Welcome in Thursday edition Clay Travis buck Sexton Show.

We appreciate all of you hanging out with us.

Buck has already, like many of your kids and grandkids, have started his Christmas vacation.

He is off and about.

I will be with you today and tomorrow solo taking you into Christmas Week, and there's a lot for us to dive into.

A couple of different stories that are out there that we will be monitoring.

We still have no idea who the Brown University shooter was.

They've released a few more videos.

I will continue to update you with that, but I'm not optimistic that there is any imminent arrest that is coming there, and as a result, we still don't know a lot about whatever the decision might have been that was made that motivated that attack.

So that is out there.

The continued fallout of the awful Bondai beach shooting in Australia continue, but we begin with some good news.

Inflation has just come in at the lowest level since the spring of twenty twenty one, when cost of goods began to skyrocket under Joe Biden as he poured trillions of dollars into the economy in the early days of what I think it's fair to call the worst administration in any of our lives.

Inflation comes in at two point seven percent.

Again, the inflation goal for the Fed is two percent.

We have been fighting our way back down since I believe it was June of twenty two.

Team can correct me if I'm wrong or right on that.

I think it was June of twenty two that inflation hit nine point one percent in this country and necessitated a rapid rise overall in interest rates.

I'm gonna actually break this down for you because a big part part of the twenty twenty six election is going to be based on cost of goods affordability.

Uh, but I want to give you the latest information.

I'll give you a couple of different ways that that this broke down.

This was from CNBC economics reporter Steve Leisman.

Here he is on CNBC reacting in surprise to the numbers on inflation coming in much lower than expected.

Cut to the.

Number of the morning the CPI, Oh, maybe coming in a little bit better than expecting.

Two point seven percent A little light here.

I'm not calling I'm just reading the headlines here.

Year over year two seven ex food and Energy Corps six, so four chants off.

That is a very good number.

Here, all right, very good number.

That is CNBC.

Here is Maria Bartiromo.

Side note.

I got to meet Maria Bartiromo for the first time.

I think it was an Earth November at a Fox event, and I was just giddy.

And Buck would tell you this, and my wife would tell you this.

I got to meet Joe Kernan.

I was a kid who liked to watch CNBC back in the day, So Maria Bartiromo, Joe Kernan for those of you who remember that era when there was no competition.

I was so excited to meet her and she I was just giddy and the fact that she knew me and she said, oh, I love what you and Buck are doing.

That was awesome, which reminds me we should get her on the program.

But here is Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo as this news comes out, reacting to it.

Cut one.

Inflation is running at maybe two point nine percent right now, two year over year.

Let me interurck you.

I'm sorry, Steve.

Two point seven percent year of a year is the number we were expecting.

Two point six percent is on core.

Two point six percent is core and two point seven percent is headline.

This is better than expected.

We were expecting three percent core.

We got two point six percent CPI for the month of November, we got headline number of two point seven percent, much better than the three point one percent expected.

Markets are on the move down.

Dusters now at the highs of the morning at one hundred and sixty five on this number.

Okay, as we speak to you, the Dow is near and all time high.

The S and P five hundred, it is near an all time high, and the Nasdaq is near an all time high.

And there's no other way to spin it, says Harvard Professor of economics Ken Rogoff here he is reacting to it as well.

Again, cut three I mean, I was surprised.

It was a better number than anyone was expecting.

Look, inflation has been very high.

It's stayed high.

It has not been coming down.

But you know, people were expecting it to be above three percent.

It was well below three percent.

I mean, I think the president will take this as good news.

The investors think that interest rates will got cut more.

So, you know, it was a positive news.

There's no other way to spend.

Okay, we're going to get into President Trump's address last night.

But this news has come out since then, and you might be saying, Okay, Clay, what impact does this have on my life?

Why does this matter?

Let me kind of lay it out for you a little bit.

I get that people are frustrated with what things cost, and let me take you on a little bit of a journey and try to make sense of what happened and why you are angry, many of you, including me, at what the cost of goods actually are.

When Joe Biden came into office in January of twenty twenty one, inflation was right around two percent.

That is the Fed's stated target, very low inflation.

That is hard to recognize in general cost of goods two percent inflation.

Almost immediately, the decision that Biden's team on the economy was, we have to juice the economy coming out of COVID.

There is danger in not spending enough money.

We have to make sure that the federal government is the fire hose that is trying to spray as much economic growth as we can create.

And remember Biden came into office and immediately passed and spent trillions of dollars in spending increases because that was.

Their idea, Hey, we can't go too small.

We got to put as much money from the federal government into this economy as we can.

And what happened almost immediately, overall inflation started to skyrocket because we were giving too many people cash.

We were still at that time telling a lot of people stay home, eat Cheetos.

The government's got your back.

You don't have to worry about income, you don't have to worry about paying for your cost of goods.

And the value of a dollar began to plummet, and inflation skyrocketed, and by June of twenty twenty two, everything had gone up.

We were at a nine point one percent inflation rate overnight.

And I know many of you felt this.

You would go out to get fast food or buy a pizza for your family, and everything just started costing way more than it should have.

You were looking around, you were saying, how in the world did that pizza cost this much.

I have talked about it a lot because the place that my family goes the most often is Chick fil A.

I love Chick fil A.

My boys love Chick fil A.

I've got three growing boys suddenly going through the Chick fil a drive through.

Starting in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, everything was over fifty dollars.

For my family, that fifty dollars used to be.

Hey, I can go have a sit down meal.

I can go to Logan's row House, I can go to Applebee's, I can go to Chili's.

I can eat an affordable sit down meal with an actual waitress coming to take our order.

And all of you felt this.

And it wasn't just cost of goods.

Because inflation skyrocketed so fast, the overall rate of the FED interest rates also began to skyrocket, and this is where the cost of homes started to explode at the same time that interest rates took off.

And for those of you out there that were fortunate enough to buy homes in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, you got two and a half percent mortgage rates, fifteen year, three percent, thirty year rates, all sorts of unbelievable mortgage rates.

And then suddenly the mortgage rates skyrocketed to over seven percent.

And a lot of you out there listening to me right now, you're still in those homes, and you're saying.

I'm not gonna move.

I've got a two and a half percent interest rate locked in.

I've got a three percent interest rate locked in.

So the overall housing market froze because a lot of people that otherwise might have been considering moving to another home because interest rates skyrocketed so fast, as inflation skyrocketed so fast, money was so cheap that suddenly we had to raise the cost of interest rates to try to bring down the overall rate of inflation.

And this was effectively the story of the Biden administration.

So many people got locked in to homes, and so many people got locked out of homes, and instead of in the spring, typically when moms and dads out there say hey we got a new kid, it's time to move to a new school district, you're saying, hey, we're not moving, we're locking in our two and a half percent interest rate.

And maybe your kids have left school, going off to college, maybe you're thinking about retiring.

You don't need the same size home you've already had.

You're sitting around saying, why in the world would I sell my home when I'm going to have to take on a mortgage that's a lot higher.

Price of homes has gone up so much.

Everything was broken that's the world in which Trump returned to office in January of twenty twenty five, and what he has tried to do is focus on bringing down interest rates and bringing down inflation and putting more money into your pocket.

And it is working.

Now.

The challenge is, I'm not sure that it's going to work fast enough for people to feel it in twenty twenty six.

If we were having this conversation next year, I think the economy is going to be firing on all cylinders.

I think the thing that you care about the most, which is more money in your pocket and the cost of goods increasing at a lower rate than your overall wage growth, is that's the number one If you told me, hey, Clay, what is the number one economic issue that you think matters the most, it is you need to be making on average more money in wage increase than the cost of the goods that you are buying.

That with that is how you feel better about your wallet, about your pocketbook, about the money there.

Trump is trying to tell that story.

Now.

The challenge is people are angry because of how bad Joe Biden was, and as a result, telling that story is really challenging because you risk sounding like you don't understand what's really going on on the ground when you tell people things are getting better but they can't feel it yet.

That is to me the story of twenty twenty six.

How much does the reality of things getting better start to pierce into the expectations of people on the ground out there?

Because things are getting better.

The numbers all reflect that, But it takes a while of things being better for people to start to feel it and for the anger of the unprecedented economic failures of the Biden tenure to start to diminish.

And this is why I have made the argument.

As you guys know, I love history.

Many of you lived through it.

It took a while for Ronald Reagan to actually start to get popular in this country.

He took over for Jimmy Carter, who was an economic disaster.

Reagan it took four years for him to catch fire and for people to recognize that all of the supply side decisions he was making were starting to juice the economy, and the inflation from Jimmy Carter and the interest rates that everybody had to pay on their mortgages.

It took a while for people to recognize that things were starting to get better.

And some of you who lived through that, remember people were sold on Reagan in eighty one, eighty two, eighty three, and then lo and behold.

By eighty four, the ravages of the Carter era are fading, and Reagan can go out and win forty nine states.

I'm not sure that we're going to see a huge victory in twenty twenty six.

I am very confident, based on the decisions that are being made right now, that by twenty twenty eight, everything is going to be firing on all cylinders.

And if you question me, remember where we were before COVID hit In February of twenty twenty.

Trump was cruising to re election.

The economy was probably at that time the strongest it had ever been, virtually no inflation, mortgage rates were incredibly low, borrowing cost.

Everything was starting to fire on all cylinders in Trump one point zero.

And then what happened COVID, and suddenly everything got shut down in March of twenty twenty, and we bore the brunt of the disastrous decisions made really in the early part of the Biden administration.

Okay, did I do a good enough job of making sense of why this matters?

We're going to have open phone lines eight hundred and two two to two A two.

Did I miss something?

Is there something out there that you think is important to add?

You can do a talkback, You can hop on the phones and react to us.

We got a couple of great guests coming your way, Brianna Lyman, first time ever on the show.

In the second hour.

Jonathan Albert is going to be with us in the third hour.

You guys love Jonathan Albert.

He was the psychologist we had on to talk about Trump de arrangement syndrome in advance of Thanksgiving.

Advice from him on how to handle your family members that may hate Donald Trump as we come into the Christmas season.

But I want to tell you right now, unfortunately, during the Christmas season, we get a lot of cyber hacking going.

Because cyber hackers don't take time off during the Christmas season, this is their prime time, which is why you need LifeLock.

Just look at what some of these hackers did with an online business recently.

Seven hundred Credit is a company that handles credit checks for car dealerships.

They just confirmed a data breach.

You probably won't recognize the company name, but your car dealership.

Does your info could be involved if a dealership use their services during your car buying process.

Just to give you a perspective, that's.

Five point six million people involved in that data breach, social security numbers, names, birth dates, addresses.

LifeLock helps to monitor all of this to look for threats to your identity being stolen.

Your protection backed by lifelocks million dollar protection package.

You can join now and say forty percent off your first year with promo code Clay.

That's LifeLock dot com.

Promo code Clay my name for forty percent off one eight hundred LifeLock Also LifeLock dot com.

My name Clay.

Making America agreed again.

Isn't one man, It's many.

The Team forty seven podcast Sunday's at noon Eastern in the Clay and Buck podcast Feed.

Find it on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Clay Travis with the Clay and Buck Show wishing you and your family of very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Buck Sexton here the entire Clayan Buck Show wish you and your family a warm Christmas season and a joyful new year.

Welcome back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show, We appreciate all of you hanging out with us.

First guest of the day joining us now.

I've been impressed at how outspoken she has been on social media of late.

You certainly are seeing her a ton all over the airwaves, whether it's Fox News, whether it's Fox Business, CNN as well.

Brianna Lyman joins us now, and she also writes at The Federalist, my friend Sean Davis got a great company that he helps to drive there.

Brianna, I've been seeing you way in a lot on this I would say maybe echo or continuing lasting legacy associated with this era of taking down historic statues and trying to condemn people based on modern day standards for decisions that they made in the past.

And in particular, you've been tweeting a lot about the state of Virginia pulling a Robert E.

Lee statue out of the capitol, where every state has the ability to have two different statues.

What strikes you about that decision and what does it say about the culture of America that we are still dealing with these continued reverberations from the crazy era of twenty twenty.

Yeah, the point of these statues are you're supposed to honor people and who you cannot tell the story of your state without mentioning Robert E.

Lee is one of those people that you cannot tell a story about Bridgie without talking about Roberty Lee.

And he's not idolized because he was, you know, fighting for the Confederacy, which wanted to preserve slavery.

He's more so idolized for what he did after the war.

This man became the faith of reconciliation.

And it's very easy for people in twenty twenty five to sit back and say he should have been executed, He should have been exiled.

This man was a trader.

But unless you're in eighteen sixty and you understand that it is not country first, it is state first.

That Roberty Lee literally said he doesn't believe the Confederacy had a reason to succeed, that he thought it was a bad idea.

But he said, if my home state of Virginia seceeds, I will not, you know, take up arms against my home state.

Right, So that's the valor that we're talking about.

And then after the war ended, he convinced Confederates who wanted to go into the bushes and cite gorilla warfare.

They were ready to die to the very end, and he said, no, go home, rebuild your families.

It's okay to ask for a pardon.

He did it himself.

It's okay to want to be friends with your northern neighbors again.

We need peace and reconciliation.

And it wasn't very easy to do that.

Nation was holding on by a threat, and Roberty Lee helped convince a very disgruntled South that it's time to make peace and that deserves remembrance.

All of that is one hundred percent tru.

And this is my Civil War history.

Nerd just geeking out here.

Everything that you said is one hundred percent tru.

I've made these arguments out there.

Is it one of the biggest threats that we face in this country?

A profound lack of historical literacy such that would you just laid out and I would add, and you and I were sending messages about this.

Actually, there was a huge radical Republican group that wanted to execute as many different former Southerners as that fought against the North as many as they could, including Jefferson Davis everybody else, and they actually ended up not winning that battle, and as a result the reconciliation of the nation, which went far better because leaders on the north and the South side said let's lay down arms and let's actually come back together as a nation.

Very few people know that.

Why do you think that is?

Yeah, I'm so happy you brought that up.

So Thaddeus Stevens was a radical Republican who kind of led that charge to execute and exile these Confederates.

But if you go back even to eighteen sixty Lincoln's first inaugural dress, he spoke of mystic cords of memory.

What he was trying to do is he was trying to remind both those in the South and in the North that at the end of the day, they were people whose ancestors fought together in the Revolution.

They were connected by blood and memory, and they were all still Americans at the end of the day.

And throughout the entire war, Lincoln's entire goal was keep the Union together.

He did not want to exile or kill all of the Confederates because he understood they are part of the Union.

They just need to kind of be coped back into it.

Right.

It's the same reason why Grant worked to get such generous surrender terms for Lee because they understood that if you want a union to actually be united, you can't have half of them, and we're talking a massive half be executed or exiled.

It didn't work that way.

And again, it's very easy for us in twenty twenty five to say, oh, well, they should have been executed, they should have been exiled, but you try holding a country together.

And the reason that this story right now is so important, it's not just Robert E.

Lee, You and I said this.

They tore down statues of Jefferson.

And if we are making the standard that if you're not morally perfect, your statue has to come down, then so does Jefferson's, so does Washington's because they own slaves.

And that's the entire point of this entire woke movement.

We don't get to have heroes like Washington or Jefferson because they were stained by slavery.

That's it.

It doesn't matter what else they did.

And that's why we have to make sure that we're being honest about historical realities and about living in those times and what those people did.

Besides, you know, the moral stains of slavery.

It's also important to apply it.

I think you mentioned Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, certainly the monuments those have been attacked for a variety of reasons.

Martin Luther King Junior used to do an advice column.

Believe it or not, you may have read this and said that anybody who was gay was victim of a mental illness and that they should be basically committed, essentially, And that was in the nineteen fifties.

Well, now that would be considered reprehensible by many parts of the nation.

Do we tear down his statue as well?

All of us, even the ones like you and me who think we're pretty good at things, and everybody out there listening, we're all going to be judged as lacking by history because no one lives up to whatever the standard is in the future in a perfect way.

You actually, and I think Robert Lee is such an interesting example of this, because, as you mentioned in Arlington, he was offered and spent all night pacing trying to decide do I want to take over command of the entire Union forces or do I want to stay loyal to my state.

A lot of people don't understand this in today's day and age, but your state used to be the equivalent of a country for many people, because in the eighteen sixties a lot of people never traveled outside of their state borders because it was so difficult comparatively to be able to travel.

And so we think of state residents now as being something that is easy to change.

And maybe your national character matters more than the state from which you live.

But back in the day, your state was more important to a large extent than your country was, because most people never left their states.

Yeah, and it's you know, part of that, you know, Ordo Amorus, Right, you rank things in priority, and to your point, people one didn't travel more than fifteen miles outside of their community in most cases.

And two you have to remember that up until eighteen sixty five, I think we're operating pretty independent of the federal government.

Right.

It wasn't until after the Civil War that we saw the federal government's role kind of expand.

And it's been expanding, you know, it's expanding today as we speak.

So states really did function as that country ideology right there.

And Robert Lee is someone who loved the Union, but he loved his state war and it's hard for people today, you know, the same people who would go publicly bash RFK Junior, their cousin, their brother, whoever.

It is to understand that back then people had hierarchies of priorities, and it was God, family, state, country, and it came in that order, and that's what Lee did.

So you have to remember Lee in the times he was in versus the time we are and now.

And you brought up a great point when Martin Luther King Jr.

Look, this is a man who fought for good things.

He also apparently was beating his wife, right, And at some point there's going to be someone, a big group of people who say wife beating is bad, which it is, and they're going to say, well, we got to tear down MLKA.

Of course that would be ridiculous, but that's what is going to happen with this slippery slope.

And I'm pretty aggrieved that the same people who are sitting today convincing us that baby should be murdered in the womb, that we should be transing young kids are suddenly the arbiters of what is good and what's bad, and we're going to listen to them.

Martin Luther King also, look, was a sad, fascinated in nineteen sixty eight on that balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, as many people have seen in the hotel room when he was assassinated, was a mistress.

Martin Luther King, as Robert F.

Kennedy and John F.

Kennedy and a lot of people of that era in particular, was not an upstanding family man in the way that many would want men to be today and in the past.

And so again, if you go and look at the past of many of our historic figures who are heroes and change the course of the nation, they all had some form of sordid past or aspect of their personality that would be found lacking.

And I just think it's interesting where we draw the line and where we don't.

How old are you, Brianna, I'm twenty seven.

All right, So you're twenty seven.

I and Buck, if he were here, we're both huge history people.

I was a history major.

I read everything I can about history.

When you are around people you're own age, how much historical illiteracy do you see?

And second part of that, how much of that feels almost intentional?

Because if you can tear down the heroes of American history, what you really allow is for everything to be wiped clean, because when you're saying, hey, if we can point to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and say they own slaves, therefore their moral legitimacy is questioned, then it starts to allow you to question the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and argue that America was founded on a huge hill of lies, and so we can just wipe clean of everything that the country has been founded on.

That feels historically like the goal.

Yeah, the goal is to delegitimize the work of the founders.

In my generation in particular, you know, we've been indoctrinated in public education and even higher education to a degree where we're ashamed of our heritage and our ancestors.

And it's not always been like that.

You know, you go back to, you know, the seventies when Roberty Lee was given his citizenship back and full that pass.

I think it was like four ten to three.

It was some massive margin because everybody Republican and Democrat understood that Roberty Lee was significant for a few reasons, and it wasn't so polarizing.

You go to what was in nineteen ninety three, the movie Gettysburg came out.

They portray Lee as an unrepentant racist.

At the end scene, he's being cheered on by his soldiers as he goes to surrender.

Right.

And so there was a consensus really up until the past twenty years that there are some figures who have a definitely complex path where some things were bad, and we don't condone that.

But nonetheless it doesn't take away from the reason that we look up to them or at least recognize their impact on America.

I want to write another book, and my last book just came out, But I think what you're getting at I've been kind of grappling with in my own head.

It's do we define people by their ceilings or their floors?

You know?

Do and a lot of times.

And I just came from a funeral of my uncle this week, and he didn't have much of a floor.

He had a great ceiling.

But if you go and watch a eulogy, it almost always is this is what he or she achieved.

Let's talk about the positives.

We don't marinate in the awfulness of the failures that we have in our life.

At the end of the life.

We like to define people based on their ceilings.

It seems to me that the Democrat Party in general focuses on the floor of American history.

The things that.

They want to say are the worst parts of our historic figures.

And it seems in general like Republicans tend to focus on the ceiling.

Is that metaphor out of line or do you think there's.

Some truth to it?

No, I think it's accurate.

And let's think why does the left focus on the worst of the worst.

Because the things that they care about, right, socialism, communism, that it's fundamentally incompatible with small r republicanism.

And if you actually want to implement communism and socialism on a large scale, you have to fundamentally reshape America.

You have to get rid of the Declaration, you have to get rid of the Bill of Rights, you have to get rid of the institutions and what underpins those institutions, which is Christianity, to start fresh.

So they have to focus on trying to sour the sentiment of the American people by bashing our heroes Jefferson Washington.

Those are heroes, they should be revered, and they are going to do this.

I'm actually really upset that we're coming into two fifty, and I'm not feeling as patriotic as I should be because there's so many people that are trying to tear down the legacy of our founders because they want to delegitimize that they can replace.

Are you so you're talking about two fifty and I think it is incredibly important because I wasn't around in America two hundred.

But for those of you out there that remember nineteen seventy six, it seems like there was a profound national spirit of optimism that came out of that two hundredth birthday celebration.

Are you optimistic that next year we can have something so mol on America to fifty or do you think the Nicole Hannah Joneses of the world and the sixteen nineteen project have been so successful in tearing down American history that it's impossible to bring everybody together.

I think the Overton window is shifting, and I'm glad that President Trump is in office.

I would like to.

See some changes to be a board running the two hundred and fifty celebrations because this is a time to honor the founders.

And I say this as someone who's you know, I'm related too.

Declaration of Independence definers.

My two sixth great grand uncles were militia men in the battles of Lexington and Concord.

My family thought this, they lived this and honoring their legacy and everyone else's legacy.

It is so important to me because without their sacrifices, you and I wouldn't be speaking today.

H Brionna, how can people find you if they want to see your content?

And or maybe they got kids and grandkids out there that are in your age bracket, and maybe they're more likely to respond in a positive way to somebody their own age than people their age.

I'm trying to be a patriot maxing.

So you could me on Twitter at Brian Alignment two or Instagram Brianna dot Lineman.

Awesome, Hey, we appreciate the time.

Have a good Christmas and thanks for fighting the good fight.

I mean, I saw you fighting history battles on social media, which I almost never see anybody else doing, and I wanted to make sure you've got a chance to talk with you.

Thank you, Mary Christmas.

Thanks so much.

That's Brianna Lyman.

That's fantastic.

I mean history nerding out.

I mean again, when I see somebody just defending just twenty seven the historic legacy of Robert E.

Lee.

I'm like, wow, maybe there are some people out there in their twenties that actually do have knowledge about American history.

Makes me a little bit more optimistic.

I've got a winner for you tonight, Thursday Night Football.

Matthew Stafford, Sam Darnold, The Rams going up against the Seahawks.

Each of these guys to throw one and a half more than one and a half touchdown passes.

If you go to prizepicks dot com, you go to the prize picks app, use my name Clay Clay, you can get hooked up.

Three point five x is what that pays off.

You're just watching Thursday Night football tonight, as many of us, myself included, will be great matchup in the NFC West.

The Rams going up against the Seahawks.

If each of these quarterbacks throws they got to throw it one and a half touchdowns are more than you will get three point five x.

You can play five dollars right now and you will get fifty dollars.

You play five dollars, you get fifty dollars deposited in your account.

That is pricepicks dot com code Clay Price Picks app.

You can play in California, Texas, Georgia.

If you're filling the left out thirteen million people playing forty states price Picks code c Lay.

You ain't imagining it.

The world has gone insane.

We claim your sanity with Clay and find them on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show.

We appreciate all of you.

Buck is already on his Christmas vacation.

I've got you today and tomorrow.

Encourage you to go subscribe to the podcast.

If you haven't already, go check out the YouTube channel.

You can find us on social media anywhere in the country and hopefully we will be able to entertain you as best we can.

There a lot of different stories that we are tracking.

More video footage surrounding the Brown University shooter.

It's now been six days, I believe, as we come up on six days since that shooting occurred.

No one has been arrested.

We have been reacting to very positive story.

If you missed it earlier, this morning, inflation came in lower than expected two point seven percent, the lowest level of inflation since the spring of twenty twenty one, when Joe Biden came into office two point six percent core inflation level.

The Fed's goal is two percent.

If you want to nerd out on economic related analysis.

We spent a lot of the opening of the first hour discussing how this, how interest rates are impacted in an inflation environment, and why I am so optimistic as we head into twenty twenty six about the overall trajectory of the economy.

We discussed President Trump's address last night from the White House nine pm Eastern that was carried President Trump right now is signing an executive order easing restrictions on marijuana.

He is now taking questions from the press that is assembled in the Oval Office.

He is seated at the resolute desk.

We will be monitoring that with all of you to make sure that we are on top of anything that he says.

There.

Now a bit of other news.

The Trump Kennedy Center is now a thing.

We'll see whether not this name sticks when there are new administrations that potentially come in.

But the Kennedy Center has voted to rename itself the Trump Kennedy Center, and that is becoming the new name there.

In the wake of the amount of interest that President Trump has given to the Kennedy Center overall again, they have renamed it Daily Mail reporting I mentioned that this was a story that we were following.

A private plane crashed in North Carolina with several people on it, and the Daily Mail is now reporting that NASCAR legend Greg Biffle died in that plane crash, and they are citing one of his best friends, saying that the fifty five year old NASCAR legend the plane was on its way to Sarasota, Florida.

According to this report, it crashed about forty five minutes from from Charlotte, and Garrett Mitchell, one of Biffle's friends, said, Unfortunately, I can confirm Greg Biffle, his wife Christina, and son Writer were on that plane.

They were on the way to spend the afternoon with us.

Mitchell, according to Daily Mail, often appears in YouTube videos with Biffle.

He wrote this on Facebook, where devastated.

I'm so sorry to share this.

He also said he was not sure who else was potentially on that plane, a Sesna C five point fifty according to the FAA.

So that is a awful story out there for those of you that are NASCAR fans.

Greg Biffle, very famous and well known race car driver in the NASCAR world, again reportedly dying, according to one of his best friends, as reported by The Daily Mail.

Okay, let's see another story that is out there that I think is getting maybe not as much attention as it should.

I was texting with producer Ali about this last night, and the Brown University shooting certainly killed two people.

This shooting at MIT, a professor at MIT was assassinated.

Two days later.

Unknown assailant fatally shot MIT professor Nuno Lauro and I'm probably mispronouncing his name inside his Boston home about fifty miles away from that other shooting.

The FBI agent says they don't think there's a connection, but other people are saying, is there a connection here?

And the the idea that a MIT professor who was an expert in nuclear weaponry would be killed like this is It's a story that I think should get a lot of attention.

He is a theoretical physicist and fusion scientist that has specializes in nuclear science, engineering, and physics, and there are a lot of discussions about how is this forty seven year old dad of three just getting killed MIT professor with nuclear weapons training background.

Is there something more to this again that happened here recently?

So all of those stories being discussed.

By the way, We're going to talk with Jonathan Albert at the bottom of the hour about how to handle friends and family who may have Trump derangement syndrome as the holidays are now upon us.

I also wanted to play this for you.

Piers Morgan had Candace Owens on his program.

We haven't spent a lot of time talking about this, but Candace Owens has been chasing the allegations or conspiracy.

She's been arguing that somebody other than this crazy guy killed Charlie Kirk, and Pierce Morgan pressed her on that, and this is what that sounded like in their conversation.

Listen, there is specifically two people at Turning Point USA, and I have communicated that information to Erica and Justine Strife that I would not be surprised if they had for knowledge of Charlie Kirk being assassinatedvident.

I'm not going to name.

I am not going to name those people, okay, because it's not right for me to name those people.

And so I know for a fact that they did.

Did you give the names to Erica?

Yes, I a truly did.

I gave the names to Erica of two employees, current employees at Turning Point, who you believe were.

Involved in the preparation for the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Is that what you're saying.

I told them that if if I were in your shoes, the would these would be two employees that I would look further into.

What evidence do you have that they had any prior knowledge of the murder?

Because I don't have concrete evidence is the reason why I'm not naming them.

I mean, this is crazy.

Uh, this is why I give credit and I am optimistic that when this trial takes place that we are going to be able to hear more and see more of what motivated this assassin.

And the Washington Post had a story that was out that I thought was significant and worthy of discussing.

The Washington let me read some of this.

This Tyler Robinson, this far left wing activist who killed Charlie Kirk based on all the evidence, and this is the Washington Post profile that they did surrounding this alleged assassin who will be standing trial soon.

A few times I'm reading from the Washington Post.

When he was drunk, Robinson would joke about right wing politicians, saying like that guy's going to catch a bullet one day.

No one took it seriously, and they would say he would say it when he was drinking.

He reacted to Trump being shot by celebratory joke, and they said that he increasingly and his roommate were angry about right wing politicians and an anti trans sentiment in Utah.

They show the roommate asked friends whether they wanted to attend an anti Trump protest.

After the twenty twenty four election, The roommate viewed Trump's election I'm reading from the Washington Post as a loss for trans rights and was distraught more than once.

The person said he saw Robinson cradling his sobbing roommate in his arms.

This is the trans roommate.

I believe this is the man who identified as a woman.

I sometimes get crossed up on this team.

I believe that's true.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

In February, the roommate was furious when people came over to watch a basketball game NBA game, According to people were there, One of the visitors said something about trans athletes and how ridiculous it was for trans athletes to be competing, and the roommate interrupted him and shouted repeatedly to shut up about that, and all the room went quiet before play eventually resumed.

And also.

This person, says Robinson and the trans roommate the killer, the alleged assassin, would complain about right wing figures in the news, including Trump.

So again, the motivation here, I think is very clear.

I also understand the desire among many to believe that there is something larger in play than just one person can get a rifle and go in the life of somebody as significant as Charlie Kirk.

And thankfully we dodged this with President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July thirteenth.

But it's I think.

Beyond the pale to suggest that someone at turning Point was involved in trying to encourage the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I mean, that is I think, absolutely a crazy, looney bin take.

And one of the things that I think is very challenging in modern media is there are very few consequences for crazy opinions.

And actually, we've.

Created a media ecosystem that can reward crazy opinions, and I think that's something that is going to be important to grapple with in the years ahead.

How do we reconcile when people say things that end up not being true.

And I'm not talking about just getting predictions wrong.

We get predictions wrong on this show all the time.

Those of you who listened to this show for a long time know that, for instance, I said we were going to have a red wave in twenty twenty two, didn't materialize.

I was wrong.

I came on, I said I was wrong.

You know, we got a red wave in Florida, we got a red wave in New York.

It didn't happen in other cities and states.

And then in twenty twenty four we did get a red wave and it brought President Trump in and so you could feel the building of the red wave.

I was just early in my forecast.

I think honestly that Dobbs decision muted what would have been a red wave in twenty twenty two.

That's my opinion.

I think that abortion got out a lot of Democrats and it forestalled the red wave until twenty twenty four.

And by the way, you can argue that if we had gotten a red wave in twenty twenty two.

Joe Biden would have stepped down then and said I'm not running for reelection.

The Democrats would have had a full primary, Republicans would have had a full primary, and we wouldn't have ended up with Trump versus Kamala.

We may have ended up with I think Trump still probably would have won the overall Republican nomination, but who knows who the nominee would have been for Democrats.

I don't think it would have been Kamala.

And so you get things wrong.

That's part of this business.

It's hard to forecast the future.

Nobody is perfect at it.

But when you say things that are able to be proven incorrect, what is the metric under which there are consequences for that?

I think it's something that in the world in which we live, it's very hard for me to sue, for instance, because somebody defamed me, because I'm a public figure.

So if you go on social media at any moment, people are saying awful things about me, They're saying awful things about Buck, They're saying awful things about many different people in public life.

And because the standard is so substantial for a public figure, to be able to sue.

We almost have created a world where you can say anything about anyone and if they are a public figure in the United States, it's almost impossible for there to be any form of defamation that is recoverable, and so that actually leads, I think, to an incentives culture where you can say awful things about whoever you don't like, awful, untrue things, not opinions, right me saying I think Tim Walls is an awful, awful governor and was an atrocious vice presidential candidate and didn't actually appeal to men at all, and Democrats made it a tremendously boneheaded decision there.

That's all well intentioned.

I believe everything I just said, But if I took the next step and said I think Tim Walls is, you know, he's a drug dealer, that would be totally made up.

I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever to support it.

But I don't know that Tim Walls could sue because he's a public figure, and the standard of public figures is you can basically say anything about them and there are no consequences.

I think this is going to become more and more challenging in a social media age.

It's something that I spend a lot of time thinking about.

And this is me going down into the weeds legally, but the New York Times v.

Sullivan standard when it comes to free speech in the First Amendment and how that is implicated, it doesn't really fit the modern era in which we live.

It's an outdated policy precedent from the nineteen sixties that I don't think fits the modern reality of media in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six.

Something to think about, something to put a pin in it.

I don't even know how many Supreme Court justices really get this.

Several of them have started to say, hey, you know what, this idea of Times v.

Sullivan needs to be modified.

Clarence Thomas has talked about it.

I think it's a huge deal.

I think it's a substantial story that is going to be generationally important in the years ahead.

But just putting a pin in it.

Wanted to play that cut and use it kind of as a jumping off point to talk about public commentary and what the standard should be when it comes to what is said and what is not.

Look, Buck learned a lot from his time in DC between that entering the media.

He's connected the dots on how quickly political power can turn into financial power.

Insiders have always had a head start until now.

To one of the reasons, he started writing a weekly e newsletter called Money and Power.

Money and Power gives everyday Americans access to the kind of fast moving intelligence that used to stay locked behind closed doors.

The team he works with writing Money and Power monitors DC for every policy, league, spending bill, and executive order, because all of those can create a chain of reaction in the markets worth billions of dollars.

Right now, you can join this Money in Power newsletter for eighty two percent off the regular price.

Go to joinbuck dot com.

That's joinbuck dot com.

Get your first alert before the next policy shock hits paid for by Paradigm Press.

That's joinbuck dot com.

The news and politics, but also a little comic relief.

Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.

Find them on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back at Play Travis buck Sexton Show, Thursday edition of the program and let's get to some talkbacks.

A welcome back in Clay Travis buck Sexton Show.

I appreciate all of you hanging out with us.

We are joined now by Jonathan Albert, psychotherapist in New York City and DC author of the forthcoming book Therapy Nation.

We talked with you back.

In around Thanksgiving, Jonathan, and there was a great feedback from the audience.

So given the fact that Christmas is nearing, we are exactly one week from Christmas Day.

If I am doing my math correctly, and I think i am, and obviously Hanukkah is underway, what is the number one piece of advice you would give anyone out there that is going to be with friends and family who hate President Trump.

Many of the people listening to us right now are big Trump supporters.

What is the number one piece of advice when it comes to holidays with Trump haters?

Well, Clay, maybe get a life, but that side, you know, I think people need to recognize that family and friends are, or at least should be, more important than Donald Trump or any political figure that may be in our country.

But all too often that's not the case.

We have people who are dividing families, cutting off relatives, loved ones, friends just because of the way that someone voted.

And as a therapist, I mean I'm seeing this endlessly since Thanksgiving.

People are coming in talking about high anxiety about seeing their Trump loving uncle or even their progressive cousin over the holiday.

So it's a real problem in our society.

And what I'm seeing this year seems worse than a year's past.

And I think part of the problem is people have become their anger has become hardened, and it's become part of their personality.

So we really need to try to examine that and figure out how to work with these people.

And sometimes a simplest saying past the gravy may work just to remind people like, we're here for the holiday dinner, not to discuss politics.

We've got Kathy in Birmingham, Alabama.

She has a question for you.

Kathy, you're talking with Jonathan Alpert.

You've got a dad who is a major Trump hater.

Ask your question, how do you deal with it?

He is ninety years old, and Clay he was he sounded I thought it was my own father that called in the Bill from Wisconsin.

My father's name is Bill and he is from the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, and Bill from Wisconsin is exactly how my father is treating his three adult children.

Thank you for the case, what should she do?

You didn't hear earlier, but we had to call her Bill from Wisconsin, who just hates Trump sounds like her dad years old.

Is that way too?

What would you suggest that she should do?

Is it completely ignore everything having to do with Trump?

What's the best way to get through the holidays with some semblance of sanity in the household?

Yeah?

And I think accepting that there will be people who hate Trump, or hate Joe Biden, or hate Kamala Harris, but again like recognizing that no one political figure should dominate a holiday, and maybe getting back to the importance of the holiday and what it's all about.

And maybe there can just be a brief acknowledgment.

I understand that we don't see I politically, but I love you.

You're my father, you're my daughter, whatever the case may be.

And let's focus on family and enjoying the holiday together.

So most of the times that will work.

We also have another question.

I appreciate people calling in Ryan and Boston has a question for you.

Jonathan Albert on with us.

Now gentlemen, right topic and Built from Wisconsin.

You have to realize you don't get every vote, and he's one of the guys that go the other way.

But I noticed this little kid, people going after Reagan, and I don't even repeat the things they said.

So this goes on politically, it seems more from the left.

They do get kind of vicious.

And I always wanted to know.

I believe on an emotional level, and i'd ask, is are these people stunted emotionally because people now are excluding people from Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and they want no part of these They don't want no part of these individuals because they can't control their political views at dinners anymore.

You know, I could.

What I could do is what I do is I just walk away.

During Thanksgiving, I can watch football I'm a sports fan, or even Christmas, they have games and I could watch and just walk away from any kind of looming to his conversation.

But a lot of people on the other side don't like it at all.

People are being excluded.

And a good example I saw as a young guy when Pappy Cannon ran for president, Republicans got vicious calling names.

So name calling is permitted in politics, but tampering with the actual agenda is not.

John, Thank you for the call, Ryan, Jonathan.

I This is something that I think everybody is grappling with and it's not gonna go away.

And I think I asked you this last time, but I find it super interesting.

Is Trump derangement syndrome as it exists today?

And I would say there's about twenty percent of Americans that just genuinely hate Trump with every fiber of their being.

Is it gonna translate to other politicians on the Republican side of the aisle.

Let's say it's J.

D.

Vance or Marco Robio or Ron DeSantis, whoever is the next flag bearer for the Republican Party.

In your experience, does this kind of hate translate or if Trump steps off the stage, which he will do in January of twenty twenty nine, does it then sort of leave with him.

Yeah, it's a great question, Clay, and I remember you did ask that last time.

I think to some degree the hate does stick around into the next president, whoever that may be, but maybe to a lesser extent because Trump has just been such a polarizing figure and he came out of the business world, and most likely we'll have a politician that steps up into the presidency next time and not this outsider that Trump was, and I think a lot of people just had trouble reconciling, like, how can this guy, a real estate tycoon and TV star become president?

And a lot of people just cannot be okay with that and reconcile that.

So I don't think we'll quite have that at play and that hatred.

But yes, to your point, I think there are always going to be people who hate the other side.

One of the differences that I've seen is the hatred towards the seems to be much more potent than the hatred towards the left.

Plenty of patients of mind didn't like Biden or Harris, but it never rose to the level of wanting either of those people dead.

But we've certainly seen that on the other side.

Mary in Texas has an opinion.

I'm curious what you would think of her opinion.

Mary, You've got Jonathan Albert on with us.

What have you got for us?

Well, the basic things about being with your family or friends during the holidays.

It's just very very very lovingly, very kindly say, look, we've been together for ninety years, you know, forty years for children, has been wife.

This isn't about what's going on in politics.

This is about Christmas, this is about being with family.

Let's take responsibility as adults, as human beings to be loving with each other, to be Christian with each other, and the rest is going to be what it is.

You're gonna think what you're gonna think, you're gonna you're gonna want to do what you're gonna want to do, but let's leave it away from around us.

Thank you, Mary.

Good advice, Jonathan.

Oh, excellent advice from Mary.

That's pretty much what I tell my patients that friends and family are far more important than politics, and they should transcend any any occupant of the White House.

Unfortunately we're not seeing that this holiday season, but that's great advice from Mary.

Historically, we talked with Breonna Lyman from The Federalist in the second hour of the program.

I love history because it teaches you that you're way tougher and then you think you are, and that the country is way tougher than many people think it is.

I would imagine that in the wake of the Civil War there were probably a lot of family gatherings that took place, particularly in border states where people fought for different sides of the country.

North and South that it took a long time to get through.

Certainly for those of you out there who remember the nineteen sixties, I would imagine during the Vietnam War there were a lot of contentious Thanksgivings and Christmases.

Are you optimistic that we will come through and that sanity will win or are you concerned that in a social media era it's harder for sanity to triumph going forward?

In other words, how perpetual do you think the divisions in the country are compared to past history and looking forward?

Yeah, and I think if people could look at history, would probably be better off now than we are.

Our mental health would be better off.

But then when you enter into the mix social media and echo chambers that people surround themselves in, it's really only intensifying the division in our country.

And that's part of what my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation is about, Like this division, and it's actually fueled in part by my profession.

We have therapy culture that is, you know, placing blame on everyone but their patient.

Of course, it's your boss that's the bad guy, or your spouse, it's not your fault.

So you know, we don't have resilience being taught to patients.

These days we have quite the opposite.

We have grievance culture that's taking hold.

We have fragility and that's a big part of the problem.

And again, if people could just look at our country's history, and you make a good point that during the Civil War and after it, families probably still got together and loved each other.

Thank you so much for joining us, Jonathan Albert.

If people want to read more of what you are doing, I know you've got a book coming out called Therapy Nation.

Where should they find you?

People can find me on on x or Twitter at Jonathan Albert and also my website Jonathan Albert dot com.

Outstanding stuff.

As always, have good holiday and we look forward to to talking to you again.

Yeah, thank you, Clay.

I have a great holiday you too.

I want to tell you.

Candles were lit on Bondai Beach in Australia earlier this week by families, children, people of faith to celebrate a festival of Light.

But instead of light, there was darkness, violence, fear, hatred showing itself during a time meant for prayer and rejoicing.

It reminds us that even with a ceasefire in Israel, Jewish people are being targeted simply because of their faith.

This is why the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews exists.

The IFCJ stands in the gap, providing safety and security to God's people.

The Fellowship brings together Christians and Jews to support Jews in Israel, the former Soviet Union, or wherever.

The need is greatest.

Your gift today will help provide the security that people so desperately need.

To send your gift call eight eight eight four eight eight IFCJ.

That's eight eight eight four eight eight four three two five.

You can also give online at Fellowship gift dot org.

That's Fellowship gift dot org.

Want to be in the know when you're on the go, The Team forty seven podcasts shrump highlights from the week Sundays at noon Eastern in the Clean Boog podcast feed.

Find it on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.