating for them. And one more thing. That 6-7 thing is deeply embarrassing. That was gone three weeks ago, and now it's in her handle. Because the kids, right? They're down with it. Greetings, fellow students. I'm Kamala Harris. Check out headquarters for the latest on what's going on and the leaders. The leaders. I think this might be, remember Hillary Clinton's Verrett? Yes. That thing that lasts in four seconds. That's right. Yeah, this has verit vibes to me. I made that point to Dana Perino. She's like, ooh, that's a callback. That is a throwback. Throwback, but I think it might apply here. Mary Catherine, we're way over time. Thanks always for your time. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

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