Straight Talk with Bill Frady 8/31/26 Hour 3 - Tony Dale discusses military pensions, social welfare critiques, AI stock bubble risks, and modern culture shift.

What this episode covers

Transcript: Tony Dale in for Bill Frady (8-31-26 HOUR 3) Tony Dale: Howdy, howdy, and welcome. Can you turn up my headphones just a little bit there? Give me—there we go. That's better. Before we launch into any news stuff, I do want to get to a couple of texts I didn't get to before. "Enjoying your show and your weekend show. Agree with your saying about economic mess. As a military retiree, I feel bad sometimes when I get my retirement check. Although I earned it, I still feel like a lowlife." Let me just address that. You, of all people, deserve that check! Don't ever feel that way. We owe you that money! And our gratitude to go with it, I might add. Thank you so much for serving our country. And if you're getting a retirement check, it's possible you were even in the Vietnam War. I'm actually reading Philip Caputo's book, Rumor of War, which is—if you haven't read it, he was there, one of the first people in Da Nang, and I—man! Whew! What people do in the military for us is... yes. Don't you ever feel bad about it. The point really that I've been addressing more is people who, thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society and the War on Poverty, we created a permanent underclass that has come to just count on being taken care of. And the net result of it—as I shared a study earlier in the program—is we've created, thanks to welfare and food stamps and the rest, with no work requirements, a situation where people go out and don't work, so they just sit around and eat, and they get—and eat a lot of bad stuff on top of it. And we've created all these metabolic conditions: diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and all these... and now we have to pay trillions of dollars in medical care for the problem we created because, well, we didn't want to be unfair. Where did I see that? Ah, here we go. Here's a text: "When I was in school, someone told the teacher that it's not fair. The teacher would reply, 'Life is not fair!'" And frankly, isn't that part of our problem? You know, this suicidal empathy that has just become a cancer in our culture is—is based on feelings. "Life, it's not fair that these people have to suffer, we've got to do something." Oh, okay. What do we do? "Well, why don't we tax those guys over there who just built the factory and put all these people to work? Let's tax them some more so we can give some of this away to these guys over here who really aren't producing much of anything." Well, yeah. Where do I start? Oh, before I forget this—since you brought up the military, this will be heartening to you, texter. This is just wonderful. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow the Pentagon to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the military, sending the issue for a second time to the court. So the administration's asking the Justices to consider whether this ban is constitutional and to reverse an appeals court—more lawfare, of course—that blocked the administration when they tried to do this the first time. So the Solicitor General, John Sauer, is arguing here that the military has the authority to determine who can serve in the armed forces, and that is, quote, "a matter of exceptional importance." You think?! Yeah, you would think that would probably be important, that the military decides, "Is this person going to be able to defend our country, or... hmm, should we hire them?" So whether the Constitution prohibits the military from exercising that authority by adopting policies is a recurring issue. Policies like: no, you can't be a transgender in the military just because you want to. So Trump signed the executive order last year stating that this false gender identity is divergent from an individual's sex and therefore cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for service in the military. Can we just take a moment here? Let's just... it all plays into this whole transgender debate, women in athletics. Well, how about this: in a real war, anybody that's been in the mil ...

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