Mayorkas impeached in historic vote; Dems reclaim NY House seat

From Hyatt. Top Fox News headquarters in New York City. Always seeking solutions, never sowing division. It's Brian Killmead. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Killmee Show.

So glad you're here.

So much to discuss. We're going to have a busy day, busy in the president.

So all he has on his schedule is lunch with the Secretary of State. That should be exciting. To me, if I'm trying to win re-election, it's a little bit busier, but that's just me. Edward O'Keefe is going to be joining us now, the CEO of the Teddy Roosevelt Library Foundation and author of the upcoming book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President. Very significant for Valentine's Day.

Hope you're having a great one already. Keep in mind on Valentine's Day, Teddy Roosevelt had the worst. His wife and his mom died in the same day on the same house. Don't mean to bring you down, but if you are having a bad day, not as bad as Teddy back in the turn of the century, the previous one.

So, before we get to Brett Baer, let's get to the big three.

Now, with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three. Number three. Tony Bobolinski confirmed what the two IRS whistleblowers said: that Joe Biden is the brand, and the family business is selling the brand all over the country to all these foreign different foreign entities. Tony Bobolinski speaks, and Dems can't stomach it. He tells the truth about Hunter, about Jim, and about Joe.

Unimpeachable source, an American dream biography, willing to take on the president for the country, what he said reportedly and what it means. Number two. This is a difference in policy. It's a terrible border situation. I'm not making any excuses for what's going on.

I think Secretary Mario Gutta goes down as one of the worst cabinet secretaries in certainly my lifetime, but it is not a high crime or misdemeanor. Here we go. That is Ken Buck, broken border, a Republican, by the way, who didn't vote for it. Illegals organized and create chaos in our cities. And the Homeland Security Secretary gets impeached.

What Biden has done to our nation by destroying the border and everything, all the ripple effects. We'll discuss it. Number one. No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator.

Well, let me say this as clearly as I can. I never will. For God's sake, it's dumb, it's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American. In a desperate attempt to change the subject, Donald Trump made it easy on Saturday night, coming out and saying that if those NATO nations don't pay up, only 11 have, you will not be protected if he's president. He's using exaggeration like he always does.

But seeing it out, Joe Biden takes the Senate foreign aid package that just passed and then goes to town and talks politics, but doesn't take any questions. Reuters has Trump up three. Biden goes on the attack while screaming hypocrisy and desperation by joining China's run TikTok, which he banned from all. Federal devices. Think about that for a second.

Brett Baer, chief political anchor of Fox News and Anchor of Special Report, joins us. Brett, welcome. Hey, Brian. Hey, I mean, first off, on President Biden, we're seeing a little bit more of him. Yesterday he gave a speech that I'm not answering any questions.

Don't want to step on the message, but use that time to really go after President Trump on the difference between how he'd handle NATO. Your thoughts? Listen, it was low hanging fruit. And to your point, I think the former President You know, he opened that door. There's a lot of people that took that to say, oh, he's going to let these countries fall and Russia to roll in and.

I think it was his. Hyperbole, as he often does, but it did come off like that, and it could be interpreted that way. And President Biden. Took that and ran with it.

Now, you know, the fact that he didn't take questions, I don't know if you can see him take questions in a while. I mean, the last time he went back to the the podium to answer a question about Gaza, he ended up talking about the president of Mexico and he meant the president of Egypt.

So, I think that's a good idea. I think the White House has an issue as far as you know, how they're going to put them out. I think if you were going to really tell the story of mental acuity, you would do long form interviews. I've got a standing request. Uh that we re re-up every couple of weeks.

and uh haven't heard much.

Well, think about this. I mean, one of the big weaknesses of the foreign policy, you know, the instincts of people like Lindsey Graham and Mike Waltz. And I just talked to Steve Scalise off camera. They all know that Russia's got to be stopped in Ukraine, but they're so frustrated that they have to explain the mission and they don't support the execution. Slow walking of weapons, not following through on where the bullets are going and where the money is being spent.

Not saying the Ukraine is full of corruption or free of corruption, but they can't answer their own constituents. And they're thinking to themselves, why am I going to bat for Joe Biden's oversea operation while he breaks the border?

So the most staunch anti. Russia Hawks among the Republicans now almost feel abandoned. By supporting a mission they almost instinctively did.

So they're sitting there, General Keene on General Keene doesn't play politics. General Keen, Lindsey Graham, Mike Waltz do a better job explaining the need to fight it than ever, and they're tired of explaining it. The President does not explain the need for the mission. I agree with you, and that's part of the issue here. I mean, the bully pulpit is a huge part of the presidency.

If you look back, and I covered the George W. Bush administration, there was no support, none for a surge either in Afghanistan or in Iraq, especially Iraq. And he went out every day and talked about the importance. And why did he do it? Because he was trying to explain to the American people why it was important.

Did it move the needle? Maybe a little, but he did explain it. President Biden does speeches every now and then. where he touches on it. But even his big Oval Office speech dealt with Israel And then Ukraine was kind of the back end.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I just wanted to bring you into the controversy. Here's Donald Trump's message on Saturday: cut five. One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, Well, sir, uh if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, Will you protect us? I said, You didn't pay? No, I would not protect you.

In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.

So that's Trump being cartoonish with an issue that everybody gets behind. George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton all said: hey, GuNATO, you're not paying your 2% of your GDP.

Now you've got 11 countries paying it, much more than ever before. France is at 1.9%, just barely missing the 2%. But the president's being cartoonish in doing it, but opening himself up for an attack. Here's Joe Biden cut two. No other President in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator.

Well, let me say this as clearly as I can. I never will. For God's sake, it's dumb, it's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American. So then they have their talking point. And we'll see how he handles eventually when he takes some questions.

So, how big a deal was Trump's statement? I listen, I think it was kind of a big deal because he opened up all this criticism. And you can say this is how Donald Trump talks, but when you're talking about big things like countries inviting countries or invading other countries, that's, you know, that's big stuff. And Listen, he could go out and say I was the guy that got them to all step up and pay more into NATO. I was the guy that made that happen.

And he could say that honestly, because he was the guy. But when you start saying, I'll tell Russia to go ahead and invade. It's not a great look after Russia invaded Ukraine.

So, Brett Bear with us now. Tom Swazi beat Mazzi Billup, a relative unknown, unique story. Ethiopian goes to Israel, fights in the IDF, comes to America, marries a Ukrainian. He becomes a cardiologist. They have seven kids.

She's a rookie legislator and runs for this House seat, but she loses handily by four or five. The weather might have been a factor. People think early voting was a factor. Others think the fact that Tom Swazi said close the border, ran from President Biden instead of to him. And Mozzie Pillip didn't necessarily embrace or reject Donald Trump.

What do you think you learn from a special election there if you're working for either party?

Well First of all, she was the supplemental in person. I mean, she had Israel, she had Ukraine, she had all the ties. I know, it's amazing, right? Everything, right? But the problem was, Republicans weren't into supporting that whole thing in large.

At least Trump Republicans weren't. And not that she ran solely on that. I do think that You know, the weather kind of probably had a had a an issue and getting people out. Low turnout, a lot of things can happen. Um, bottom line is Republicans now can only lose two votes.

Two. That is an untenable majority if you're trying to get big things done. They're not, and they're not going to be able to. What do you think happens to the foreign aid? I actually think there might be an effort to discharge, which is Essentially, if the speaker doesn't bring it up, that they have a vote that they could vote on it.

There are Democrats that have a problem with the Israel side of the funding, but not as many, and you could have enough numbers. to do that and possibly pass it. I think it would be really a test. For the hawks. You mentioned Mike Waltz and others.

who really want that funding. but now have the talking point that they want to have the border first. When Lindsey Graham says we should make it a loan, Because that's what former President Trump wanted. That's a major turnaround. How many times have we had Lindsey Graham on our shows talking about the importance of this moment, the fact that we have to support Ukraine?

We're not putting soldiers on the ground. You know, he makes the point again and again and again, and yet his vote is no. That was a big turnaround. It is. And now he's going to the border instead of Munich for the Security Council, because I know he loves that.

He should. And that's a major conference, but he said he's going to the border because it's totally busted and broken. And then you have the actual story that shows how they're at each other's throats inside the Biden administration. But one of your big interviews last night, Fred Smith, I talked to him about a month ago, the founder of FedEx, a real genius and a great person and a great American. Here's a little of your interview talking about what worries him about the economy, Cut 31.

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve said it Sunday evening a week ago. The head of our largest bank, I believe, J.P. Morgan, Jamie Diamond, has said it repeatedly. And hopefully, I'm adding to the chorus that's saying this is unsustainable. It's been because we've borrowed from our grandchildren.

And we're spending money today primarily to employ more people in government, health care, services, and other pursuits that are not being really driven by the fundamental engines of growth, which is national productivity and invention and innovation. Everybody hopes that artificial intelligence will be the new thing that will create a lot of wealth. But to date, over the last couple of years, we've simply been borrowing from our grandchildren and living beyond our means. After the precipitous drop in the market yesterday, and people thinking, on the other hand, We think the economy's turned around. He just worried, he's worried about the debt and he's worried about the dollar, right?

Big time. And the use of the dollar as the world's currency. Fred Smith is a guy that sees around corners, not just be founding FedEx. And think about this, nineteen seventy three, they deliver one hundred eighty six packages on their first Monday open. Last Cyber Monday in December, or November rather, they delivered 27 million packages.

It's a $90 billion company. I mean, it's just crazy how successful that company has been. And he has the sense long-term about what he's seen in the U.S. economy.

So whenever I talk to him, I just come away with this thought that here is a guy that knows a lot. And if the country just listened a little. We could turn the aircraft carrier upstate a little bit. He's in his 80s, right? He's 82?

He turns 80 coming up, and I think he can run the country. If you told me he was president, I would say he could do it. Nothing to do with age. It's about acute. But even he said his CEO, the guy he chose to put take over the company.

It's fifty-four. And he said, I play a lot of tennis. You know, I'm I'm d dialing it back.

So he's he said uh, you know, that that that's there's no Fortune 500 company that's saying I want a CEO that's eighty one. True. Brett, I know you it's usually a dramatic situation when you pick your panel. Have you picked the panel today yet? Yeah.

I don't know who the panel is today, but it will be a wonderful combination of journalists and columnists. The Super Bowl took place on Sunday. According to reports, you were there with your family. You've been to Super Bowls before. How do you describe this one?

I think this was honestly the best Super Bowl I've ever been to. And think about. I d I texted with Jim Nance yesterday. The number one television program ever Ever in the history of our country, 128 million people. I mean, that's.

That's amazing. And it gives you a perspective that maybe President Biden should have done that Super Bowl interview with CBS. No, he's so much better on TikTok. And he hit 85,000 people with that hacked-up video, which, by the way, we got to talk about that. I don't know if you talked about that last night, but for him to ban TikTok from federal devices and then open up an account and ask people to follow him on TikTok, knowing that people like Mike Gallagher and his staff say that this is a spy device of China, who they're not only taking his information, but they're taking his followers' information.

I mean, come on. How is he going to get away with that? I mean, he already is. And it's just an effort to get young people. But listen, first of all, it's not going to be a great effort if you're, you know, talking about Mama Kelsey's chocolate chip cookies and in little chopped-up videos.

I mean, that's not going to get you votes. It doesn't seem like. And two, if you're going to make the other message about the threat and put your FBI director up there and say all the things that China's doing, including TikTok, it's just a disconnected message. All right. And Vegas can handle a big game, right?

Man, I think they should do it every year. I think it should be like the Masters, where you go to one place. It would be unfair to other cities, but man, they can really handle it. Did you walk to the gate? We d we uh we were dropped off, but then you walk, you know, a quarter mile.

The flow was great. The stadium was great. It was really and all the stuff around it was great. I took my kids to U2 and the sphere. I mean, it was awesome.

Did they like you two? They're like the sphere. Right. I'm wondering about that because I think U2 is great. I wonder if they pass through this generation.

Hey, Brett, I look forward to your show tonight at 6 p.m.

Okay. I'll see you there. One time you'll come back on. I'm just waiting for the invitation. I'll go, man.

I have an outfit ready to go. Just call me. I got my special report blue suit, plain tie. That's good. That's all you need.

That's all. Brett Baird, thanks. Hey, Ed O'Keefe at the bottom of the hour. Your call's next. Brian Kill Me Joe.

Giving you everything you need to know. You're with Brian Kilmead. The more you listen, the more you'll know it's Brian Kilmead.

Well, I was there, Sandra. Of course, they're cherry-picking that out of context. The full context of what the president was saying and asking of all of us is if we continue to pay. Europeans know that we're going to subsidize their defense budget. It's so that they can pour money, their money, into their social programs.

Why would they ever pay up? And the fact is, Obama's defense secretary, Robert Gates, asked back in 2011, he said, they're perfectly fine for us to pay. After the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe did nothing. And now, still today, we have only 9 of 11 of our NATO allies living up to their commitment. He means 9 or 11.

It's 11 of 30. And when Sweden gets in, it'll be 31. But that's what I know. It just would be very easy for people to defend Trump, like Marco Rubio and Mike Walsh, because they know him so well. But if you were just listening and you heard any candidate say we're going to let Russia invade, you overreact.

But you would think people understand the Donald Trump way of doing things. He does it in a big, cartoonish way. I don't think it's a good way. I said this earlier. Donald Trump does not have to be Phil Mickelson.

He does not have to hit through the forest and try to get on the green. What he has to do is play conservatively, and he will become president again. That speed Saturday, too much Mickelson. If you're interested in it, Brian's talking about it. You're with Brian Kilmead.

We are back. Hi, everybody. Edward O'Keefe is our guest. If you were smart enough to get the Fox Nation app, you see him. He's the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, authored the upcoming book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt and Women, who created a president, of course, on Valentine's Day, where he's about to tell a story.

Uh that is legendary, not must the rom not the most romantic story, but you also have a rich media background, right, Ed? I do, yeah. I worked in twenty years in media, ABC News, CNN, uh worked at now this, a whole bunch of different places.

Some of the people you work with are? Oh man, I worked with George Stephanopoulos. I worked with Anthony Bourdain. We did worked on Parts Unknown. That's probably the most famous show that I worked on.

Great guy, really tragic ending, obviously, but phenomenal working with Tony. You were over at CNN for a while, right? I was there for five years. Yeah. You know, and did mostly content like Tony Bourdain and others.

What do you think is happening with the business right now? It's just total upheaval, right? I mean, this is reminded you of any other part in our background. Even when cable came in? I was going to say, I mean, look, every new medium goes through an upheaval and transition, right?

When you go from newspapers to radio, radio to television, television to even motion pictures, right? Most people learned about the rise of totalitarianism and Adolf Hitler by going to the movies and watching the newsreels that preceded the feature. These all disrupted. Cable certainly disrupted network television, and the internet is still disrupting what I would consider to be now traditional forms of broadcast media. When you look at the streaming platform, does it remind you of the dot-com bubble when everyone said, I'm just going to go get the internet.

Everything's going to be a zillion, everyone's going to make a zillion dollars. And they realize there's no way all these websites and everything is going to be able to survive. And it kind of collapsed in 2000. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, well, it goes through fits and starts, right?

Now everyone's got it happen. Everyone's streaming. Everyone goes, wait a second. What am I paying $4.99? For.

I'm not even watching this.

Well, it's niche casting, right? Not broadcasting anymore, right? Cable disrupted the network model. You get 30, 40 million people a night watching the network news.

Now, podcasts, what we're doing right now on Sirius XM, the Fox Nation, right? You've got to be everywhere that the audience is and delivering the content that they want, the news that they want in the way that they want it. That's very different than the models in the past.

So I think that there'll be a couple of big winners in this, but there'll be a lot of other outlets that have a specific catered audience. Cutting the cord, but not losing the channel. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what makes it, I guess, kind of a tough model.

But the one thing people can bet on is sports. Sports and live, right? Live. The things that Netflix said they would never do, and now they're starting to do, right? The live and sports.

Those are tried and true. I mean, 124 million viewers for the Super Bowl. That was pretty astounding. And it makes people want to run to sports. Yeah, absolutely.

What else can you count on? And it's safe, right? It's as much as we enjoy talking politics and as much as people enjoy debating politics, sports is generally non-controversial that you can root for and against, but it's good and safe. Look at what the advertisers did in this Super Bowl. It was pretty safe content that they were adjacent to.

Do you think the political correctness era is coming to a close or more rational actors? I mean, around 2020, everybody was getting canceled, not just for horrendous acts like Harvey Weinstein, but for statements. I think Dave Chappelle might have been the turning point because they tried to cancel him and it didn't work. Yeah, you know, I think, well, I, you know, as a historian and now author, I look back in history and see that there are many moments that are much worse and more intense than what we're going through now. I mean, in the past, when you had a political difference with someone, it generally ended up in violence, right?

Assassinations. I mean, between 1864 with Lincoln and 1966. With McKinley, there were 12 major American politicians who were assassinated, including three presidents of the United States. Thank God we're not there, right? I mean, that's an evolution of the culture in a good way, in a positive way.

You know, I think if the worst you're doing is throwing words at each other, you've come a long way in history. Right. I think, are you amazed? It seems to be a consistent attack on our history and how it affects the schools, the curriculum, school choice. I think, you know, she who writes history controls the world, right?

I mean, look, what I did in this particular book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt. I took a different look at Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt is the myth of the self-made man, right? Nobody's self-made. You always have people in your life: your brothers, your sisters, your spouses, people who support you along the way in these terrible and tough moments in your life.

That doesn't mean that he wasn't the incredible, heroic Theodore Roosevelt that we all know and love, that he did these. Phenomenally courageous acts throughout his life that you just look at and go, that's insane and daring and different. But it's when you try to use history for your own current political purposes. I get asked a lot: what would Theodore Roosevelt think of whatever is happening now or today? And I say, look, I can't take Theodore Roosevelt out of the time in which he lived and project what he would believe now.

I like to say Theodore Roosevelt is like a Rorschach test. What you see in him says more about you than it does about him. Because he does not fit the traditions. No. He's a Republican who is an environmentalist.

He was a Republican who saw the evil of big banks and conglomerations and wanted to make sure that everybody had a shot at wealth, not just the few. He was a Republican who, when he did not like what his party was doing and who his party nominated, ran as an independent, still the most successful independent candidate in the history of our country. I think Theodore Roosevelt ultimately put country before party principles. Before policy. And that is something that, regardless of the era, regardless of the time, everyone yearns for.

I think so. In particular, were you shocked that they boxed up his uh his statue In front of the Museum of Natural History in New York City, I think what his family founded, one day it was boxed up, the next day it's gone. And now, do you guys have it in North Dakota? We do. Yeah, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation did take possession of the equestrian statue as it's known.

I mean, you know, it's obviously a controversial work of art. Do you think so?

Well, I think that it engendered controversy. I mean, anyway. You have an Indian standing behind, American Indian standing behind him, and an African-American. Right. He's on a horse.

And it was outside, right? It wasn't inside the museum where you made a conscious choice to go see it.

So it obviously engendered the controversy that. The museum, in consultation with the city of New York, made the decision to. You think that was a terrible decision? Because I think it was a terrible decision. I think that it was a decision that they made.

It's good for you guys in North Dakota. And we knew that, look, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library wants to preserve and protect the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt wasn't alive when that statue was built. Theodore Roosevelt specifically said he did not want statues built to himself in memorial to himself. That was built because.

The American Museum of Natural History is the New York State memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. People forget that. The whole reason they have a grand entrance on Central Park West is because they are the memorial to the New York governor and the governor that became president of the United States from New York.

So he had nothing to do with that creation, that statue, that memorial. His descendants did, but again, the interior of the space was really meant to be the tribute to T.R. And I think you know. And what's in some of his big game hunting and some of his works there? Yes, fine minds.

And if you look around as you come in the entrance, you see four quotes from Theodore Roosevelt about the strenuous life. You see the work that his sisters, Bammy and Connie, did to help do that preservation and memorialization. You know, I again I think that Theodore Roosevelt didn't want a statue. And yet, that became intertwined. Talk about history.

Theodore Roosevelt, the last speech that he ever gave in his life, November 2nd, 1918, was at Carnegie Hall. He was on stage with W.E.B. Du Bois, and there was a mixed-race audience, as he often spoke in front of mixed-race audiences. I mean, you've written about this, right? Teddy and Booker T.

Having Booker T. Washington to the White House for Dinner was a revolutionary act in 1906. They didn't realize. And he, right, correct. He did not realize.

And he lost the South. For the rest of his political career. If he doesn't have Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner, as you cover in your book, Teddy and Booker T, in 1901, he probably wins in 1912. I mean, think about that.

The last speech he ever gives in his life, November 2nd, 1918, a full-throated endorsement of equality. He he espouses Beliefs that had he become president in 1920, which easily could have happened, T.R. likely would have put a knife in the heart of Jim Crow 45 years before the Civil Rights Act.

Now, that's not to say that he did everything perfectly. Brownsville is a stain on his record. With the Buffalo soldiers. Absolutely. There are things that are unexplainable that you have to look at and say, we've got to look at Theodore Roosevelt as a human being who made mistakes, right?

That we don't want to pretend that he is the rush more perfect version of himself. That's okay, right? That's a version of history you can enjoy and debate and live with. But I think to, you know, what happened with the statue was almost an appropriation of Theodore Roosevelt. Those were not his views.

And that memorial didn't really stand for what he stood for. And so, you know, I think that the museum and the city made the decision they made, and we made the decision we made.

So let's move forward. It's Well, right now it's in storage. It's in a safe and secure location in North Dakota, and that's where it's going to stay for a while. Right. Do you not know where you're going to put it?

No. I think that it needs a good cooling off period and some time for us to consider how and when and if it should be much protest in North Dakota. Probably not, no. Right. So, what's going to be consistent in the library?

Well, you know, look, I want to say real very quickly, we have made a very intentional effort as the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation to reach out to the Native American tribes that we share geography with in North Dakota, the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara tribe, the Standing Rock Sioux, sev three other tribes that I won't go through and mention in detail. They've all been a part of our deliberate dialogue. And I do think that they would be offended by the presence of that statue. And so, you know, it's a dialogue, it's a conversation that we want to have to make sure we do this the right way. Is it because there's an American Indian standing?

Is there something the Indian's wearing that's not consistent? Yeah, I mean, again, I think that there's a variety of reasons that people do not. Like that statue for Good reason in many circumstances. Again, it was displayed in a very public place on Central Park West. We have the opportunity now to take a breath, to talk to our partners, to talk to people we respect in the state, and think about what, if anything, should be done with it.

Right. So tell me about your book. Yeah, so The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt, The Women Who Created a President, is all about the unsung and extraordinary women in the arena, the people that you haven't heard much about that help make TR. I mean, as I said earlier, Theodore Roosevelt is probably the most masculine president in the American memory, and he's actually got all of these extraordinary women who support him: his sister, Bami, his older sister, Bami, his younger sister, Connie, and his two wives, Edith and Alice, and of course, his mother, Mitty. And February 14th.

What we're celebrating here today, 140 years ago, very tragic events and ending for Alice and Mitty. What happened?

Well, I mean it's You got to back up a little bit. Theodore Roosevelt knew Edith Care. From the time that she was three years old, they grew up together right here in New York, 28 East 20th Street. They were homeschooled in kindergarten together by his aunt Anna.

So they were expected to be Lovers. They were expected to be married. They had a rupturous split in 1878 after the death of Theodore Roosevelt's father, his beloved, revered father, who had said, Theodore, you have the mind, but you must make your body. And that's what changed the trajectory of Theodore Roosevelt's young life. He goes to Harvard and he meets Alice Hathaway Lee, an incredibly beautiful Boston Brahmin, very sought after amongst all the elite in Cambridge and Boston.

They are engaged on February 14th, 1880.

So to the day, he's elected to the State Assembly three times. He's the youngest member of the New York State Assembly. He writes the Naval War of 1812, his first major book. He, in his own words, rose like a rocket when he was with Alice. And then she becomes pregnant with their first child.

On February eleventh, he heads back to Albany. Where he is a state assemblyman. She gives birth on february twelfth. He receives word that she's only fairly well, but he celebrates on the floor of the New York State Assembly, thinks everything is going to be just fine. Then he receives a second telegram.

We don't know what the contents of that second telegram were. We only know from a description of another legislator that his face went white and he was, in his words, ashen. He takes a five and a half hour trip back from Albany to New York City. Two and a half hours is the standard time that train trip takes. It takes twice as long because there's a dense fog that has come over the city.

So dense, so thick is this fog, the New York Times writes a story about it, calls it suicidal weather. That those who are subject to prone to emotional responses to the weather should not go outside. You literally can't see the ships out on the Hudson River.

So he gets to the door of Ed, why don't you hold that thought? You're on the edge. On the precipice. Yeah, we're going to give you a chance to finish it up. You listen to the Brian Killmee show.

Ed O'Keefe is here. His book is coming out soon. It's called The Loves of Theodore Rose. The women who created a president. Back in a moment.

Don't move. Expanding your knowledge base. It's the Brian Kill Me Show. Radio that makes you think. This is the Brian Kill Me Show.

All right, a couple minutes before the top of the era, Ed Ord Keith is here, the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, author of the upcoming book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt. But there's a significant reason why this story works on Valentine's Day.

So, Ed, you were telling us what happened on Valentine's Day with Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt comes to his house at 6 West 57th Street. His brother Elliot is there and says there is a curse on this house. Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too. He rushes wife and his mother are dying on the same day in the same house, Valentine's Day, 1884, 140 years ago today.

So he rushes upstairs. He visits his wife. She's semi-conscious, in and out of consciousness. They've had the baby two days before. He goes downstairs at 2:30 in the morning.

He and his brother and sisters gather around the bedside vigil of their mother. She passes away of typhoid fever. He rushes back upstairs to the third floor to Alice, his wife, and he's with her, holding her in her arms. In his arms for almost 10 hours until she too passes away in the very early afternoon. No medical attention?

Had a doctor there, but she had what was then known as Bright's disease, something that would be easily treated, a kidney disorder that was exacerbated by the pregnancy.

So she didn't die in childbirth, but she died with complications from the childbirth later. Yeah, she was 22 years old, 22. He's 25. He's abjectly depressed. He writes an enormous X in his diary on February 14th, 1884, and says, The light has gone out of my life.

For joy or for sorrow, my life is lived out. He goes back to work. He goes back to work. I mean, well, he tends this excruciating double funeral. On Fifth Avenue, they line up double hearses with the coffins of his wife and his mother.

Because they're a prominent family. Prominent family. They have the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian service on February 16th. On February 17th, his daughter is baptized. But he does return to work.

He goes to the New York State Assembly. He finishes out his term. He loses politically in the 1884 presidential convention. His candidate does not win the nomination. He's defeated personally.

He's defeated politically. He's abjectly depressed. What did he go to bat for again? He was Senator Edmonds of Vermont, and James G. Blaine, the Speaker of the House, became the plumed knight.

James G. Blaine became the nominee. Gotcha.

So then he ends up just saying what?

So he says, I, you know, I'm done. I'm over. He leaves his daughter with his sister. Yeah, he leaves his baby in the care of his sister Bammy, an extraordinary woman who I talk a lot about in the loves of Theodore Roosevelt. He leaves for Dakota.

He gets beat at the Chicago convention, and he's largely in the Dakota Badlands for the better part of two years, living what he will later call the strenuous life. It saves his life, that time in nature and out in Dakota. Why do you pick it? He picked it, he'd been there before to hunt to Buffalo. He had a ranch out there and he had some operations.

He built a private ranch, the Elkhorn, which is now part of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and it saved his life. Right. And not a great Valentine's Day, but shows your resilience. Your Valentine's Day will undoubtedly be better than TR's. Yeah, everybody listening, that means you.

Ed, congratulations on the book that's about to come out May 7th. And you can pre-order it now. Yes. Brian Kilmeicho. Happy Valentine's Day.

From the Fox News Radio Studios in Midtown Manhattan, it's the fastest growing radio talk show. Brian. In Kill Mead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Kilmy Show.

We come to you from Midtown Manhattan, heard around the country, around the world. We're going to have an interesting study. We know Valentine's Day is today, right?

So let's get scientific about it. And that is the best way to a happy life for happy and successful kids is, believe it or not, something you might see in black and white television in the 1950s, and that is a nuclear family. Having a wife, Uh having kids after you get married. And then your kids, if you look at just pure statistics, if you want successful kids, they come from it. If you look at some of these elite colleges, not even talk about Ivy League, forget about all that and what comes with Ivy League these days.

But if you just look at elite colleges, which we really tar usually target the most successful kids, most of them come from traditional nuclear families, but almost all those kids think it doesn't matter. Interesting subject. We'll talk about that. And Congressman Patrick Murphy is here. You know, he was the 32nd Under Secretary of the Army, fought in wars, and also is a Democrat.

Unless we can convert him sometime in this half hour.

So before we get to Patrick, big three.

Now with the stories you need to know, it's Brian's big three. Number three. Tony Bobolinski confirmed what the two IRS whistleblowers said, that Joe Biden is the brand and the family business is selling the brand all over the country to all these foreign different foreign entities. Yep, Tony Bobolinski speaks for hours, seven hours. The Dems can't stomach it.

He tells the truth about Hunter Jim and Joe because he lived it. He didn't hear it. He lived it and met with Joe Biden as dates and times and receipts. Unimpeachable source with an incredible background. Deal with it.

We'll discuss it. Transcripts about to come out. Number two. This is a difference in policy. It's a terrible border situation.

I'm not making any excuses for what's going on. I think Secretary Mayorkis goes down as one of the worst cabinet secretaries in certainly my lifetime, but it is not a high crime or misdemeanor. Ken Buck, Republican, not going along with what Republicans did, and that's impeach Mayorkis in the House. We'll discuss that, along with what Biden has done to our nation by destroying the border. It's overrun our cities.

Now, get this in Boston. They're telling people: open up your houses if you're in the suburbs and bring in some illegal immigrants. That sounds great. Give me two with neck tattoos. Is that all right?

Number No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator.

Well, let me say this as clearly as I can. I never will. God's sake, it's dumb, it's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American. And I'll take no questions. 2024, Reuters says Trump up three.

Biden goes on the attack while screaming hypocrisy and desperation by joining the China-run TikTok. And with me right now is Patrick Murphy.

So, Patrick, great to see you. You too, Brian. Thanks for having me back on, man. We have not paid attention to that Pennsylvania race. I want to get to that in a second.

But the one thing that really bothered me yesterday is to see the president. I didn't pay attention to the president's TikTok. I'm not on TikTok. But he turns down a Super Bowl interview and hops on TikTok. And we know what his.

What Admiral Kirby said about TikTok. We know what the FBI director said about TikTok. Do you know that President Biden took it off federal phones and devices off TikTok? Does it bother you that he's on TikTok? I always talked about this on outnumbered on Monday, Brian.

I couldn't agree more with you in a sense that I'm glad that we banned it from all federal phones, computers, et cetera. It is the Trojan horse for China to get our Americans intelligence. It is wrong. I'm glad they did it. But Just like Vivek said, leadership is you got to meet people where they are.

Younger Americans, now again, that's on the campaign side. There's a separate church and separate people. You would never do it. I will never do it. I'm not on it.

Even if they said to you, Patrick, you can't win without the 18 to 30, 22-year-olds, and they were on TikTok, you and your background, you would not have done it. But Brian, I tell you, you can't bring a knife to a gunfight. And the fact is, you got to go to where younger people are. They're on, and they shouldn't be on it. But I'm telling you.

They're on Instagram. I know, I know. But as you know, Vivek and others, they've come out and said, you got to meet people where they are. That's what the president's doing. It is on a campaign side, not on the official side.

See, I could even rationalize it if I'm vivaque, and I think he's wrong to do it. But he's like, listen, I'm not going, I'm not. I'm not setting policy. I'm running. This guy said policy.

And so this guy's telling the posse, listen to Michael Walsh cut nine. There's multiple concerns, and the Biden political campaign should be ashamed of themselves. We already discussed that why it is not okay for millions of federal workers, but it is okay for voters. Explain that. Number two, we know that the Chinese Communist Party are using this as a data collection bonanza.

We would no more have allowed this with the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War than we should now. Number three, talk about election interference. This is a practical superhighway for the Chinese Communist Party to adjust the algorithms should they so choose. But now, a major presidential, the sitting presidential campaign is going to legitimize this app and so far. I mean, it makes no sense.

It's not that Trump banned it, Biden banned it. Right, right. And that was the right move, and we both agree on that. But again, you can't bring a knife to a gunfight, and this election is going to be nip and tuck. It's gonna, you know.

They're both older candidates. They got to somehow get in front of younger Americans. And you know, too, the voters that go on and say, oh, my president looks so young on TikTok, and he doesn't wear a tie, and his car's open, and maybe he'll go on the beach again. He'll do that. And then those people that are following him open up the back door to their data to go to the Chinese.

So is that even fair to you voters? Yeah. Yeah. Listen, it's not a great day in America, but I understand the rationale. And we better wake up as a country because they're getting more and more aggressive.

As you know, we just had in Taiwan, we've had elections. China tried to interfere with their elections via cyber security attacks. They held it off, and the good guy won. Yeah, the good guy won, but we can't be. And you know what the Russians are doing, too?

The Russians, according to the French, are trying to interfere in their elections, cyber attacks, so old to Western Europe. Yeah, like I said with Mike Gallagher, congressman, you know, who just unfortunately announced his retirement, Marine. We serve in the Cyber Security Commission together. There's 14 of us, U.S. Senators, members of Congress, CEOs, leaders.

There's 14 of us. And I will tell you, people in America, and I love our country. But they are asleep at the wheel. There is war in Europe right now. There's tens of thousands of Ukrainian people that have been killed by the Russians.

If you think Russia was going to stop 10 years ago in Crimea, they're not stopping now eight years later, two years ago in Ukraine. And we're just sitting here and at least the Senate passes it. We got to get the House to vote for it because we can't look the other way. And for the folks, I'm official conservative, Brian. You know that I was a blue dog Democrat.

This is my thing. If you think supporting Ukraine is expensive, Wait till how our experiments can be when we abandon our allies. Or we go in treaty we are treaty obligated and one of them's attacked, well then we're fighting it. Treaty obligated to fight it, and we will. I am with you.

The one thing that you have to acknowledge is that the communication from the White House on why we're there is almost zero. The last time the President addressed it was in Poland, and he had to be walked back after he says, My God, this guy can't stay in power. If I get a paraphrase, they had to quickly say, We're not calling for the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.

So we know the slow walking of weapons must drive you crazy. No highmars, give a high Mars. No Patriots, give your Patriots. No harpoons, we'll give you harpoons.

Now, all of a sudden, we're dropping Cluster bombs, which is relatively controversial.

Okay, here with cluster bombs, we're going to train up, we're going to train pilots. What happened to the training of the pilots, right?

Okay, you're not going to give F-16s, but if an ally wants to, you can. We're going to train the pilots. What happened to the trial?

So that's what drives people nuts.

So instead of the Dick Chandies hopping on meet the press for 45 minutes to say why we're in Iraq, and you might go, I hate him more, or now I get it. You have no one saying anything. About the war, especially now that it's spread out.

So, what I would have done is, I would say, listen, I understand there's some problems with compliance. I'm going to follow every bullet to the front line. I would have picked two people that we respect, almost the Simpson Bowles type people on both sides on accountability. I'm going to ask you to work the Ukraine Accountability Act. I'm going to do that.

And then I'm going to explain it to you, and I'm going to find somebody who's conversant in it. I don't know who's conversing it on the right. I know Lindsey Graham was doing a good job explaining it. General Jack Keene's the best at it. There's no Schwartzkopf to explain it.

I'm not sure. There's got to be somebody out there. I had Tom Rooney. And that's my problem. I had my guy, Tom Rooney, last night in my class.

We give a master's class to veterans getting their master's class. And who's he? Tom Rooney is a Republican, conserved Republican, U.S. Congressman, former congressman. His dad's one of the owners of Steelers.

We served in the Army together. We were professors at West Point together. Then 9-11 happened. I went to combat twice. And then we served in Congress together.

He's Republican. I'm a Democrat. And this is the thing. We talked about. America I get it.

People don't say, well, listen, I don't want to be policemen in the world. I get it. But guess what? What happens? When you have despots like Vladimir Putin goes and kills tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Europe.

When they call 911, they're not calling France. They're calling the United States of America. I'm with you. And we got to understand that we have a moral responsibility as the greatest country on earth. Again, I'm not saying the pocketbook of the earth.

We got to. The EU, the EU has spent more money on Ukraine than we have. You're 100% right. That's a total misconception that they're not spending in proportion. And I'm about to bust your balls, Brian.

I'm sorry for saying that. I'm with you. But I'm just passionate like you are on this. But the problem is there's been no accountability in the weapons. And then if you have a government, a democracy just standing on itself and they have huge problems with accountability, we got to make them accountable for their own good.

Right. And by the way, can I really fast? It's helping America's national security because we're giving them our weapons and we're reproducing more of them in places like Scram, Pennsylvania. We are the arsenal of freedom for the world. By the way, why is Mark Thiessen explaining that in the Washington Post?

Well and not people understanding it, that we're buying it from ourselves, employing people, and then giving it to them and then replenishing, which could cost money. But I would add another thing. The reason why guys like Lindsey Graham, who agree with us, are going to the border, not to Munich. is because that border is a five-alarm fire. And that is a huge problem.

And now we have Chinese coming through twenty thousand and twenty thousand in fiscal year.

So you can't just say, Hey, if you want your tax cut, if you want your tax cut, then I'm going to do no, this is related.

So these people are coming to exploit us.

So we're seeing that for them not to the bipartisan bill can be debated, but maybe they could have there Mitch McConnell could have said we're going to get the X amount of dollars for just border security, something that's not debatable. Do you know those guys don't get overtime? Do you know they're going to get overtime?

So we get any more agents. That's why that bill is going to be a little bit more difficult.

So at least if there's somebody the bill to bipartisan, right? And this is what, and this can I just be honest on this? Because I called Straight Brian, you know that. This is what. Upsets me as an American.

In the army we had a saying, lead, Follow or get out of the way. And on one side, we have a bipartisan bill that Lankford and Murphy worked their asses off for to get get done. And again, it was a tough border bill. And cinema. Right.

And cinema. Yep. Yep. So those three. They brought it.

People voted against it. They said they came out against it for they even read the bill. It is what it is. President Trump before President Trump weaponized it. It is what it is.

But on the other side, you have a secretary who's basically like, hey, the system's broken, like, puts his hands up in the air. Hey, listen, if you want to be part of the solution, you would never have done that. Absolutely not. Even if President Biden would be saying the same thing to you, you'd say, listen, I'm going to sit there. And at one point, if he says, you know, I want it open, you would have left.

Right, right. And because, guess what? I love my country more than my party, right? And that's how most Americans are. That's why people are upset with Mayorkis because he's not telling the truth and he says he can't do anything.

And then when Tom Holman said, he worked for me. He knows exactly what works and doesn't work. He's being totally insincere at best and lying at worst. Yeah, well, listen, I the status quo is not an option. This catch and release program i is not happening.

It is not good policy. And 20 years ago, and yeah. And so I just hope and this is why I think the elections, if I could just wrote I think that's what people are saying in America. They're saying we want leaders who are going to say, give me a solution. You can talk about why the other person should be fired.

Why are you going to be hired? What about this special dispensation, if that's the right word? They'll bypass the speaker to get through the house. Can you tell me in layman's terms how to do it?

Well, for a second, I thought I didn't get ashes yet. I thought you were giving me hard times because I didn't go to church yet for Ash Wednesday, which is today. No, I wouldn't have to do that. I had a special dispensation. What is it?

Eric, do you know you usually go to this stuff? What is the right terminology when you bypass the leadership that's only been done twice in twenty years and put the vote to the floor? Yeah, oh man, yeah. Is it possible? Because I hear thirty at least thirty Democrats don't want to sign for the foreign aid.

So if you lose 30 Democrats and all the Republicans, most of the Republicans, do you even have 218? Yeah, listen, I think you're going to get. Most of the folks in Congress will vote on that Senate. Yes, yeah, there's folks, yes.

Okay, so they they have to offer it to the floor. They bypass the speaker, which is odd because you have a majority for a reason, and they just put it on the floor. Right, right. So, yeah, there's there's mechanisms there. We used to talk about this, and usually there's political pressure against the speaker to bring things up, even if they disagree, you know, and say, hey, we got to do what's right.

So I think there's that's. I think that's actually going to probably, I would say, happen because what you're seeing is people are like. What's going on? It's a bizarre world. You have you have right.

Right, the very far right of the Republicans, the far left of the Democrats, are saying we don't want to vote on this bill to support our allies in Europe. War in Europe is happening. They don't like Israel money. The squad doesn't like the Israel money. Wow.

And the Republicans don't want the Ukraine.

Well, you know what? Corey Bush, part of that, is going to lose her re-election. She's now 22 points in St. Louis. You guys did a great job on Fox Friends this morning on that.

Oh, yeah. Lawrence did a fantastic job. Back in a moment, we're going to talk about the two special elections in a moment. Both sides, all opinions. It's Brian Killmead.

Breaking news, unique opinions. Hear it all on the Brian Kill Me Show. It's about election mechanics that's bothering me as a Republican. Voting early, voting by mail. Ballot harvesting, getting your votes in.

It looks to me like the Democrats here crushed. In the early voting in Nassau. Where the Republicans had to do well. And you're always just one snowstorm away. from some kind of a turnout problem.

And so the Democrats are going to win this. It looks like. We haven't called it yet, but it looks like they're on their way. And a big part of it is the Republican Party remains resistant to getting votes in the bank. You've got to vote.

Get your vote in. That's all I got. I got it. Scott Jennings upset to Republicans. Patrick Murphy here, 32nd Under Secretary of the Army, former Democratic Congressman.

So, significance of Swazi's win. Huge. And again, I know Scott was talking about the mechanics of early voting, which I think is important, but it's really a message. What's his message?

Well, his message is you got to embrace early voting, which I agree with as far as if I was advising Republicans. People want to vote early, right? When they have still. I tend to agree. I don't do it.

I go in person, but it is one of the things. But Swazi's message was: shut down the border. I don't even know Joe Biden's name. I'm a moderate. I want to make a deal.

So that's not the guy that says I'm an honorary member of the squad. You live in his, you're in that district. You live there. You saw his lawn signs. It says, let's fix things.

Meaning, let's get things done. There's one thing, Brian, about these elections. People see if you're just running against something or if you're running for something. It's okay to talk about why the other person should be fired, but also why you should be hired. Swazi was like, we will have to do things.

We have to. Get border security ASAP, this catch release is not working.

So he talked about that. And again, you know, in the past, you enforced sanctuary cities. Right, right. And so, you know, and again, what people need to understand across this country, it's not just a Long Island thing. This was Peter King's district.

I started with Peter King. This is a Republican held seat. Yeah, he had more of me. Yeah, yeah. And they cut my town in half.

Okay, well, they were probably worried that you were going to run, right? Exactly. But then you look in Bucks County. I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

So Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican member of Congress. In a district that he wins in a state rep race last night, yesterday's special election, in the district that he wins, that guy, Jim Prokopiak, won by 10 points. Right. And this is a state. This is a state, yeah, but it controlled the state house in Pennsylvania.

And as you know, Pennsylvania is the Keystone State in the presidential election. It's the Philadelphia suburbs. That's where I live. That's where all the marbles are. Because as James Carville once said, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and the state of Alabama.

We have more NRA members than any other state than Texas. That's why I own three weapons. Right. So. My point is, people better wake up on what's going on.

And people can bitch and moan. Hey, well, the economy, what are you going to do about it? What's different? And so I think as long as you're showing people like Tom Swasey, hey, listen. I'm not going to be just some rubber stamp.

He has been a rubber stamp. He bites a bunch of people. I think he had a come to Jesus moment after that. Like, hey, listen, I screwed up before. I'm going to change.

But the message is right. Success leaves clues. That was one of the clues. Say the border's broken, like Henry Quear did. No one listened to him.

Now everybody's listening to him. And then he won his primaries, right? But I also say this. And they tried to primary him on the Democratic Party. But the Americans are going to say this isn't one-off.

We had Kentucky last year and others, too. The fastest three hours in radio. You're with Brian Kilmead. Hey, welcome back, everybody. I know it's Valentine's Day.

You know it's Valentine's Day, so let's get into what Valentine's Day represents. That's relationships, marriage, girlfriends, boyfriends. Brad Wilcox is all over this. He's the director of the National Marriage Project and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies and author of a brand new book called Get Married: Why Americans Bust Defy the Elites, Ford Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad, welcome.

Good to be here, Brian. What prompted you to write this book?

Well, I've been studying kind of the effect of marriage on kids for a long time. I was raised by a single mom and kind of, you know, had the sense that marriage is beneficial for kids. But as I've been talking to UVA students, particularly younger women, what I'm hearing from them is just kind of like a noise, sort of a voice of concern about their prospects for dating and marriage. And I just kind of realized that I think it's going to be harder and harder for our young adults today to get married. And so I wanted to write a book that kind of underlined the importance of marriage for adults and then kind of gave people some ideas about how they can forge strong families today.

Right. What have you found that people are pushing back on which was natural in America? That was find some you love, get married and have kids. Are people pushing back on that model? Yeah, there's kind of what I call a Midas mindset where a lot of folks today, especially kind of elite liberals and outlets like Bloomberg and the New York Times, are kind of telling folks that, you know, the path to prosperity and happiness runs through education.

Money and especially work kind of tends to discount, deny, devalue the importance of marriage. That's sort of one thing that I've been seeing in the media, but I've also been seeing in the last couple of years people on the online right, people like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis, also kind of making a similar argument, but kind of targeting men.

So the left is sort of saying to women, you know, you don't need marriage. And the online right is saying to men, you should steer clear of marriage. In fact, Pearl Davis called marriage a death sentence for men. And who's Pearl Davis? She's a big online influencer.

She's got a very big platform on Twitter and other YouTube platforms. And both she and Andrew Tate think that there's really no ROI, there's no return on investment for men. And one of their primary concerns is that they think that most marriages end in divorce for guys. They're actually, they're wrong about that, but that's sort of their perspective, and they're articulating that to a lot of people online. All right.

How is that related to happiness?

Well, there's no better predictor of happiness in my research than marriage, especially a good marriage.

So, Americans who have what they would sort of describe as a good marriage are just much, much happier than other Americans who are either unmarried or Americans who are not doing so well in their marriage. But again, the quality of your marriage matters more than how much money you have, kind of job you have, how much sex you have. If you go to church services a lot, for instance, it's the number one factor. And a lot of Americans, I think, don't recognize, don't appreciate the importance of investing in their marriage and also then, of course, getting married in the first place. And you say the term soulmate doesn't really apply to a successful relationship.

How do you define it?

So I talked about sort of this idea of the myth of the soulmate in the Wall Street Journalist past weekend. And the basic idea there is I think too many folks have this notion that love and marriage are about kind of an intense emotional or romantic connection. And that's basically it. And it's going to be kind of one perfect person that's going to fulfill you. It's going to kind of perfectly connect with you.

And oh, by the way, if there's any kind of like, you know, difficulty or tensions, you know, in your relationship or in your marriage, you should kind of maybe just discard this current marriage and head, you know, for a new marriage. And I talk about the book by Liz Gilbert called Eat, Prey, Love, a very famous book, very popular book, which kind of I think embodies that soulmate approach to love. The problem with that approach is that feelings are a fragile foundation for marriage. And what we see is that people who understand that, yeah, romance is important, but also realize that marriage matters for their kids, matters for their kin, matters for their financial well-being, have kind of a richer view of, I call it the family-first model of marriage, are more likely, of course, to steer clear of divorce court, but they're also happier in their marriages as well because they're not kind of expecting to have like this intense romantic connection kind of running throughout their relationship, you know, for the next 10, 15, 30 years.

So what led you to this conclusion?

Well, how did you go about your study?

So I look at more than seven large numbers. National surveys do a lot of statistical analysis with my colleague Dr. Wendy Wang at IFS, the Institute for Happy Studies, and then also interviewed more than 40 Americans kind of across the U.S. about their experiences with love and marriage and relationships. And you're led to, okay, if you look at uh a successful two-person marriage.

It also not only gives you a more rounded life, maybe a more happy life. But you also say, think about the kids. When you have kids, how do they do when they're from a two-parent household?

Now, I want to kind of preface my response here again by saying I was raised by a single mom, and there are many kids who are raised by a single moment. You went to the University of Virginia. And I went to UVA as an underdog. And that is an elite college. It's a good school, yep.

And so, you know, many kids who are raised by single parents can do just fine. I want to be clear about that. But I'm also a social scientist, and I can tell you that basically kids who are raised by, you know, Their own married parents are more likely to be flourishing, Brian. We see, for instance, that boys who are being raised by their own married parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college compared to boys who are raised in some kind of non-intact family. What's also striking, probably the most striking thing in my book in terms of the kids' story, is that boys who are raised outside of an intact family are about twice as likely to end up in jail or in prison.

They're more likely to go to jail or prison by the time they turn 30 than they are to graduate from college. I think it's important to back that up and say, you said that if you are from a single or a broken family or something. No, so it could be single, step family, cohabiting. You're more likely to be in prison than you are. You go to prison or jail at some point before you hit 28 than you are to graduate from college.

And by contrast, boys who are being raised by their own married parents are about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to spend time in prison or jail.

So just kind of a huge story there about education versus incarceration. And you found, too. When it comes to minorities, Hispanic and black families. Uh what was taught in their school, the success sequence matters to them. Family matters to them.

Sure.

So we have this idea out there called the success sequence. This is a notion that you get at least a high school degree, you work full-time in your 20s, and you put marriage before the baby carriage. If you take those three steps in terms of education, work, and marriage as a young adult, your odds of being poor are just 3%. Your odds of kind of rising to the middle class or higher as a young adult are 86%. And this success sequence matters not just for white folks or for kids from rich families.

It applies across the board.

So black, Hispanic, lower-income kids are much more likely to be flourishing if they take these three steps as they move into adulthood. Going into the 60s, it's been said the black family was much more intact than it is today, statistically. Even that was before the civil rights movement. Have you looked at this? Yeah, I think what's striking is a lot of Americans don't realize that really from the 1870s to, I mean, depends on kind of what you're looking at, the 1940s, early 50s, what we saw was that African Americans were actually more likely to marry than whites.

And that's really kind of since the 1960s that there's been this, you know, huge gap growing between black and white families on the marriage front. Why is that? I think it's a couple of things. I think it's partly a cultural story. You know, in the 60s and 70s, we kind of devalued the importance of marriage.

Sexual revolution was part and parcel of that as well. I think the way in which welfare policy rolled out in the 60s and 70s tended to De-emphasize and penalize marriage as well in ways that had a disparate impact on blacks. Um and then I think um Just There is still kind of an underlying fragility from slavery that has still kind of been with us. And as the broader society became kind of less marriage-friendly, I think that kind of movement, both culturally and legally, had a disparate impact on African Americans. And then finally, economically, we saw obviously a move away from an industrial economy towards an information economy.

And that hurt a lot of black working-class men in terms of their marriageability. Do you also think that government programs had a negative effect, even if the intention was to have a positive effect? Yes. So I think, you know, certainly back in the 1670s, a lot of poor families kind of had marriage effectively being penalized by the way in which welfare policies were crafted. And then today, it's actually more of a working-class issue because just the way in which benefits are structured.

So a lot of couples, both black and white, Hispanic, who are working class today, tell me that when they're making decisions about marriage, things like the structure of Medicaid. And how it works discourages them from putting a ring on it. All right, so also you bring up this, there are things government can do to help. You could incentivize. For example, Don't penalize people if they're single.

But provide a bigger child tax credit for multiple kids, right? Or for kids. Bigger allowances. You notice what the military does. If you get married in the military, they give you a bigger house, a bigger allowance.

There's almost an incentive. There is.

So can you do that in society? I know Hungary has gone to the great extent they're actually paying their families to have more kids. Yeah, so in terms of, I think, you know, there are a lot of folks in D.C. particularly that I've spoken with who are kind of what I'd say naysayers. They say nothing can be done to strengthen marriage, strengthen families.

And I say, well, do you know that the biggest federal agency in America has a very pro-marriage policy? And they kind of look at me blankly. I'm like, well, the Department of Defense, you were just saying military. If you get married, and your partner has access to benefits in terms of housing and health care, they're just much better. If you cohabit, they don't have access to those benefits.

And we see in America today. They just live together. Correct. We see that whites, blacks, working-class Americans, guys who've served in the military, much more likely to have gotten married than their civilian peers. And it shows us then that kind of the way in which the military approaches things by incentivizing marriage could be a model for how we could restructure federal policy in general to do more incenting and less penalizing marriage.

And by the way, we're talking to Brad Wilcox. He's giving us a great topic at a great time. It's February 14th, and we're talking about his book, Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilizations. Do you also think, to be dispassionate about it, structure matters? Because in marriage you have a structure, you have a system.

You have got to get the kids off, school, I got to buy a house, see if we can get a bigger house, see if we can put a dormer on. Let's see if we can get a a a fence, let's get that lawn handled, let's get a job, let's get vacation, so I know exactly where I'm going. When you know, especially in the military, one thing people say when they get out of the military they get out of sports. All of a sudden, the coach is not telling them what time practice is, telling them what to eat, how much to lift. In the military, they're not saying you gotta be here at a certain time, even if you don't like doing those things.

So there is a format. Exactly. I think it's actually particularly important for men.

So I was talking to a guy in the outer suburbs of Washington D. Actually conservative. Good job, six figure salary. He owns his own home.

So by kind of the culture standards of what I call the Midas mindset, he should be doing just fine. But he doesn't have a girlfriend. He's not married. And kind of he was sort of palpably lonely and directionless in the evenings and on the weekends. And he kind of said, like, he just doesn't feel like there's much meaning and direction in his life.

So I think, particularly for guys without kind of the purpose and direction that a wife and kids bring to their lives, you know, an obligation to help others, not for yourself. Exactly. It's about weird, not me. Yeah, totally. That's part of my book's part of it.

Yeah. So I think for guys, especially not having this kind of mission and direction and even just sort of a routine on the weekends and the evenings can be really hard for a lot of guys. When we get back, I want to ask Brad about this part: elites and people against the idea of marriage and tradition, and even though they might be the product of it, because what he's seeing, because you are a professor at the University of Virginia. Back in a moment. Brad, you're going to stick around?

Yes, I'll do. And by the way, you can always watch us on the Fox News app. You click on watch, and you just scan over, and you can see the cameras. If you have watching on Fox Nation, you can also watch on the phone. Don't move.

Educating, entertaining, enlightening. You're with Brian Kilmead. The talk show that's getting you talking. You're with Brian Kilmeade. Brad Wilcox is here.

He's the director of the National Marriage Project, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, author of a brand new book called Get Married, Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. And by the way, especially, this is a great theme too, and I'm sure it's not a coincidence that Valentine's Day is today. Yes. Some people talk about relationships. Tell me if this is right.

Brad. Because sometimes I type things wrong. 73% of students at elite colleges, not just Ivy, come from two-parent families. And 51% of high school seniors. I did not finish that sentence, so I'll stop saying it.

Most marriages, you say this too, most marriages do not end in divorce.

So that 50% thing is not true. Right. So there's two different points that, you know, I think to touch on there. One is that what I'm seeing at elite universities, including UVA, is that the vast majority of those kids are actually coming from intact families. And what's striking about that is that only about one in two kids across the board have intact families growing up.

So it's just kind of showing us that even though a lot of our elite students tend to be very progressive on family issues, they're benefiting from this more traditional institution that is the Intact Mary family. That's kind of a bit of a contradiction. But then on the divorce question, what we're seeing is that a lot of Americans believe today that one in two marriages end in divorce. But actually, divorce has been coming down since 1980, Brian.

So that means that today most people who are getting married go the distance. And so it kind of gives us a note of hope when it comes to encouraging our young adults to get married. Right. It's interesting because everyone says, oh, you know, one of every two marriages, you said you found out, and when your studies, it doesn't happen.

So, but when you get those kids to these elite institutions, you have so many friends who are professors, and the ones you experience. University of Virginia. Do they appreciate the two-parent family or do they think that do they realize the role that you say it plays in their success?

So, obviously, you know, they're professors across the spectrum, but they tend to be on the left side. And so, there are some folks who would kind of explicitly articulate this idea that marriage doesn't matter. I talk about it as the family diversity myth. It's this idea that's really about love and money, that any kind of configuration for kids works just fine as long as the parent or parents are loving or the adults are loving, and as long as they have enough money. And what they don't, I think, appreciate is that the intact married family is the strongest option for our kids, you know, on average today.

And that's in part because the intact married family is the situation where you have two parents who are most likely to be spending actually a lot of time and giving a lot of affection and also kind of having the best kind of discipline.

So, the love, if you will, is. Stronger in the intact family. And then, also, financially, there's just no question that when you stay together, you're able to accumulate income and assets far better than if you're doing it as a single parent or if you're kind of moving in and out of a series of relationships or marriages. And now I heard this too. Um I think this is from a different group, the Ramsey group, but they say that having joint Checking accounts.

Do you believe that too? Yeah, so I report in the book basically the couples who have joint accounts are about 15% points more likely to be very happy, also much less likely to get divorced. And I contrast this with Susie Ormond's advice, and she's this big financial guru, and she tells couples to kind of have separate accounts and keep your financial autonomy. I'm like, that's, you know, autonomy and marriage don't go together like a horse and carriage, right? It's about we before me, like you were saying.

And so when it comes to money, having a we before me approach to money is much more sensible. I actually have an experimental study that just came out from Indiana that randomly assigned newlyweds to either joint accounts or single accounts and found that the couples who were assigned to separate accounts had a bigger decline in marital equality in the first two years of marriage.

So pretty rigorous evidence that we before me money is the way to go.

So one thing you have, and just to go through the success sequence, tell me if I have it right, and I don't get my feelings hurt if I don't record correctly.

Well, I don't have a high school degree. Number two, work full-time in your 20s. And number three, marrying before you have children. Correct. So these are the types of things to set yourself out to be successful.

A lot of Americans, you know, I think don't appreciate, don't realize that there really are three pillars to kind of the American dream, financially speaking, and those are education, work, and marriage. And if you kind of, you know, understand that and act accordingly, you're much more likely to make it America. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And let's end with this. You say generations talk left, but they walk right. What do you mean?

So I'm talking about our elites tend to talk left and then walk right. Politically, culturally, you know, so professors, you know, college presidents, Hollywood, you know, producers and moguls, journalists.

So, what I mean by that, and I talk in the book, you know, about Reed Hastings at Netflix, and there's, you know, a lot of offerings from Netflix that you could wonder about. Big time lefty. But he has this thing called Marriage Story, this film that they produce, totally negative portrait of marriage. But he himself has had a stable marriage, I think, of more than 30 years, two kids. They worked on their marriage when they had tough times, and they got through that.

So he's an example of a very marriage-minded elite. Right. Yeah, look at what they're doing, not what they're saying. Get married is the name of the book. Brad, love your insight.

Thanks so much for doing it, and happy Valentine's Day. Thanks, Brian. You too. Back in a moment. From high atop Fox News headquarters in New York City.

Always seeking solutions, never sowing division. It's Brian Killmead. Hi, everyone. Brian Kilmy here, 40th and 6th Middown Manhattan. Heard around the country, around the world.

We're so glad you're here. Here, we have a special election day in the northeast. Got slammed by snow. Not as bad as we've had in the past. I think we got probably some listeners and viewers because of that.

Also, you can always watch us on Fox Nation where you garb your app. On the bottom, it says watch, and you can see what goes on in the studio. My studio is not as nice as the one next door. It became uh, but hopefully, we'll get the rug off the wall soon, and we'll have a more of a um I don't know, more of a race car look. But I like the look, but I think it could be a little bit better, especially when I see what they're doing at the podcast rooms here.

This hour, we're going to be joined by Brian Brenberg, Jackie D'Angelis, and Taylor Riggs. They are the hosts of the Big Money Show on FBN. I want to make sense of the crashing economy yesterday and see how long that will last.

So, why not call in the best, most conversational around? And Mike Lawler standing by. In fact, I'll go to Mike right now. Congressman, welcome back. Thanks for having me, Brian.

Congressman, are you seeing Swazi win by what, five or six points? Does that worry you in your district? No. Look, special elections are always just that, special. And it's a function of turnout.

In this case, Tom Swazi won early voting and absentee by eleven thousand votes in Nassau County.

So we have a lot of work to do heading into November when it comes to early voting and absentee. and getting people to recognize we have to bank the votes. You know, you can't just wait till Election Day to get our votes in when Democrats are getting big advantages during early voting and absentee. The other thing is this: Tom Swazi has been in office for nearly 30 years. He first got elected in 1993 as mayor of Glen Cove.

He represented most of this district for six years in Congress, and Democrats spent $25 million on this special election. And Tom Swazi ran away from Joe Biden. He ran away from the failed policies on the border, the affordability crisis. And so, you know, voters were comfortable with him. They knew him.

Democrats came out and voted. And ultimately, that's what the results bore out. With respect to my district and districts in New York, We are in a very good position as Republican representatives in New York. We are tireless, all of us. In representing our constituents and fighting for them on the issues that matter, whether it's public safety, whether it's the border, whether it's affordability.

Today, we're going to be voting on a measure on SALT tax relief on the House floor that I, along with my Long Island colleagues, brought forward and continue to fight on the issues that matter. My opponent is a radical socialist, Mondair Jones. He was the third most progressive member of Congress. He voted with AOC and Rashida Tlaib ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of the time. He is somebody who called for defunding the police.

That's not popular in my district. And so when you see somebody like Tom Swazi, who presents himself as a centrist who ran away from Biden in this special election, wouldn't allow the president to come out and campaign for him versus someone like Mondair Jones, it's clear that this election is not going to have any bearing on the November election. It would be a loss for Congress because you actually do stuff and you get involved in things and you're very impressive one by one. I think most people, even on the other side, they would be honest. They would do that too.

Because you have to do the hard part. You have to represent your district, and sometimes it means you have to stay away from the right side of your party, the extreme right of your party. And sometimes that's in leadership.

So you have a tough situation where people like to criticize you. That's part of your doing your job. Here's what Steve Kornacki, how he analyzed the special election yesterday, cut 14. He reversed what went wrong for Democrats in 2022. Nassau County and really Long Island itself and the suburbs to the east in New York City in 2022, that's where the red wave actually hit.

It missed in a lot of places of the country. That was the headline story from the 2022 midterms. Democrats had a good night. But one reason the Democrats didn't have an even better night in 2022 and actually retained control of the House was the 3rd District of New York and Long Island itself.

So you can see Swazi in what has become pretty hostile political terrain in the last couple of years for the Democratic Party, actually took a major county here. He used to be the county executive, used to be the congressman, and he took it from a Republican double-digit win two years ago, and he won this portion of the district, the lion's share of the vote, by five points last night. And again, it adds up to about an eight-point win district-wide for Swazi.

So he ends up winning. You said the early vote mattered. The weather mattered. And the fact is, he wants to be tough on the border. What bothers me most, Mike, Congressman, is that that's not how he governed.

That's not how he led. If he wanted to stop the border, Henry Queyar was available 24 hours a day to have a dual press conference.

So was Michael Waltz or you to say, you know, the border's an issue for years. Not you, you weren't there then. But for years, he doesn't care about the border. He read a pie chart. Look, he Tom is a career politician.

And he's a good one at that. And he's been in office for almost thirty years. When he was county executive, he bragged about kicking ice out of Nassau County. He voted with Joe Biden 100% of the time during the two years that they overlapped. And you know, look, Tom obviously has always presented himself, uh, you know, kind of middle of the road.

Uh, voters out in Nassau County. Generally, I like him. But his votes obviously have not been middle of the road. And we'll see what he does now that he gets here and how he votes and whether or not he's going to push back against his party. But ultimately, the Democratic Party has become very extreme in their policies.

Voters in New York are fed up with one-party rule in Albany and New York City. They see the results. You have an incident that crystallizes the problem. Illegal immigrants beating up two law enforcement officers being arrested and then released on cashless bail and then fleeing New York. If that doesn't epitomize the crisis that is New York, I don't know what else does.

Well, you know what else? Let's add in giving us the finger as they leave, and then they could impanel a grand jury and decide they should be jailed. It's just crazy. And you have people like Alvin Bragg who throw victims under the bus. Uh, you know, spit in the face of law enforcement professionals and put criminals on the pedestal.

It's just truly ludicrous. To see what's going on. And Tom Swazi ran away from that. And that's something that I think a lot of the media is missing here. Swazi ran to the right.

You know, he presented himself that he's going to be tough on the border. He didn't want President Biden to come campaign for him. He didn't want him to be there. He talked about how he's not doing a great job on the border.

So this is a special election. Swazi was a known commodity. And again, Democrats spent $25 million. I'll spend you guys two to one.

Okay, Congressman, what do you think of Pillip as a candidate? Do you think she'll run again? Or do you think we have I'm not sure what will happen. Obviously, petitions are slated to start soon in New York to get on the ballot. We still don't know the final maps yet.

As the Democrats stacked the Court of Appeals and got a decision to order the maps to be redrawn for the 2024 cycle.

So we're still waiting on the final maps. I'm not sure what the plan will be in that district. But I thought Mozzie has a great American story. This is a woman who is Ethiopian-born, moved to Israel when she was nine, served in the IDF, came to America, mother of seven, serves her local community as a county legislator. She was a great candidate.

It's just, you know, special elections can be difficult. And I think as a party, we need to recognize the importance of early voting and absentee voting. It is critical. No, I hear you.

So listen, Donald Trump came out on True Social because she would not ask for his help, and she didn't really endorse him or run from him or to him. Say, Republicans just don't learn. But maybe she was still a Democrat. I have an almost 99% endorsement rate. In primaries, very good in general election, but just watch this very foolish woman, Mazzie Pillup, running in a race when she didn't endorse me and tried to straddle the fence.

Would she have been better off endorsing a full-throated endorsement of Trump? Look, I don't think that was really going to have a bearing on the race. In the end, I think the bottom line is you had a known commodity in Tom Swazi, who ran to the right, And the Democrats spent $25 million on the race. I think that's really what the determinant factor was. You know, I believe she came out and said she voted for the president, she would support him.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, that's not what voters made a determination on. It was a binary choice. And ultimately, Democrats came out to vote in the special. All right, enough of that special election. Let's talk about what the Senate passed yesterday.

It's going to be billions of dollars for Israel, most of which goes to Ukraine, and some for Gazans. How do you feel about it? What will you do with that Senate bill? How will you vote? Look, I have supported aid for Israel, for Ukraine and for Taiwan because Russia, China and Iran have been in an unholy alliance that seeks to undermine and destabilize the United States and our allies.

The House is going to have to work together to come up with a package. You know, it doesn't have to be exactly what the Senate does. Obviously, I think there's a lot of. uh dispute with some of the humanitarian aid, both for Ukraine and for Gaza. And especially when you see a situation in Gaza where UNRWA Is as corrupt an organization as could be and should be defunded and disbanded.

And so I think there's certainly a lot of concern on that. Obviously, with respect to lethal force and replenishing our stockpiles, we're going to need to do that. And so I think the question is how we go about doing that in the House. But we're going to have to get aid and support to our allies. But you know the problem, Congressman.

The President never talks about his strategy, has to tell he has to slow walk everything. We have no idea why we're in it. And then when we see the border fall apart, even people like Lindsey Graham and Mike Waltz say, wait a second, they're as anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian as there is. They're having trouble mustering the support and selling a strategy that they can't get behind, even though if the mission is right. No question, and the administration has done a horrifically bad job.

of selling specifically with respect to Ukraine, continued funding to the American people. And they have failed to answer legitimate, serious questions from members of Congress as to the path forward. We had a classified briefing with Secretary Blinken just a few weeks ago, and frankly, that was probably the most productive conversation that we've had on Ukraine since I've been in Congress. And without getting into details, I'll just say it was more forthright and frank discussion about what the plan is. And I think the administration needs to do a much better job Of handling this both from a PR standpoint, but also in terms of dealing with Congress so that we can actually execute on an actionable plan that.

you know, brings success. for the goals and objectives that we have. Vladimir Putin is not our friend, and anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. But obviously, just throwing money at this crisis Is not going to solve it. You need to have a strategy and a plan, and the administration needs to do a better job of explaining that.

Because it is one of both.

So the impeachment of Majorkis is going to die in the Senate. Is it worth it? Look, Secretary Majorkas and the Biden administration have failed miserably in their responsibility to uphold the Constitution. to enforce our immigration laws and to secure our border. Since Joe Biden took office, ten million migrants have crossed our southern border, most of them illegally.

Ninety percent of them have been released into our country. Catch and release should not be the policy of the United States. and they need to enforce our laws. And he has willfully and systemically refused to do so.

So I had no problem supporting the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkis. He has lied to Congress on numerous occasions. uh and failed to uphold his constitutional oath. and responsibility. Obviously, the Senate will do what they will do, but I think it is important to send a message to the administration.

Enough is enough. Enforce the law. They chose to reverse a lot of the policies of the previous administration For short-sighted political purposes rather than looking at the effectiveness of them in keeping this migrant crisis at bay.

So, they bear the responsibility here. It's not just your district, but it's your state. Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, all affected by the massive influx of these illegal immigrants taking over soccer fields.

Now, there might be organized crime gangs. They're talking about these moped gangs that could be coming from Venezuela who have this cyber team to not only take your bag, take your phone, but actually wipe out your accounts. This is taking root. Where is Chuck Schumer on this? Where are all the powerful Democrats wielding their power in Congress to get things done on the border or at least in these cities?

Look, House Republicans passed H.R. two back in May of last year. Chuck Schumer stood silent. Silent for months. And it wasn't until the supplemental package was in jeopardy that they finally decided: okay, we've got to do something on the border.

But it is an embarrassment what has happened in New York. Governor Hochl and Mayor Adams have kicked. Public school kids out of their schools, sent them to remote learning to house migrants. in public schools. They are talking about cutting state school aid.

To public schools to fund the illegal immigration in New York City. to the tune of billions of dollars. Then you look at the Crime crisis, you had an illegal immigrant in Times Square shoot a tourist and then shoot at law enforcement officers. It's totally insane. Right, but it's amazing.

He wants to get rid of energy drinks. He'll have a press conference about energy drinks, but we can't get rid of illegal immigrants. We have nowhere to house them. It's costing us billions of dollars, and the federal government's not helping, nor should they. They should just steal the border.

Chuck Schumer's more concerned about powdered nicotine than he is about what's happening in New York. It's shameful. There's no question about it.

Well, look, he's running for two more years. Congressman Mike Lawler will have his hands full whenever they tell him his district, but he's on House Financial and Foreign Affairs. Thanks, Congressman. Thanks, Brian. Take care.

You got it. 1-866-408-7669. I see you up there. I'll get to your calls next. Diving deep into today's top stories, it's Brian Kilmead.

He's so busy, he'll make your head spin. It's Brian Killmead. Hey Chris, you'll see here in the Cat Skills on WABC. Hey Chris. Hey, good morning, Brian.

The analysis that Brian Kil that Mike Waller just did on your program is the best analysis I've heard of the results from last night. All the other pundits, I heard Andrew Giuliani, I called into Dominic Carter last night. Everybody's off base with what happened last night and why. Um and what the point that you made about Mike Lawler When the district maps get put out for the New York congressional districts getting redrawn, which might happen the end of this week, the first draft. If Lawler gets put into the same district, as State Senator James Scufis, who represents much of Orange County.

That would be the best debate. that I think would be one for the ages because James Skupis is one of the best debaters I've ever seen, and Mike Waller is a very talented politician. Waller's District, Biden won by over ten points. And the the state senate district that James Scupis represents. He only won it by 890 votes.

And uh Lee Zeldon won it by over fifteen percent.

So that would be a great matchup. It would be great. I mean, Lower somebody to get things done, too. I know Michael Walsh couldn't believe his foreign policy and his intellect. Emma.

Information you want, truth you demand. This is the Brian Kill Me Show. Hi, welcome back everyone. I have three great guests. Don't ask me who I like best.

It's not important. Brian Brenberg, Jackie DeAngelis, Taylor Riggs. Together they make the big money show. They don't start until 1 o'clock, but yet they pledge to bring their A-game right now. Can you back me up on this?

Or are you going to keep it a little low? Whatever happens, happens. You have to pick it one, Taylor.

Well, maybe this is our warm-up. It's like the opening act. That hurts. And then it's a little bit more like a huge. I don't like to feel like a warm-up.

Let's work out the kinks here. Let me try some new material. Hold it a little back. You're like drinks before dinner. Thank you.

I'll take that. Better than Taylor's warm-up.

So, first off, Jackie, when we saw the market drop like this and consumer prices up at 3%, I'm thinking to myself: wait a second. What's going on? While I'm doing um we're watching the market fall apart. Uh what's going on? I mean, why is everyone panicking?

So I'm going to take a victory lap for the big money team here because we have been saying that we see a bumpy road ahead and that the problems with inflation have not been ironed out yet. And this is exactly what we saw yesterday. There are some caveats in this report. Things have turned around and shifted. Surprisingly, it's not in energy, but like housing is a huge problem.

Insurance is a huge problem. Food continues to be a huge problem. And so we're seeing the numbers, at least on a monthly basis, go in the wrong way, Brian. And when you look at the real wages since President Biden took office, real wages adjusted for inflation, including yesterday's report, are down 2.1 percent since January of 2021.

So people are not keeping up with the price increases that are happening on the street. I agree. I'm nodding my head at Jackie because the numbers are going in the wrong direction. I think yesterday we looked at about 19 of the big components within CPI. 11 of those, that's more than half, are re-accelerating back up, seeing price gains in the basket of CPI.

So none of it is good. And to Jackie's point, a lot of this is the sticky stuff that doesn't have a chance of coming back down. When you think housing, once they raise your rent, your rent isn't going back down no matter how much the overall other parts of inflation start to fall. And so when that, same with insurance rates. Once insurance rates go up, they're not going to come down next year just because we think that inflation is going to fall.

And is interest rate rate. And that's the problem. They don't trade like commodities. Right. And guys, is one of the big things now all of a sudden the interest rate drop doesn't seem inevitable?

Yeah. Yes. By the way, I don't like being the other Brian here. It's good when I'm the only Brian.

Now I feel like I'm going to be a good person.

Now you know how I feel when you ask me to come on your competition. Thing. The weird thing you guys do on your show, they're like, Brian, walk on. I'm like, there is no chair. They're like, just walk on.

And I don't get a chair until the break. Yeah, you earn it. I find, but that's that's a different within you.

Okay, never mind. We make you work for it. Right. Like, but I walk on, but I think people at home are like, where's he going? You know, he doesn't, they don't want him here.

The chair would be there. It's like an existential play. You know, you've got to think a little more deeply about it than that. Like, why do you need a chair, really?

So don't distract me with my great question. I know. It was a good question. Here's the problem. And this gets to the housing thing.

So mortgage rates bumped up already today based on what happened yesterday with inflation. And that's going to create this kind of vicious cycle because the problem with the housing market is that rates are too high, so nobody wants to sell. You need to come down so people will sell again and buy. That's not going to happen with inflation up. And one of the big feeders of inflation.

Is housing costs.

So it's a catch-22 right now. The problem the Fed has, they've been trying to cut inflation by raising rates, and they've done a lot on that front, but they've got a federal government that's spending, spending, spending, and they're spending even more this year. Inflation's never going to dip below that 3%, 4% level with that kind of spending. Can I tell you what Fred Smith, guys, just let you hear what Fred Smith said last night about what worries him, founder of FedEx, Cut 30. The political process is really Focused on the extremes of both parties.

No one is supporting trade, which made America great really since Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Hull passed the first major trading bill in nineteen thirty four. And then we led opening the world and restored Germany and Japan, our enemies. to prosperity through trade. and the American Alliance system. And then on top of that, our financial capabilities to print money at will is dependent on the dollar remaining the reserve currency.

And the so-called BRICS alliance, Brazil, Russia, India and China, have set out on a deliberate course to dethrone the dollar. If that happens and we can't sell our bonds, I can assure you the living standards that we all enjoy today are going to be a thing of the past. Jackie, how serious should we take this BRICS thing? I take it pretty seriously. I think what we're seeing is pretty much unprecedented the amount of debt that this nation has racked up and continues only to add to, more than $34 trillion.

Brian's talking about the crazy spending that's come from this administration as well. You are putting us in a position, as you've devalued our currency through all of this money printing and spending, in a situation where we may no longer be competitive. It's got to stop at some point, yet you see nothing from this administration about putting the brakes on this whatsoever. There are some long-term ramifications as well. I know preview, we're going to be talking a lot about that CBO report at the top of our show at one, but it parlays into this really nicely.

You don't feel the effects necessarily outside of inflation on a day-to-day basis. The sort of long term, this debt overhang on this country, it does start to impact Americans when you think about how much of our budget is now going to pay interest expense, not principal. We're not paying down debt, we're just paying the interest on that. A trillion this year over a trillion expense this year. And it's crowding out.

Yeah, more than almost anything. Crowding out all of those other things that we should be paying for. And so back in the 1980s, when you had projections for 3% GDP, projections are now for about 1.8% GDP because all of that stunts real economic growth.

So here's a naive question. If we could get this budget in line, and they did the Simpson Bowles thing to get our spending in line. And it comes out, and these guys spend, what, two years to do it? And no one even looks at it. And Obama says, I'll never be able to pass that.

And Paul Ryan goes, even though I was on that count, I'm not going to sign off on that.

So if I would never serve on this. But if we begin to cut Or or the budget. Can you renegotiate that debt or do we all just link to the prime rate? Can you go do like we're able to do? No, no, I think that's viewed as uh that would almost look like a default in a way.

Uh, you look at it? Here's how you do it. Like, no, no, well, that's why no one wants to do it. Nobody wants to touch the issue, Republicans and Democrats alike. Yeah, look, the way you renegotiate that is you get your spending under control, and then as your debt rolls over and you don't have 7% interest rates.

Then you can actually pay a lower interest rate and get things under control. You don't have to do anything funny or crazy. You just have to live responsibly, and you're not in a situation where you're paying a trillion dollars. And that we, to your point, we just don't have people who want to live responsibly. They want to get elected.

And those two things right now happen to be at loggerheads. And the funny part, Brian, is that in personal finance, they'll always tell you as an individual, if you have debt, that you need to pay that debt down and not service the interest, or it will just go on and on and on.

So why are we giving that advice to people on a personal basis, yet we're not running our country in that way? That's a great point. I like to, I just when people say the economy is healthy and we're humming, we're the first ones to go back from the pandemic. And when I'm on your show and I listen to you guys, the first thing you bring up is the debt. We are underfinanced every single month.

We're spending more than we have. And I think, again, sort of on the short-term ramifications, you don't see that. We are still the world's reserve currency that may not be replaced for 20 years, maybe 50. I don't know. But it's sort of that long term.

When you start to hear business leaders like FedEx, Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, Jay Powell, outside J-Powell, those are people running real businesses. When they're now starting to talk about how this feels unsustainable, that's when our ears perk up because these are business leaders who are now thinking about the future of their business in this country, and it doesn't look sustainable. I want you to hear what Janet Yellen says about energy costs, not acknowledging that they cut all contracts for new natural gas. Cut 32. Or work to give families.

more breathing room starts with energy costs. I traveled to Boston last month where I talked about how the administration. Took action after Russia's invasion of Ukraine to prevent spikes in energy costs. Though we're focused on making historic investments in transitioning toward clean energy in the medium and long run, Record domestic oil and natural gas production have addressed our immediate needs. Can I can I please?

I listened to that and I'm dying. As somebody who's followed the energy markets, we covered this story about Biden banning natural gas exports. Where are other countries going to get their natural gas? They're going to go straight to Russia.

So we're trying to pass or passed in the Senate a $95 billion aid package, mostly that goes towards Ukraine to fight Russia. Yet, the same way you're funding Iran in a roundabout way to attack regions in the Middle East, you will now be giving Russia more ammunition to fight back against Ukraine, who you're funding. None of this makes sense. And he got away with it. There was so much going on in the news, he just suppressed, I think, these all new leases that are not going to happen.

And one of the things they say is, we have enough. We're producing so much natural gas. By the way, we are, right? Yeah. That we don't need those new leases.

But how would you feel if you, Europe? This is a chance to make money. They must rather depend on us as a customer. We need to set up terminals. Don't we need to set up terminals in Europe?

Well, this is what gives us some leverage too in the world. You just talked about the bricks wanting to dethrone the dollar. Why do they want to do that? They want more leverage in the world. You get leverage by making your currency the reserve currency.

If you're the world's energy supplier, you have leverage. You dictate things. You can set things up in a way that's beneficial to you and your allies. But if you don't play to your strengths, Than your competitor does. And that's what's happened, whether it's the dollar, whether it's energy, whether it's racking up debt, we're letting our competitors play to their strengths and we're cutting out our needs on our own.

And what was wild is energy, actually in the inflation report yesterday, was the bright spot. If it had actually come down, you take that out. If energy has historically been the problem with inflation, CPI would have looked much worse. By the way, we brought Venezuela back into the oil market and we said, if you promise to have a real election, you can do it. And guess what they did?

They banned all opponents from running. And do we hear any press conference to say Venezuela is out loud? No. Do you know that they're about to take Guyana, which is, I guess, an oil rich small country without a defense? And it's dirty oil, Brian.

We have the cleanest oil in the world. But if you you you guys are the experts, but if you get Iran to pump and you get Venezuela to pump, this way and you empty our reserves, is that a way to keep the pro price of oil and gas down and get a guy reelected? No. Well, he does. I mean, look, he does want oil and gas prices to be low.

Let's be honest. But he doesn't want to pump more because he's not thinking long-term. Gone back to our main theme here. He's not thinking long-term energy independence, he's thinking 2024, November. Low prices.

And that's why the business leaders are saying we need somebody who's thinking longer than that. I'm gonna bring up Jimmy Fayla, where he said, Unfortunately, when we're all in the same swimming pool, NUP, we're all swimming in the same pee. I understand that people care about the climate. You know, I do. We all want a healthy, cleaner world.

No one wants to inhale smog. But when we shut down our oil and gas production, and everyone else, like Venezuela or Iran, increases theirs, guess what? We're all breathing the same air.

So you have to put it in the middle of the matter. Just one quick thing before you move on. Prices are also lower because of demand issues right now, not necessarily because of the balance in the market.

Well, do you think demand is lessened? Yes. And also, worries about China and growth in China, and that could be a bubble that's going to be an ugly burst. You know, I signed Larry Kudlow for you, I signed Stuart Varney for you. These are the people that are supposed to be resources, not Jimmy Phala.

I didn't have Taylor quoting Phala today. I didn't go on like this. I mean, you take Comeback of Eternity and you quote Jimmy Phala as a reference. I mean, you have four pages. It's a good analogy.

I mean, it resonated with me. I was like, oh, I can see how we're all breathing the same smog and swimming in the same bee. Right. Fantastic. There was another story that came out this weekend.

I don't know if you guys had a chance to discuss it. And that is. How these major corporations are just blowing off urgency from, you would assume, the State Department and still doing deals in China.

So, I mean, what is it going to take for people to realize there are other markets? I heard there was a decoupling, the tariffs were working to a degree, but these major companies are still looking to China. Because we have to be more competitive here in the U.S. As long as it's cheaper to do business there, businesses will run a business and they will still be in China. We've got to make it better for them here.

And nobody has done that. Trump was on his way. He had started laying the groundwork for it, but then it stopped in its track with Pres uh tracks with President Biden. I want to give you one long statement so you can get working on your show, but have you put anything together yet? Because Brian says he does most of the work.

Our show? Our show's done. We're ready to go. Like the teask at the top. We're doing Talking about debt deficit, CBO, how business leaders are reacting to what they feel like is an unsustainable path.

Yeah, speaking of Larry Kudlow, he's on the show. Is he really? Wait, are you zooming him in or is he in studio? Oh, no, live. Oh, Jimmy Phila is not in studio.

Right now. Are you going to have him walk out for the teas without a chair? No, we put his chair. No, we give him his chair. See, that's unbelievable.

I walk out. They go, I just don't have a chair. And I just walk out anyway. They go, your music's going to be up. It's going to be a wide shot.

But for Larry Kudlow, he's going to walk and sit down. It's a respect thing. You earn it. That's all I'm saying. It's just not there yet.

It's just not there. One day. Thank you. A little bit of hope. I know Jimmy Phaler, but I tend to.

How is his name coming up like 10 times in this interview? That's wrong. It's Taylor. It's Taylor. Brian Brenberg, Jack DeAndalus.

Taylor Riggs, co-host of The Big Money Show. You see it every day on FBN at 1 o'clock Eastern Time, earlier if you're somewhere else. Thanks, guys. You bet, man. Back in a moment.

Thank you. Learning something new every day on the Brian Killmeat Show. From his mouth to your ears, it's Brian Kilmead. Tony Bobolinski handled himself very well. I've never seen Democrats or anyone act worse in a deposition than they did.

The Democrats couldn't handle the truth, and that's what Tony Bobolinski delivered today. He delivered the truth. He talked about Joe's involvement. He talked about the numerous times he talked to Joe Biden. He mentioned that Joe Biden thanked him for what he was doing with his brother and his son.

So Joe Biden knew very well the role Tony Bobolinski was playing in the Biden orbit. And he talked about what CEFC was.

So that is James Comer talking about Tony Bobolinski behind closed doors. I have a pretty good source.

So Bobolinski, in case you don't know, was an executive brought in by Hunter Biden and Jim Biden to help them navigate international business deals. Why? He has this rich military background, this international business experience. And he was asked to come out basically out of retirement and help out. Then, when he realized how corrupt this was and how bad it was for America, and that this guy was actually running for president, he backed out and went to tell a story.

Nobody wanted to listen. If you covered Bobolinski, your account was frozen by then-owned the owners of Twitter with Facebook. And now he's coming out behind closed doors. He was talking to the Senate when it was a majority Republican. They lose the Senate.

They lose Bobolinski.

Now they got him back. He said, quote, he provided information. He provided text messages that the big guy was indeed Joe Biden. Why? He has it all there, including Rob Walker's urgings to him: don't ever bring up Joe Biden.

The family is very paranoid. He writes back, they should. be paranoid. I believe we have presented a collection of projects that parallel the streets, parallel the interests of you and your team, and we look forward to discussing them in detail. That is the draft letter to the CEFC president, who is Chinese, which was distributed among Hunter and his partners, Rob Walker and James Gillar.

That is from Tony Bobolinski to everybody involved. And if you want to say, oh, Bobolinski, well, he's full of it.

Well, let me just give you an idea of his background. He served in the U.S. Navy on this Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, a decorated master training specialist instructor. He's the command's chief technology officer, holding Q security clearances from the Energy Department, from the National Security Agency, and later served in Direct Input Officer for the command in his final Navy Fitness Report. Graduated.

Obviously, he actually wrestled at Penn State, had a lot of friends there. And Bob Melinski said that, believe it or not, while they're inter David Weiss is interviewing everybody to find out what Hunter Biden was up to, They never called Tony Bobolinski, even though he had these text messages, he had all this information, had the money in the transactions. David Weiss never called the business partner of Hunter Biden. who is more than willing to talk and whose stories stand up to scrutiny. You'll assume the brain kill me, Chill.

Listen to the show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus, on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your Prime Membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Mm.