Come. Yeah. What? I know. You might not think there's any happy for happy or any more, but there is. You know why? Because Viva Love resists downs and all that shit. And we got a Matt Gates scalp this week, ladies and gentlemen. OK. And we have great resistance warriors, Randy Winegarden, the president of the Teachers Union. It was fantastic. Still out there fighting the good fight for her. Because she actually does believe children of the future. She does. She teaches them. I'm on the fence about the little German wagons.
No, I'm not. Yeah, kind of are though. And then Rina Shaw, the fantastic founder of Republicans against Trump, right? We welcome everybody in this fight, as long as you don't kiss the ring and the ass and the sphincter in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, Joan Mika. Yeah, welcome all our new morning show viewers.
Anyway, fantastic happy hour and drink up and you know those salty maga tears over mac gates. Drink up. Enjoy. Happy hour.
I know, let's ask Randy Onegarden, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Hi, good morning, Randy. You're making your laugh. Well, that's a good thing. We are considerably less happy than when we ran into each other at the DNC, but hi. Good morning. Well, you know, let's say that science should be rocking and rolling here.
Oh, my God. Randy, Randy, Randy. I, you know, here's the vicious circle, you know, we get into is liberals get accused of talking down to people and blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, we are in this horrible place we are in where people have voted against their self interest again.
And I don't know what, you know, if there's one definitive answer, but, you know, you tweeted about Florida's average SAT scores have dropped to 9.48 in 2024, 18 points lower than last year, nearly 70 points lower than in 2017. The education state, as Rhonda Santis likes to call it, is now ranked 47th. I mean, these people, you know, we're joking about playing Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but
You know, someone was talking about Joe Rogan's influence that any proudly says, I'm just dumb. I don't really know anything. You know, I go ahead. Well, let me first off, thank you for having me on. And then there's, you know, I could I could wax for a long time on what I think has happened here. But let me just say this. I do think and I wrote this
this weekend in an op-ed, Al Shanker used to do an op-ed every week for the New York Times. I do it once a month, but I wrote in the op-ed. I do think it was the price of eggs.
Yeah, really, I really, I mean, all of these other things are part of. Yeah, there's other factors. It was a perfect storm. But yeah, I mean, yeah, and these folks, because Lauren Barber was like this.
before the 2022 election. And she literally almost lost her race to Adam Frisch at that point by just a couple hundred votes. And then she moved to another place. I think that the issue is we have two realities. We have reality one, which, you know, you and I try to live in.
And then there is this kind of lack of fact-based reality, which Beaubert and others live in. But most people who are non-college working class folk basically have been saying not just through COVID, but before COVID, before the 2008 recession, before NAFTA,
that what they want is to have a decent life for themselves and their families. Yeah. And the chart, the two charts that matter to me most in the post election, um, you know, gap fest has been number one, that people who were poor voted for Trump and number two, or, or more people who were poor voted for Trump. I don't, I don't have the chart in front of me at number two, Steve Ratner chart.
that showed that more families now no longer make more money going forward than going backwards, that our kids are making less money than we are. And so these two things that America, what normally binds America together is that we believe that
there's going to be opportunity that's better in the future than it was in the past, and that our kids will do better. And so when you see the price of gas or the price of eggs or the price of bacon or your groceries,
That is a reality that's shared by a lot of people. Right. And so it was exploited by the boberts and the others of the world. Randy, here's to do something completely different than what they, what it meant. Let me just interrupt you for a moment. I was reading a tweet. Do people really think the price of everything is going to magically drop in January? WTF is wrong with them. I would ask you about critical thinking skills.
It's not just the disinformation that Trump won entirely on lies and on no plan at all for inflation. It's that why are people so prone to believe these lies? Half the adults in America, half the adults in America are not as literate as you and I
would hope that they are. Half the adult illiteracy rate is about 50%. What you're saying right now is absolutely right. There's a whole lot of people that fear knowledge, and I would say that there's been a huge indictment of our test-based education system. In 2000,
Everybody, you know, Bush, Kennedy, all of them were like, okay, just create test, test, test, test, test, test. What we need to do is project-based instruction. What we need to do is critical thinking. What we need to do is kids being able to discern right from wrong, and that right from wrong,
but fact from fiction, understand context. What we need to do is create joy in schools. So there is a huge indictment here of what we can do as school teachers in terms of being able to impart those skills. But I would say this, when fear and anxiety rule
as they did in terms of the price of eggs. It's hard to get through. And our job going through the next two years is to do exactly what you just said. These things root for the best, root for the price of eggs to go down. But already in the last month, the mortgage rate, the fixed mortgage rate
for homes went up 1%. So already the market is saying that what Trump said in terms of reducing costs ain't going to happen. Already Musk has said, oh, no, no, no, we really shouldn't do tariffs. Why? Because he doesn't want to compete with China. He wants to sell things in China. So we have a big job to do going forward. But the one thing I wouldn't do
is I wouldn't actually undermine what people really felt, which is they feel pain about not being able to get ahead for themselves and their families. Right. But I guess, again, my point would be Kamala Harris did talk about that. She did talk about prices being too high and what she was going to do about it. Let me just, when I texted, go ahead. Look, the people who read the newspapers,
voted for Kamala Harris by plus six. People who followed the race voted for her. People who made their low propensity voters who made their minds up at the end.
plus 19 Trump. So yes, she did. And she I think she's fantastic. Yeah. But this whole notion of how we communicate with each other and how people actually hear what's being said, it's just something we have to learn. Yep.
So you retweeted Dr. Hotez, who said for years and in pandemic, he has targeted me and cited violence with me and my family, with conspiracy nonsense because I made low-cost, patent-free COVID vaccines and other vaccines for the world, reaching 100 million people at $3 a dose. He is a hero. When I texted Dr. Irwin Redliner, who's our regular about Bobby Kennedy's nomination, he said the ultimate cue to science, health, safety, and every American a living nightmare.
I mean, it is, they're almost like proudly anti everything, expert, facts, science. I mean, what, I don't know how you inoculate our kids against that. Well, I think what we do is we start with what we should be doing in schools, which is number one, we have an obligation to protect our kids and protect families. We have an obligation to fight for their dignity.
That is what schooling is. Number two, we have to lift up what really works and we have to transform schools so that every public school is a place that parents want to send their kids and educators want to work and kids thrive. So they're going to be doing all this stuff here and we're going to be working on the local level.
through our communities, because look what happened in terms of down ballot races. It was almost as if there were two different worlds. Thank you. And you said that Americans voted in state after state to protect public education and funding for public services. They elected school board candidates who see public education as a pathway to opportunity. I mean,
Part of what I think we have to continue to fight, Randy, we I'm sure you saw this the clip of the mom at the school board meeting who continue continually said the word retard and said you're not going to police my speech. You know that she she was telling her kid it's okay.
You know, so when we have the biggest bully we've ever seen as President of the United States, how do you teach your children? You know, now we have, you know, texts going out to black people about where to show up to pick cotton. We have texts going out to Hispanic people and gay people about, you know, being deported and going to re-education camps. I mean, how do you teach kids in this environment of hate that it's still not okay? You know? Go ahead. The number one we do, what?
We do what Tim Snyder said. I have a very worn copy of Snyder's book. Let me see if I can find it. My friend JoJo from Jersey is obsessed with him. We've got to get him on. Yeah. This is my very, very worn copy of it. It says, on Tierra. Yeah, which is you don't obey in advance. And that's and you can be as courageous as you can. But there's a third piece, which is we create community.
and when you create community, and I'm not just talking about creating communities within our tribes, create communities cross tribe, create community cross generationally, create community cross ethnically cross-gender. When we start creating community and being with our families, being with our schools, then we start having
not just a fight back, but a fight forward. And I think that's what schooling is. And that is what we will do. And when you see a bully, you try to stop a bully. But one of the ways that you stop a bully
is if all the other people around start saying to the bully, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? It's not going to stop Donald Trump that way. He is the best marketer in the world. He is like Reagan, like FDR. He has a skill that is probably, Molly fast said this. It's probably unique in this generation.
Yeah. But in terms of the rest, look what we have done in terms of schooling. Look what mom's for liberty. I mean, one of the, one of the things I chuckled about in the last few days is that Steve Bannon on his podcast. I was just going to mention this. There's a silver lining on, you know, saying, why did you lose? Well, why did they lose? Because the people around children basically said, no, I don't want that. Now, they didn't say that in terms of national election.
with the great marketer, but they said that locally. So we build up locally and we do what works. So I have one more thing I say, which is one of the things I have tried to get the Biden administration to do a lot. And, you know, they recognized it on Thursday when we had a career or Wednesday when we had this classroom to career event at the White House.
is that we need to transform high schools. 60% of kids do not go to college. We need to bring the jobs, the opportunities, the apprenticeships into high school, stackable credentials like we're doing with Micron and Syracuse. We need to change high schools to be about more projects and less tests, more relational, more critical things.
All right, we've gone way long, so I better get extra credit. You were grading those papers. I better get a gold star. Do you know how long I went with you? I love you. Goodbye, Randy. You got a gold star. Yes. Thank you so much, Randy. Thank you. Rina Shaw is the founding member of Republicans for Harris. Yes. The founder of Relax. Am I saying that? Relax strategies. Hard to relax right now, isn't it, Rina? Good morning.
good morning to you you know i was thinking about that name i mean my company some twelve years ago when i left capital hill and it's actually a play on my name which is of indian ancestry reena luchney and it's like a mary and so i took the ri in the l a x and now people are like you don't relax ever and i'm like not always in the fight yeah can i read it can i just say i'm so glad i have you on this morning uh... i think our friend steven best loss uh... uh... told us about you but i
I just heard another discussion this morning beating up on Democrats for what happened and that, oh, you know, they need to go more centrist. How many more Republicans for Harris could there be like you? You know what I mean? Like, I just I wanted to get your take on these analysis because every major and Republican that worked for Trump tried to warn America.
Right. I mean, a lot of sounding in the alarms, right? And we thought it would work. We thought we could get through to people particularly on the message of democracy and then also going a step further for many of us who may be anti-abortion for ourselves. I'm talking conservatives, right? Republican or Harris who were supportive of the Harris Wall's ticket, who were supportive of Biden in 2020.
For me, I can be anti-abortion for myself, but I can be pro-choice for other women. And so then that just puts me in the pro-choice camp. So going a step further on that, there was a democracy argument, there was a reproductive rights care and access argument, and essentially what we saw was
people were willing to say, you know what, that stuff may matter to me, but some other things matter a little bit more. And I think those other things were obviously the feeling of the economy, the cost of living, being very burdensome, and then just geopolitical tensions that weren't there when Trump was in office.
And I've been calling it luck and I've been getting a lot of heat for that because people expect a little bit more from a political strategist. But when I try to tell people it's a duopoly we have here. You can go in and you can write your brother or sister in, but that's not going to do anything. I tried with the third party in 2016. I was the top advisor and the chief spokesman for Evan McMullen.
We ran a three month sprint to try to deny Donald Trump the White House in 2016. We failed miserably, but hey, we tried. And so in saying that, I learned a lot more about the system than a lot of people did. And what I saw here was not an acceptance of Trump so much as just a rejection of what they, the people again who went for Trump or who helped Trump with their vote, a rejection of what they felt the Democrats were serving up. So it was always going to be a hard fight.
Yeah. Speaking of third party, Dana Gould said, I'm sure Jill Stein has harsh words for Trump's staunchly anti-Palestinian cabinet picks. We just played Tom Holman. Everybody's been talking about Latinos that have been interviewed on TV and elsewhere.
that were literally have undocumented relatives. They're like, oh, well, he does. They don't mean us. I mean, that's one of the other stories is people voting against their self-interests again, whether your cause is, you know, what was happening in Gaza, whether you're Latino. I mean, there's a whole piece today. Here's how Trump's anti-immigrant message broke through with non-white voters.
I mean, it is amazing, right? How fear-mongering and dividing can work even. It says Trump made notable gains with voters of color despite his openly racist and xenophobic campaign messaging. A record 46% of Latinos voted for him, 14 points from 2020. Asian-American support jumped 5 points to 39%. Black support gained only 1 point at 13%.
talk about this a little bit because it's just it's a little particularly I was just thinking of Asians with his whole kung flu and China virus and he I mean he has been racist to every single segment of the population. Nobody nobody goes untouched from from Trump's
I think true ire against those who just don't want to support him because they find him problematic, whether personally or policy wise, right? Because that's what I think it comes down to. Those numbers you just shared, though, tell a story and a really important one that makes many of us in the political
Insider class which I unfortunately am now after many years, but you know, I can't say I didn't want to be here I got into politics because I love people and then when I started to I've worked for two members on Capitol Hill I started to see how the system worked. I liked it less and less But yeah, and so I got into radio because I hate everyone I'm kidding
I'm not going to lie, I have those days. But I think being in politics requires you to have this sense of eternal optimism. And the story that those numbers tell is one that I think the political establishment needs to kind of come to terms with is that this is all about us versus them. When people put themselves mentally in the camp, because we're all very tribalistic, right? At the end of the day,
It's what we are human. This is this part of it. I think for the Asian American segment and so I'm the I'm a new American and I'm a daughter of immigrants from India and Africa and I can sort of speak to the attitudes there. I think there's this there's a sense that a lot of these people follow the law. They got in line.
They followed the letter law almost to a fault. And they feel kind of a sense that something's being taken from them by an entire swath of people that are being let in freely. So the sort of open borders, the poorest borders argument that Trump and all of that went out with, it resonated because it drove those people further into this mindset that they were wronged because the whole class people who didn't follow the law were getting... Yeah, no, I get it.
Some of them came in illegally in the case of this one Latino family and some of their relatives are still illegal. They just don't think they mean them. And so, you know, this line in the many Latino voters also disconnected from the immigration experience and hold xenophobic ideas themselves. Trump intermingled his xenophobic attacks with his economic message. In every single message, immigrants are taking your jobs. They're coming after you said one analyst inevitably, particularly if you're part of certain ecosystems, you'll start to believe that rhetoric.
that is a that's a neat trick and I just hope to make and now we're just we're I keep saying Rena we're in the find out in the look around and find out program very quickly I mean people that don't realize Obamacare is the Affordable Care Act that they have
This Dr. Oz nomination scene is a potential boon for Medicare privatization. I think people, many people, it's like comparing it to Brexit. They have no idea what they voted for and what's coming.
I think you're touching on something that I've been thinking about a lot this past week and what's going to happen to our social fabric here. But the reality is so many people felt like our social fabric is already unraveling. We have found ourselves in a moment where we have become even more individualistic. See, our system, our society set up for us to become so selfish, for us to become so individualistic. But what I see right now is that happening on steroids. People have just started to say, well, my situation matters way more than the person next door.
We don't even talk to our neighbors anymore. So it's no surprise that a lot of these same people are going to be touched by and impacted greatly, not just touched by these really these policies that they don't even really start to understand that they know they voted for, but don't even realize they fully voted for. Yeah.
People just need to be slammed you know they need to be met in the face with it for them to for it to sort of Get down into their system for it to really resonate with them. How bad it all is. Yeah now speaking of steroids Bobby Kennedy
What? Nothing. I mean, first of all, it just shows part of the cowardice and hypocrisy of how we got here. I don't know if you saw this. In audio we recovered from his radio show, he read and praised the description of Trump and his supporters as belligerent idiots, outright Nazis, cowards, and boot liquors. He also compared Trump to Hitler.
Right? Which makes him, I mean, it just didn't, you know, but you were, you wrote just a great thread about post polio syndrome ruined the last years of my late dad's remarkable life. Had he had access to polio vaccines as a child in Uganda, he'd likely be alive today and would have been able to run and play sports with me and my siblings among so many other things. I mean, it, and just that this hypocrite, this coward, Bobby Kennedy is going to do God knows what, you know, in his thirst for power, right?
Yeah, I think there's just so much that can be said about it. It comes from, obviously, a political dynasty has been shunned by his own siblings. And you can see that it's cowardice on display, RFK Jr. As much as he looks like this strong, independent voice, I saw people when he announced his bid say they found him refreshing. And I think for me, it was always the vaccine stances. I'm like, come on now. You say something like that. You're not in touch with the reality.
So you see refreshing, I see lunatic. I love someone on Fox trying to defend Matt Gaetz yesterday. I was like, well, you know, she just come out and say, you know, I was a firebrand. I'm like, oh, is that a new word for rapist? You know, two years ago, I was a firebrand. Oh, well.
Um, yeah, the problem though, people found him refreshing because they did not go beneath the surface. Well, we have an electorate that is just genuinely not interested in doing that. And that's why I had to tweet that about my dad. It's like, I can like some of this stuff about arcade junior wanting to remove processed and food and additives or whatever. That's cool. I'm the mom. I try to make my granola bars at home. I fail.
But every time I, you know, I come to the store. I'm empowered. I read the ingredient list. But what we're talking about with him is the fact that he openly sits on media and says, no, I didn't say that. They run the clip. And this guy still is like, no, I wasn't a vaccine denier. So I having him at the helm, even if he's saying that he won't ban any vaccines that are currently available, it's the public health messaging, the fact that he's talking about informed consent.
The number of people, including his own vice president, Joe and Mika, who have called him Hitler, you cannot walk back without being a giant coward that wants to be close to power or afraid of power.
By the way, to your point about just healthcare and general Laura tweeted, did you know that free annual checkups and preventative screenings like mammograms, colonoscopies and pap smears didn't used to be free? This is part of the Affordable Care Act, pass it on. I mean, it just, I keep saying, you know, as we come from circle, disinformation was the big, the big, because they didn't win on the truth on things that were actually Biden-Harris policies. They won on fear-mongering.
you know, on lies about the economy, about trans people, about, you know, if you noticed, I don't know, there's no, apparently all the dogs and cats have been eaten. There are no, because I hadn't heard anything else about that now. People eating dogs and cats. The caravans are gone again. It's like magic.
You were sitting senator taking a Facebook post and extrapolating it, making it seem like it's a widespread problem. That's what JD Vance did with that Facebook post about the eating the dogs in Springfield, Ohio. The woman who posted that is apologize. I'm like, I'm so sorry. But hey, the can is already open. The monkeys are already
out or crawling in, whatever you call it. I know our viewers can't see it, but I'm wearing these earrings. I have a have a loop of monkeys. I mean, that's what Washington is doing. They are monkeying around with our lives. I saw them do it. I mean, just a few years after the Affordable Care Act, not even a year or two later, they were talking about repeal and replace. Yeah. And this was
The Affordable Care Act, I was a young staffer, a weed staffer on Capitol Hill, working for Republicans, by the way, when that whole Affordable Care Act was being crafted and then got passed, obviously landmark legislation that gets the moniker Obamacare, there were Republicans conceding how much it was going to help their own communities. The talking point at that time was there's no bureaucrat that belongs in the exam room. Look at this about faith that the Republican party's done. It's so hypocritical.
I love the cartoon of the woman in stirrups, and they're like, oh, I see your problem. You have too many Republicans up there. Rina, we welcome all Republicans against Trump, as long as you don't go to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring. We are welcome back anytime. No grumbling. All right. Thanks, Rina. See you next time.
