Point of View August 21, 2026 – Hour 1: Weekend Edition

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View. Kerby Anderson. Thank you for joining us. It's the Friday Weekend Edition. We are grateful that you can join us today. Of course, it's back to school for many of you, but I might mention, especially having been on the West Coast, that school doesn't start until after Labor Day.

[00:00:32] And I've always sort of thought that there should be sort of this philosophy throughout the universe that school should not start until after Labor Day. But some of your kids are in school. Some are about to go back to school. So we're going to be talking about that. A very good piece by Cal Thomas. We, of course, have all sorts of comments being made about some of the leftist proposals. Charles Cook gets us into that. Fake polls. I think we saw that over the last couple of weeks, which we are certainly going to warn you about.

[00:00:57] We will, as I mentioned earlier in the week, talk about online sports betting, some of the sports betting which has gotten out of hand, as well as we will spend a little bit of time talking about Iran. And I will just acknowledge that we just crossed $40 trillion in national debt. At the same time, the bond market broke and it came to the point where no one wanted to buy our treasuries. And, well, Scott Bessett said, I guess we'll have to buy our own treasuries.

[00:01:25] So we will probably spend more time talking about those economic issues on Monday, but they are certainly relevant as well. Around the round table, we have Liberty McCarter. And, of course, she's the co-host and host of Point of View, as well as a host of Know Why Podcast, including one of those we've posted for you to watch later if you have time. And Holly Randall is, again, counsel with First Liberty Institute. And Liberty, if nothing else, we always like to start out with some of these First Liberty conversations.

[00:01:54] And I think we have a victory, don't we? Yeah, I was really happy to read this. Of course, I'm glad that you guys also make your victories public because there's so many of these things that people wouldn't even realize were becoming issues for people. And so now you realize, OK, there can be victory if something like this happens to me. And I was just surprised again at how often employers want to claim undue hardship to accommodate religious liberty requests.

[00:02:23] And so this is about a Forest Service officer who was requesting a Sabbath exemption. So tell us about him. Yeah, what's cool about this case is that it has kind of three steps of First Liberty in it. You mentioned the words undue hardship. And for a long time, the United States Supreme Court interpreted that standard. That's an employer can deny a religious accommodation to an employee if it would impose an undue hardship on the business.

[00:02:48] For many, many years, the Supreme Court defined that term to be like the lowest possible barrier. If it even made the employer have to lift barely a finger, that religious accommodation we've denied, which is kind of crazy because the word undue hardship like you. That means something. There's some there's some adjectives in the dictionary. Right. Yeah. So years ago, First Liberty had a case. I say years ago, three years ago, First Liberty had a case called Drawf versus DeJoy.

[00:03:16] And we went to the court and we said the definition of this term needs to be fixed. We need to make it actually a protective standard for employees of faith. And the Supreme Court agreed in the 9-0 opinion, which is incredible, and said no, undue hardship means it has to impose a substantial cost to the business as a whole. So not just that department, not just, you know, that individual employees boss to the whole company. So what we're seeing now is the fruit of that win, essentially.

[00:03:45] And this case with the press release that you mentioned is one of those cases. Adam Demert, Forest Service officer, wants to have a Sabbath off. He attends two church services on Sundays and says, I can't be at work that day. The Forest Service Department originally denied that accommodation. And then we said, oh, hold on. This is not a substantial cost to the operation of this agency as a whole.

[00:04:14] And Adam's willing to work on Sundays in emergency situations. Right. If the forest is burning down, you probably need people to stop the fire. OK, so that really kind of took the wind out of any of the sails they had to prove this is any sort of burden on us. And so we're incredibly thankful to the Department of Agriculture for granting this accommodation. And I said three steps. So Groff is step one. Adam Demert is step two, essentially the fruit of that.

[00:04:43] And then step three is just more cases like this, more examples. You mentioned we put those press releases out. That's because we want people to see them and we want them to know if I'm in this situation, there's there's people gaining victory over this. And so we want to empower other employees of faith to do the same. Yeah. It seems like sometimes employers maybe just don't want to mess with figuring it out.

[00:05:06] But one of the things that I just really struck me in the press release was that this had been an unfilled position before he was hired. Right. So they didn't have anybody working on Sundays or any of the days that he currently works. But now all of a sudden, because he wants Sundays off, then they can't accommodate that. Right. And that's I mean, business and employers that make the world go round. We all love our jobs, but sometimes it does take a little prodding to get them to be creative and say, hey, engage in this process with me.

[00:05:35] How do we solve this problem? How can you accommodate my religious beliefs? And we still keep business going and up and running. And so this is one of those situations where it had already sort of been demonstrated. We didn't really need somebody in there in that time because the position was vacant. And so that helped make that sort of collaborative process between employer employee possible. I thought I might have for fun for just a minute, because sometimes when you try to teach Latin, I know that you're probably doing that your home school and things like that or teaching the class in school.

[00:06:04] They say, why do I need to know Latin? De minimis was one of the go ahead. Explain how that relates to this case. We didn't learn a lot of Latin in my public school. We can talk about this later. So most of my Latin is legal terms that I learned in law school. But de minimis, the word you use, that used to be the standard for denying an accommodation. If it was going to the definition of undue hardship was that if it imposed a de minimis burden on the company.

[00:06:34] So that really empowered employers to be in a deny, deny, deny mode because, I mean, we can all think of something that meets the definition of de minimis. Like I said, inconvenience is a person even slightly. So the sales, the winds have really changed from it just has to be de minimis to substantial cost to the business. And that's incredibly protective of people of faith.

[00:06:56] Just before we take a break, if you receive some of the material from First Liberty and I do, they were talking about one of the cases you're bringing before the Supreme Court. Can you speak to that? Yeah, we have a like a record number of cert petitions, the Supreme Court. So we're all being really prayerful about what's going to happen with those. But we filed one just yesterday for a set of families in California that, like so many of our cases, just want to be treated equally by the state. So we're eagerly anticipating what's going to happen with that one.

[00:07:25] The court has made a lot of great strides, especially in the education arena, on treating religious schools, religious entities equally in cases like another one of First Liberty's Carson versus Macon, where they said you can't deny school vouchers to this family that wants to use them in a religious school. So it's kind of a follow up on some of those issues that we have been working really hard on and the court has been responding really well to. So we are very hopeful for what's going to happen. Can take a break.

[00:07:54] And when we come back, school is started for many of you or will start shortly. And Cal Thomas has some comments about that. Also, Larry Sand, who's been on the program with us, along with, of course, Cal Thomas, wrote a piece. And we talked about the other day escaping the educational industrial complex. And I certainly wanted to get to Liberty's comments about that because we've talked about homeschooling and it also gets into some other issues as well.

[00:08:17] But if you are concerned about what is being taught in your kids or your grandkids school, I think Cal Thomas will reinforce some of the concerns. And so we'll come in, get into the issue of school choice, which, of course, is also a religious liberty issue. So we will certainly have lots to talk about in the terms of education. So stay tuned. We'll have more right after this.

[00:09:00] This is Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson. You know, there are many ways to demonstrate the failure of socialism. One very effective way is to compare similar countries such as North Korea and South Korea. But another way is to compare a city that was cut in half. I mentioned both examples in my booklet on socialism and suggest you watch a recent YouTube video on the simple questions socialism couldn't answer.

[00:09:26] Now, the first half of the video gives some history of feudalism, capitalism and Marxism. But then it points to what happened after World War Two when Germany and Berlin were divided. People began leaving East Berlin for West Berlin. So the East Germans built a wall around the city. It also provided a social and economic perspective on the differences between a socialist economy and a capitalist one. The video tells the story of two grocery stores 20 miles apart.

[00:09:53] In East Berlin, there are 3000 items and just one form of mustard, not even spicy mustard. In West Berlin, the grocery store has 7000 items because it was competing with three other grocery chains. The store in East Berlin had its prices determined by the Politburo in Moscow, who determined what products they want for their population. Prices and the supply of products in West Berlin grocery store were determined by what people buy and what the store manager occasionally adjusted prices.

[00:10:22] As you might imagine, the citizens in West Berlin enjoyed a better standard of living and live longer than the citizens of East Berlin. They also enjoyed more freedom, had more consumer choices, had less government corruption. We need to remind the young people who are promoting socialism of this social and economic experiment in the city of Berlin. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view.

[00:10:49] Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. The Pet Winskinen School is in session, and there are a lot of people raising some very significant questions.

[00:11:11] I have had Larry Sanda on the program, and he points out that if you look at the latest survey, 56% of parents believe K-12 education is on the wrong track. I wonder why. Well, it turns out that if you look at what is called the National Assessment of Education Progress, many people call that the nation's report card. It's not the report card I wanted to give to my parents. The 12th grade students scored lowest in reading and math in decades.

[00:11:38] 45% of high school seniors scored below basic in math, and 32%, at least a third, below basic in English and reading. And so we certainly have not been able to produce quality students. Some of that maybe is the pandemic and the lockdown. But I've said before, Liberty, that sometimes people will even put up with some of the bias in the schools, the anti-Christian bias.

[00:12:06] If we were producing a good educational product, we're not even producing that. No, I mean, I see this all the time, especially in comments online and things like that. You know, there's always somebody who wants to, has a bone to pick with homeschoolers or something like that. And you just see these parents who are like, look, I don't want my kid going to a school where the majority are graduating not proficient in the basics. And so this is not hard.

[00:12:34] I really appreciated the point in the article that you posted here from Town Hall where Cal Thomas notes that, hey, competition is a good thing. And so if schools are realizing that, like, hey, people are turning to other options and we don't want that to happen for various reasons, then maybe we need to up our game a little bit and actually teach kids how to read and do math. Yeah, the bare minimum, the de minimis skills that you need to graduate. Yeah, three R's here is all we're having for.

[00:13:01] Talk about where you are with some of these issues of educational choice, because that's something you at First Liberty have been involved with. And it does seem like this is a case of where finally there is a movement towards homeschooling Christian schools, charter schools like we've never seen before. Yeah, that Willard petition I mentioned in the last segment is an issue of school choice. And you can use that term really broadly. It can be homeschooling. It can be charter schools.

[00:13:29] So Willard, the cert petition, concerns homeschooling. We have a case right now in Oklahoma about whether religious institutions can operate charter schools because we want students to have access to quality education providers. And a lot of state laws, including Oklahoma, prevent those individuals or organizations from operating charter schools. And then, of course, we have our typical like slate of cases of all the nonsense at public schools. So we really see religious liberty issues in all these arenas.

[00:13:59] But one of the ways, like I mentioned, the court has been moving in a positive direction is not excluding religious institutions or religious organizations from generally available public benefits. So we just talked during the break about the Texas school choice.

[00:14:15] So that's a great example of ways that families are able to take advantage of benefits, like returning their own tax dollars to them to be able to educate their children as they please, which to me sounds like logic. But you get big groups, big teachers unions, big education industrial complex industries, educrats, as some people call them, that want to funnel all money towards secular public schools.

[00:14:45] And so the court has done a great job. And even let's give credit to state legislatures that have made a lot of positive strides for school choice in the past few years, expanding options like Texas, like Oklahoma. Oklahoma. Those are the ones I'm familiar with. They have done a great job to make sure that kids have access to quality schools, regardless of where they live.

[00:15:07] Let me pick up on that for just a minute, because yesterday and even on Tuesday, I had guests talking about energy and they had a map of the country and show which are the places where energy is cheapest. And you have a map at First Liberty that shows which particular states have the greatest amount of religious liberty in terms of some of these issues. Education is one of those. And so you can go to the website and find that out, can't you?

[00:15:34] Yeah. And you're going to hit now, just like my Oklahoma roots. Energy is great for the economy in those places. And it often I think this is an unscientific survey. But in my observations, states that are investing in energy and making that a priority often have more freedom of things like school choice. And because they're willing to generate that tax revenue and then give it back to their people to make sure that parents can send their families to Christian schools or access Christian homeschool resources or whatever religion.

[00:16:04] Really, they're not going to discriminate. But that's yeah, you're pairing my two. I think energy is a is an economy driving industry. And when the economy is doing well, people have more access to freedom. And that means religious freedom. So, yeah. Number one, I think, was Arkansas, wasn't it? That's right. Yeah. Sarah Huggies Andrews is doing it. That's right. Yeah. You know, this is I would encourage churches or any Christian organizations listening to take advantage of these wins,

[00:16:31] especially look up the Religious Liberty Index, see how the religious liberty for educational issues is in your state, because something that I'm really convicted of is that as Christians, we should be concerned with the education of children and not. I mean, people often think about Christian education is like, OK, well, you know, a class about the Bible or Christianity. Christianity, but all education has Christians should care about because it's teaching kids to use their brains,

[00:17:00] which God gave us to learn about creation, which he gave us. And so we should be invested in well-educated kids. And Kirby, you said something a minute ago. Parents might be willing to dismiss some anti-Christian bias if they felt like their kids were at least getting a good education. Think about the flip side. Think about secular families who might be willing to send their kids to a religious school or a church charter school if they knew their kids were actually going to be well-educated.

[00:17:26] So I think there's a real opportunity for churches here to step into that gap because so many families are dissatisfied and you are seeing things like school choice and religious liberty, the backing from First Sobretti Institute and things like that with school choice to make that an option for more people. And the good thing there is that churches have a biblical command to be excellent and do excellent work. And the government does not have that. So regardless of your personal religious belief, if you want your child to have a good education,

[00:17:56] a Christian school or a school that's under a biblical command to do excellent might be a great place to teach your kid reading, writing and arithmetic. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, again, you just mentioned a minute ago this whole idea that some people are critical of homeschools. And you take that personally because you were homeschooled and you are homeschooled. And the article I posted by Larry Sand has the link, and you've seen it before, but it's worth mentioning again.

[00:18:18] Recent nationwide studies show that homeschool students score well above the national average in reading, language, math, social studies and science. Well, that sounds pretty good to me. And I think it illustrates again that, of course, the parents that are more involved are probably also going to do a better job.

[00:18:36] But even in other circumstances with charter schools, Christian schools and a variety of others, we always see that if there's any, as Cal Thomas talks about, competition and a motivation to improve, you see that that's a better way to educate the next generation. Yeah. You know what? On Monday, I actually talked about something that was in the Wall Street Journal that I didn't realize.

[00:18:59] But it was super interesting that in the 1940 school year, there were almost 120,000 local school districts. And then there began a consolidation effort that lasted several decades. And it kind of coincided with the rise of teachers unions really becoming a powerful institution. And today there are only 13,000 local school districts in the United States.

[00:19:20] So even in terms of the public schools, we've lost a lot of competition because instead of them being really rooted in these smaller local communities with local control there, you have these sprawling school districts often across huge cities where teachers unions are pulling the strings. A lot of times not really with the local community's interest in mind. And so people are responding to that in their own ways, trying to make that competition again. I would encourage you to go back and listen to that Monday broadcast because it certainly documented that.

[00:19:48] And one other one I thought I'd mention since I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. This one still makes me smile. Roll your eyes. Probably a better way to say it. The teachers union in San Francisco went on strike back in February. They thought it was going to be a long strike. It ended up being four days. But the United Educators of San Francisco didn't just walk off the job. They emailed all the parents urging them to not do any at-home learning.

[00:20:11] And they did so because any educational progress the families made independently would actually weaken the union's bargaining position. What? I'm not making this up. Do not read your children. So you have teachers unions. Yeah. Do not read to your kids. Telling parents not to educate their kids. Because ultimately, if they actually showed no difference when the teachers were in or the teachers were out, that would hurt their bargaining position. Wow.

[00:20:40] And I put that with, of course, the Cal Thomas one about, you know, the public school system may be the last and largest remaining monopoly in this country. And, of course, we have a booklet coming out on capitalism in which I say, yes, one of the arguments against capitalism is monopolies. But oftentimes, monopolies are due to either too much government or too little government. And in some cases, that is certainly the case. But the case out of San Francisco just had to make me smile. That's hilarious.

[00:21:07] We don't want you teaching your kids because if they do just as well when we're on strike, then we're going to lose our bargaining position. Wait, so parents can teach their children? I'm going to teach them even more now. It's a great story. And it's documented in the article by Larry Sand came out yesterday. And, of course, the Cal Thomas one today. We have other things to talk about. We're having a lot of fun. We'll be back right after this. Who can you trust?

[00:21:36] Years ago, many of us could probably have provided a fairly long list. But today, well, today, it seems we almost can't trust anyone. Educators don't even know what a woman is anymore. Many so-called public servants have shown all they care about is themselves. The FBI has been accused of bias, law-breaking, betrayal, and journalism. It's largely corrupt with no Clark Kent standing up for truth, justice, and the American way.

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[00:23:04] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, is Kerby Anderson. Back once again, perhaps you've seen that a political cartoon has somebody looking at a ballot and has two boxes. One that says common sense. You can check that box. The other says communism. You can check that box.

[00:23:26] And what we're starting to see is a number of people that are saying, if you vote for common sense, then you're probably not going to vote for some of these democratic socialists or very leftist progressives coming up with ideas. Charles Cook addresses that. Leftist zealots just can't admit when their schemes don't work. And the first one he talks about is Ro Khanna, who is the representative in the state of California. And it's the idea of a wealth tax.

[00:23:54] Now, last week, Holly, you were here. And you might remember when we talked about the piece by Betsy McCoy, who actually was the lieutenant governor of the state of New York. Later on, really a great deal of fame because she was the one that started talking about the Clinton health care plan, Hillary care and all that. Lately, she's been writing about tax the rich. And I know you don't like this, but in Rhode Island, where I was the other day, they have the Taylor Swift tax. I know you love Taylor Swift, but Taylor Swift has a mansion right there.

[00:24:24] And that's the case. You also have a in Connecticut. I was in Connecticut. They have a mansion tax. Washington, D.C. has a tax. California has Proposition 40. And it's all about we just need to tax these wealthy people without the reality that as soon as you do that, you're going to chase every one of them out of the state. Don't you think? Yeah. I had a conversation. Actually, I'll have to give credit with my coworker this morning, Cliff.

[00:24:48] He said the problem with all of this tax the rich desire for socialism is that we have lost the idea of like thou shall not covet. He was like we need to bring back the idea of like covetousness. Yeah. It's bad because the origin, you know, and jealousy has kind of become our modern synonym for it.

[00:25:07] But it's not quite exactly, I think, what that's getting at because he was explaining that, you know, it's because people want what others have and aren't willing to sort of take the efforts to get it on their own merit. And then you get these ideas like, well, we'll just tax Taylor Swift until she sells her mansion because she doesn't want to be subject to that tax anymore, which is inevitably going to happen. And then, you know, then who do we point the finger at? The middle class. That's good. Of course.

[00:25:37] Nobody nowhere for, you know, lack of good grammar there I'm having. It's my public school education. But, yeah, I don't know. I think it's just we've got this level of like jealousy in society that's leading us to these horrible ideas. Well, again, tax the rich sounds good until you realize that even if you could get the money, only about 2.7 percent of a billionaire's assets are liquid enough.

[00:26:03] They might be jewelry or homes or luxuries, everything else tied up in stocks. And later in this piece, you'll even talk about Mark Cuban, who's partly a Trump fan, just about the opposite, and pretty much a Democrat, has had questions about Ro Khanna and some of the things being said.

[00:26:19] And I just think even within the Democratic Party right now, Liberty, they're just people saying this is the wrong way to go because even as Betsy McCoy points out, you can talk about one income tax scheme that was supposed to be temporary and only was going to tax the rich. It's 35 years later. Now it's still in effect, and it now has seven brackets, and it's reaching into the middle class because once the rich leave, the middle class have to pick up the pieces. And that's you and me.

[00:26:48] You know, I think I'm trying to understand, you know, why they keep pushing for policies or supposed solutions that don't work. They're not working. They haven't worked in the past. And I really think a lot of it comes down to just ideology. And as we become more secular, then really a political ideology kind of replaces that zeal that used to be reserved for religious beliefs.

[00:27:16] And so whether it's about, you know, taxing the rich or climate change activism, these different examples, when you read interviews with people who've kind of come out of those movements, they will say, if I said, wait a minute, that seems like that's not going to work. Or like the science doesn't match up or the numbers don't add up there. They're told to shut up, basically, and say you can't question that. And so I wonder if they're just saying, you know, this is this is the ideology.

[00:27:46] This I this is my truth is that I feel like, you know, because of covetousness or whatever, billionaires need to be taxed and this is going to fix everything. And even when it's like you can feel how you want about billionaires. But if it's not working to fix the economy, it's not working. So why are you continuing to, you know, push for that unless there's some other reason, which I think is, you know, ideological zeal that's kind of at the root of a lot of it? Well, again, one of the things that I thought was interesting is we talked the other day, Holly, when we had you and Dr.

[00:28:15] Matthews in last Friday about, well, they'll leave and go to another state. Well, I found this. The Democratic Socialists of America, they have a magazine. I mean, I wouldn't subscribe to it, but apparently in the magazine, they do say that the fight to tax the rich will go on to. And this is direct quote. There is not a single state that is a safe haven, unquote. So you, I think, have a pretty good idea of what they want to actually achieve if they can. You're seeing this.

[00:28:42] I mean, just using Texas again as a case study, the economic growth in our state, people are drawn to the freedom that we have here. They're really drawn to it. And my town can account for that. Yeah, you're, you're, once they have to live through their first 110 degree summer, they may want to go, you know, move out as we're all suffering. But even stuff like the, what are they calling it, Y'all Street, because people went out of Wall Street.

[00:29:07] They're bringing money and investment to Texas, and Texas is making that a priority. And so I think you're seeing, hopefully, solutions to prevent that. But you have to, like, beg people, when you move here, don't bring your politics with you. If we drove you out of California and Connecticut and you came here looking for freedom, do not vote the way you used to vote. Learn. Or, yeah, I have friends or people that I knew, you know, from different things in the past.

[00:29:36] And, you know, we'll keep up on Facebook. And, you know, maybe from the West Coast or from Seattle, they've moved to Texas to the, you know, kind of North Texas, Dallas area. And it's just funny, the things they'll post kind of in a positive culture shock, like, wouldn't believe how cheap this was. You wouldn't believe how free. There's American flags hanging in the Walmart. They're just so unabashedly patriotic here. And it's like, yes, welcome to God's country.

[00:30:01] But, yeah, I mean, economically, too, I know a lot of people who just, you know, they move for the opportunity because there's so much more opportunity for economic advancement and prosperity whenever you allow the freedom. And then it does trickle down and make a lot of people more prosperous, too. Well, one of the other pictures here is not only Ro Khanna, but also Zoran Mamdani. And he, the other day, identified one of the five boroughs where they're going to put a city grocery store.

[00:30:28] And the point, I guess, is to try to reduce costs. But there's a problem. And I think we've talked about this before, because if you can, and he was hoping to reduce costs by 30 percent, you know what's going to happen. It's going to have a black market. People are going to go in, buy those groceries, and sell them somewhere else. So the only way to get around that is to have people show an ID before they want to buy groceries. And that would at least cover the people outside of the city. But then the people inside the city, well, they could show an ID.

[00:30:58] So that wouldn't work. So then you also have to limit the amount of groceries. So imagine going to your HEB or your Albertsons or your Kroger's or whatever, and you have to show an ID to buy the groceries, and you only are limited to the kind of groceries you can have. That sounds a lot like socialism. There's going to be a black market for spicy mustard. And you may be participating in it, because I know that's what you like on your sandwich after last week. That would be crazy. It wasn't ID.

[00:31:25] According to the quote here, it was a library card-esque system. All right. But, yeah, the way they tried to frame that. I'm like, oh, no, no. That's still an ID. All of a sudden, I think maybe they realized, like with the voter ID, some of the hypocrisy, library card-esque. So we're going to go with that. But what really got me is I think it was another of Momdani's staffers that was being interviewed, basically. Like, what if this puts out, like, the local, you know, bodega owner that's right next door?

[00:31:53] And the response is, well, maybe they shouldn't have been in that business. Yes. And it's like, whoa, do you not care about – No. I thought we liked bodegas in New York City. I thought that was who – we were standing up for the little guy. But now it's just how dare the little guy have, you know, dreamed of starting a business for themselves. Pretty amazing. If people don't understand the spicy mustard quote, you can see my commentary today because I pointed out that one of these studies – and this comes actually from a Berkeley group as far as I can tell.

[00:32:21] They did a comparison of a grocery store in East Berlin to a grocery store in West Berlin. And this is, of course, Germany where you would probably have lots of different kinds of mustard. Well, in East Berlin, only 3,000 products out on the shelves. Some of them pretty inferior. And only one kind of mustard, not even spicy mustard. Over in West Berlin, more than 7,000 different products. Cheaper and better quality because they're competing with other grocery stores.

[00:32:50] And you have just a perfect example, which, again, for the younger generation, they won't remember. But if you look at it in history, this 30 miles apart, two different grocery stores, two different stores because one is actually determined – the prices are determined by the Politburo in Moscow. And these are the products, and you have to be happy with those products. And the one in West Berlin, this is the free market.

[00:33:17] We have to do something with those library cards now that we can't use them to teach our children to read at home. So let's take them to the grocery store. Yeah. It's not an ID, though. Yeah, it's not an ID. Nevertheless, this piece by Charles Cook, we always appreciate his wisdom. And he takes on a couple of the leftist leaders. When we come back, though, I thought we might get into these fake polls. They've been way off. Why? We'll talk about that right after this.

[00:33:59] This piece of news belongs in the category, shouldn't we have done this already? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just announced it has finalized a rule that eliminates all federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for sex-rejecting procedures on children and adolescents. CHIP is the Children's Health Insurance Program. The American College of Pediatricians describes sex-rejecting procedures as pharmaceutical and surgical interventions intended to alter a child's physical characteristics to resemble those of the opposite sex.

[00:34:28] Through Medicaid, the federal government has been subsidizing such gender transition procedures, including for minors, in more than half the states. In January 2025, via executive order, President Trump started the process to cut off this federal funding. The process included HHS's release of a 400-page report writing a rule aimed at eliminating the funding, public comment on the rule, and final adoption of the rule. In announcing the final rule, President Trump stated,

[00:34:55] We no longer are going to pay for our innocent children to undergo these barbaric surgeries and practices, which result in unthinkable and irreversible harm to their young bodies. But why did this take so long? We've had the CAST report out of the U.K., plus our own 400-page report, both showing the lack of scientific justification for these draconian protocols. Most Americans oppose them.

[00:35:17] The rulemaking process takes time, but the urgent necessity of stopping this mutilation of children and of protecting taxpayers from having to fund this evil should have prompted Congress to act. It's great that we now have this directive, but a radical future administration could reverse it. Congress should codify it. Health care providers could skirt this rule by miscoding a patient's diagnosis or prescription.

[00:35:38] The Washington Stand reports that Planned Parenthood affiliates admit to using endocrine disorder codes instead of gender identity disorder codes to get payment for gender transitions. We need vigorous enforcement of the new rule and congressional action. For Point of View, I'm Penna Dexter. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth.

[00:36:05] Back once again in studio with us, Liberty McCarter as well as Holly Randall. One of the articles I've posted here, Don't Fall for Fake Polls. And if you have been watching, I'll use Michigan as an example because our listeners in Michigan know that almost every poll had Abdul El-Sayib with a double-digit lead over Haley Stevens. And that was very close.

[00:36:30] Most thought that in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, I'm glad she's not going to actually get elected, was going to win. And so some of these polls are so far off. So I wanted to go around the roundtable and get some comments. But let me just do my routine comment about the fact that if you've taken statistics, and I've even had to take enough statistics and live to tell about it,

[00:36:53] that if you actually do a three-day poll of 1,000 people that are proportioned over the 3,000 counties of adults, you can, with certain statistical accuracy, say that poll's accurate 19 out of 20 times, which is, again, when we talk about 95% confidence. The problem has been in the past polling the right people. In the old days, when everybody had a corded phone, that was really easy.

[00:37:22] Now it's a little more difficult with that. And, of course, the real poll that you want is likely voters. It's always hard to get a little bit of a handle on who's going to vote in the primaries. But there's also some other problems, and that is what's called social desirability bias. That is, when a person asks you, you sort of get the sense of the answer they want, and so you might say that. It's even been referred to as the Bradley effect or the Clinton effect.

[00:37:49] The Bradley effect was Tom Bradley, who is an African-American, lost in 1982, even though he's ahead of the polls in Los Angeles, because nobody wanted to say they weren't going to vote for an African-American. Same thing happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nobody really wanted to say, well, I'm not going to vote for the first woman candidate for president. So there are some problems with these polls, but I thought we'd go around the roundtable for just a minute. I think both of you read some things. Liberty, what's your thoughts?

[00:38:15] Because Jeffrey Blayhar says some of these are just fake polls, and we need to have a lot more discernment and recognize that some of these people are putting out polls to try to drive the conversation, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, first of all, I didn't know if the trust crisis could get any worse, but here we are. And so this is so fascinating. And I think a lot of people were a little surprised, especially with some of these candidates saying, wow, they're leading by that much.

[00:38:45] And then you had one of them, one of the supposed polling companies, Median Strategies, just was releasing fake polls. And then afterwards said that it was conducting a social experiment. So, again, we have to be discerning and look for names that have been around for a really long time that we can, you know, trust that, you know, some polling organizations that have name recognition.

[00:39:13] But what concerns me is whether we're going to see more of these pop-up fake polling because there's the concern here that's mentioned in the article is that it is an experiment to see, is it going to affect prediction markets? I know we're going to talk a little bit about betting and everything. Yeah, you sure are, right after the break. So, but that could, I mean, that could affect people's decision because sometimes polling does, or it could affect, you know, whether or not somebody even goes to the polls if they think that, oh, well, it's, you know,

[00:39:41] so in the bag already by this other candidate that my vote, people already struggle with thinking that their vote doesn't count. So, yeah, this is just one more thing to add to the mix that I think is going to make people a little cynical. I've never taken a statistics class, but another thing that I have never done is answer a phone call from a pollster. I don't know if you have ever done, participated in this. If I don't know the number, I'm not answering. Yeah, I'm a millennial thing. Polls are like a weird, I think I said this last week. They're just like a weird thing to me because I've never answered the phone.

[00:40:09] I'm like, I am planning to vote for. But what I did do while you were talking is open up ChatGPT and asked it, create a poll for a local election with results for me regarding the Oklahoma governor's race, because I know that's ongoing. And it has given me a, it's labeling it's hypothetical, barely, but it has now given me poll results for an outcome of an election with candidates that are not yet selected, right? There's still a runoff for who's going to be the primary current.

[00:40:36] So it's this, I mean, I could very easily take this and I could say, hey, point of view, I've got a poll for the governor of Oklahoma election. Breaking news. And suddenly it's not hypothetical anymore. So I think it's scary what we can do. I probably need to tell my AI monitor computer guy that that was fake and never do that again for me. But if you're listening, AI, please fix it. But it's scary that, I mean, people can do it. You can generate it just that fast. Yeah. And it looks, I mean, it looks real.

[00:41:04] It knows who the candidates could be, even though they're not picked yet. So. And the scary thing about that, and this is another point made too, is that like, OK, there's, we've always needed discernment. But the lies can spread so much quicker than ever because of social media and algorithms. So you could post that. And somebody out there is going to be smart enough to know that, like, wait a second, this hasn't happened yet. We don't actually know who this is. There's something suspect here. But by the time that has happened, millions of people might have seen it if it went viral.

[00:41:34] And then you know what doesn't go viral? Corrections. Right. So it's just misinformation. Or actually answering the phone to participate in real polls. Right. You never get the information. Yeah. Yeah. And I do have people sometimes, so we haven't been opening up the phones lately, but we are going to start doing that. And I've had people call in the same thing, says, I have never participated in a poll all of my life, you know. And, of course, recognizing that you're only looking for 1,000 people out of 300 million. Of course, you obviously have low odds of doing that.

[00:42:02] But that's one of the other questions that people have had about that. And I just think it is helpful to begin to, as we mentioned just a minute ago, think through where I find my trusted sources. And for just a minute, let's talk about that. Because years ago, when we had the USA Radio Network, for a while, people in the news business, and I'm thinking of John Clemens and all sorts of other people, said, okay, which polls have worked the best? And for a long time, they were conservative pollsters, Rasmussen and Zogby.

[00:42:32] Now, let's give credit on the other side. I think probably the best liberal pollster would be Nate Silver. And he was the one who kind of began to be the wonder kind because in 2016, if I remember right, he accurately predicted the outcome in 49 of the 50 states. And he was the one that predicted that Trump was going to beat Hillary Clinton. So there are a few of them out there. But here's the other thing to pay attention to.

[00:43:00] Some of these are online polls. If you have an online poll, well, that is not even a statistically representative poll. So I think, again, back to buyer beware. And certainly, as Liberty said, we've got enough of a trust factor with whether or not my vote actually counts because of some of the voter fraud issues we've talked about. But then when you can't even trust the polls either, as I said before, the only poll that really matters, it's going to happen in November. Yeah. So, hey, don't be discouraged by anything you see online.

[00:43:29] Because even the official ones, you know, get it wrong a lot of times, like in 2016 and things like that. But just go vote. Do your research. Look at the candidate for yourself. Go vote because it matters. And, like, that's when it counts. Well, and I think we might just talk about whether or not we should wager on any of that. So we're going to talk about that after the break. Oh, my. We have, of course, already posted some things about gambling. I'll hold up our little booklet on gambling.

[00:43:57] One of the reasons I did this was because of the issue, really just the significant issue of sports gambling. So after the break, we're going to get into this in some detail. Because, first of all, we are posting the Know Why podcast on online sports betting that Liberty did. I have an athlete here who's probably thought about sports and sports gambling and just the fact that you can bet on just about anything. So we're going to get into that as well.

[00:44:22] So if you find yourself wanting to learn a little bit more about some of these topics, feel free to go to the website. We have a link to, of course, First Liberty Institute. We have, of course, the information about religious accommodation back to the schools. Leftist schemes don't work and don't fall for fake polls. And if you think that's enough, we're only half done because we have some coming up here on, of course, what's going on in Iran and, of course, some commentary and a variety of other issues as well. So let's take a break.

[00:44:50] And if you haven't already taken the time to get the commentaries, you have Pentatextra's commentary, my commentary. And, of course, we still have our take action on the flock cameras. All of it available at the website, pointofview.net. Let's take a break. We'll be back with more right after this. The Bible tells us not to worry.

[00:45:18] And yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step. He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult. And that is why Point of View has relaunched our Pray for America movement, a series of weekly emails to guide you in prayer for our nation.

[00:45:47] Each week you'll receive a brief update about a current issue affecting Americans, along with a written prayer that you can easily share with others. We'll also include a short free resource for you in each email so you can learn more about the issue at hand. Will you commit to pray for America? Go to pointofview.net.

[00:46:13] Click on the Pray for America banner at the top of the page to subscribe. Again, that's pointofview.net. Click on the Pray for America banner. Let's pray together for God to make a difference in America. Point of View will continue after this.