The election super depressing in a number of ways. And I think let's kick this off with the Bible verse that most frequently is coming to my mind throughout woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter, Isaiah chapter five, Verse twenty.
I find it amazing that I guess in this sense.
For most of my life as.
A political observer.
One of the things that I sort of noticed that always bugged me up until very recently was how even in presidential debates, even on news debate shows, sort of topics like abortion were always sort of skidded around. I think people were nervous to actually flat out argue for or against the nervous to actually duke it out.
To have an actual argument about it.
And I would say probably for most of the last twenty four Okay, the two thousand election was like the first election I was really kind of paying attention. I was thirteen years old, I was very engaged, and you know, listening to talk radio, et cetera. I don't think abortion was ever the lead issue for any of the presidential
campaigns from two thousand through even twenty twenty. I don't think it's the lead issue in this election as far as how most people are thinking of voting, but it's certainly up there in a way that it hasn't been for any other election in my lifetime.
And one of the things.
I always realized was people just liked to say that abortion was such a contentious issue. This is such a contentious issue, And actually it was almost like so contentious that even in the context of a presidential debate, you wouldn't see the two major candidates actually duke it out about the ethics of abortion. No one would actually have that argument. No one would actually kind of go to the fundamentals and say, well, what is this thing? Is this good or is this not good? Is the unborn?
Does the unborn child have value as a living human being, living member of society, or is this just a non valuable human organism. I wouldn't actually, if you really think about it, you go back to prior presidential debates, no one's actually trying to have that argument. No one's actually making the case. The Democrat candidate just sort of talks past it with their slogans, and the Republican candidate is skittish and doesn't want to talk about it.
That's the dynamic.
Donald Trump, of all people, actually wound up engaging with it more vigorously, honestly than prior presidential candidates, just purely because he would actually talk about third trimester abortions and how vile they are, which was actually I think an effective thing against Hillary Clinton, certainly, but no one would actually sit there and debate it, no one, And Democrats even had to be a little careful with how they
messaged on it. They had to be a little careful to not appear like absolute radicals on the issue, which they always were, so they would, you know, they'd say things like, you know, safe, legal and rare. That was the bit, you know, the Clinton era slogan safe legal and rare. And they've been a little quieter about what their slogan is right now. Their slogan right now is not safe, legal and rare. They don't want it to
be safe, legal and rare. They want it to be accessible universally, meaning they don't they will sacrifice safety for the sake of universal access, and they demand legal And when I look at the Democrat messaging in these last days of the election, Harris had this big rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which it seemed like this is you know, this is one of her last big rallies in the key swing state. Okay, and all right, so here she is. This is like one of her very last rallies. It's in the key
swing state of Pennsylvania. Here's her closing message.
And look, Donald Trump's not done. He would ban abortion nationwide, yes, even here in Pennsylvania if he were successful. He would restrict access to birth control, put IVF treatments at risk, and force states to monitor women's pregnancies. Just google Project twenty twenty five. Read the plans for yourself.
Now here's the sad thing about that. First is the idea that, I mean, just the whole mindset is so sad.
Having actually started a nonprofit clinic that provides OBGYN care to women, having actually set up systems for directly interacting with women who are considering abortion, and having actually really exhaustively poured over the data and heard the actual stories of women considering abortion, it's so sad that there's a whole political movement built around this and like this, the problems we're seeing the drive towards abortion has to do
with the atomization of society. Young women, young moms feeling isolated from their communities, isolated from their own families, sometimes isolated from friends, from support networks, the breakdown of community associations, churches, civic entities, whatever. Where these women feel so totally alone, so totally unsupported, that they don't feel like they can handle a pregnancy. And here in California, our public funded health systems, our public funded insurance systems, financially push you
towards abortion more so than childbirth. If you wanted to get an abortion, it is easy. If you want to keep your baby is hard. There aren't enough doctors who want to take medical because medical is so screwed up. There aren't enough places to go to get an appointment. Whereas with abortion easy in California. Not in you know, not in some caricature of a Republican state that cuts Medicaid funding and cuts funding for healthcare.
No, in California.
Medical is so screwed up in California that doctors don't want to take medical because they lose money on every patient.
A global bill for delivering.
A baby from a mom who has private insurance, the global bill for patient visits and the actual delivery itself is forty five hundred dollars. The global bill for a medical patient exact same scenario is fifteen hundred dollars. They lose money. Dealing with medical is a nightmare. Dealing with the government is horribly difficult. Doctors don't want to do it.
So you have fewer and fewer entities that are able to care for women, provide prenatal care for women, and planned parenthood will get you in and get you an abortion quick with no copey, with no deductible because California got rid of the cope and the deductible. And who's getting a nice fat reimbursement from insurance from medical with
extra supplemented California dollars the abortion provider. So women who are scared, who are atomized from their families, who and this is the key, don't really want to have the abortion to begin with.
Don't let me repeat that.
About two thirds of women who have abortions don't really want to have an abortion. I see this anecdotally and it is backed up by the stats. These women don't want to have abortions. They are driven towards it by
sinful structural problems. Structures of sin was I think the John Paul the second phrase for this kind of thing, the structures of sin within our culture, within our government, within our public health systems, our public funded health insurance systems, that are driving women towards abortion when all they need. And I've seen this directly in our work at Right
Till Life of Central California. I've seen it directly. All these women really need is to slow down, talk with someone and think about what is the support system you have in place that maybe, yes, you can have this baby. And instead, our laws, our public health systems are pushing women towards abortion far more readily, far more easily, far more simply than they are towards childbirth. It is evil.
It is wicked for one of the two major presidential campaigns to make this its signature issue, for it to have convinced an entire demographic of eighteen to thirty five year old women that.
This is the right to do.
This, this thing that sixty seven percent of the women who participate in it don't want to do.
It's against their preference. They would rather have the baby if they could, but they feel like they can't.
That that freedom, which is a mockery of the word freedom is the single most important right that they have as Americans. It should guide their vote for the president of the United States. It is a tragedy, and listen to the things. And this is the cornerstone of the Kamala Harris campaign. It's all she's got. It's the only thing that she pulls better than Donald Trump on. The only issue she has in her back pocket that she knows she pulls better on is abortion. And so it
is front and center. And I think the bigger tragedy here is because of one bad election cycle in twenty twenty two, Donald Trump can't effectively respond. He feels like it's a loser of an issue. I know of people who talked to Donald Trump and heard him say that to their face.
This issue is a loser. The pro life cause is a loser politically, and as a.
Result, all of the good pro life things that are
in the Republican platform that are not anti woman. If limit, if you think unrestricted abortion is pro woman, then talk to the sixty seven percent of women who don't even want to have these abortions in the first place, who feel like they have no choice, who are having this abortion either because they were pressured by boyfriends, possibly even in a small number of cases even coerced, or just feel coerced by the pressures of atomization, isolation finances.
Et cetera. Who are shoved that way by medical.
Shoved that way by a lack of providers able to care, who are willing to care for them. And before you say, what have you, I've started one more nonprofit obgyn clinic to care for these women than you have.
I can guarantee that what have you done? All your pro life is just care about fetuses?
Shut up, walk a mile in my shoes first before you start saying crap like that. I think that maybe the most tragic thing about what Harris said. Here's the list of things Harris said. She says that Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide, he wants to stop access to birth control, he wants to threaten IVF and follow Project twenty twenty five. I think the saddest thing is that Trump doesn't want to limit abortion nationwide, that he has
not been super clear. I mean, I guess I find it highly questionable that Trump would follow through with Democrat led mandates for contraception for employers who.
Don't want to cover it.
I think he'd probably be the right way on that, But threaten IVF. Trump doesn't want to threaten IVF one iota with the you know, ten embryos destroyed for every successful.
IVF implantation more or less, and follow Project twenty twenty five.
Trump has only decried Project twenty twenty five a million times, inspite of the fact that everything Project twenty twenty five says about the abortion issue is sound and great. And I think this is sort of the tragedy is at this moment where one whole political movement is dedicated to calling evil good, calling good evil. Who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter? As Isaiah says, I guess it just saddens me that I don't think Trump has a response for that.
I hope.
I think Trump is going to win, and I hope if he gets elected he just does all the same things he did as first term.
If he does, it will be a successful.
And positive pro life presidency. But he hasn't committed this go around.
To doing any of those things.
And I guess that's the tragedy here, is that there's this assumption on the part of Republicans. You know, I'll discuss this when we return. I think that Republicans are actually afraid that their messaging is anti woman, when it is the last thing from it. It's actually pro selfish men. That's next on the John Gerardy Show. I've been sort of stunned a little bit at how abortion is really the central messaging of these last days of the Harris campaign.
It's all Harris has left. It's all Harris has left is the abortion issue. And like one of her big last rallies that she has in Harrisburg, what's the cornerstone of it.
It's abortion.
And I feel like Republicans Trump included, have been nervous about how to respond and this idea. I mean, Trump is openly criticis been critical of Florida's law that bans abortion after six weeks, saying, oh, you need more weeks, you need more weeks available for people to have abortions. Trump has said that, all right, that's not a pro life position. I mean, clearly he's favoring abortion for much of the first trimester, that it's somehow too harsh to
women to ban abortion. That's not a pro life position. And I think Trump has been embarrassed by the pro life position to he I think he actually deep down feels like he has to actually agree with the contention that it's anti woman. Let's talk just real quickly though, about whom this is really benefiting, which is selfish men.
So much of the there have been several ads in the last few days about basically basically several ads in the last few days Harris ads aimed at guys because the Harris campaign realizes, oh my gosh, we're losing young men, like young men are completely not voting for Harris. One of them has involved a guy pleasuring himself, and then all of a sudden, a Republican congressman jumps in to say, oh, Republicans want to ban pornography, limit pornography. That's terrible, isn't it.
Oh yeah, that is terrible.
I'm going to vote Kamala Harris.
Another shows a man and a woman having sex and the man it's oh, my condom broke, and the woman says, it's okay, I've got plan B. And then a Republican congressman comes into the room and says, so you can't
do that. Republicans want to stop you from having sex, and the messaging to men, the only messaging the Harris campaign can have for men around sexuality is one of selfishness, selfishness, avoiding responsibility, personal gratification, because that's kind of what abortion is ultimately, when you message it to a male voter, Hey, do you want to get out of responsibility for the natural consequence of your actions?
Support legal abortion? Men?
Are you desperate to not have to pay for a child who came about because you were horny? Support legal abortion? And there were plenty, plenty, plenty, plenty of quotes from guys.
I mean, I remember in the White Dudes for Harris, you know, zoom call where they were raising money all these White Dudes for Harris, where Pete Bodagich talked about how abortion makes men more free, more free for what Pete more free to escape the consequences of their actions, all of the you know, I had this tweet I saw from uh this guy named John Hassen is a conservative kind of commentator guy, and he writes out here are all the things that the Harris campaign has been
promoting to young men as the reasons they should vote legal weed, cryptocurrency, porn, video games, they've been just so they've had had try to have Tim Walls play Madden the NFL video game against AOC of all people. What a bizarre combination of people. Ben Walls comes out with several tweets, including another today that seemed to indicate he has never watched a single snap of football in his life.
Video games and avoiding fatherhood. This is the vision of masculinity from the left, weed crypto porn, video games and not being a father. That's the only thing abortion is promoting for men is the avoidance of responsibility. How is supporting abortions somehow kind to women? And again, let me just reiterate, there's this Republican. I think there are a lot of these Republicans who genuinely are afraid that they are being hostile to women by supporting restrictions on abortion.
I think Trump has more or less admitted this because he opposed Florida's six weeks abortion ban and said it was too harsh, too few weeks in which women could have abortions, that that's too harsh to women. What about abortion do you think is positive for women? Sixty seven percent of women report they would rather not have an abortion.
It is this undertold epidemic of abortions in America that are either pressured or coerced by economic circumstance or and I think this is much more common than anyone on the left wants to admit. Women who are pressured into abortions by the fathers of these children, where if it's not outright coercion, maybe it's a threat that I, you know, I never agree to have this baby. If you have this baby, then we're done. I'm not going to support you in any way. If you have this baby, you're
on your own. If you have this baby. There is an epidemic of that kind of thing. There are probably tens of thousands of women on the low end of this who are having abortions for that precise kind of pressure. I wish Republicans would have the perspective that there is nothing about abortion. The social science backs it up, the stats back it up. This is not something kind to women, This is not something supportive of women, This is not
something that is pro women. Multiple surveys shows between sixty and seventy percent of women do not even want the abortions they are having, would rather not And it's again, it saddens me that we live in this topsy turvy world where good is called evil, evil is called good, and I feel like Republicans don't have.
The wherewithal to really address it.
All Right, We're gonna shift to something light, the bizarre world of online yarn sellers.
We'll talk.
We'll talk about this bizarre thing I found next on the John Girardi Show. I want to talk real quick about that. Just I need to lighten the mood. The first two segments of this show were way too serious.
I think it's true. Everything I said was bright.
Maybe it's appropriately serious, but we're it's a little heavy. It's Friday afternoon, guys. Let's end on a some levity here. I want to talk about this bizarre world, this little pocket of wokeness, if you will, as much as the word woke is overused, this little pocket of such extreme navel gazing, so insane, but so much in your bubble that you don't realize how insane you sound to the entire rest of the world. This little world that my
wife told me about. All Right, my wife is really good at a lot.
Of different things.
She's a very good little artist. She's a good photographer. She was actually a fine Arts major at Notre Dame. So she's actually a very good artist, very good photographer. She is a great cook. She's a spectacular baker in particular, and she has lots of skills with knitting and all kinds of things. Knitting in particular. My wife's really good at knitting. She's made sweaters for all the kids, kind
of like in Harry Potter. One of the things that have one of the characters, Ron Weasley, his mom knits sweaters for all the kids and it has each kid's first name initial on the sweater.
And Holly did that.
For our kids, so our kids have Jack has a sweater with the letter J on it, and Selphie has a sweater with the letter S on it, etc.
Maddie with them.
Holly's a really good knitter and as a result, Holly wants to buy yarn for various knitting projects, so she'll knit. You know, friends having a baby, she'll knit sweater for the baby, or a blanket for the baby or whatever. And there's apparently a knitting themed social media site called Ravelry, which who knew. I had heard my wife mention ravelry before talking with her sisters or friends whatever, and I had assumed it was just like a store where you
buy knitting product. Apparently, it's a whole social media website of people who knit talking about knitting, sharing projects, sharing, I guess, sharing patterns, etc.
And my wife mentions to me.
Oh, gosh, you know, it's probably a probably something about a fat tax for when you buy yarn.
Wait a minute, what fat tax? What are you talking about? Or a plus size discount? Huh So what I learned from my wife is that there's this whole sort of.
Little mini industry of women who die yarn, and they usually have some kind of like like an Etsy shop or some kind of like little online shop. It's a little small business that these individual women run and they are selling. They get yarn from some kind of wholesaler, they diet themselves, and then they sell it. Interesting colors, interesting collections of colors, themes of color sets. You know.
My wife was mentioning, my kids really love the children's picture books written by this artist slash author named Tommy to Paula, who writes a lot of I think he was a Catholic and he had a lot of very nice Christian Catholic he themed books.
He wrote The strikean note books.
So here's this yarn seller who's selling her Tommy to paula themed color palette of yarns for projects that you know, moms who like these books want to knit. And my wife mentioned something about a fat tax.
I'm like, what the heck is that.
Apparently these yarn sellers are so left wing and so woke. This is the kind of insular, insane liberalism that goes on, and it is fomented on this little social media site Rivelry that everyone everyone seems to want to do. There's rushing to do this to be the most woke. Apparently
being overweight is unfair. It is unfair the various kinds of quote fat taxes that are imposed on overweight people that you know, because you're overweight, maybe you have to buy two tickets on an airplane, and that that is unfair. That because and this extends to the yarn selling community, the yarn dying and selling online store community, because well, overweight people need more yarn, more square footage of yarn for their knitting project than a skinny person would.
Okay, look you're doing a.
I guess knitting a sweater for someone who's this kind of a size takes more yarn than knitting a sweater for someone who's that kind of size, and apparently the need for more yarn and the need to buy more yarn is unfair. This is an unjust fa phobic phenomenon
to charge fat people more for needing more yarn. Ergo, what a bunch of these stores have done, and they will get real I guess criticism if they don't is they have a fat basically an overweight or I don't know how that maybe they phrase it differently depending basically a plus sized discount where it's basically just on the honor system, you're supposed to message the owner of the store to say, hey, I'm overweight, give me a discount,
and you get a discount. Now, the my immediate thought process was, okay, so they're just charging everyone too much so that they can offer fatter people this discount, Right, that's what that's that's really what's happening here. To make up the amount they lose selling to fat people, they're gonna make more off of skinny people, right. I mean, the economics of that is not terribly difficult to figure out. So this is basically I'm saying, this sounds like this
is just a fat tax. And my wife's like, I don't know, I mean, maybe these are not the most savvy business persons in the world. The other thing my wife also noticed was all of these women who die yarn are just obsessed with left wing politics and i left wing identity politics. All of these different women who are selling yarn, and and it's usually like women with their own individual stores, or maybe they're identifying as women.
I don't know.
All of their different color palettes for so many of them are LGBT themed, just like.
Almost all of them.
My wife's sister was recommending this one again. The the Tommy dea powla thing I mentioned. I heard about it because my wife's sister recommended it to her. My wife's sister likes Tommy to Pola. My wife likes Tommy pa Paola's storybooks for kids. She saw this store that was selling Tommy Depaola themed color palette of yarns. Hey, you like Strekkanna, Hey you like all these Tommy Papala stories.
Why don't you? This is a cool store that sells these. Okay, thanks, And Holly.
Goes to it and the store says immediately, if you don't support a women's right to abortion. Don't buy from our store. If you support Donald Trump. Don't buy from my store. If you're a Republican, I don't want your money. Like I refuse to sell to anyone who doesn't support a woman's right to choose. It's like, wow, I mean, these are terrible business persons. And it's all these stores. There's like all these the entire marketplace of ladies selling yarn.
It's all these left wing women.
Who refuse to sell the conservative don't don't want to take conservatives money. So don't don't dare breathe aloud that maybe you voted for Trump or something, and that's it, Like, don't don't you dare breathe aloud that you lean republic that you're anywhere to the right of Hillary Clinton. Unacceptable. And this is what happens, I think with communities of liberals. You know, I saw this when I was in college.
This is how the woke kind of attitude works. You hear that a thing is not politically correct in some way, and you kind of can't unhear it. You know that other people will judge you negatively if you say something like okay, all of a sudden, there was a time when it became politically incorrect to refer to Native Americans as Indians. That became unacceptable, and so once you hear that, hey, that's offensive to call Native Americans Indians, you kind of
can't get that out of your head. And the social consequences to you, if you're in a kind of insular liberal bubble, the social consequences of saying Indian are pretty are worse than the effort to put in to say Native American.
And so you therefore just don't say Native American again.
Now, more and more examples like that compile within your little social bubble until you get to a point where you are so insane with how you talk about things that someone outside the bubble will look at you like
you're a crazy person. It gets to the point of saying, well, you know, it's it's offensive to transgender male to female transgenders to refer to or female to male transgender people to just say women, when you really what you're referring to is womb haves, so we should refer to them as womb haves.
And then all of a sudden you'll start saying, you know, this is the way.
That Native American womb havevers were treated was I literally saw this example just a few days ago. The way Native American womb havers were treated was shameful in the prior American history where it's like, okay, maybe Native American instead of Indian was more reasonable here. But womb havevers, do you realize how insane you sound? No, they don't
because they're so insular. And so to see this on something as random as a yarn selling site, who would have thought that selling yarn was this politically coded thing where they are so obsessed with not wanting to appear not woke, with not wanting to appear insensitive to the plight of oppressed groups such as the overweight, that we're gonna, oh no, no, no, we're gonna have a whole system on the honor system. You get a discount if you're fat,
but if you're not, you don't get that discount. And also all we have to name all of our color palettes after something LGBT themed, Pride theme, whatever. And also if you voted for Donald Trump, don't don't shop here. We won't take your money. Just to find this tiny little community like this, this tiny little insular thing I just thought was so hilarious, or you could find a tiny little island like that. In most communities in America,
they are called universities and colleges. When we return, my final election forecasting for the week that's next on The John Girardi Show. All right, last days before the election, let's do some forecasting. By the way, listen to me from I'll do a special two hour edition of The John Girardi Show six to eight PM on Election Night, and then starting at eight Trevor and I will be anchoring Power Talks election night coverage, and we'll have special
guests coming in throughout the course of the night. We'll have all the updates on local elections, plus obviously an I towards what's happening nationwide.
Don't miss it.
I one hundred percent recommend to you have your TV on, you know, Fox News or whatever you want, and then listen on your radio to me and Trevor. We're going to have a better election night coverage that's going to combine local and national stuff. It's going to be better than anything you're seeing on local news. It's going to be better than anything you're seeing on national coverage. So do tune in my last predictions. I don't think this whole.
Oh Trump called for the assassination of Liz chanining, No he didn't. He said maybe she should, you know, stand in a foxhole rather than keep voting for wars.
It's idiotic.
Trump's ahead, but he's not ahead by a lot. And I'm afraid of what Shenanigan's Democrats could pull under cover of law or otherwise.
That'll do it. John Dulready show see you next time on Power Talk