St. Louis Radio Host on Crime Stats Manipulation and Media Trust Collapse

Mark Reardon [00:00:00] Hey, something confusing happened. And she goes, well, you know, dad is not your real dad. I'm like, well, I do now, but here's what happened. So I, I know that's shocking, right? But

Vance Crowe [00:00:08] Whoa, the, I see. I'm a big believer. I actually think, and this is a controversial opinion, like I think we should not have drunk driving laws. It

Mark Reardon [00:00:16] Said their name and then it said she her. Okay? So my response, and I'm going through my, I'm just, you know, you know, you follow me on Twitter, sometimes I see things and I'm just gonna post them up there. So all I said was, you lost me at she, her. Two weeks later, I got a letter in the mail from the Boone County Sheriff's Department saying, there's a warrant out for your arrest. Howdy. I'm Hannah Nwi Wonderer, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois. And you're listening to Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:46] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Mark Reardon returns longtime listeners of the podcast know that Mark Reardon is perhaps the most recognized voice in the entire St. Louis region. He runs a drive time daily news show that covers topics all over the spectrum, both about St. Louis, and national stories. Mark and I have developed a great friendship over the years, and I invited him in to come talk about what's going on in the city of St. Louis, both in terms of crime, but also some of the other issues that have hit the national stage, like the transgender clinic that is going on in Wash U. We're gonna get to those topics in just one second. But first I wanted to talk about an experience I had the other day over Memorial Day weekend. I got a letter, or from a person that purchased a legacy interview about two years ago for a family member. As it turns out, that family member aged and unfortunately passed away, but the person that was writing me the letter said, for the first time in their whole lives, they had a chance to be the person that thought ahead and was really seen as a hero during the funeral because they had this great video of a vibrant, loving grandfather that had so much to talk about and so many stories to share. So they wrote me a letter saying, thank you for helping me have this for my family during this trying time. I share this because if you've ever been a person that's thought about, I want to capture this loved one, I wanna make sure it gets done, but you haven't done it yet, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out how you can get an interview scheduled for your loved one.

Vance Crowe [00:02:20] Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with my man, Mark Reardon. Mark,

Mark Reardon [00:02:26] How are you, Vance?

Vance Crowe [00:02:27] I'm great. How are you? Can

Mark Reardon [00:02:28] I ask you a question about the Legacy Interviews? A hundred

Vance Crowe [00:02:30] Percent. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:02:31] You and I have talked about this before, but in hearing your description, I, I'm kind of thinking through, if I had to do one of those, and I dunno if you know this, but this is a little frightening. I'm uncomfortable with the word that starts with G, but my 27-year-old son is about to make my 9-year-old daughter an aunt in September. I'm told that his implications for me as well, okay, again, I'm uncomfortable with the word that starts with G, but I'm thinking to myself, how do I not just baw when I'm doing one of those Legacy Interviews and get all emotional? You have to have people that do that, right?

Vance Crowe [00:03:02] Oh, un unquestionably people that they'll write me and say, my dad's not gonna say very much, and da da da da da. And unquestionably the guy that's been the strong silent type his whole life balls doing the whole thing, talks a lot about the, the really deep memories. But really what happens is you have that cry out about this profound gratitude that you have Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:03:24] For

Vance Crowe [00:03:24] Getting where you are in life. And then it's like a release, and now all of a sudden you get to talk about things that you don't normally get to talk about. I believe

Mark Reardon [00:03:31] That,

Vance Crowe [00:03:31] See that? So we get past, like this point in crying. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:03:34] Where

Vance Crowe [00:03:34] Like, now this opens up a whole nother level of the conversation. It's pretty profound.

Mark Reardon [00:03:38] That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, I probably need to do one, we'll see if I can get my, inspire my children to buy me a, you know, present for Father's Day or something. Dance.

Vance Crowe [00:03:45] You know, without question, the, the thing that Legacy Interviews has taught me the most is that people love being grandparents. Like they, like if you ask, like if, if you and I were talking and I say, oh, you're now a grandparent. What's that? Like? You watch their whole body change dispositions. Yeah. And it's because you get to be around this precious child, but you don't have all of the pain and responsibility and give back.

Mark Reardon [00:04:12] Right. You

Vance Crowe [00:04:12] Get to give them back. And so these grandparents talk about it, and I think like, it's just such a wonderful thing. Imagining a grandchild, being able to hear their grandparent talk about like, this is what it was like growing up. This is what our family went through. This is what I did, and who you are. So well,

Mark Reardon [00:04:28] I, I am, despite the fact that it was a little jarring because it wasn't planned. I'm only, I'm not even 60 yet. So, you know, wasn't really anticipating that. And I became a father again at age 50, you know, so that was a little weird. But I was very close with my mom's mom and dad in particular. They helped raise me, I don't know, my biological father. So I lived with my grandparents, you know, for the first couple years of my life. So, my grandpa in particular, who died when I was pretty young, I was like 12 years old. He played e even though I was only 12 years old. I remember the importance that he played in my life between, you know, you don't really remember stuff until you're about five or six, but certainly made an impression on me. So I'm excited from that perspective. For sure. What

Vance Crowe [00:05:06] Was he like?

Mark Reardon [00:05:07] He was a big barrel of a guy who loved to bowl, and he had run a gas station, and he was a janitor at this point in our local church. So I helped him out with that. We would go to this little bar in the neighborhood called Bring Her In, and he'd put a little salt in his beer, you know, and make it fizz or whatever. The bubbles would come up. I'd put a little salt in my soda, you know, stuff like that. So I just remember spending time with him more than anything else, just hanging out and doing things. We never did anything like went fishing or anything like that. We just kind of hung out and we were pretty tight. And my grandma and I were as well. She would be devastated by my allegiance and loyalty to the St. Louis Cardinals van, because she was a big, big Cubs fan.

Vance Crowe [00:05:52] Oh, wow. Back

Mark Reardon [00:05:53] In the day. Yeah. This was up in Chicago. I grew up there in the north suburbs. So

Vance Crowe [00:05:56] You grew up as a, a kid of a single mom in

Mark Reardon [00:06:00] Chicago? Well, no. No, not necessarily. So what happened was, just to kind of tie up the loose ends, I I, this is a funny story. I don't know if I've ever told you this kind of a funny story. It makes me look really stupid, but I'm good at that. So let's share it. Anyway, so when I was about 37 years old, 38 years old, I was going through a divorce and, you know, things were tough. And I remember coming back from a trip here in Missouri, going back to Milwaukee. My mom and dad lived in Chicago, and my dad had a little bout with prostate cancer, and I said something about going to the doctor. And, you know, I told him about, well, I mentioned that you had prostate cancer. And he says something like, well, you know, it can't just jump outta my body and into yours. I'm like, lemme think about that for a second. So I'm driving to Milwaukee and I call my sister, and there's a little bit more to this story. I'm like, Hey, something confusing happened. And she goes, well, you know, dad is not your real dad. I'm like, well, I do now, but here's what happened. So I know that's shocking, right? Whoa.

Vance Crowe [00:06:55] But the,

Mark Reardon [00:06:55] You know, your mind kind of plays tricks on you a little bit. And here's what I remember. I remember when I was 12 years old, my mom and dad, you know, my dad is my dad. I don't know any other father, right? So they were married when I was two. Alright? So they said to me something like, well, do you ever wonder why it's our 10th wedding anniversary, but you're 12? And I'm like, no, I'm not good at math. I never thought of it, right? And it was, the message that I remember being communicated was, you were born before we were married, if you have any questions, but I'm not thinking, oh, there's a different father. I just didn't ever look at it that way. And then I never brought it up and they thought, I never brought it up because I wasn't comfortable with talking about it. So, you know, I don't know, 25, however long that was after being told at 12 years old, this comes up at the age of 37 or 38. So it was a little bit of a shock to the system, but I felt pretty stupid because there were things that were communicated with me. And I don't know what happened to them in my brain. I'll be honest with you. I don't know if it was one of those weird, you know, memory things that I hit away, but it was, it was interesting the way that I found out

Vance Crowe [00:07:58] The father son relationship is so deeply important as psychological development. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:08:05] But see, I never knew it any other way, you know, because I, I, I remember when I say that, that I was with my grandparents, they helped raise me from the standpoint that, you know, I wasn't always in, in my house with my mom and dad. Once my dad married my mom, I would be hanging out with them and sleeping over and stuff like that. So, but I never knew anything differently than that. So that was my, you know, he was my father.

Vance Crowe [00:08:27] How long, long did it take you to process in your thirties that like, oh, not only are you going through this divorce also, you've

Mark Reardon [00:08:34] Got

Vance Crowe [00:08:34] This different backstory than you ever imagined?

Mark Reardon [00:08:36] I've never really been that obsessed with that. I really haven't, you know, I'd be lying if I would tell you that I wasn't curious, especially if the biological father is Bill Gates or somebody like that. But it, it never really, you know, did a little internet sleuthing, stuff like that. Nothing ever came up. The, the biological father is a sax player in a band, actually, and, or was, and all I had was when my mom, when I was 37, 38, she pulled out the, the eight by 10 glossy of, you know, his band. And you would know right away just from the indentation on the chin

Vance Crowe [00:09:12] That

Mark Reardon [00:09:12] That was the dude, Joe Barnes was his name. Now, I don't know if that was a stage name or anything like that. I have no idea, because nobody ever has turned up along those lines. And again, it really, this is the most I've talked about it in, in God knows how long, because it's just nothing I really think about very much, or that's affected me. It really hasn't. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:09:30] That's totally profound. I mean, one of the things that I've learned in Legacy Interviews is that it turns out like if children know their family stories, who, where they come from, the odds that they'll get drug addiction, that they'll go to prison, that they have all these problems, goes way down. And that includes kids that are adopted into a family. Just having a backstory. Yeah. And knowing like who we are is enough to give what they think from the research they're doing is enough to give people that grounding that they need to keep their head above water.

Mark Reardon [00:10:03] So that's the reason I did a two year stint in the Missouri Penitentiary events.

Vance Crowe [00:10:07] I had no idea, by the way,

Mark Reardon [00:10:08] That is not true. I did not do that just one day in a holding cell in 1984. That was it.

Vance Crowe [00:10:12] What'd you do to get there?

Mark Reardon [00:10:13] Oh, that was a possession of marijuana charge. Ooh. Oh, it sucked too. Because think about where we are with, with cannabis now. And my wife works in this industry. So it's been something that's been near and dear to my heart since 1984. I come back first, first semester wraps up at Mizzou. I go home, everything seemingly is fine. I make the dean's list my first semester, 3.5 GPA. Had you known me back then, or maybe since you know me now, you're like, wow, was that a grading mistake or something like that. So it's the first weekend back from, you know, winter break. And I'm in my dorm room and there's a friend of mine, we've been friends for years and we're smoking weed. And he starts to have a really bad reaction and he starts to say stuff like, I'm never, in order to get into the journalism school, using that word, journalism right now is really comedic. You had to have a 3.0. And the first two years, when you're a freshman and sophomore, you kind of work on the, you know, the broader education, liberal arts stuff. So this was a friend who was older than me. He is like, oh, I'm not gonna get into journalism school. My parents are gonna kill me. And I read about this after it happened because I was so curious about it. Well, he literally starts freaking out. He runs out of my dorm room, he bounces off the walls almost. And I'm panicking and I have a little bit, I mean, there was such a little amount of weed, and I throw it in the, in the garbage can outside of my room. I didn't flush it like an idiot. Right. And the rap think RA busted me. And so I went to University Hospital that night with my friend, and the university cop drives us back and says, look, as far as I'm concerned, you know, nothing's gonna happen.

Mark Reardon [00:11:48] You're gonna have to deal with your dorm. Two weeks later, I got a letter in the mail from the Boone County Sheriff's Department saying, there's a warrant out for your arrest. And I'm thinking, okay, what, you know, I knew what had happened a couple weeks before, but I go down and they arrest me and they put me in a holding cell and I had to get an attorney. I had to go to court several times. Vance, I was put on two years probation. And what that meant was with a suspended sentence. So if I had another offense, I think it was 15 days in jail, I had to get permission to leave the state. I, it was unbelievable. Think about that. So if I wanted to go visit my family in Chicago, if I wanted to go on a trip somewhere on vacation, I had to get that signed off on in 1984 for two years. It was utterly, especially when you compare and contrast and juxtapose it with where we are right now, utterly ridiculous. But that's how far we've come, you

Vance Crowe [00:12:41] Know? And how were people talking to you about, say, like just marijuana in general? Were they like, oh, you were disgusting for having

Mark Reardon [00:12:48] Back then?

Vance Crowe [00:12:48] Yeah,

Mark Reardon [00:12:49] No, I was a college student, so, you know, everybody, it wasn't, I mean, I think it was a little bit of a surprise to my mom and dad. I remember coming home after that summer and, you know, everything had happened. That was the worst part of it, that I had to tell them what happened. And I had some, some hemostats in my, you know, hemostats are little, little pliers where,

Vance Crowe [00:13:08] Oh yeah, yeah,

Mark Reardon [00:13:09] I can't say that I've ever used this, but you, you know, you take the end of a joint and you use that. And my dad finds 'em and says, oh. I said, well, those are Brandon's. My, my roommate, sorry Brandon just outed you. And my dad goes, well, I didn't know Brandon was a surgeon.

Vance Crowe [00:13:24] So it

Mark Reardon [00:13:24] Was, you know, it, it was really, it was an education in, in the justice system in how iJust I think it was. And, you know, I'll be honest with you, what happened back then, because of that experience, not that I was a radical campaigner for this, but despite the fact that I've always been a conservative politically, you know, I'm very libertarian on those issues in particular. And I campaigned as much as I could on the air and off the air for decriminalization. This was long before, you know, we were talking legalization, but decriminalization was very important to me. And it took 30 years to, to 40 years to get to that point if you're really, you know, tracking the math 35 years. So, you know, it's really amazing.

Vance Crowe [00:14:05] It's the perfect example of like why laws and morality are not the same thing, right? Like the the act of of using marijuana Yes. Is no different now than it was when you were doing it. And yet the legality of it changes whether or not you were bad or good, or right or wrong. It's such a bizarre thing that, I mean, like, to watch it happen in our lifetime, that people could go from being like, cannabis means your life is over to like, ah, it's, it's down just downstairs.

Mark Reardon [00:14:34] Well, it, it was, it's, it had such a stigma, there's no doubt about that. And, you know, I'm not gonna sit here and recommend that people use cannabis because might not be the best idea for me. You know, being a little honest here. So I quit drinking in 1990. I haven't had a drink since 1990, but I started using cannabis again about seven or eight years ago, and under the auspices of helping my anxiety, which it did, but I won't lie recreationally, I like it. And I think there's a double standard, a strong double standard, because I have, I have friends acquaintances who are very anti-cannabis, especially the, the smoking, you know, the flour, because a lot of people do edibles and that doesn't smell, and it doesn't infringe on anyone else. But these are people who, you know, openly drink whiskey, whatever. I, I, I, we encourage people, you know, we have Bush Stadium, we encourage people to use alcohol. We market it everywhere. And I, I don't think that anyone, especially a police officer, law enforcement can make the case that it's more dangerous in society overall than alcohol. I read a study even in the Wall Street Journal, maybe the New York Times a couple weeks ago, about, oh, the dangers of marijuana are coming to get you, you know, well, maybe there are some, right? But let's be honest, they're not even close to what alcohol does. And you know, you have people that beat the shit out of their girlfriends and wives when they're drunk, they black out. They, and again, you shouldn't be driving when you're on weed or anything like that either. But I just think it's, it's, the double standard is stunning. And we've, we've gotten past that now, I think.

Vance Crowe [00:16:06] Do you think that there, there will be a test for people taking, like if they've been driving under the influence like

Mark Reardon [00:16:12] That? That's one of the challenges. I'm not gonna say that. I'm not interested in that because I do think that you, you know, you shouldn't be out there if you're altered. And there's no reason at this point, you know, Uber's everywhere. So, but I'm a big believer. I'm surprised we don't have that yet.

Vance Crowe [00:16:25] See, I'm a big believer. I actually think, and this is a controversial opinion, like I think we should not have drunk driving laws. I think that you break the law when you actually kill someone. Yeah. Or when you actually get into that accident. And like, we radically changed culture when we started making it that the police officer's job was to go out and find out, does anybody have a blood alcohol level above this certain level? Right. And then we started allowing them to put up checkpoints

Mark Reardon [00:16:53] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:16:53] To monitor you for no reason of suspicion. And like, I think that that, you know, if you go back and look at photos of what did people spend their time doing when they were adult, when they were our age?

Mark Reardon [00:17:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:17:06] You know, a generation ago they were spending time in communities and groups of people. Right. And the certainly there were drunk driving accidents. Certainly they're sad and, you know, should be prevented. But the loss of freedom that we had when we started saying, here, police officer, you're supposed to find out not whether that guy has broken a law.

Mark Reardon [00:17:23] Yeah. You

Vance Crowe [00:17:23] Know, or done something wrong. But whether or not he is too high of a blood alcohol concept.

Mark Reardon [00:17:28] Yeah. Well, I don't know if I'd go so far as to have no rules around that. But I do understand your point. The checkpoints in particular, and I went through one of those. I, I guess it would be about 10. I, I always like going through checkpoints just because I always took my phone out and recorded. I knew that I hadn't had, I had no risk because I wasn't drinking. And I was always curious. And I, I ran through one in Fenton probably 10 years ago in the home that I was in previously coming back late one night. And they had stopped everything going down into the lane. And, and I'm not a fan of those, and I understand that you're trying to, you know, prevent accidents, et cetera. But those always struck me as, as going too far. And they don't do them anymore. I don't think. They really don't Not here. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:18:04] I'm, I've, since as long as I've lived here, I haven't seen 'em, you know, I probably take a lot less risks than I did when I was younger, but I think that that's the sort of law that people implement that ends up eroding overall freedoms. You start getting used to the fact that the, that the police can just set up a checkpoint and be like, are you wearing your seatbelt? Right.

Mark Reardon [00:18:23] Whereas

Vance Crowe [00:18:23] Your cell phone located, but I, a lot of this,

Mark Reardon [00:18:26] Well, that, that's, that's where I have a problem. And you know, I I'm glad you brought that up because, and you know this, maybe to some people, this seems weird, but I, I hate the primary enforcement seatbelt law. You know what that means? Primary enforcement.

Vance Crowe [00:18:38] Whereas if they're driving along the road, they see you, they

Mark Reardon [00:18:40] Can just pull you over. If you, if they think you don't have a seatbelt on, they can pull you over. No, no, no, no, no. They do that in Illinois, they do that in California, in Missouri where we have freedom. And I know some people might think again, well, you should have, you know, your seatbelt on, yeah. You should have your seatbelt on, but a cop shouldn't be able to pull you over just for that. And that drives me crazy. So that's what I call nanny state nonsense. And quite honestly, Missouri doesn't have a lot of that. We've, we've tried some, I think recently, and I've been a critic of it, because, you know, Republicans in Missouri, we have a super majority of Republicans. So anything that would happen would have to go through a strong Republican majority. But I'm, I'm, I hate laws like that to

Vance Crowe [00:19:17] Me. Like this goes along with bike helmets, seat belts, these kinds of things. Like, okay, if you choose not to wear your seatbelt and we get into a car accident and you go through the windshield, my insurance isn't picking that up. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:19:30] But

Vance Crowe [00:19:31] If you're taking all the safety measures that you need, then, then like, we'll definitely call that, you know, that I should owe you compensation. Right. It should be my fault. But all of this stuff of like, we're gonna make rules to protect people. No, no bueno on my end. This

Mark Reardon [00:19:45] Is what we do in, in this country. And it gets, yeah, it gets a lot of control.

Vance Crowe [00:19:49] But I've been poking you for maybe a month now about an author that's pretty controversial. His name's Steve Sailor and he made a point using St. Louis statistics. That was, we keep pointing out in all these urban areas that crime is going down. And you have these mayors coming out being like, look at what we did. Right. We're champions, we're heroes. And Steve Sailor points out, actually, if you, if you look at homicides and then you include traffic fatalities, cities are actually as dangerous or more dangerous than they were before.

Mark Reardon [00:20:23] Yeah. We've pointed this out on my show quite a bit. You probably have been familiar with, or maybe you've even met Jane Duker, who's on my panel quite a bit now. Jane is an attorney here. She used to be the chief of staff for one of our governors, Bob Holden, many years ago. She's very active in the crime issues. She represents the cops. So we should always say that she's, you know, one of the union lawyers. But it, it's a situation where these crime stats have been manipulated nationally. And you have cities like LA and, and other big communities that have not reported crimes. They also group crimes. So if, you know, I'm parked at Forest Park here in St. Louis or the zoo or something like that, and there are 30 cars that are broken into, sometimes that gets reported as like one incident. So they've cooked the books on a lot of this stuff. There's no doubt about it. It is very complicated. There's, there's nobody who is sane who can make the case that St. Louis has a crime problem that's been solved in any way, shape or form. And that crime has gone down in the other direction. Just hasn't. And any attempt to say that it has is completely manufactured. Now, do we have periods where sometimes the murder rate seems a little bit lower? Sure. That might be the case. But again, violent crimes, are you matching those up with all the other violent crimes or the times where people may have been stabbed and, and not killed. So I don't trust the numbers at all. I really don't. And and I think based on what we've experienced in this country with, and I wanna support law enforcement and I do, but with the feds in particular, I don't know how you can believe some of it. So it's

Vance Crowe [00:21:51] Unfortunate. Yeah. And it's so wild because like, there should be things that we as a nation want to just keep solid. We want to know obesity numbers. We don't want those changed. Right. We want to know over time, are people getting heavier crime statistics. Like if you start changing those like the CPI, whether or not we're having inflation. Yeah. Those numbers all being doctored. Like this is all, anytime somebody's changing the definition of these numbers, it's because they're trying to win an argument through Sure. Their ability to change things.

Mark Reardon [00:22:21] Well that's what, you know, our mayor is gonna run for reelection and she's gonna tout that some of this has been solved to a certain extent in my mind, some of the stats don't even matter. And from this perspective, look, I, I saw, do you know who TJ Miller is? Comedian was in Silicon Valley. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:22:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A

Mark Reardon [00:22:37] Little controversial Deadpool movies as well. So he came to town a few weeks ago. He was in the studio with me. Very funny. But the guy that warmed up and I feel badly 'cause I've told this story several times, and it was a comedian from Texas. I have no idea what his name is. He's very funny. You were very funny. But the first thing he says in his set is, yeah, he is my girlfriend. You know, I told my girlfriend that I was coming to St. Louis. She goes, that's a murder town. Murder town. So he goes on with this murder town bit throughout the set, TJ Miller comes up, he references crime in St. Louis. So we have this reputation here, and many urban areas do, and people know that it's bad. The only people that don't acknowledge that the situation exists in the way that it is are business leaders downtown because they're brainwashed or something. I don't really get it. And the mayor of St. Louis, everybody else knows that it's a, it's a, you know, a problem that has reached critical. And I, I can give you a couple of real life examples. Vance, you know, downtown St. Louis. So there is city hall right at the corner of Market. And Tucker, I, I work in a building just two blocks away from that. There's a couple of parks in between, then there's a Veteran's Memorial, there's a courts building across the other way that's dilapidated that became a homeless encampment. And then there's Enterprise Center and Stifel Theater, and those are tourist areas. And people go to hockey games and concerts and stuff like that. So at the corner of 14th and Market, there's been terrible homeless encampments over there. And I have from the building, the geography's important because from my building, I walk to a concert or I walk to a hockey game.

Mark Reardon [00:24:10] It's only a quarter of a mile, probably. It did not feel safe in the last couple years. And I went on the air repeatedly saying this intersection is a problem. And what happened one night, I went to see this band in 1975, and I knew when they were getting on stage. So I wasn't in a hurry at that point. No, cops were outside the building. And I walk over there, I didn't feel safe. And I came back after that and I said, look, someone's gonna get killed here and someone's gonna get shot and there's gonna be a bystander. Well, since that warning last fall, there've been two shootings and one death in that very intersection. So in response to the most recent incident, and there were homeless people that were, you know, in, in confrontations, whatever you wanna call it. 'cause it's an open air drug market too, right after that shooting, and this was when people could have easily been caught in the crossfire, the mayor puts up more gates around this courts building, cleans out the homeless encampment masks the problem. By the way, the gates went around these buildings, this will come as no surprise to people. I don't know if you know this, but Kamala Harris, our esteemed vice president, came to town in October. They gated the area around city hall and this, this park called Ker Park under the auspices of Park renovations. Restoration is the word they used complete bullshit. They've kept them that way. It's because of all the homeless folks there. And they don't wanna do the most politically incorrect thing, but they've cleaned them out at this point. It's become a danger to people. And it was, and we're we're really lucky that somebody that was an innocent bystander, a kid or someone like that, just gonna a hockey game was not killed.

Vance Crowe [00:25:40] Yeah. It's down there. I've been to, to your, you know, radio station and driven away from there. Yeah. The la maybe two times ago I'm driving, I hit the stoplight and I'm stuck there. And two cars drag racing. At what time could it have been 5 35

Mark Reardon [00:25:57] In the afternoon. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:25:57] Fly past me. Sure. They must've been going 70 miles an hour. Oh yeah. As though no one was there. And and this is like the very core, the courthouses are there, all the

Mark Reardon [00:26:06] Sure

Vance Crowe [00:26:07] Big giant buildings. You can see the arch off in the distance. And so I feel completely gaslit when people come on and they're, and they're trying, I understand they're trying to do the rah rah, you know? Yeah. We can't just let the city sink. But you don't make friends by telling people that what they are seeing is not actually there. And

Mark Reardon [00:26:27] Some of this is just so frustrating from this perspective. Again, this is a geography thing, and for people listening outside of the area, they may not understand this as well, but if you go to the east, you hit the Mississippi River and the arches down there in the ballpark Bush stadium, and we have an area called Ballpark Village that is relatively safe down there. Then you have the soccer stadium out west of where I work. But there's an area all in between that, that is not very well protected. And this is because we don't have enough police, and we have a member of Congress who wants to defund the police. We have a mayor in St. Louis and Tisch, as I call her, that doesn't want support the police. So you have, I bring it up because you have good things happening in St. Louis, the area where our soccer stadium is, is really kind of exciting. It's vibrant. But I've had people that I've worked with who have come back from a soccer game to our building where they parked not feeling very safe. The situation that I described in front of, you know, enterprise center, et cetera, if you had some police enforcement, you could send the message to people that, Hey, we're, we're gonna take care of this and you're safe. But people don't believe that anymore because there've been so many examples. And I'm not putting this on the cops, I'm just saying there's no effort to, to put police. And maybe it's just because they don't have the numbers. Right. But they're not putting them in locations to give people who come downtown for whatever reason, a sense of safety.

Vance Crowe [00:27:46] Well, and my understanding is it's not like we're like, oh, we just need 20 more police. You need like hundreds.

Mark Reardon [00:27:52] Hundreds.

Vance Crowe [00:27:52] There's hundreds. Yeah. But

Mark Reardon [00:27:53] I wanna go back. You, you remind me of something too. So I leave work at six o'clock every day. My show reps at six o'clock. It's mostly broad daylight. Right. Because unless we're in the winter, I don't go through those traffic lights that you're referring to, even if they're green, without looking both ways, because I've seen too many of the drag races, I've seen too many people blow through red lights. They don't care at all. The reason they don't care is because there's no consequences for those people whatsoever. They know that they're not gonna get pulled over. They know that there's not gonna be a cop that's gonna give Chase. So this, this affects a lot of different things because when that stuff happens at midnight or one in the morning, two in the morning, okay, well, who's really affected by it, but it's easily something you can say, you know, 4, 5, 6 in the afternoon, people, they're coming to games, whatever. It's very dangerous.

Vance Crowe [00:28:39] Well, and like going back to the gaslighting idea and not having enough police, one of the great proposals out of the city of St. Louis was well, you know, some of the burdens about having to pay for your title and registration and getting your smog checked. We're just, we're going to pay those for the citizens that can't pay them.

Mark Reardon [00:29:00] It's unbelievable. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:29:00] It's crazy.

Mark Reardon [00:29:01] That's one of the solutions they had, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:29:03] And, and this is presumably to like free up police time. Like how could you possibly justify this? Well,

Mark Reardon [00:29:09] You can't, and, and I don't know about the, the whole free up police time because they're not pulling people over for those particular,

Vance Crowe [00:29:15] Even expired license plates

Mark Reardon [00:29:16] Or anything. Yeah. And you know, there's, you know, there, there's another host who's retired here, Charlie Brennan in St. Louis, who's made kind of a, you know, a mission of his to post these pictures up on X or somewhere else saying, because these aren't people who have expired tags for just a couple of months, which I did last year, just to tell you, tell you that they're, you know, I, I let things lack, you're talking about six months, eight months, maybe a couple of different year, couple of years. Now that's important from this perspective, that probably means maybe not necessarily, it might mean that they don't have insurance, right? So if somebody hits you in that car, and you know, I don't really care if they have a tag on their license plate, but if they don't have insurance, that's gonna affect me perhaps very detrimentally. So yeah, it's, you know, we, we don't have enough people to answer 9 1 1 calls we've had and, and why that can't be something that's prioritized. We got all this money that's come in from the lawsuit that resulted in a big settlement from, you know, the NFL because the Rams left St. Louis, and yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:16] So it's a shady

Mark Reardon [00:30:16] Fashion, like

Vance Crowe [00:30:17] $225 million or something like that, right?

Mark Reardon [00:30:19] There's federal ARPA money that's coming, there's infrastructure money. So there, there's all kinds of money that they want to use in productive ways, like paying for people who can't afford their tags on their cars. That's not gonna solve one thing in this city, but that is the little tiny brain thinking that they do in city hall in St. Louis.

Vance Crowe [00:30:39] Is that what you think it is, is to, to you, when you look at it, it looks like people not thinking through things. Because to me it looks like open sabotage or like somebody, if I were gonna purposefully do something to harm things, this is what I would do. No,

Mark Reardon [00:30:53] I think they, maybe you're right. I think they really think these are good ideas. I think they pluck these ideas, like they see reparations. They're talking about reparations in St. Louis, right? So I, I think they really, there's people that think that, that these are, you know, really good ideas that are gonna help people, but they also don't have it within themselves to spend the money wisely, you know, on police. Because boy, if you mention law enforcement, the progressives, they go nuts. They don't want anything, you know, to do with that.

Vance Crowe [00:31:22] My understanding, I, I don't, we had a guy on here named Solo. He runs a rap studio in the north side. When you ask him, do you want more police? His answer is Yes, I want more police. Right. My, my studio was shot up not that long ago. My, I have all kinds of problems. He even talks about he gets pulled over more than other people do, but he's like, I don't care. Yeah. I want more police. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:31:45] I think that he's in the majority not the minority. And those voices are not heard. And this gets segue into a whole nother conversation. And you'll have to be the judge here. It's the media, because they're not telling stories that represent the true nature of where people are. I can give you a perfect example of that in the aftermath of all the horrifying protests that we saw across college campuses when they tried some of that nonsense here in St. Louis at Washington University, and I can criticize Wash U for a variety of things, and we may get to that. They, they shut it down pretty, pretty effectively. They actually did, you know, they did the right thing at Wash U, but you had the board president of the city of St. Louis Alderman, the alderman board President, Megan Green, who was also a, a part-time professor over there who was trying to get in the middle of this and claim that Wash you were the bad guys. Well, a week late, you know, most people in St. Louis, I would put an overwhelming number of people here, whatever you wanna say. 70, 75%, maybe even higher. Like, yeah, wash U did the right thing. But our local paper does this story about how things are tilted in the other direction. Critics still concerned about Wash u's decision. No, they're not. People support it. How about this headline? How about the overwhelming number of people in St. Louis are so happy that Wash U put down these terrorists? Okay, let's do a story on that. There's no quote in there from anyone that says, man, we're happy that they did that Same thing with the police. They're not gonna give, you know, any kind of credit to the police. We had a, this is unbelievable. I don't know if you, you followed this story, but there was a police cruiser that ran into a, a bar over the winter, kind of a camera caught the car.

Mark Reardon [00:33:22] They were going a little too fast. They swerved, they hit the bar. There was this, you know, notion at first that it was some grand conspiracy and some hate crime. I, I don't even know what people thought, but there was more effort on that story for a couple of cops that, you know, who knows what they were doing. And if they were doing something that was not cool or not professional, then they should be punished for that. Right? But this was like a two week story in the local media. Even the TV media did this. Now they had pictures so they could show, you know, the car. But give me a break. Okay. There are people that are dying legitimately, you know, crime victims that you're not gonna do any stories on. And you want to do, you wanna raise the, the gay bar owners in this position here because they had an accident in front of their bar? Gimme a break. Okay. So that, you know, the, the media, the local media has become, I think, more complicit in a lot of this used to be my target used to be the national media, and I would give the local media a bit of a pass because I felt like TV reporters and newspaper reporters were trying to do their jobs. I no longer believe that, that's for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:34:25] Well, what is the local media even anymore? What, what's out there that people, well, it's outside of your show. Yeah. I literally would not see local news, period.

Mark Reardon [00:34:35] Right. And, and that's a problem. And you know, we, we, you have, let me use KSDK as an example, which is our local NBC affiliate here. I saw over the weekend, there's a reporter, and I don't know her at all, her name is Christine Byers. She was at the post dispatch, in my mind, always seemed to be a pretty good reporter, right? She goes to KSDK Channel five, and she does some of the same thing, and she's doing pretty good reporting. And then over the weekend it came out, she's going to a law firm to do, you

Vance Crowe [00:34:59] Know, I saw your tweet about that. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:35:00] Right. And you know, it's sad because the, one of the few people in St. Louis that was doing real journalism, and I think that was doing it in, in as much of an unbiased fashion that you can, is leaving. Now, I can juxtapose that, and I won't use any names here, but I, I got into a little dust up and this is just me being a pain in the ass. And I do it one day, I'm scrolling across the X and I see a weather forecast about some storms. And I thought it was the meteorologist that was tweeting this out. But all I saw was in this particular person's Twitter, what would you call it? Like the header, right? It wasn't in the bio, it was in the masthead, if you will. It said their name and then it said she her. Okay. So my response, and I'm going through my, I'm just, you know, you know me, you follow me on Twitter, sometimes I see things and I'm just gonna post them up there. So all I said was, you lost me at she her, right? Well, this ended up being a big thing. And people responded and then she responded. But here's what, here's what caught my attention in all that. And I think that this was helpful for me to make my broader point. She wrote how, you know, this is so important to her, and that she's an ally to what I call the Alphabet mafia. The LGBTQI plus folks out there, an ally to the Alphabet Mafia. Then right around that time there's Title IX news that comes down, right? And the Biden administration Horrifyingly tries to change this stuff to, you know, you have a daughter, right? To make sure that our daughters can't compete fairly in the future and they're gonna compete against biological men, which is ridiculous.

Mark Reardon [00:36:36] So how can someone who is an ally to the Alphabet Mafia do a story on that without being biased? That's a rhetorical question. They cannot, they cannot do that. But I wrote there, there's a guy who's the news director over there, art Holiday, used to be, I think he used to be a sports guy. He is a Mizzou guy. I don't know him very well. Good guy of a different era of journalism, but he's the news director now. I sent him a, because I'm a troublemaker Vance, I sent him a note and I said, Hey, I'm gonna dust up with one of your reporters. But here's my question. How could that person do fair reporting on some of these issues, whether it's the trans issue or something else, when they are declaring themselves an ally to that particular group. No response. And I think there was no response. 'cause I was right about that. What could he say? But then I heard from another reporter over there that I didn't know, supporting and defending his friend, which I can respect, you know, colleague talking about how, you know, journalism is not about the facts anymore. Just isn't. And I've known this for a while, but now they're being vocal in the sense that they're proudly declaring that it's not about, you know, being fair. It's about making sure we're on the right side of the causes. Look at what happened at Northwestern University. One of the people leading some of the charges up there in the anti-Semitic protests was a journalism professor from Northwestern, Northwestern, university of Missouri, Columbia University, the esteemed journalism schools of the country. You go to his bio page, he's proudly affiliating himself with every group out there that is with identity politics.

Mark Reardon [00:38:09] That's what they think is journalism. Okay? I went to journalism school between 1983 and 1986 when I was arrested. And we weren't taught these things. I mean, we all had, all reporters have their biases and their, you know, ideologies. But I cannot believe what journalism has become. It's, and, and that, that, that includes local journalism because they're not telling you things that you need to know. I always call it journalism bio omission. They leave a lot of things out.

Vance Crowe [00:38:38] Yeah. The, so the big news just in the last week or so here in St. Louis, is there's one of these news outlets called the Riverfront Times. And for context, this is like the standard student and alternative newspaper that's put around near where all the bars are at, right? So people would come by and they'd pick up this free paper. There'd be a ton of ads in there, but it'd be about local issues. I I then, and this one would certainly be left-leaning. It was, it was run when, what was his name? Ray Hart. Ray

Mark Reardon [00:39:08] Hartman

Vance Crowe [00:39:08] Started this and, and then it, and it's kind of passed on, and it got sold. It's a, it's, I mean, outside of the Post-Dispatch, now what other newspaper is there in St. Louis? And, you know, why couldn't they

Mark Reardon [00:39:22] Keep the doors open? Yeah, there's, well, there's an African American newspaper. Well, but I think what happened with the RFT, even those of us who were politically conservative, and I'll use Rolling Stone as an example. When we were politically conservative in the eighties, I knew where Rolling Stone and Jan Winter was, right? But they had PGR work in there, and he was funny. And I don't know if you know, PG R's satirical, you know, POL political conservative passed away a few years ago. But he would write from a very different perspective. Well then Matt Taibbi took over. And that's even funnier to describe right now, because Matt Taibbi was the global warming, alarmist, scare the crap out of people. The right is the most, you know, they're the most evil people on the planet. Matt Taibbi is also the guy that in the past four years, said, holy shit, what's happened to journalism? And he completely flipped the Twitter files. That's, you know, Mike Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, these are the people that have changed the narrative in journalism because they've gone out bravely and said what we see at the New York Times, what we see at NPR. Yuri Berliner made this very clear a couple of months ago, you know what Yuri Berlin said about NPR? I've been saying for 20, 30 years. Okay. Of course they're biased. I know exactly what they do. But he was an insider and he got to expose it firsthand. That was really the only difference. But it's horrifying to see, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:40:40] NPR is way beyond where they were

Mark Reardon [00:40:43] Because

Vance Crowe [00:40:44] I used to work at

Mark Reardon [00:40:45] No, they are at station.

Vance Crowe [00:40:47] And they went to a level that like you, like you turn it on and you're like, they are overtly stating their opinion.

Mark Reardon [00:40:53] And I forgot to make my broader point, and I thank you for reminding me. Because what happened with Rolling Stone and with the RFT, even people like that were conservative. This was gonna be my point. We knew what we were getting into, but we still found value in the RFT from maybe different news perspectives or articles about music or movies. Right? And that changed somehow, I think it changed a little bit before Donald Trump, but really changed with Donald Trump says, because what they did is that now they don't really want to hear any kind of alternative views of anything. They decide what the agenda is and they move forward. And really what the RFT had become is you, you know, a parity of itself. It, there was nothing valuable. They weren't relevant anymore. The core audience was a lot smaller. And, and look, I'm in this industry too, so I've got no room to say, you know, print journalism is in a worse shape than broadcast. 'cause broadcast, we have our, our challenges too, because of all the, you know, the ad possibilities out there with digital marketing, et cetera. But it, it's, it's just unfortunate that there, there can't be, well, I don't think we're ever coming back from this is what I would say. I, I just don't think that there, there's going to be a time where anyone decides to do journalism the way we used to think it was done. However, there's other outlets. Now the free press is great. What Barry Weis started is, is outstanding. I would recommend that to people. If you're looking for other sources, go to real clear politics, real clear is just a site that, you know, compiles everything in news and opinion pieces. So there's ways to get information. Of course, talk radio is the best way.

Vance Crowe [00:42:24] I think that, like, you know, I can be accused of saying that inflation is the cause of all, all sorts of problems. But to me, one of the big challenges you have in media is if, if people aren't paying for a subscription, or even if they are, you have to get ads and the amount of money going into marketing keeps going up, but how far it takes you Yes. Isn't anywhere near as far. And if you are in charge of a budget, and you've gotta be like, I need to make sure that the money I'm spending is bringing a return. Running print ads doesn't feel very good, right? Like,

Mark Reardon [00:42:58] No,

Vance Crowe [00:42:58] You, you like, maybe it's working, maybe it's not. But I can't directly tie my ad copy to the fact that more people came to our website. And so

Mark Reardon [00:43:06] Newspaper ads have always been a little weird to me. I, I, I get, I think I've always understood print ads in magazines better because we're paging through. But remember when we used to get the Sunday paper, and apparently there is still a Sunday paper, but you'd get a lot of it would be ads. And, and people would kind of, you know, you'd go in and see what the, the ads or the specials are at Lowe's or whatever. And you would specifically, I think, take some time to look at those ads back in the day because you knew there might be something that you were looking for a lot. Let's see if Sears has it. I'm mentioning all these stories that haven't survived. So there was some value in that, but then it got to the point where like, eh, you know, we don't even need to look at this. We know we can get it online, right? We don't have to go to newspapers. We can Google some price differences. So I think newspapers got hit in a very hard way. From my perspective in my industry, what I'd like to emphasize, I want our industry to emphasize is that live local radio in particular, there's really nothing like it. Because you can, you can talk about stories and you can cover things in real times, whether it's a horrific story, flooding, tornado shootings, things like that. Or issues related to politics. So I think there's a lot of value. And, and I, I understand why people go to podcasts and streaming. Not my thing because I'm a live radio guy, but there are things that live television, live sports is why, you know, that's where the effect of advertising is because you have a captive audience, right? You know, you're not gonna tape the Cardinals game or the football game. You're gonna keep watching it, college football. So that's, that's an area that I could never criticize. And that's where the majority of the ad dollars are going.

Vance Crowe [00:44:36] A big challenge in media is the fact that you, particularly local media can't scale, right? Like if you're doing a national Barry Weiss for example, she can write a story that maybe is occurring in Nashville, but it's relevant to people in California. And so therefore her audience may give her much, much smaller per person. But the number of people that are able to see that goes way up. And the challenge of, as you know, a community like St. Louis. So what are we, like two and a half million Metro? Something like that. Yeah,

Mark Reardon [00:45:05] Around that. I think

Vance Crowe [00:45:05] So like, if you don't have somebody, if you don't have news outlets that are already established, being able to continue to do the, what's going on in the local scene, to spin that up and make it an effective news organization, I just, it's just overwhelming how much it would cost. And can you even recoup that

Mark Reardon [00:45:25] Well, and when you've lost people, like I referred to Christine Byers, you've lost her. She had the depth and knowledge of this market. I have that because even though I was gone for a little while, I've been in Missouri, back in Missouri since 2006. I was here until, you know, 1996. So I know the political players, I know the history of St. Louis, I know the things that have happened in this state. And I can, those little tidbits of history I think become important in relating stories to people and reporting. And you've lost that completely. The, the way that I would put it for people who watch local television news, and I think people mainly watch television news, not for the news, but for the sports and for the weather in particular, is when I went to, have you ever been to Columbia Mizzou and, and seen the media market there? So you, you start as a journalism school student on the broadcast side. You know, you could be newspaper, if you're newspaper, there's a daily paper, the Columbia, Missouri. But KOMU is an NBC affiliate that is essentially student run, right? So the full-time anchors are, are paid and compensated. But as a student, if you were good enough, you do during the today show the little live, you know, news cut in or whatever. So it's kind of funny, and it always has been, by the way, I was one of those people, one of the first times I was on the air, I had a teleprompter issue, and my mom and dad were watching from the Lake of the Ozarks. They had paid for my education. They had to be like, oh, we're paying for this. But throughout the years, if you lived in Columbia and it still happens. You watch these students, you know what you're getting into. They're 19, 20 years old and experience, and it's comical, it's laughable because they're so, they're so bad now.

Mark Reardon [00:47:02] They're, they're cutting their teeth and they're trying to get better. The point of my story is, used to be you'd be that person, you'd work in Columbia, Missouri, you'd go to North Dakota, you'd go to a Springfield, Missouri, you'd go to Joplin or whatever, you know, a smaller market, south Bend, Indiana. You'd cut your teeth there. You get to that medium sized market, then you'd come here and you would have the chops to take on big stories. You'd have the chops to ask tough questions, right? That doesn't happen anymore. These are, you know, these are kids that aren't getting paid anything. They're coming right outta journalism school, and you never get to know who they are. And the audience doesn't get to know them, neither do the players. The, you know, there, there's a, there's a trust that gets built with people in politics and in leadership positions with reporters. And I think reporters shouldn't trust them as much because there's manipulation that goes on. But it is the way that you find out things like Vance, if I needed to get some, you know, information on a story or something that's breaking, or anything that I'm interested in, I pick up the phone or I text or I get on with someone that says, you know, tell me what's going on here. Okay, what, what's the real story about what's going on? And you won't have, I think you're losing the ability to, to do that. I really do. And I think it's sad. I, I think that reporting in journalism is, is important. But I would say that the, the, the two biggest, I dunno how I would phrase this, but the, the two biggest problems that we have in this country are the legacy media and academia, people in academia. And they, they are hand in hand with all this crap out there right now.

Mark Reardon [00:48:34] And it's dangerous to the country. And I've seen it, we've seen on full display here in the, the last period,

Vance Crowe [00:48:38] Out of all the things, why those two do you pick out as the, as the big ones? Because

Mark Reardon [00:48:41] They're, they're focused on the same things. They, and maybe this is a little extreme for all of journalism, because in academia, they don't like this country and they want to turn people in a very different direction. And there's, you know, I know we lose people when we talk about Marxism, et cetera, but that is really the focus of some of this stuff, especially when it comes to BLM, et cetera. But I, I think that at the higher levels of legacy media, even locally than the post dispatch, in particular, the newspapers, the TV media may be less so, but they're, they're not trying to help the community. They're not trying to, you know, investigate the facts or get to the tough questions. They're going down the agenda lines. Like, let's talk about Wash U in the trans clinic, right? So for those people who don't know, in February of 2023, a woman named Jamie Reed, who's a lesbian, married to a trans person, came out as a whistleblower in Barry Weiss's free press and said, here's what I've experienced at Wash U. And just to cull it down, by the way, it's child abuse. We're not paying attention to mental illness, et cetera. I just interviewed Jamie a few weeks ago. I heard it on my show. And what's interesting about that is that the instant reaction, and I clipped a couple of local people, television, media, they went to the other side, right? They went to the other side. What's the other side? The other side is trans activists, right? These are people who are not gonna really think through things. They're gonna say, this is what we think kids should be hopped up on. And, you know, if someone says they're a woman and they have a penis, doesn't matter, they're a woman, right? So, the minute,

Vance Crowe [00:50:12] And to put context into this, so what that woman from Wash U did is a whistleblower, is she was supposed to be one of the people that was greeting people that were coming to the clinic, finding out what sort of treatment, assessing them. Have you had already, what are you, what are you going? And she said, her job, if she turned anybody towards, like going to see their own private family, they would rubber, rubber stamp

Mark Reardon [00:50:31] It, go, go the other way,

Vance Crowe [00:50:32] Puberty walkers. So she came out and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is, I'm in full support of this, of, of some people needing this. We're

Mark Reardon [00:50:40] Going too far. We are going, and, and a lesbian married to a trans person, right? So now she's kind of, you know, doing this. And there's several people that are, that are campaigning for this internationally, not only in this country, but the instinct of the media is not to say, wow, this is pretty serious. You know, we should look into this. This legitimately, literally is child abuse. What's happening here? The instinct is to go to the trans activists and put their position, just like what I said with the, the pro Hamas stuff. They're not gonna represent the true feeling and concern that people have. They're gonna minimize our attorney general Andrew Bailey's, you know, instinct to investigate this, because it's pretty serious. But what's interesting about that is, and this is vindication, since that whistleblower report in February of 2023, there have been all kinds of things that have happened that are rather remarkable. There have been opinion pieces in the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post from Detransition warning, the same thing. There has been a clinic in the uk, the Tavistock Clinic, which shut down. There's been Dr. Hillary Cass, who was appointed in the UK to take a look at some of the stuff, who does a report, issues a report just a couple of months ago that completely falls in line box by box by box with everything that Jamie Reed has said in her warnings from last year. So there is a consensus that is building about the dangers of this trans ideology right now. But you would never sense that from the media. You'd never sense that at all. But regular people need to know that that's, you know, because I think we, and this is where academia, I think is sinister, and, and maybe I have to take it down a peg into, you know, high schools and middle schools, and even elementary schools, because the brainwashing that's going on in these schools with kindergartners, first graders three about gender and all this other nonsense is outrageous.

Mark Reardon [00:52:28] And people don't want any part of it. And by the way, this is not a Republican thing. That's the other thing where the media lies. They act like it's just conservatives that are on this culture war path. No, no, no. By the way, you know, who else, and I asked Jamie Reid this question as a gay woman, I said, Jamie, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you a question that I say all the time on the radio, and I pretty much know the answer, but I'm gonna a, you know, I'm gonna ask you anyway. Would you say that if my assessment is that the LGB part of the Alphabet mafia, not the QTIA element OP, right? The lesbians, gays, bisexual people who have, you know, grown up in this country and really had challenges, they couldn't come out in the eighties and nineties because of the way that everyone felt about, you know, homosexuality. And that's evolved over the years. So if I said to you, Jamie, the older gaze, they're just as horrified by this trans nonsense as me, as a conservative, what would you say? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:53:29] Well,

Mark Reardon [00:53:29] The older, the, these are people, and by the way, this is the other thing. These are people that fought for their rights. They had to do it in private. They never ever played the victim. These kids today, and these, you know, trans activists and all this other crap, they play themselves off as the victim so many times. And

Vance Crowe [00:53:45] It's embarrassing, I think. So when I've talked to my friends that are, I have several friends that are lesbians, and they talk about how the reason this subject is so horrifying to them is they do not want the, the gay community to be attached to the idea that they think children should change or that their genitalia should be moving because

Mark Reardon [00:54:04] They don't believe that.

Vance Crowe [00:54:05] Because they don't believe it. And they think that this is going to come back. When, when the, when the people push back on this in a big way, they're gonna look and say, who did this? It was the, oh, you guys said you were all together, L-G-B-T-Q ai, right? Well, they're saying, no, no, no, no, no. We, we don't want that support. And, and oftentimes suggesting that, like in the beginning it was, Hey, we're building a larger coalition to make sure we have rights. Right? And all of a sudden they lifted their heads up and said, no, they've gone off. We got hijacked. Now

Mark Reardon [00:54:35] They're challenged though, because they, they, outside of Jamie Reed and some others, there are people that don't want to go out there and put themselves out there because they're gonna be criticized. But in, in their world, this is some of the challenges that, that they're dealing with. Let's say that I'm, I'm 59 years old, right? Let's say I'm a 59-year-old gay man, like many of my friends, and I am interested in someone else who is the same sex as me, right? But then you have the biological woman who now says she's a man. You can flip this around for a lesbian who is now facing a biological male that is now a woman. Well, I'm not attracted to that person. I, I, I, that let's bigoted that person says that person's a man. That person is a woman. They, they claim to be. So how dare you be bigoted to, you know, that person based on their true sexuality. That's the reason that goes on there. I had Riley Gaines on, on my show not too long ago. Riley's been a hero and a champion on some of these rights.

Vance Crowe [00:55:39] She's the, the swimmer that former swimmer

Mark Reardon [00:55:41] Competed against. Leah Thomas tells these stories that are just, you know, one time there was an NCAA meet where she played, she tied, she literally tied with Leah Thomas, and they had, you know, an award that they specifically gave to Leah, and not to Ri Gaines, but I asked her, I'm like, why? You know, what is it about that? Because it seems so unfair and just so logically discombobulated. And she said, look, if they, if they give one inch there, if they say you're right, that that's, you know, well, then the whole thing collapses. The whole thing collapses. So that's why if you're a little boy at age four and you think you're a little girl, there's no other possibility that maybe you are gay. And that's what it is. And maybe it's manifesting itself in a different direction, which I think we know now from Tavistock, from Wash U, from Dr. Cass, that many of these kids are confused. Maybe they're just gay and they just get caught up in this social contagion.

Vance Crowe [00:56:33] Well, and there's gonna be a time when, you know, I was just, my, my daughter, I was just explaining to her that you can't, when I was growing up, you couldn't watch television on your phone. Like you couldn't watch a little show on your phone. Right? And this is like mind blowing to her, right?

Mark Reardon [00:56:48] There'll

Vance Crowe [00:56:48] Be a time when the language that people will have said, Noah, there's always been a conflict over this language. Whether they're, whether there are boys are boys and, and girls are girls, they'll believe that this conflict has always existed. And one of the things that I heard from a very close friend who was finishing her master's degree in, in teaching nursing, so this is to the teachers of future nurses, and their teacher came in and every time she said a pregnant woman, there was one student in there that would just lose their mind. Yeah. They would freak out. And it was an O-B-G-Y-N nursing class, right?

Mark Reardon [00:57:25] It, it's unbelievable. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:57:26] And so the people in that class, this person that I, I know very well said at first, people kinda laughed about it, and then they realized, well, it's gonna cause me social anxiety to push back on this crazy person, right?

Mark Reardon [00:57:39] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:57:39] This person is gonna go ballistic on me, so I'm not gonna do that. So just to like quell it, I'm gonna go along with it. She said the teacher, you know, was appalled by this at first, but then became very scared of the student. Yeah. And so just kept having over and over again, wrong

Mark Reardon [00:57:53] Reaction. And

Vance Crowe [00:57:53] Eventually you'll get to, it's not on day one when that kid freaks out, it's that that kid walks into the class and everybody already knows, and so they do it, and then every other class goes like that. So you change the normative belief. Yes.

Mark Reardon [00:58:05] Yes. That's what's happening. And what's happening in medical schools in particular, not only with that, but with race, you know, we are elevating people that have better check marks on social justice and lower check marks on medical expertise in the name of fixing the world, in the name of fixing the country. It's, it's outrageous. There's pushback on it. I, I hope that we can do something about it. My hope is that what has been exposed on college campuses in the past six to seven months in particular, have led people down a different path. You know?

Vance Crowe [00:58:33] But I think, I think, so let's go back here real quick to the medical school thing. Like, I actually think all of the major associations, this is from the scientific associations, the, the doctors. This could be the, the certified Public Accounting Associations. They have all been co-opted because they're all a part of the bureaucratic class of, of people in our culture. And so somebody decides, Hey, I'm not gonna be an excellent doctor, but I could go become a member of this, you know, lobbying group. They then start supporting these things. It starts happening at every single lobbying group you can, you can find this is going on in the ag world too, anywhere where they're getting close to dc those people then move into that bureaucratic class. They throw out anybody that's got descent. And now these associations that were supposed to be representing a professional group, now are taking these massive political stances. And the worst one among all of them is the American Medical Association. I think that thing should be obliterated. We should not let them determine who can and can't go to school. How many slots are there? It's, it's not a good system.

Mark Reardon [00:59:40] It is a problem. You know, I have, there's a guy that comes on my show, John Seiler, who is really good at exposing some of the DEI stuff that's happening in universities, and there's more pushback on that. But it does, to your point, you know, some of the stuff takes on a life of its own. And then you have people that are being represented by organizations that aren't willing to step up and say, Hey, wait a second. We don't really believe that because they're afraid of the pushback and consequences.

Vance Crowe [01:00:05] Imagine being a high school boy that's a little bit rebellious in this climate, right? There's no way that the rebellious eighth grader is gonna go along with all of the DEI stuff. But to push back on this could leave you with a black stain on your, on your record in a way that I don't, I don't think was, was possible when I was growing up.

Mark Reardon [01:00:27] The, the whole, you know, I referenced this earlier, but the whole pronoun thing is just so goofy to me. But the people who are younger, and I'm sure even my kids who are adults, they, they just think it's just part of, you know, life now. And I, I think that there are some of us that just can't get our arms around some of this stuff. And the reason I bring that up, because you're right, the rebellious eighth grader might say, what? But I, I don't, I'm concerned that there are fewer rebellious eighth graders and everyone is just kind of glomming on saying, you know, and you're seeing this as an example, people that don't even know what they're protesting. You know, people that will repeat over and over things that they hear or they, they see on social media, but they're not thinking through all of that. They're not on the, you know, fairness and sports issue in particular. I I, I, I'm so baffled by why people can't think through that a little bit more.

Vance Crowe [01:01:21] I think that people want to be a part of a tribe or a part of a team Yeah. More than they want almost anything else. Like that concept of, of pushing back on what the rest of the group is doing is so overwhelming to most people. Right. It's like, imagine their fear of public speaking and now make it so what they're public speaking about is going against the grain that that amps it up 10 x.

Mark Reardon [01:01:45] Absolutely. And I don't know where that takes us ance.

Vance Crowe [01:01:48] Well, in the city of St. Louis, there is a mayor race that just began. So in St. Louis, there's a woman that won the last go round to Shara Jones. And now there's a, the same woman that challenged her last time, Kara Spencer, who's been a guest on my show Yeah. Is coming back to run against her in the mayoral election. What do you think? Does Kara Spencer have a shot?

Mark Reardon [01:02:10] I'd like to think that Kara has a shot. I, I just don't know. It's very hard to predict that with how people in the city might vote. I mean, the way it breaks down very easily geographically is there are more voters on the south side of St. Louis, they're gonna vote for perhaps a white candidate. Kara Spencer's white and not a progressive than, you know, certainly a progressive on the north side that is opposite. But I think it really comes down to, you know, people being dialed into the crime issues and whether or not they, they want someone that's gonna take a stand. Kara Spencer is very policy oriented. She is not someone who's gonna be out there, I don't think, doing a bunch of flashy things just to draw attention and personality. She seems very, you know, fixated on, on the solutions, or at least her solutions.

Vance Crowe [01:02:55] She seems to be, to me, the only idealistic person that I know that's like, made it to their forties. Right. Like, I think most people that had the idealism of like, I'm gonna go to each one of those meetings, I'm gonna have every paper read. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna know what my, you know, what my constituents think. And like, most people burn out on that. But if you go out on Reddit and you look at the St. Louis subreddit and they talk about Kara Spencer, they're like, I thought she was a joke, but she showed up to our city zoning meeting and helped me make sure I didn't have to plant erroneous trees. And like, she's doing all that stuff. Right.

Mark Reardon [01:03:31] And I don't know how that, and she will tell you that she's a policy won. You know, and I don't know that I've ever told Kara this, but I will tell Kara this now. I, I do like her. She was on my round table. I do a political round table advance, as you know, on a Friday afternoon. We have, me and my friend Jane, who I mentioned earlier, Jane Duker is on the left. I'm on the right, and then I bring someone from the right and there's another person on the left. And we rotate those people. Jane and I are regulars. So we invited Kara as a guest a couple of months ago, and the downfall of her on the round table is she had no idea really how to weigh in on some of the national stuff, because then she told me that before the show, she's so focused on St. Louis that she doesn't pay attention to a lot of that stuff. So she's not interested in the politics, from my perspective. That's great. By the way, as far as someone who might lead the city of St. Louis, I, I just don't know if the, you know, the politics of the day, it just depends how many people want solutions, you know, I, I don't know. Because I think they vote based on personality and race and all these other things. And you know, the mayor that we have right now is gonna try to paint this beautiful picture and how the city going

Vance Crowe [01:04:36] Forward, and she called it, we're going through a city renaissance. Yeah. What's going on with that giant at and t building that made national news where everybody was talking about how, you know, we,

Mark Reardon [01:04:46] We screwed up Vance because I think what could have happened there is you could have had a beautiful new studio for your podcast. And that thing sold for what, hundreds of millions of originally, and it was, was it two and a half million dollars?

Vance Crowe [01:04:58] Yeah, something like that. It was like,

Mark Reardon [01:05:00] I walked by it on the way to the baseball game last week, and my crew from the show was with me, Fred and Sue and Abby, my producer, and we all looked over and said the same thing that you just said, what's gonna happen, you know, with that building. I have no idea because there's a lot of dead spots like that. I mean, commercial real estate was always gonna be, be an issue in the aftermath of the pandemic. I think we knew that. But that, that's one that certainly stands out here in St. Louis, for sure. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:05:22] And I mean, this is a perfect, you know, object to be able to zoom back the camera lens and look at a national level. Like what companies right now want a giant skyscraper filled with thousands of employees, right? Yeah. Like who and who wants that downtown, right? Like who, what employee that's in their late twenties looking to, you know, get their big job at is, is like aching to get to downtown so they have a 30 minute commute or that,

Mark Reardon [01:05:51] That's what's so interesting about that because I, I, I'd love to be able to fast forward 10 or 20 years and see what that actually looks like. I mean, how do you bring back a downtown like St. Louis, where crime is outta control, where you can't hire enough police, where, you know, businesses have, have pulled back. And then the other thing that's weird about that is you have, you know, people like Jason Hall, who's one of the community leaders in downtown who are also on the same, you know, side of as the mayor in this denial. And, you know, I think some of the business leaders have not been as vocal as they need to be because they're sensitive to some of the race issues, et cetera. Because there's no pa path for downtown that is strong without figuring some of those things out. Really, there's not,

Vance Crowe [01:06:37] I mean, like, my belief is the only way St. Louis comes back, the only way any city comes back is to make it gault Gulch to make it a libertarian haven where like, if you come here, we are going to really radically lower your taxes. We are going to, you know, radically change what you are and aren't allowed to do here. You know, it used to be an industrial city. Yeah,

Mark Reardon [01:06:57] Absolutely. You

Vance Crowe [01:06:57] Know, there was a lot of building going on. I would have to imagine that if you loosened restrictions and you let people build things that they're not allowed to build in other places, well people will come here, but until you have some radical change Yeah. And nothing's gonna change.

Mark Reardon [01:07:10] Well, this goes to the issue of, you know, regional cooperation and gets into the weeds a little bit. But there was an effort, gosh, I don't even know how long, it might've even been 10 years ago now, to, you know, combine the county and city governments because we have a lot of duplication. There's certainly merit in that. But what happens is, is when you talk about combining the, the city of St. Louis is not in the county of St. Louis, which is a little weird, like to use Milwaukee as an example. Milwaukee city that I spent in, it's in Milwaukee County as well. So the, the governance covers the entire area here. Everything is separate, which means we have separate, separate police, separate prosecutors, separate everything. The thought is, wait a second, what if we would consolidate some of these practices, save the taxpayers some money. Great idea. Really probably should have happened a long time ago. But now with the devastation in the city, the people that are sitting here in, in West St. Louis County or elsewhere saying, hell no, we don't want any part of that. We, you know, yeah, that's gonna help the city a lot. What's it gonna do for us? So that's probably not gonna change. There have been people that have tried to push us in, you know, more of that direction. They fail at every turn. So I, I don't see survival for the city unless you get to a more regional approach. And that's not happening right now.

Vance Crowe [01:08:24] The county is making a march left, it feels like. Right. We had, during Coronavirus, the county executive ordered everyone in, you know, locked into their houses. Yeah. By, by decree. And he had plenty of support for people that thought, you know, a small tyrannical government should be allowed to do that. Is, is this inevitable?

Mark Reardon [01:08:43] I wonder, do you think that that support, that that, I mean, you know this 'cause you listened and we've talked about, there were, there were no other group of people that annoyed me more than the mask up people, you know? Oh, yeah. Sam, page R County executive. They couldn't wait to put a mask mandate down when all this stuff was happening that hell, even late in 2023 when nothing was happening with COVID, there were efforts to do something to scare people about COVID. So I'm fascinated by that. But here again, Vance, my feeling is I, I think I can use a couple of friends of mine in particular, and they may check out my show every once in a while, but they're not politically conservative, so they don't really want to hear my conservative politics, and I don't really want to hear their liberal politics. But this is where it becomes a problem, because they are so into the NPR world of being sold this bill of goods. That's just simply not true. That they're, they're not able to see things in a different perspective or in a different light because they don't know the truth. They really, and I know people are gonna, you know, people on the left would say, ah, you're just our rabid right wing, you know, talk show host full of hate. Well, there's, there's aspects of stories that are so important to, you know, really interpreting them and digesting them in their complete form before you make a decision on something. I mean, there's, I can give you all kinds of examples of that, but people are given only one lens to digest things. And so then they think, well, that's Trump's problem, or that's the Republicans, because they don't wanna, you know, deal with the border.

Mark Reardon [01:10:15] Wait a second. No, no, no. But I read that in the Washington Post, or I read that in the post dispatch, or NPR told me that. Well, they're flipping lying to you, and you need to know that. And, you know, I think the, the best example I, I think I told this story though, I don't wanna repeat a story. I told the, the Duke volleyball story here, didn't I? I'll do it in

Vance Crowe [01:10:35] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do remember this. Just,

Mark Reardon [01:10:36] Just real quickly. So this happened a couple years ago. Duke's playing BYU in volleyball in Salt Lake City. There's an allegation, there's hundreds of people in there, right? There's an allegation that the African American player for Duke, every time she's serving, they're, they're dropping the n word on her, right? Her aunt, who's by the way, running for political office in Georgia, tweets this out, LeBron James tweets this out. Never happened, never freaking happened. Okay? Dawn Staley, the esteemed African American basketball coach of South Carolina basketball says, I'm not playing BYU because there are a bunch of white supremacists. It was, it didn't happen. But see, people think it happened still. And, and here's what's even more frightening. There are people out there that they probably know it didn't happen. They don't care. They don't care that it didn't happen because it still could have happened, and because it could have happened, we're gonna go down with that. So when you don't have people critically thinking about stories, my wife gets annoyed by me because I, I get told stuff all the time and I'm like, nah, that's not right. Because it just, if something doesn't, you know, sit well with me, I push back. I don't think enough people push back. I, and I'll, the, the, the story that happened in the household is I live in this area where there's a couple horse farms and they reduced the speed limit to 20 miles an hour. Right? You can't go 20. I mean, you're not going, so the cops sit out there all the time, and they're not pulling people over for going 30 or, or whatever. But if you're going, you know, 40 to 50 or whatever, they're gonna pull you over.

Mark Reardon [01:12:06] So our neighbor gets pulled over, sorry Michelle, if you're watching this. And my wife says, yeah, Michelle says, 'cause I think it was her daughter telling the story, you know how this happens. She got pulled over for going 31 in the, in that speed zone by the, the horse farm. My reaction is, no, she didn't come on. It, it, it just doesn't, logically my brain is like, no, okay, there's something more to that story. Well, there was, she was pulled over for going 41, not 31. Now, am I always right? 99.9% of the time, I am Vance. Every once in a while I'm wrong, but it happens on my show all the time. I'll hear things, my, you know, the race hoaxes are something I've become particularly good on because there's all kinds of things that happen along those lines, like BYU and you'll see them in the newspaper, or you'll hear about them. You'll be, most people will be like, oh, that's hor look. Those terrible white racists at BYU or whatever. But then when the follow-up comes out, they don't pay attention to that. So I think that the media influences the way that these people think, sorry, these people. But the way people think, and it's not, I don't wanna say it's not their fault, but they're just basing their opinions based on what they're told. They think that NPR is a trusted news organization. They think that CBS news is a trusted news organization that the New York Times, they are not, they are not trusted. They're anything but trusted these days.

Vance Crowe [01:13:27] Do you think that the other side of the media, do you think Fox News is worthy of trust?

Mark Reardon [01:13:33] I think, you know, what's interesting about Fox News is up until Brett Kavanaugh's hearings for the Supreme Court, I was a CNN guy. I did conservative radio ever since 1992. But CNN was in my DNA because I grew up in the eighties and the space shuttle, challenger explosion in, in the Gulf War, all of these things, CNN is the sort of what I'm talking about, trusted. I'm trusting in my mind, even though I was a conservative, I'm like, well, you know, Fox News, I don't really wanna be influenced by that. And I thought they're just, my perception was right wing, you know, they're not gonna do this fairly, I would say it's almost the opposite in this sense. Sure. Fox has Hannity and they used to have Tucker, but their news product I would put up against any of them out there, because Peter Ducey iss the only one asking questions in that press room of KJP. You know, last week he had Peter Alexander from NBC and some others finally chiming in about some stuff. But Fox is actually, Brett Bayer is a really good news person. So I'm never convinced the liberal watching this. I'll never convince the CNN audience that Fox does a fair job. Are they more fair than CNN or M-S-N-B-C? I think in their news coverage, they are. That's my perspective. So, I don't know,

Vance Crowe [01:14:48] I, it's

Mark Reardon [01:14:49] A good question.

Vance Crowe [01:14:49] I've been struggling with, you know, my children right now are three in one, you know, just about to age up, but we're still far away from them knowing what news is.

Mark Reardon [01:14:59] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:14:59] But you know, my wife and I will be talking, and my young daughter will ask something about like, oh, that was on the news. What is the news? Right,

Mark Reardon [01:15:07] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:15:08] Do you teach your children from a young age, don't pay attention to them. They're, they're like manipulating you. Do you teach them like, Hey, this is a financial thing, and you know, they're, they're playing to their audience in order to get as many people watching so they can sell that to subscribers. Do you allow them to believe in, you know, some ideal of journalism? Like, what do you do to teach your children to prepare them without making them cynical?

Mark Reardon [01:15:33] That's a good question. And I don't know that I've ever approached parenting in that way, specifically when it comes to information. What I will tell you is with my 9-year-old in particular, you know, unfortunately for her, I'm monitoring from the moment that she gets up. Now, if there's war, if there's mass shooting, if there's something that I don't want her exposed to, well then I flip something else on. But she notices things and she asks questions, and she's inquisitive, and I try to give her as much information as possible. I'm not the type of parent who wants to lie to her. I mean, I'm not gonna give her all the details clearly. So what I've just been doing as a, as a parent, is just sort of managing information from the perspective, Hey, I think this is interesting. You should know about this. Hey, watch this. Look at what happened. So it's coming through my filter to a certain extent, but that's a good question, but it's also a better question for kids in the sense that the news coverage isn't gonna affect them that much. It's Instagram, it's Twitter, it's sadly the agenda in their schools. You know, if, if you're being pushed down a progressive agenda, which many of them are, you know, the my favorite thing is always gender queer. You know, the book because it's the most controversial one out there, right? I guess. And the, the supporters of gender queer, like, what's wrong with it? And the opponents are, you know, horrified that it's in schools. But how about you just do a story or you expose some parents to some of the slides from gender queer, we, every newspaper and on the planet has the ability to put a graphic in their story, right. And show you what, but they never do that. They just write the stories about how genderqueer is being criticized by these evil, you know, conservatives.

Mark Reardon [01:17:09] But if you were to put a couple slides in there of a little boy interested in sucking a little boy's penis at the age of whatever, most parents, whether they're left or right, would be, ah, you know what? That's right. There's no censoring this notion that there's censoring of books going on. There's no unfettered access to the internet in an elementary school, in a middle school, in a high school. We restrict that, right? Of course we do. It's common sense, which is the same thing with some of the topics in the books. And I bring that up, Vance, because I, I just think that a lot of these things that, that kids are hearing, they're coming from their own, think about high school kids that are protesting against, you know, the Palestinians in, in Israel right now protesting against Israel. They don't really know the nuances of that. And by the way, maybe, maybe there's a reason to say, Hey, I'm concerned about the humanitarian crisis. But you're doing it from a perspective where you're just in a club that says, yeah, we don't like American, what America's doing. And they feel that that's what they should do. And they're being brainwashed. They really are.

Vance Crowe [01:18:07] So if we keep the, on this subject, but we go back to the trans con conversation we were having before, if you believe the way that you do, hey, a man is a man and he can't change into being a woman. But now there are these, you know, people that identify as being trans. They want to change their gender. What do you tell a young child about that? Do you explain to them what's going on? Do you tell them, Hey, you gotta be complicit in this, in this, you know, lie, do you tell them, Hey, I'm gonna let you figure it out and when it's time, then we'll sit down and I'll straighten you out. Like, what's the right way to, I,

Mark Reardon [01:18:40] I'm bracing myself for that particular moment because I don't know, but I've always been very honest with my daughter, and I speak to her, you know, as a person, not, not as just a little kid. And I try to put things as understanding as I can. And I guess that if I was gonna explain this to my audience, which I have, or to you or to your audience, my position would be, look, I, I think that there, and it's not too far from Jamie Reed, and I'm not a lesbian, I'm not married to a trans person, but I think there are true cases, rare cases of gender dysphoria and maybe even some medical intervention would be necessary with that gender dysphoria after the age of 18 when you're an adult and you're making these decisions. But I think that we have a situation where there's too many kids out there that are being caught up in this social contagion that are confused. So I think maybe I would tell my daughter, there's some kids that are confused and they don't know if they're a boy or a girl. I don't know. I, this is a, that's a tough question because when she comes home and that happens in class where the teachers start talking about, you know, pronouns, et cetera, that is gonna be a challenging moment for me, and I'm just gonna have to kind of see what

Vance Crowe [01:19:48] Happens. It's just such like a tough moral question because if, if you believe one way about it, right? To tell your child something other than what you believe, you're lying to your child, right? Right. If you say, okay, well, in our family we think this way, but they think that way. But if you go out and tell them that that's what you think, you're gonna get in trouble. So I'm gonna teach you to be complicit and a lie that's not good. Right? So like, the options start running out. I know. And you can't, they, they do. Can you keep your children isolated from it? Well, maybe you could homeschool 'em, but eventually they're gonna have to enter a world. And of course, like, you know, 16, 17, 18, those kids are gonna make up their own mind on these things regardless. But all those preceding years is important to say, how are you gonna prepare

Mark Reardon [01:20:30] 'em? I, I think about it. I, I'll give you an example of something that I've done in the house, and I've thought about this, and it's such a little thing, and you wouldn't have even considered it being an issue years ago, but I had to think about it. So one of the great failures of my entire life, Vance Crowe, is that up until maybe a year ago, I did not have a rice cooker. If you're making that mistake as an adult, don't do it. Okay? And I, I'm, I'm not even joking because it transform, I would make minute rice. I'm like, rice cooker is so easy. It's unbelievable that, that I, I ignored this my entire adult life. I would also put the leaf blower in that category. Don't men in particular, don't deprive yourself.

Vance Crowe [01:21:12] Oh. And, and spend the money to get a good one

Mark Reardon [01:21:14] Of a leaf blower, right? So when I, I have, and I bought the basic $30 one, I'm like, Hey, this is even better than the men. And then I, and I took a step up. I have one that's like a cuckoo, now they have like $400 rice cookers, right? So on the, on the rice cooker, there's some settings, and one of 'em is sticky rice, right? So I, I've always, for years I love Asian food, and we know that there is a little bit of an accent. There's an Indian accent, you know, animated shows that mock this. So I say something like, ah, sticky lice. So I say it with an L like, ah, sticky lice. My daughter picked up on that and she thought it was so funny. So now, you know, I'm making rice, she'll go, ah, sticky lice. So I, where am I going with this? Right? What, what? She says that it's school, right? She goes, sticky lies.

Vance Crowe [01:21:58] What happens? What's the reaction? Right? So

Mark Reardon [01:22:01] That's a little thing, but I'm just telling you as a parent, I don't wanna set my, you know, kid up for an uncomfortable moment or failure. I, I don't think that that's gonna really be the trigger for it. But you know what I mean? I do think about these things and I think about the challenges.

Vance Crowe [01:22:12] Oh, I mean, kids have no concept of what they can and can't say at school and who they can trust. And I mean, this is the, the sickening thing for me is to have a deep understanding of what happened during pole pots. You know, rise the red China, the Soviets in Russia, they all used the children against their parents. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:22:33] To

Vance Crowe [01:22:33] The unwitting of the, the children. And I think of that being like the, the closest thing to pure evil that you can, right? An innocent child just to talking about what she heard mom and dad talk about. Now all of a sudden becomes the undoing of the family. But like, the same thing goes on with children that are picking up things around the house that are supposed to be, Hey, this is the way our family believes. And then they get caught up in the controversy at school.

Mark Reardon [01:23:00] Everything is nuanced and everything is complicated, and all situations are gonna be different, different, you know, even even on the issue for my daughter, it's interesting, she's, she's seen television shows where there are males and females that are couples. She's visited my friend in Las Vegas who's gay and has a partner, and it just, she's never really brought it up or, or mentioned it. So I know that there's questions and these kids talk amongst themselves, right? So I, I think some of this has to be, see where her brain goes and develops. But it scares me because she'll be in that period in a few years where these kids are, you know, really influenced by peer pressure. They're obviously, the social media aspect of it really terrifies me. It didn't terrify me with my boys. Maybe it should have, but with her in particular, it really does.

Vance Crowe [01:23:46] So summer is upon us. Do you have big summer plans?

Mark Reardon [01:23:50] This is a summer where I don't have a lot of big summer plans, believe it or not, not, not a big vacation plan. I'm gonna Louisville, Kentucky in a few weeks to see some horse races down at Churchill Downs and take a little family vacation. And then my daughter and wife are going off to Michigan. But it's a little bit more of a, of a chill year for, for vacations. We've, we've had some challenges in the house just with employment with my wife, so trying to catch up on that front right now. And for me, it's just a fascination with what's gonna come up in the fall and the elections, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:24:23] I mean, this is the thing that I have been asking everybody, which is on the day after the election, half of the country is gonna think, the other half stole the election. Right? What are we gonna do? What's gonna happen?

Mark Reardon [01:24:36] That's, that's the a hundred million dollar question, because I don't think there's any way to get around that at this point. I think there's gonna be that feeling. And my, my sense at this point, and I'm always wrong, I should point this out, is that I don't, I think that the figure that I saw even this weekend is there's never been anyone except for the Clinton Bush race in 92, I think, where someone this far back in the polls has come back to win the White House. As far back in the swing states in particular, that Joe Biden is now, I, as a conservative and as someone who does not want Joe Biden in the office, which by the way could be a little different than being who's someone who supports Donald Trump. For a lot of people, you know, you, you have to assume that. And I'm not even gonna go down the stolen elections. I'm not a stolen election guy, okay? That I'm just not, I, I know that there were issues in states, could it have swung the election? My assessment is it couldn't have. But that doesn't matter. 'cause now we are at 2024, right? You're not gonna change people's minds and they're gonna believe that, and it's gonna be a problem for the country either way. So my concern is really that Biden somehow pulls this off, and then yeah, half the country's gonna be, wait a second, you know, what, what happened with the polling? And it looked like he was just gonna get smoked. And now, somehow, miraculously, and one of the reasons that that's true is that, let's face it, I, I don't think, I don't want to insult the intelligence of half the country, but a lot of people don't understand the, the differences between the electoral college and how, you know, millions more in votes in, in a, you know, an election like Hillary Clinton doesn't result in an electoral victory.

Mark Reardon [01:26:13] So this all goes back to the media and the way the media sells this, let's face it, you know, that's gonna be problem too. So the spin is gonna be there, it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a nightmare either way. I really do.

Vance Crowe [01:26:25] Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way. I, I look at my calendar, I, I get booked out for talks and stuff that are right after that, and you're like, really? What, what will the world be like,

Mark Reardon [01:26:33] Remember? Well, we'll settle down, we'll get through it.

Vance Crowe [01:26:35] Remember how, how crazy it got though. I mean, like remember in, in all across K Street, you've been in DC right? Like things were on fire, people were throwing bricks through, through bank buildings, and then anytime a social issue kicked off in any way in the US it appeared to have a lot of strong support. People would show up in buses and start burning other buildings down in Minneapolis and in Portland. And I mean, like, that level of chaos is not something I want to,

Mark Reardon [01:27:04] I hope, but I think that we, we, we should be prepared for any level of chaos, especially given the last six months of chaos what we witnessed on college campuses. I think many of us never, never thought that, that we would see the, the level of anti-Americanism, you know, the hatred for this country led by professors at universities. So

Vance Crowe [01:27:24] Seems like Don think they're gonna try to be seems leap on my radar. I like you've talked about this now a couple of times as being like a really big deal. And I watched this and thought like, eh, it's, it's college kids getting angry. I don't,

Mark Reardon [01:27:34] Right? But I think that's because you're not being told the, the true nature of where some of this is coming from. Some of it is college kids not realizing what they're even doing, but they're being driven by many of the people that are leading them in classrooms. There's people that are taking off, Hey, we got, I know you have a final exam tomorrow, but we're gonna, we let the class off for, for the today. Oh, great. We're gonna go to the protest. So, no, I think that's a, I think what what's happening on college campuses is a major, major issue and, and probably will be moving forward because they're, they'll do everything they can in these campuses to say, you know, whatever might help the progressive left of the Democrats and whatever might hurt Donald Trump. There's no one fairly assessing this election in a college classroom across the country at this point. They're not political science. You think a pol I, you know, this would be an interesting experiment and I'm painting with a broad brush here. There are, I even know people in academia who are not nuts. Okay. There's not many of them. But it would be interesting to go to a political science class and hear how they're discussing the election and, and the, you know, how they're framing it in particular, you know, are, they're being honest about Pennsylvania and working class voters and how people feel disconnected from the government. How, you know, union workers and auto workers in Michigan are, are seeing the prices of electric vehicles and how much GM and these other companies are taking a loss and saying, wait a second, you know, this doesn't make sense. People are demanding the other cars. So I think there's a lot of disconnect with, with people and they're very confused and the media doesn't help with that, unfortunately.

Vance Crowe [01:29:09] Well, mark, we'll have you back on around election time, see, see how things are panning out. I

Mark Reardon [01:29:15] Mean, a lot can happen between now and then. Couldn't it? It's amazing to me, Vance and doing this, you know, as long as I have how quickly things change and, and we could be talking about something completely different by the fall.

Vance Crowe [01:29:27] Yeah, there's that, that line gradually then suddenly it seems like there's a lot of things that appear to be in the gradually, but could be suddenly right away. Right. All right, mark, thanks for coming on. Thanks

Mark Reardon [01:29:37] For having me. I appreciate it.