FEMA Funds Diverted to Illegal Immigration and Iran's Global Impact: A Deep Dive into National Security and Domestic Policy
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. As always, we're jumping right into our interviews. First guest up today, Tristan Justice is the Western correspondent for The Federalist and author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health and wellness. You can follow him on X at Justice Tristan. Tristan Justice, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me. So, Tristan, today we have a FEMA whistleblower alleging the agency misappropriated funds. You've been covering this, how money's been going to illegal immigrants who have come into the country. Why don't you paint for our audience the picture of what you've undercovered and what FEMA has been doing with the money that's supposed to be basically light item for disasters like the hurricane we just had?

Right. Well, the Biden administration, as listeners might recall, came into office about four years ago and made a

these kind of social, these identity politics agendas top priority across the administration. So Susan Rice, who is the National Security Advisor in the last Democrat administration, came in as the chair of the Domestic Policy Council of the White House, and it was her job to root out systemic racism across the bureaucracy. And of course, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, being part of that, had a restructuring over the past four years under that agenda. And so just going on the FEMA website,

I found that they had allocated about $364 million in the fiscal year 2023 and $650 million for the fiscal year 2024 to something called the Shelter and Services Program. And that program offers humanitarian services to non-citizen migrants following

following their release from the Department of Homeland Security. So that's about a billion U.S. tax dollars under FEMA going directly to the humanitarian services for illegal migrants. Of course, that is a man-made crisis. So Tristan, let me ask you this, and I'm sorry for interrupting you. Explain to our audience, is this perfectly legal for them to do? Is this sort of like a pot of gold that they can move money around? Or have they defied legislation saying this money is supposed to be only used for disasters? Yeah.

That's a great question. It's my understanding that the agency has a lot of flexibility with where to shift around and spend its money. I do know that FEMA is primarily funded by supplemental appropriations in response to natural disasters. It is not usually proactively given money by Congress. Historically, in recent years, as storms have become more devastating, and that's because there's just more to destroy. Higher property values and all that contributing, yes.

Exactly. And so now that there's more destruction because we've built more, FEMA is given money after these storms and not necessarily proactively.

In this case, one of the things we've sort of seen a pattern with, and to follow up on Chuck's question, is they're moving a lot of monies around. We've had this story. We've had the story about them subsidizing the higher risk pool within the ACA using Medicare funding. Is this something that we're seeing more from the Biden administration where they don't have the support of Congress, which is obviously led by Republicans?

to get these appropriations. So they've found ways to shift cash like this. But then that leaves some holes in what all these agencies are supposed to be doing.

Right. I think we're also seeing parallels with what's happening with Ukraine and Israel, right? You see the Biden administration trying to circumvent Congress at every opportunity to shift money within the Pentagon to more military equipment to send over to Ukraine. And so the administration is doing everything it can to circumvent the will of Congress in shifting money to different misplaced priorities.

Have you talked to any Congress members about this situation and how this might impact their vote on an emergency appropriation? I have not, but it's ripe for a congressional hearing on this. I don't think Congress is in session until after the election, however. But we did have that whistleblower report come out from, I believe, Matt Gaetz's office. And I'd be curious if they want to hold an emergency hearing on this.

So I'm looking at what you posted from a tweet from America First Legal, who is the ones who found all this information, right? The FOIA request? Well, a lot of this information is just right on the FEMA website. So they just read it. They're not even hiding it. The best place to hide something is in front of people's face, right? So they just put it on the website. America First Legal decided to look into it. I find it interesting for our Arizona listeners. Of these funds, $21 million went to Pima County.

11.6 million went to Maricopa County, and then 11.6 million again went to World Hunger Ecumenical Arizona Task Force. When you look that up, they've been around since 79 to address the root causes of hunger.

How is this a FEMA thing? Well, it's a man-made crisis. And I think that's at the heart of the controversy here. You have an administration that did everything in its power to open up the border, even though they said they didn't, to open up for tens of millions of migrants to come across the border and create this humanitarian crisis that we're seeing now.

That was entirely man-made. It was entirely preventable. And now Americans are paying for it. You have Americans across the Southeast who just saw a torrential downpour of 40 trillion gallons of water who now won't have the same taxpayer resources that are being made available for migrants brought into the country from all over the world. How much has FEMA's...

I guess my question is, was FEMA, it seems like they've had a bad history, frankly, Chuck and Tristan. It seems like there's been a lot of controversy since we created this agency where they have failed, you know, whether it was, I think, Hurricane Katrina with New Orleans, with repeatedly in these type of situations, they seem to be a day late and a dollar short. And yet,

As your reporting shows, their mission now doesn't even appear to be focused on what they were created to do. It was created April 1st, 79, by Jimmy Carter. And the dual functions were for civil defense and emergency management. This does not seem to follow that mission. No, no, not at all. Tristan, as you're talking to folks here,

How much has, since Susan Rice came in and did this and shifted the focus, how much do you think this is affecting not just FEMA but all these other federal agencies, that their mission has been redefined from whatever they were created to do to being this number one focus on creating diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and guidelines? Yeah.

Well, I feel like every time there's some type of disaster that is involving a federal agency, you always see this come up. And so it's almost I feel like Americans are getting numb to, oh, well, of course, FEMA's top priority is equity and some type of item on the social justice agenda. I think we saw that with East Palestine train derailment. I think we see that with other agencies, not really.

focused on their core mission. You have Idina Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce, being a surrogate for Kamala Harris. And then she goes on to CNBC and they ask her, what are you going to do about this port strike that's going from Maine to Texas? And she goes, well, I'm not really focused on that.

And so I just think you're seeing a lot of distraction across the administration to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to promote an ideological agenda that is built on this divisive issue of identity politics. And you're seeing that play out across the board. So how much money, as you've been looking into this, do you think is going to need to be appropriated to help the families in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, etc.?

I'm not sure how much Congress will probably need to put into a supplemental aid package. Of course, there's always issues in those packages where a lot of the money doesn't even go to disaster relief. It goes to different boondoggle projects that local congressmen are trying to get money for. We saw that in the Hurricane Sandy bill. But I do want to point listeners to an article that one of my colleagues wrote. It's headlined, Sources, FEMA's Failure Leads Hurricane Helene Victims Crying Out for Help. It is devastating.

It's a depressingly sad but incredibly important read. It'll highlight all the different issues that residents are facing in Appalachia and how FEMA is just not present. Where do they find that again? We'll post it on our social media pages. Oh, that'll be on the Federalist.com. Federalist.com. It's on our homepage. Okay, great. We'll post that for everybody on it. So...

I haven't seen this confirmed, but is it confirmed that FEMA, the federal government, is offering this $750 payment like they did in Hawaii to victims of Helene? And then we do know, for instance, that they are giving $9,000 to newly arrived illegal immigrants. First, is that $750 number true and accurate?

I believe so. And that number is processed into direct deposit 10 days later. So it's not necessarily immediate, but it's timely. And in terms of the process for folks to be able to get that, what is the vetting process? Because we know that literally everything this administration has done has been riddled with fraud, whether it was the COVID spending, COVID.

Well, I think we'll see. I mean, it's an interesting thing.

Any of these kind of payment programs are always ripe for fraud. We definitely saw that with the PPP loans during COVID, how much money went to people who didn't lose their businesses and didn't need forgivable loans from the federal government. But I imagine this process will be similar to any one --

number one of those government paycheck programs, but also raises questions of how are elections going to be conducted in some of these rural areas of states that have just been washed away? How do you verify an address that doesn't really exist on the map anymore? And of course, these are

red rural areas of a state that is going to play North Carolina in particular and Georgia that are going to be two of the biggest battlegrounds in this election. Sam, let me ask you this question to both Sam and you. Should the Republicans go to a judge and say voting needs to be extended a week out in these areas?

I don't know if you can do it that way, but I do think that a concerted effort to put in place the mechanisms of an election needs to happen right now. Like you're out of time. Right. I mean, you can't wait. I mean, you can't do the typical Republican thing of like the day of. No. I mean, they need to be on this now and saying these are the options we're going to take. So people know it's coming. It's not last minute. We're going to go through. I mean, I think this is an area and Tristan, we have just a minute left. But so I'll get your comment real quick and then we'll go to break on this. But.

this strikes me as an area based on my experience where government lack of it technology prowess really hampers them because you could geo fence phones to this, these locations and, and coordinate a lot of this stuff that way. Um,

We're going to be coming back here with more from Tristan Justice. He is the Western correspondent for The Federalist, author of The Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. You can follow him on X at JusticeTristan. I'm tripping all over my tongue today, Chuck.

But at the end of the day, this is going to be an ongoing story. So we're going to be staying in tune with everything that's going on because there's going to be a lot of ongoing impacts from Hurricane Helene relating to this election, relating to the federal management of our government. So stay tuned. Breaking Battlegrounds will be right back.

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All right. Continuing on, we have Tristan Justice, Western correspondent for The Federalist, author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health and wellness. You can follow him on X at Justice Tristan. We started out, Chuck, the first segment talking quite a bit about the

money that FEMA has redirected to illegal immigration versus disaster relief and some of the difficulties with their recovery efforts around Helene. But you also, Tristan, have a new piece out. New docs reveal Facebook trains CDC bureaucrats how to censor Americans. Can you give us a quick synopsis of that? What is this? What happened?

Right. So these records came out from a Freedom of Information Act request from the conservative legal nonprofit America First Legal. And they found that Facebook had created an end-to-end workflow allowing federal bureaucrats to flag posts for censorship. So they essentially created a portal for federal employees under the CDC to censor.

make requests to Facebook on different posts that the CDC wanted to be suppressed. And when bureaucrats did that, according to these documents that were made public, bureaucrats actually received

So Tristan, explain to our audience, when you say Facebook opened an end-to-end workflow, allowing federal bureaucrats to flag posts, what does that mean to end-to-end to our audience? Explain to them how complicit they were in this. We're low-tech dummies here, Tristan. Yeah.

My understanding of this is that it is a direct portal from the CDC to Facebook to where the CDC could track their request from the time that they were made to the time that Facebook suppressed it, allowing the CDC to see the entire process play out with Silicon Valley on posts that they wanted to be censored. So for example, go ahead. In layman's terms, this is essentially like creating an app.

for the CDC to report people on Facebook. Well, then not only that, if you had a regulator with a bugaboo on his bottom about someone, he could look based on this end-to-end and say, why haven't you gone and talked to Mary? Why haven't you taken Mary's post down? Is that correct, Tristan? That's the way I understood this presentation, the slides from this presentation that was made public. And they're posted in the America First Legal website.

online thread that's in the story. But that's my understanding. It's almost like contacting customer service within a portal with that company. And you can see the progress on your request made. And of course, we knew that the censorship was happening throughout the coronavirus lockdown, throughout the Biden administration, because

That much became public in that censorship case out of Missouri against the federal government that the Supreme Court punted on. But these documents shed light on the details of that censorship operation with Facebook. Does this suggest that there is a far deeper level of coordination between all the various federal agencies and the social media companies than even perhaps some of the Twitter files reporting or that case and others have identified?

Well, I worry that we've barely scratched the surface of the so-called censorship industrial complex. I mean, if they already have this portal between one federal agency and one big tech platform, I can just imagine how many agencies are working with how many platforms on –

All this entire censorship complex. And it's concerning given the Supreme Court's decision this summer to punt on this issue to where the federal government can continue to implement the censorship regime over private companies in Silicon Valley. So let's talk out loud here for a minute. It's our time, so we're going to all talk out loud here with Tristan and Sam. What do we need to do? Does there need to be put together a bipartisan group, a commission for each agency of citizens?

and former members of Congress or legislature that go and start diving into what are the functions you're actually doing? I mean, like a thorough, like an audit, like an IRS audit. But do we, what do we need to do to break this up? I think this happens more than any of us even can imagine. And I think because it's hidden basically, or it's lying out of some stupid program,

What do you think we need to do to start just attacking this? Because when people find this out, they're not going to like this, period. But the problem is they don't know, and the problem is those of us right now talking have a semblance of understanding, but we don't know. Tristan, we'll start with you. What do you think we should be doing with these various agencies to start breaking up this type of shenanigans?

Well, I would argue there probably needs to be some type of federal commission formed, just like the 9-11 Commission, to investigate big tech censorship, considering the damage that this kind of monolithic narrative created in support of lockdowns, how much devastation that brought to the country. I think Jim Jordan's committee, the Select Committee for the Weaponization of the Federal Government, it was good. It wasn't... It didn't go far enough.

I think Americans expected more. But of course, this is a congressional committee that's bipartisan in contrast to the select committee on January 6th. And the mission is probably just too broad as opposed to honing in on federal censorship itself. And so I think it probably needs to be some type of independent commission set up to probe this. And of course, that's a lot easier in a Republican administration that's eager to blow the whistle on a lot of this content.

I realize I have sort of a fantasy about this because this is – I know government enough to know that this isn't really possible. But I would create a commission around each agency and I would tell them you have – your first obligation is this. I want you to take every individual and every program in that agency, every sub-effort of those programs, and I want you to divide them into two buckets. One is core mission. One is not core mission. Okay.

And separate out the things that each agency is doing that are actually related to their core mission versus those that are not. And then when you have those that are not separated out, then you go after those. Are they necessary? Are they beneficial? Are they something another agency is actually tasked with? And this is mission creep.

use that to just get rid of most of that garbage because our government's just tied itself in knots and it's incapable. I think this FEMA case, we see they're bad at their job. The things they're supposed to do, they stink at. The problem is it's just too big now. So you got to start somehow breaking it up a little bit. They're heading to different oversight. So for example, like FEMA, I think FEMA should be the same way as the Postal Service. I think it needs to be run by a bipartisan executive committee.

I think you just take politics completely out of it. It's just like FEMA says, here's my budget, and I need $3 billion every year, and I may need more, and it's run by these two Democrats and two Republicans. And that's how this is. And this is our core mission, and we don't go outside our core mission. The only core mission for FEMA is civil defense.

in natural emergencies. That's it. That's all it is. We're not doing anything more than that. I'm with you 100 percent. We have just a minute left. Tristan Justice, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you coming on the program today. Again, folks, you can follow him on X at Justice Tristan. And Tristan, you also have a book coming out pretty soon. Can you tell us about that? And I assume people are going to be able to go to your X and find a link to buy it there when it's out.

I do, yes. It'll be out on November 12th. There is no pre-order period as of now, but in a month, I have a book coming out on the obesity epidemic, talking about how body positivity in particular is an instrument of big food and big pharma to keep Americans fat, sick, and depressed, just like big tobacco kept us smoking. So people, if you're interested, can go to my Twitter profile in a month, and I'll be sharing all about it.

And we will share that from our social medias as well. Tristan Justice, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate having you on the program. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. We're going to be continuing on in just a minute with our interviews. Our next guest up is Gabriel Nerona. He is a fellow at the Gemunder, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, Center for Defense and Strategy at Jewish Institute for National Security of America, previously served as special advisor for the Iran Action Group at the U.S. Department of State.

has extensive experience in national security policy, and brings a wealth of knowledge from his work in Congress, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and beyond. You can follow him on X at GLN.

N-O-R-O-N-H-A. But before you do that, folks, real quick, you've got to stop Big Tech from tracking your every move because they're going to know everything you send to everybody. They're reading it all. So experience true freedom with 4FreedomMobile. Visit 4, that's the number 4, freedommobile.com today for top-notch coverage, digital security, and total freedom. Use code BATTLEGROUND at checkout to get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout.

for freedom mobile.com today. Gabriel, thanks for joining us today. First, we like to have our audience get to know our guests a little bit better. So reading your bio, you speak and conduct research in Russian, Mandarin and Spanish. Is that true?

Yeah, and I also have dabbled in Parsi for a long time. I was the State Department's Parsi coordinator for a year. I love it when our guests make me feel stupid before we even begin the interview. Are languages easy for you to pick up? Because those are three, I mean, especially Russian and Mandarin are hard. Are those hard for you to pick up?

Yeah, they're hard. I spent three hours a day learning Mandarin and then added Russian on top of it because I had a death wish. Two hours a day for Russian for three years. So I didn't get around to the bars in college as often as I ought to have. So so when you get mad at people, do you use the very the very peaceful languages of Russian and Mandarin or do you use the romantic language of Spanish? Yeah.

I think the curse words in poetry and Spanish are a lot more beautiful. The Russian ones are, you generally get the sense of what you're being called when you use it in Russian. Just even hello in Russian sounds aggressive, right? I will say that of all the languages, Mandarin is the one that seems the most emphatic when someone is cursing you out in Mandarin. They mean it. So has there been a less consequential president in the Middle East than Joe Biden? Let's start off with that.

Let me change the word to less influential. The least influential president in the Middle East, Joe Biden. Most consequential, you know, Joe Biden is putting his name up there in his ability to do damage and his ability to undo the peace and the structures and the advancement that had been made over the past few years. I mean, he was handed on a silver platter

four new peace deals, and an Iran that was on the brink of bankruptcy, on the brink of political collapse, and the brink of military collapse. And in three and a half years, he's reversed all of this. He's made Israel more isolated, and he's empowered the Iranian regime and its proxies.

to go on this rampage that we've seen the last year. So explain to our audience, we may have to go to this next segment as well, but explain to our audience, how did he do that? Because you're right, there are four peace agreements. The world is calm in the Middle East, as much as the Middle East gets calm. And all of a sudden, it's on fire. And so explain to our audience what the Biden-Harris administration did to reverse that trend.

They started with one simple premise, which was we believe we can appease Iran back to the negotiating table. And if we isolate our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, we'll create a balance of power in the Middle East that will allow us to leave. And it was this flawed intellectual idea that has spawned everything that's wrong with the Middle East for the last few years now. And...

What got me about that is that seems to have been, if you go back pre-Donald Trump's presidency, that philosophy you just described seems to have been the overriding philosophy on dealing with the Middle East for the Obama administration. Before that, to some extent, the Bush administration. And then we had this dramatic turnaround in Middle Eastern relations, relations among those countries, peace in the region, so forth, under Trump.

How does anyone at the State Department or elsewhere even make the argument at that point that we should go back and re-embrace the strategies that had led to, at best, stagnation and at worst, significant failures for decades? You know, I think it was two things. One, it was emotional attachment to what had been done previously. Some of these folks spent years of their lives trying to negotiate the Iran deal and other agreements. And it was a reflective hatred experience.

and disillusionment with anything that Trump touched or anything Trump did. And so the view was Trump did it. It must be wrong. We must reverse it. And I don't think they had the intellectual humility to look at it and say, hey, maybe there were actually some really good progressives that were made and maybe we should adopt some of them. I think that's the sort of integrated intellectual sin was saying we have to reverse it because it was Trump.

And we can't do anything that makes it appear that he did something good. We're going to dig in more into all of this. And when we come back here for the next segment, we've got a much longer segment coming up. So we have just about 30 seconds here before we go to break. We are talking with Gabriel Nerona. He is a fellow at the Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy at Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

We're talking about Iran, Israel, the Middle East, everything going on there. So stay tuned. More good stuff coming up. Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be right back.

Folks, this is Sam Stone for Breaking Battlegrounds. Discover true freedom today with 4Freedom Mobile. Their SIM automatically switches to the best network, guaranteeing no missed calls. You can enjoy browsing social media and the internet without compromising your privacy. Plus, make secure mobile payments worldwide with no fees or monitoring. Visit 4FreedomMobile.com today for top-notch coverage.

digital security, and total freedom. And if you use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month of service after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Visit 4freedommobile.com to learn more.

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Welcome back to Breaking Bad Rounds. Folks, there's a lot of crazy signals out there in the economy right now. The stock market is up. The stock market is down. The price of gold is going up like inflation, like a recession is coming.

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We're continuing on now with our interview with Gabriel Nerona. He joined Jensen in 2022 as a fellow at the Giermunder Center for Defense and Strategy from 2019 to 2021. He served as special advisor for the Iran Action Group at the U.S. State Department. So I recently read an opinion piece, and I shared it with Sam, and it was from UnHerd. You may have heard of them. But the premise of UnHerd

The opinion piece was how the U.S. intelligence community got Ukraine so wrong, how they said Russia would take it over in three days. And their premise was, and they weren't pro or anti-Ukraine, it was just simply our foreign policy experts, they just become very static. They just like one person believes this, so I can't think outside the box and do another. Does that happen a lot, you feel, in foreign policy circles and especially regarding the Middle East?

I think you're absolutely right. There is a tendency for folks to come in and say, I know everything about the Middle East. I'm an expert in this. This is how the world works. Both sides are guilty of this, to be fair. Right. And I think the Middle East in particular has been the victim of ideology as opposed to sort of a really hard-nosed, realist look at politics.

What might groups do? How are people going to behave? How are things going to shift? If you look at Afghanistan and the intelligence community there, the assessment was, oh, they'll probably be fine for a year or two, and then they'll collapse, when in reality they collapsed within about 35 days. And so I think looking into Ukraine, I think a lot of intel analysts were afraid to make the same mistakes, so they made the opposite mistake, where they underestimated the Ukrainian will to fight,

and basically just said, well, we want to say the opposite thing now so that we'll be okay with our bosses. I think having groupthink is one of the most dangerous things you can have in government. Now, it's really dangerous because sometimes that means inviting people in who you don't agree with, and a lot of us politicians sort of are afraid to do so, but it's a healthy sign for any government to have dissenting voices inside.

How much did that play a role, for instance, in the reports that the Biden administration pushed Israel back from going after some of the Hezbollah leadership months ago? Basically saying you don't have the capability to target these individuals without U.S. help and we're not going to help you. As it turns out, Israel absolutely did have that capability.

You know, there's this pattern that I think a lot of people have probably recognized in this administration of this habitual fear of escalation and the idea that escalation is the great sin that causes the region to become unstabilized, when in reality it's weakness and the perception that no one will take action is the most provocative and I think the most escalatory thing because it gives the other enemy confidence

green light to take action. If Hezbollah knew right now what had happened in the last two weeks, if they had known that a year ago, I don't think they even would have started any of this, if they had realized how thoroughly they would have been decimated. And I don't think escalation should be thought of as this dirty word. Escalation is how you win wars. Correct. I think every day the

How can we prevent escalation? And every day the Israelis wake up and say, how can we win our wars and prevent ourselves from being exterminated? Is that a fundamental? I mean, really thinking about I think what you just said there is actually really profound. And it may be the fundamental flaw in U.S. foreign and military policy, really, since the.

The start of the Vietnam War is that we stop trying to just win wars when we engage in. Well, one thing I and we worry all the time about escalation. Gabriel, Sam, the one thing I hate, there's a word I hate that's always out now on the Middle East proportional response. What's a proportional response? As far as I'm concerned, if you attack me when I'm not doing anything, it's sort of like the old knife fight. Screw me. No, screw you.

And so, you know, if Iran shoots 180, 200 missiles into Israel, what is proportional mean? Does that mean we need to send 180, 200 missiles to Iran? Or do we just go wipe out their oil infrastructure and say, do it again next time, then we go hit X? I mean, what do we do, Gabriel?

Well, 10 missiles would wipe out the vast majority of Iran's oil infrastructure. 182 missiles would wipe out their oil infrastructure, their ballistic missile infrastructure, their nuclear infrastructure, and all their air defense. Then we should do it. So, personally, I think it would be great if Israel said, okay, we're going to do exactly that. We're going to send exactly 181 or 182 missiles and do this. Proportionality...

It might make sense if some errant rocket accidentally hit one person, it was an unintentional thing you have to do to protect. This is not, you don't do, when Al-Qaeda flew four airplanes into the United States, we didn't respond and say, okay, we need to take out 3,000 Al-Qaeda members. We said we need to wipe off this group from the face of the earth. And we spent 23 years trying to do that with medium success.

Proportionality is what civilized nations might do to each other. We're not talking about civilized nations. You were talking about a terror...

against the civilized country. Well, proportional is the new word for the media. It's the same thing as Waltz's lies being misspoke. It's not a lie. It's misspoke. And I just I just hate him. What do you think we should allow Israel to do? I mean, do you ever see there's a time there's even I mean, we had sort of a peaceful existence at the end of 2020. What do you think we need to allow Israel to do to get back to a more peaceful state in the Middle East?

They have to have their hands not tied behind their back. Israel has a lot of very smart military planners. Israel is not going to take on more than it can chew. Correct. And so I actually don't think Israel is probably going to strike the nuclear program today. They've got to – I think if I'm an Israeli planner, I say I want to finish wiping out the Hezbollah threat right now. Give me a couple months.

Then I'm going to talk about the nuclear program. So I don't suspect that we're actually going to see this massive response from Israel because I think they say, we just finished Gaza. That's pretty contained. We're working on Hezbollah. After we've done that, we'll go to our next target. Israel doesn't need our coaching. They don't need our admonishments. They're doing just fine. Honestly, we should take a playbook out of their situation.

a page out of their playbook, look at the cartels, the way that they treated Hezbollah. If we could do a fraction of that, America would be a lot safer. Let me ask you a question that may be a little sensitive. So you work for Senator McCain, one of the senators you work for on national security issues, correct? Yeah. And I imagine you deal a lot with people who've worked in Republican administrations on national security. Yeah.

Do you feel most of them fear Trump's national security or are they more in line with it? You know, for example, Sam and I have a little difference here. I'm all for just letting Ukraine kill Russia. I just don't. I'm for Ukraine doing it with Europe's help while we deal with the rest of the world. So anyway, OK, so anyway, I'm very pro get rid of Russia type stuff. But my question is for you in the national policy circles you'll deal with and you deal with a lot of people who worked in Republican administrations, Republican senators, you

Where do you feel they really line up, a majority of them line up on this? Are they Trump people or are they Kamala Harris people? I would say a lot of the national security colleagues I worked with in the King World, they would sign up for Trump's foreign policy any day of the week. And then it's sort of the other side where they get the cold feet. Sure. Look, it was two completely different visions of Trump.

both conservatism and tenor, shall we say. I've, you know, I've learned to appreciate both of them had a lot of things they brought to the table. I think that you can, I don't think you have to throw out one to work for the other. Correct. Middle East policy. They were fully aligned on Middle East policy. China policy, fully aligned. Great.

Granted, okay, we're talking about Russia-Ukraine rhetoric. Yeah, miles apart. But if you look at the result of the Trump administration,

on on Russia. There were a lot of things that John McCain called for. John McCain called for sending offensive javelins weapons to the Ukrainian army. And ultimately, Trump did so. So on the foreign policy side, I think McCain, all my friends would vote. McCain was more diplomatic about it than Trump. But McCain had pushed for many years for our European NATO allies to live up to their obligations. Yeah.

Absolutely. I mean, he I went with him to the Munich Security Conference, which is the big confab where all the Europeans and Americans get together. He would rail against them talking about how they needed to spend more on their defense and do these things.

Again, different approaches, but I recall working for Trump and McCain both having a temper, both being fed up with allies that didn't do their fair share. I think when you're older, you sometimes have your best friends who you yell at a bit, but you forget what you have in common.

I'd like to think that there's a harmony that they could have. Again, they were miles apart on plenty of issues. Correct. Correct. I mean, but the tone there kind of masks, and I think the press misreports how aligned they were on a lot of these things, quite frankly. So, Gabriel, we've got three minutes with you here. Okay. Tell us what you feel are the top five forecasters

foreign policy issues or hot spots that you feel the United States just really needs to focus on and go go go for it

Number one is the terror nexus at our border. 350 individuals on the terror watch list who have come up through the border who have been caught in the last three and a half years versus about 20 the four years before. There's a 9-11 waiting to happen. That's what should concern every American most. Number two, China. It's the only country that is capable of

of competing and beating us across the whole spectrum. What we saw Israel do with Hezbollah, the pagers, China could do that to us on every single dimension if they wanted to. Number three, I think for me, is the idea of an Iran with a nuclear weapon. The idea that a country chants death to America, death to Israel. If there's one thing we should have learned from the Nazis, it's believe our enemies when they say something.

A nuclear-armed Iran would change the Middle East, and it would completely imperil U.S. security. Number four is the resurgence of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

They are now at the position where they can launch attacks across Europe, across America, likely. And their new home is in Africa, in Afghanistan. We're sleeping on the ticking time bomb in Africa, I think. Yes. And it strikes me they're smart. They're not going to do anything during this election cycle. No. Because they're worried about Trump. But I would, and Gabriel, just your opinion, are we likely to see...

coordinated attacks across Europe and the U.S. in the coming years if we don't deal with this right now? Absolutely. You know, I'll admit I'm surprised they haven't hit before. I think they're developing the architecture and they're looking to take over and create a caliphate in Africa. And from there, they can move on to Europe, move on to the U.S. And we're getting kicked out of Africa. All of these bases are getting kicked out. The Russians are replacing us.

That's, I think, one of the greatest sort of long-term nightmares that 10 years from now we'll look back and say that was one of the worst things that happened.

where they do not get that from us. It takes years and they may get denied. Do we need to change the way? I mean, do we just need to be more real and honest about how we're interacting with the world when it comes to arms sales and military cooperation? We do look back in the, in the cold war, we made some hard nosed controversial sales and agreements and we worked with some unsavory countries. We thought 20 years ago or 10 years ago, we could be this paragon of purity and

And frankly, we do not have that luxury anymore. We should still try to do things aligned with our values, but we need to be competing with China, competing with Russia, and willing to cut some deals and willing to cut the red tape to make some of these things happen. And I'm sorry a few lawyers are going to be upset along the way that

That's okay. I agree. We'll let that be the final word. Tristan Justice, I'm sorry, I want to give credit to both our guests today, Tristan Justice, Gabriel Nerona. We really appreciate having both of you on the program. Gabriel, we'd love to have you back again as soon as we can. We want to, obviously, this is a major area of focus for our program and for our listeners. So we really appreciate having you and your insights join us today. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week, but make sure you're downloading our podcast segment. Kylie had too much murder and mayhem to even touch this week. You're not going to want to miss it. Back on the air next week. Hey, folks. This is Chuck Warren of Breaking Battlegrounds. Do you want to prepare for a secure retirement? Grab a pen and paper right now and write down 877-80-INVEST. As our loyal listeners know, Breaking Battlegrounds is brought to you by YREFI.

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All right. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Our next guest up today is Stephen Lemons. He is an independent freelance journalist here in Phoenix, Arizona. He's one of Chuck, one of my favorite kind of journalists here because he is pardon me, Stephen. I don't mean to be insulting by this, but he is one of those crusty old bastards who hates everybody in the news. And damn, I love that.

Exactly. Fantastic. Fantastic. But, Stephen, you've done great work here for many years. You're covering a story that I really haven't seen anywhere else, and you broke some news on it yesterday that I really felt did not get the attention it deserved.

which is available at the Phoenix New Times for folks who want to check that out. State Bar knew Alistair Adele may have been a domestic violence victim. And folks, if you're listening to this, we want to give you a little warning about this segment. If you have kids or folks who may have trauma in their lives and are concerned talking, this is going to be a very painful, sordid story that's happened here in Arizona that there isn't much information on. There should be a lot more information.

And frankly, I felt like a lot should have come to light before the tragic events that led to this story. But Stephen, if you can give us just a little background on what happened with Alistair Adele, the former Maricopa County attorney, and then what you found out in this latest piece.

Yeah, in August, I did a piece for the Phoenix New Times about information that had come to me that Alistair Adele was an abused spouse. Adele was...

originally appointed to be county attorney in 2019. She later won election in 2020 and had there were it was as always, usually with the county attorney's office, very political office, it's very contentious. And so there were a number of issues that plagued her during her

brief time there. She had a lot of health issues. She also had issues with alcohol addiction, very public issues. And that all started coming out around just after that 2020 election, as I remember.

Yeah, well, it was in 2020. Right before the election, she had a fall, and it caused a brain bleed. And the night of the election, she was taken to the hospital and was in a coma and actually had to have part of her skull removed. And so it was pretty severe, and she was out of commission for –

about a month or two before she could come back, actually come into the office again. In fact, she didn't know she had won the election until weeks afterwards. So there was that issue. And then in late

the thing it was in August of 2021, she admitted herself into a rehab program. And that was, that became public. And so she had to deal with both her addiction and the fact that it was a public issue as well. And in August,

In 2022, the number of her division chiefs, five of them, wrote a letter that was leaked to the public shortly thereafter calling for her resignation, saying that she had relapsed and that she had a lot of other issues health-wise. And so they called on her to resign. She said no. And then very shortly thereafter, she ended up resigning.

And so there was a lot going on publicly. There was a lot going on that was not public. What was not public was that her husband, David Donetto, who was a financial planner for Wells Fargo, was abusive towards her. And I initially found out about this because a close friend of her approached me,

with some photos that she had taken that Adele had taken of herself with bruises on her. And she had sent these to her friend as, you know, sort of like, you know, keep this. I want you to have this in case something happens. That's a cry for help. You don't send those without that being a cry for help. Right. Right. And her, her friend,

you know said hey are you are you okay do i need you know do you need help etc etc she said no everything's fine right now but i just want you to have these in case something happens so so in any case this this happened she sent these uh there's also some video uh that she had taken of uh arguments between her and danetta

And she sent this to her friend in 2019 and 2020. Then

So I was in possession of these. Her friend was telling me stories about this. And then I talked to some of her coworkers, and one of the individuals was assigned to her security detail, who said, yes, we saw these bruises as well. She played them off, saying that they were bruises.

do the rough housing with her boys or because of certain blood thinning medication that she was taking. So, but in hindsight, they believe that it could have been evidence of abuse. And what I should have said previously is that she ended up dying shortly, like about a month after she resigned due to organ failure. And, and,

About a year or so after that, David Donetta on Christmas Eve, I believe it was 2023, ended up killing his girlfriend and his girlfriend's mother and then himself with a semi-automatic rifle.

So in hindsight of that, of that incident, a lot of her friends and family suddenly said, oh, this all makes sense now, right? I mean, we saw these bruises. There was this mysterious fall, which she never really was able to explain very well, like how did this fall happen where she injured her skull and had to have a part of her skull taken off. So...

They started putting the evidence, the pieces together, and it sort of led them in this direction that she was abused. Stephen, let me ask you this question. This is Chuck. Do you think she didn't resign because she sort of viewed the security in the office as protection for her to a degree? Just the position and having the security detail as somewhat being a buffer and protecting her to some degree?

I think that may have been the case. I actually talked about that with the guy who was part of her security detail and other people in the office who were always wondering why she had this security detail. I mean, it's common for the county attorney to have security detail if it's needed.

They use them to specific events and things like out in public, but it's not common to have like a 24-7 event.

in-house security detail following you home or that kind of thing in that position. Right, right. It's not... Unless there's a specific threat of some sort. In this case, there wasn't. So there was... Yes, I think that was... That's speculation, of course. We don't know for sure, but that is something that a member of the security detail did tell me that he thought that that's a possibility, you know, that that's why she wanted them there. And he was...

Obviously, this is speculation, too, but it seemed like she had a very contentious relationship right from the start with the other attorneys and people in that office. And it seems like there were warning signs, but they were kind of glossed over. Is that fair to say?

You mean warning signs in relation to the abuse and to her condition deteriorating via both the alcoholism and abuse. Yeah.

Yeah, there was, you know, I mean, that was what was interesting about, and you jump ahead to the more recent story, which was confirming a lot of this previous reporting. The story that I just, I did this, that was published this week, which was about the fact that this, when she left, the state bar was investigating her primarily based on this,

letter that her five division chiefs had written saying that she had memory lapses, was not at the office enough. Of course, I should say that being an elected official, you don't have to be at the office all the time. And being 48, I don't know how you avoid memory lapses every now and then. Yeah, exactly. And you also have to keep in mind that she

Had a number of ailments. She had a heart attack when she was 39. She had terrible anxiety, which is probably what led her to self-medicate. She was on a cocktail of medications due to the fact that she had these issues with her blood and her heart, et cetera, et cetera. So it's hard to...

pinpoint exactly. And then of course she had, she, she had addiction issues. So it's part of pinpointing exactly, you know, what caused all these things. And that was what was interesting about the revelation that the state bar in its investigation had evidence that she was an abused spouse. And, and go ahead. On that particular issue, the state, so the state bar at per year reporting, the state bar has evidence that she's being abused. And,

How do they not turn that over to law enforcement to investigate that specific issue? Well, we don't know exactly what they did and didn't do. They won't comment on it, which is what's odd about it is I had actually asked for the state bar to investigate a file on her. But what they said they wouldn't.

wouldn't give it to me, and they cited some Supreme Court ethical rule or something where basically after a case is dismissed, it's available for six months as a public record, but then after that six months, the file is sealed and no one can get it, which is weird. Very weird. Very weird. Very weird. Very strange. Yeah. But...

But I got a copy of the file from a third party. And so in that file, there were a number of affidavits from staff at the county attorney's office. And in one affidavit in particular, the person describes a phone call that she received from Adele where Adele is hiding in the closet from her husband.

where she says specifically that I am an abused spouse and I have bruises that the security detail has seen. And right now I'm hiding from my husband in a closet so we can continue this conversation. And the person who's on the other end could hear her husband raging in the background. Why didn't they report it? I mean, why did somebody call and do a welfare check? You know, that's the big question. And once again, I don't know that...

that didn't happen, at least far, far as I can tell. I mean, I put in public records requests with the Phoenix Police Department trying to find out if the cops ever showed up to her house, and I have not gotten anything from them. So I can't say that nothing happened, but no one's commenting on that part of it. I mean, the person who, the person who

the call, according to the affidavit, was a member of their media staff, the communications, not an attorney. She was new to the job at the time. The previous press secretary had resigned and she was certainly on the spot. So I don't know. You know, it's hard. Beyond that, it's just it's speculative. Right. We don't know. I, you know, I agree with you. I don't know if I was on that call. I mean, I

I would have been calling the police. Yeah. Right. 100%. Or you kind of figure that, okay, this person is not the highest ranking person in the county attorney's office. Did they tell someone else? Right, right. And say, hey, look, I just got this weird call. What am I supposed to do with this? You know, I don't know. It's a question mark.

This is crazy stuff. We really appreciate your reporting on it because it's kind of a story that everyone else has dropped, which shows you the value of real old school investigative journalism. Thank you so much, Stephen Lemons, for joining us. Folks, you can find him on X. He is...

He's like me. He's a bit of an irreverent kind of guy, which we appreciate on this particular program. But you can find him at Stephen Lemons on X and on Phoenix New Times has the latest reporting. Stephen, thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us this morning. Well, I appreciate you guys and thanks for having me. Thank you. Have a wonderful weekend. Thank you. All right. Well, what are you going to add to that downer?

What the hell are you going to add to this? That's a terrible story. I mean, every way it's told. Look, I'm telling you right now, and I want to get to Kylie here, but somebody's culpable over there. Yes. And I'm telling you right now, if you're on the phone,

And you're having somebody in a closet while there are raging abusive husbands out there. And I'm not sure he's saying, hey, Alistair, where are you at? It's like he's raging. He's yelling. The violence, the language is violent. If it's a family member, I'm grabbing my shotgun. If it's not a family member, I'm calling 911. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like someone's got to go help this woman. Yeah. And no one did it. That is...

No one did it. And these people have blood on their hands. They do. They do. And this ties to something. Before we began this segment, you and I were talking about this a little bit off air, but we've talked about this on air in relation to other things. But this is where you have to have real friends. If you're in political office and you don't have real friends who aren't political and are outside of this stuff. That's why every politician should have a dog. Yeah.

No, I mean, look, this is a catastrophe. It could have been prevented. I think, again, this is being an amateur psychologist. I think she kept on the job for the security. That would not surprise me at all. And, you know, the interesting thing, so I dealt – part of the reason we're covering this is because I dealt with Alistair a lot when I was at the City of Phoenix because she was with Greater Phoenix Leadership Council at the time. Right.

And she was working as their in-house attorney. Again, this is someone who was surrounded by people who cared about her but was isolated by this abusive husband and by her substance abuse issues and these things and didn't feel safe turning to people who would have absolutely gone to help her. The reality is no one did anything because this jackass –

Was dating another woman, killed her mother, her and him, and then they left these kids alone. Right. Whoever did this, you're a bad person. This guy is clearly a really bad, bad guy and nobody's going to miss him. It's too bad he had to go out the way he did and take others with him. Yeah. You know, I mean, but at the end of the day, man, this type of story highlights how fascinating

frankly isolating politics can be for a lot of the people in it. It's not only isolating for politics, it's isolating for a lot of women who are dealing with abuse and they don't talk about it. On that happy note, Kylie's Corner's back in person! So what awfulness do you have for us today? Sorry if my voice is shaky. You have no Boston accent though. I'm totally disappointed in this. She hasn't yet parked a single car.

No, but the world is a scary place and it actually makes me really sad because people are just losing their minds. They are. I have a lot of stories today. I'm just going to talk about two, but I want to highlight a few more because I want to. So there's a TikToker named Mr. Prada. This is all allegedly. He killed his therapist and dumped him on the side of the road.

You have Rushie Rice running back for the Chiefs. His mom has now been busted twice for theft, allegedly, because I don't want to be sued by these people. But she got caught because she was wearing a Mama Rice jersey.

So that's how they caught her on camera. And I'm sure her son takes care of her financially. So I doubt she wants much. Yeah. Kleptomania is a thing. There was a woman this week running around 4.30 p.m. in New York and a man attacked her and she actually did fight off and she got away. She broke her hand, but she got away. The Democrat candidate for Maricopa County Sheriff is a sexual predator. A couple tried to sell their child for a six pack of beer.

A lot of parents may not dismiss this trade at some days. I was about to say, I had the exact same thought that went through my mind. I'm like, there's been days like I don't have kids, but I have nieces. Yeah, you got my kid for a six-pack. They look like they're on a lot of drugs. It was $1,000 too, wasn't it? I think they did $1,000 too. It wasn't just a six-pack.

I hope my life's worth more than the thousand. Fear and a chaser. Speaking of politics, Doug Emhoff is being accused of slapping a woman for talking to another man. He also got the nanny pregnant. Redefining masculinity as an absolute scumbag. But those are not the stories I want to talk about today because there's one... There's two that I do want to talk about because I feel like they hit closer to home. And this one...

happened right here in Arizona. An Arizona judge dismissed attempted murder charges against a black college student who knifed a white classmate because she was an easy target. I'm putting that in air quotes because she actually said that. So Casey Sloan has reportedly been eyeing two potential victims, Navy veteran Matthew McCormick and female Arizona State University classmate Mara DeFron. I believe it's how you pronounce her last name.

Casey told police she had issues with self-worth and had attempted to launch her attack the evening before because she thought it would make her problems go away.

So she has real mental problems. And she planned this out for some time. She said she signed or she singled out Mara as an easier target than the veteran she originally had in mind. And after searching her backpack, there was a series of handwritten letters addressing family and friends apologizing for what she was about to do.

So this is planned. She also told investigators she's had intrusive thoughts about hurting people, but felt disgusted with them and never had made a plan until the night before this attack. So again, she's telling investigators she made this plan.

She's a psychopath. This is premeditation by a psychopath. This happened on September 17th, so just a few weeks ago. How this happened was Casey, she apparently tripped, I'm putting this in air quotes, walking into their microeconomics class. And Mara, the one she stabbed, tried to help her up.

And that's when the attack happened. She realized something wrong was going – or something weird was happening, so she actually ended up turning. And that's when Casey stabbed her in the back. So she stabbed her twice. Stabbed her twice, yeah. And then this girl tried to run away. And this happened at school. This happened in their microeconomics class. So ironically, the veteran, who she was originally targeted, was able to apprehend Casey.

Casey before she was able to stop her third time. There was 13 witnesses and even the professor said that this was completely unprovoked.

So now these charges have been dropped. There was speculation that it was because there was a grand jury indictment. But for superseding state charges. And anybody who watches a crime show on broadcast network, you always have this issue. Federal charges superseding state or civil. Right. But in that grand jury indictment, that's not there's still no murder charges. It's.

No, we had – Aggravated assault. Jen Wright, a local attorney who has worked on numerous cases here for Republicans but has also been a prosecuting attorney for the state attorney general's office, looked into it. She initially thought there was this superseding indictment. Then she dug more and it's not there. The only charges she's facing is aggravated assault and disorderly conduct with a weapon. Why? Why?

We don't know because we don't have the grand jury transcripts. You know, we don't know what was said in front of the grand jury. We don't know if the prosecutor did not present those charges. We do not know if the grand jury dismissed those charges. But what we know is that based on this, a woman who, as Kylie described, planned out a premeditated attempted murder. She should be put down.

Yes. She is a danger to society, period. She admitted these things to the police. She admitted them. There are some people that need to lose their job. They need to be under a microscope. This is unacceptable on every level. Something here is really wrong. Yeah, so Judge Jane McLaughlin, she was actually the first person who – the first judge that she saw. She had said that this is equivalent to a school shooting and she's a risk that –

And she poses extreme threat to the community. She's a danger to community. But the second judge, it's unknown who that was. I don't know why we don't know. So how do we find out who the second judge is? That will come out. The hell needs to be brought upon this judge and the prosecutor. I'm serious. Their picture needs to be everywhere and say these people need new jobs. Can you recall judges in Arizona? No.

No, but they have judicial review, so they will come up on the ballot at some point, right? Judge needs to be gone. But one of my thoughts was that the initial court appearance would have been in Tempe. It would have been in Tempe's city jurisdiction. Or was it the downtown campus? No, it was on the west campus. West campus. So that's Phoenix. Yeah. So the initial court would have been the city of Phoenix and then the county or the state.

Something is really off here. It doesn't make sense. No. So Mara's mom was like, so would she have these charges only if my daughter had died? Yeah. Mara's mom needs to sue the city. Yeah. Yes. 100%. Yes. Yeah, it's horrible. So I'll keep you guys updated on that one. Yeah, please. Yeah, stay on this one. I will.

The second one I want to discuss is not no one's dying, but so there's a fourth women's volleyball team that's refusing to play San Jose State because of a player on their team, Blair Fleming. Blair is a biological male that transitioned to a female. So in 2020, Blair Fleming was playing at Coastal Carolina, but after a law banned trans athletes from playing in South Carolina, she transferred to San Jose State.

Then in 2023, Brooke Slusser, she was playing in Alabama. She transferred to San Jose State. She's a team captain. She is roommates with Blair. So this is the same person or they have two transgender people? No, no, no. Sorry. Brooke is just – she's involved in this because she's suing the NCAA. Oh, okay. So they're playing on the same team. But the reason Brooke is involved in this is because –

She was rooming with Blair and she had no idea that she was a trans athlete. Okay. And she only found out because of, she overheard two students discussing that Blair was originally a male. So then when, after reports came out, I'm assuming she went to someone and then, um, the school had actually told them not to discuss this because they went to the team and said, do not discuss this. This is your responsibility to protect your teammate. So they were told to keep it quiet. Um,

Your daughter is forced to room with somebody with a penis who they don't know about. Who they don't know. They were unaware. And that's okay, apparently. San Jose's starting this season 9-0. Southern Utah was the first team that decided not to play against them.

Then Boise State followed suit. Wyoming and now Utah State. Colorado State did play them. Of course Colorado State did. Yeah, so Brooks-Lessers actually joined a lawsuit that's suing the NCAA that would ban trans athletes from playing in women's sports. In the letter, she's referring to the Title IX, stating that it's already illegal to participate in women's sports as a trans athlete.

Also, in this lawsuit, it's claiming that Blair can spike a ball at 80 miles per hour. And what's an average woman's spike? That's a great question. A lot less. Well, let's Google it real quick. Jenna, would you Google that real quick? I've seen some video, and just as an eyeball comparison, it's about twice, maybe 50, you know, difference between 40 and 50. So like the difference between a seventh middle school pitcher versus a senior pitcher? Yes. Okay.

Yes, I did retweet something on our Twitter account, so you can go there and see the difference between another spiker who plays college volleyball, who's very well known and very good as well, versus Blair's spike. It's visibly, dramatically different. Yes, and the liberal media is reporting that this is not that big of a deal because there's estimated 40 NCAA athletes out of 500,000 athletes that are trans, which...

I think the bigger deal is the one that they're hiding it from women athletes. And we know that those 40 athletes are not male or are not. They're not women sports. What did you find? What'd you find, Jenna? Yeah. So the average for a woman's spike is 71.2 kilometers per hour, which is 44 miles per hour.

So it's double? Double. So, yeah. I watch her spike, and the girls, it'll take them out. Can I just take credit for having an excellent eye for judging speed? No, you cannot. We had to have Jenna look it up, so no. I was spot on. 40 to 50. Spot on visually. So they're saying there's 40 NCAA athletes out of 500,000, 40, which 293,000 are male athletes, so.

I'm going to assume that there's no female athletes playing against male athletes. It's funny. The people doing saying this are the same people. You pick any tragedy. Well, if we can just stop one person, we should stop carrying a gun. We should stop one person. We should stop driving trucks, whatever. It's the same people who do that. But for this, it's not a big deal, right? Well, and here's the thing. I mean, it is – again, you and I have talked – we've talked about this on this program. If you want to go ahead and create an open division –

Then go ahead and create an open division. I agree. I agree. I agree. Yeah. And if you want to transgender, I don't care. Right. But you shouldn't be in a girls league. So you have an open division. I agree with you 100 percent. Co-ed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A co-ed division. I love it. Fine. Yeah. I mean, that's fine. But I don't care. But like, you know, my my nieces were not great athletes, whatever. But dear audience, Sam's face is total disgust. But continue, Sam.

Well, you know, here's the thing. My sister – here are their parents. Their father is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, OK? Right, right. Their mother was an Olympic team trials athlete. OK. And neither of them can throw a dang ball for two feet. They're both terrible athletes. So this is a little baffling to me, right? Yeah.

At the end of the day, they both did get to, like, through high school, play various sports, right? And had a lot of fun and had a great experience and grew from it. It's the purpose of it. Yeah. They built their confidence, right? If you had put a boy on there, that would have destroyed their confidence. It would have been the exact opposite of what actually happened. It's the exact opposite of the purpose of playing sports. 100%, Sam. 100%. Well...

I think this is why we end the show with our happy moments. Well, yeah, we're going to bring Jenna on now for a little sunshine moment. Jenna, you have to hit a home run today. This transition always kills me. Home run today, Jenna, on the sunshine moment. What do you got?

Okay. Well, I have two topics that I'm going to talk about today. I'm starting with a darker subject, what's going on in Florida and Georgia with Hurricane Helene. But

with all of everything that's going on down there. There are heroes that are arising out of all of that. And so I just want to highlight a couple people that have been in the news for just helping their family and doing what they should do. But so Dan Murphy used his canoe to rescue his colleague,

in Georgia. Um, uh, the U S coast guard has saved a man and his dog. Um, and we'll, I'll send you the article and we can put it and you can see it's a really cute photo. Um, but, um,

uh sam perkins um hiked to his um family's home in north carolina he couldn't contact them and um he hiked 11 miles um 2 200 feet of elevation and he found them um they he found them okay um and uh filled them all in on all the news they're missing um is this sam perkins the basketball player

Because he was from North Carolina. I don't know. That is a good question. I mean, I'm just curious. Yeah. But yeah, he was from North Carolina. Yeah, I'll have to... That would be... That would upgrade your story. Yeah, let's just say... We're just going to pretend that's true, whether it is or not. Well, yeah, so... And...

Yeah. So they, um, and, um, yeah, 400 or 700 Canadian linemen, um, traveled to North and South Carolina as well. And they're restoring power down there. Um, and, uh,

They, power is a huge thing and people have been thanking them. They put up Canadian flags as a show of thanks. It was Jim Salmon, the vice president of Holland Power Services, who sent crews from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. He sent them all down there and they're working 16-hour days to help everyone out. Getting up at 5 a.m., working tirelessly as so many people are.

Linemen are the heroes in every one of these recoveries. Yeah. No, they really are.

Yeah, yeah. And everyone's working so hard down there. And there are a couple things that other organizations, so if you want to get involved or help out, Red Cross actually needs blood donations. And that's a huge thing for hospitals down there. And then a lot of different organizations you can donate to, Save the Children, Salvation Army. Just, yeah, do your research and find it online. But, yeah. And then a lighter topic as well. Jimmy Carter's

100th birthday was October 1st, and he's turned 100 years old. He was the longest living – or the president who's lived the longest. First president to make it to triple digits. Triple digits. Yeah. And so he spent it raising money to support the Carter Center. And in St. Paul, thousands of volunteers from around the world –

built 30 homes in just one week or gathered to build 30 homes in just one week as a part of their work project. So, yeah, they brought out Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood to go and help construct sustainable, resilient, affordable housing in Twin Cities Habitat, largest ever development. So, yeah, lots of good going on down there. Kylie and I had the exact same reaction about Garth Brooks when you brought that up.

Allegedly, it's fake. Allegedly. Allegedly. Well, thank you, Jenna. And happy birthday, Jimmy Carter. I doubt we'll see him at 101, though. If you've seen a picture of him, I'm surprised he hit 100. But happy birthday, Jimmy Carter. He did make it to the talk to a podcast, though. That is a heck of a... Look, 100's a heck of an accomplishment. 100's a heck of a day, yeah. Well, he's lived...

No matter what you think of his presidency, he's lived a life of service. Yes. And I think that's given you purpose, and purpose helps you live longer. I don't think there's any question that you have to say that Jimmy Carter is one of the best human beings who has ever served as president of this country. Yeah, he's a good man. He might have been too good a man for that office, quite frankly. Well, he's a bit of a liberal, but that's okay.

All right. Well, folks, thank you for joining us this week on behalf of Kylie, Jenna, Sam, Jeremy, and myself. Have a great weekend. Please feel free to share our show with your friends and family and colleagues. You can follow us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote or wherever you find our social media or podcasts. Have a great weekend.