Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - Is Iran Winning the War?, Matt Calkins on Woke Culture That Led Him to Quit The Seattle Times & Trump’s Feud With Canada

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Hey BillOReilly.com Premium and Concierge Members, welcome to the No Spin News for Tuesday, August 25, 2026. Stand Up for Your Country.  Talking Points Memo: Bill looks at Atlantic contributing writer Robert Kagan’s claims about Iran during his appearance on Erin Burnett’s CNN show, OutFront. Matt Calkins, sports columnist, discusses his column on the Sophie Cunningham situation that was spiked by The Seattle Times and why he quit the organization. Bill breaks down the situation between President Trump and Canada. Trump scores two wins as the Supreme Court is allowing his White House ballroom construction to continue and opening the door to mail-ballot restrictions before the midterms. Final Thought: Bill's plans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Bill O'Reilly here. Welcome to the No Spin News for Tuesday, August 25, 2006. Stand up for your country. I hope you saw the great debate last night on News Nation between me and Chris Cuomo with Leland Vittert moderating. I thought Leland did a very good job. And I think I got my points across, and I'm sure that Cuomo feels the same way. Important debate. If you did not see it, you go to Bill O'Reilly.com and we'll link you right over. It's worth watching. Now, we're spending more and more time on the media here because of the midterm elections. And the media is in a frenzy. It's collapsing. The ratings are terrible.

But it's actively rooting for the Democratic Party, which it shouldn't be. Stay neutral on it, okay? Okay, with me, if you point out that the Republicans are not doing what they should do, that's fine. But if you're just going to root, root, root for the home team and a home team at Democratic Party, that's not fine. So we're zeroed in on that, and that is the subject of this evening talking points memo. So when you book a guest, and we have guests every day here on the NOSPN News, you get their point of view, P-O-V. And so you know you, the anchor or the moderator, you know what they are likely to say. And there's other wrong with that because you have to frame the interview around what your guest is interested in.

What CNN and a lot of the others do and conservatives do it as well is they only book guests that agree with their editorial philosophy. philosophy. Everybody else is blacked out. And we've documented that time and time and time again. When I go out to promote Confronting America, which comes out September 15th, we know what shows won't put us on. And it's not that I'm a bad guess. I bring ratings everywhere I go. Okay. They just don't want to joust. They don't want to hear an opposing point of view. They don't want their audience here opposing point of view. I don't watch vehicles like that on liberal. or conservative media. I just won't watch it because it's a waste of time. So last night on CNN, there's a guy on the Aaron Burnett show. And Burnett's been around for a while. His name is Robert

Kagan. And he apparently writes for the Atlantic Magazine, it's a far left magazine. And so Burnett knows that Kagan's going to come in and smash Trump. And that's what she wants. and she didn't book anybody after Kagan that's going to say good things about Trump. All she wants is Trump to smash, is Kagan to smash Trump. Now Kagan himself says he's a neo-conservative. That's just not true. If you look at his resume, and of course we look at everybody's resumes, he calls the Republican Party and MAGA far right white white,

Christian nationalist. I mean, the guy is just off the chart. Okay? And you know, again, what you are getting at. Trump's his threat to democracy, on and on and on and on. You know, it's boring, Paul. It's boring. Even I couldn't make you exciting. You are boring. So he goes on, and I'm cruising around watching the news shows. I don't usually do that, but I was coming up at 9 o'clock on News Nations, so I was cruising around. And I was stunned about what I heard, roll of tape. The Iranians know that really the United States does not have a military option right now, and that is the reason why the Trump administration is now trumpeting their economic sanctions,

but that's a major retreat, and the Iranians understand it. That means Iran is essentially now going to go forward in substantial control of the strait of war moves, which gives it incredible power to deal with not just the region and all the Gulf states are now going to have to make their deals with Iran, but also with the rest of the world. And that's simply not true. Iran is not going to control the straight of Hormuz, not with Donald Trump as president,

Bibi Netanyahu as the leader of Israel, which is not true. I mean, and instead of being skeptical about what Kagan said, Ms. Burnett just sits there like a mummy. Doesn't say anything. So it is inconceivable, and I will apologize if I'm wrong. The President Trump is going to allow Iran to dominate the oil flow out of the Middle East. It's inconceivable.

As far as U.S. military powers concerned, we have plenty of power. Okay, we can knock out their infrastructure today. But what offended me is not Kagan. You know what you're getting with him. Well, what is wrong with Aaron Burnett? Just sitting there, you don't have any follow-up questions? Iran's going to dominate the oil flow for the world, and you're not even going to be curious enough to ask about that?

It's preposterous. That happens all the time. Okay, so I'm sitting there and I just said, I got to show this to my audience. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And it shouldn't be happening. And not at all. If you are a journalist, you should be skeptical of everything. Okay, simple.

Not a complicated profession. All right, new poll by Reuters Ibs, not a great poll. They're not that accurate. But it's about Iran. Do you approve or disapprove of the USA attacking Iran? Prove 31, disapprove 63. That's a big repudiation. However, again, you break it down.

Republicans approve 69%, disapprove 29%. So, Republicans are backing Trump. Democrats approve 8%, disapprove 90%. I'd like to get, you know, a little more analysis of that. but I'll never get it. And Independence got approved 23, just approved 67. I guess this is all about gas prices and food prices, but I'm not exactly sure.

I will be. We'll do some research on it. So, according to this fall, most Americans think that this is foolish. What Trump did is foolish and not a good policy. All right, summing up, when you hear on the media, social media, is now dominating, linear media, that Trump's an idiot, that Iran is winning, that Iran's going to dominate the straight-of-hor moves, when you hear this over and over and over again, and you don't know much about how the government works, about anything like that, you tend to believe it.

Because people believe it they want to believe, right? If you're a die-high Democrat, whatever Trump does is wrong. So you're going to be in that category. But let's stay in the real world, okay? That's my job. And that's the memo. Now, the media, as we told you yesterday, it's going to do everything it can to help the Democrats win the midterms.

All right, so not going to be any balance. You're not going to see many Republicans around. Trump's the devil. On and on and on and on. And there is a movement to even up this. So the Washington Post fired a woman named Karen Atia when she said horrible things about Charlie Kirk after he was assassinated. quote from Ms. Attia,

refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is not the same as violence. Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and have solution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.

Okay. a racist column. So it's white men that are generating violence. She's fired. Bezos, who owns Washington Post, fires her. She's in the union, so she gets a hearing. Arbitration, it's called. And she wins. They have to rehire her and pay her all the money that she lost for about a year. Okay, it's a Washington Post problem, not my problem. But if you're writing a racist column, what if she had substituted the word black for white? But she would have been hired back? No.

Seattle. So on the Sophie Cunningham front, she is the basketball. player professional, who says, you know, it's not really good for biological men to play basketball against women, even if they're transitioning. That's her opinion. Sophie Cunningham is entitled to her opinion. For that stance, she's got smashed in the face. She's the object of vilification. She's this, she's that. So a columnist for the Seattle Times, A guy named Matt Kalkins writes this, quote, Two things can be true at once.

You can show compassion for people who feel trapped in the wrong body while acknowledging they have a biological advantage. After all, why do we separate males and females in sports in the first place? It's not due to the potential awkwardness of physical contact is because men have a higher testosterone level and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages. This isn't something I bring up at dinner parties, but it's undeniable.

By every measure, metric in sports. Would it be to 100 meters, vertical leaps, weightlifting yards off the T, the top males substantially outperform the top females, unquote. So this is Calgan's column for the Seattle Times. The newspaper spikes the column. We'll run it. Will I run it? And Mr. Calkin resigns his position.

He joins us now from Brea, California. So first of all, were you surprised that the woke Seattle Times, everybody knows a far left paper that's woke, A, spiked your column. Were you surprised? Nope. I expected it. They'd spiked three columns of mine previously,

and anytime I sort of went against the grain, the left wing grain, I guess you would say, you know, the prevailing ideology of the newsroom, my column would get spiked, but I still thought maybe there was a chance that I could get this in. It's a hot button topic, and I felt like I wrote it pretty diplomatically. It was basically through the eyes of two high school girls who were saying, listen, we're not transphobic. We just don't think that biological males should compete against girls or women, and that was the thesis of my column.

Just because you believe Sophie Cunningham were back your stance, doesn't make you transphobic. Times wasn't feeling it, and they spiked it, and I said, I can't work here anymore. Did you confront the woke editors who did this? Did you ask them, listen, Yarnie as a columnist, I write a responsible column

because many millions of Americans feel this way. I don't write it with any vitriol. I'm not calling people any names like the Washington Postwoman. I'm not doing any of that. I'm laying out the argument that Sophie Cunningham believes did you confront them with the facts of the matter.

It was a very interesting situation because I submitted the column on Friday morning and the editor said, we're going to look at this, but we might not put it in Sunday's papers, so have some other ideas. And then on Monday, I got an email saying, hey, one of the assistant managing editors is going to talk to the top two people in the

newsroom on Wednesday. And then on Thursday, I got back to me saying they weren't going to run it. And their justification was, well, I didn't tell them exactly what I was doing ahead of time, even though I said, there's no rush to run this column. I just worked on it. I want to see what you think. Is that the rule of the Seattle Times because I'm a columnist? I don't. Yeah. No. I don't tell anybody what I'm writing about. I just submit the column. And if they got a beef with the column, then come to me and we'll discuss it. But I don't have to be a permission to write on a certain subject. Is that what's going on at the Seattle Times?

Yeah, it was a BS excuse. There are all kinds of times where I've, you know, written a column and say, hey, what do you think about this? And, you know, it'll be edited and then it will run later. Or, you know, I can tell my boss an hour before, you know, I'm submitting my column what I'm doing if I was at a Seahawks practice or a Marry's game or something like this. So no, this was kind of their way out.

As far as confronting them on it, it sort of felt pointless because this has happened so many times to me before. I know where they stand. They weren't going to budge. I think a lot of it, you know, I was on with Glenn Beck yesterday and he was asking me, are they true believers or are they just cowards? You know, basically is this just coming from a place of cowardice or ideology? I think it's a combination of both.

but I think at the very top, and I've had a lot of great times at the Seattle Times. You know, as I said in my substack, there's no personal animosity towards them, but I think at the end of the day, they really fear the activists. They fear an uprising in the newsroom. You know, they have a very monolithic environment in there, and I was someone who kind of broke that monolith, and they just didn't want to deal with it. All right, so it's a far-left personnel situation. Do I have it correct? Many, many people working there are far. I don't like to put that kind of labels on that, but I would say at the top it is.

There are a lot of really reasonable people, you know, on the ground, especially in sports. I love the sports department there. I have a lot of friends there. And I'll have people come to be and say, man, I'm with you, Matt. And I think that happens a lot in newsrooms. At the top, though, yeah, I would say it's very far left leading. Is it economic? This is what Beck was getting at.

Is it economic? because Seattle has just left the building? Or is it true believers we don't want to hear the other side? I think it's, you know, I'll make a football analogy. I think they kind of play the pre-event defense, which is they just don't want to make a mistake. Even if they're killing themselves in the long run, they're afraid of that big 80-yard pass, you know,

burning them for a touchdown. And I think when it comes to these kinds of columns that go against the grain, I think they just think what's the worst thing that can happen? And they sort of apply that to their decision. I don't think it would have been a bad decision economically because the support I've gotten this, including from local people in Seattle, has been overwhelming. People want these common sense perspectives.

I think they're starving for it. I don't think they see it in most of these people. I think the Americans, fair-minded Americans, want to hear both sides so they can make up their own mind about what the issue is. rather than banish someone who doesn't carry the far-left orthodoxy. What happened in Seattle? I used to, when I was a reporter racing around the country,

I used to look forward to going to Seattle. You know, you go to the fishermen's place. They have a nice four seasons there. They've raised boathouse a little bit north of town. Oh, yeah. I used to, and it wasn't crazy. It wasn't a crazy town. What the deuce happened.

I got there in 2015. I didn't grow up there. And this was kind of when wokeness was starting to take over the country, not to the full extent that we saw, you know, after Trump and in 2020. But I think Seattle's just always drawn a very liberal crowd. You know, I think it's young people,

young idealists, you know, who maybe in the 80s and 90s, they were kind of hippies. And now they're, you know, kind of the people that are, you know, marching in no kings protests. and this is something that's really important to them. You can go across the water where I live, like in Bellevue or Kirkland,

and you don't get any of that. But Seattle is just a hotbed, and it just draws this type of people that will vote for a socialist mayor, that will tune you out if you have any kind of opposing view. You can certainly find pockets where people are normal, if you will, where people are common sense. I would even say that maybe most of the residents are like that. You know, the loudest people are intimidating, and there are a lot of really loud, unreasonable people in Seattle, and they drown out the reasonable voices.

Well, you don't like the mayor who's a communist, not a socialist. I mean, she... And you have the highest amount of empty buildings, you know, for corporations in the country. Yeah. Okay, in the country. So I think Starbucks left. I mean, there it is. You can see it that most of the people working for a living or involved with corporations,

they don't want any part of the culture of Seattle. So they're moving out. Okay, they're going other places. And that hurts. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and

discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. The city of Seattle. But they never admitted it. They never, you know, say, okay, maybe I'll moderate a little bit. They get more entrenched, the powers that be. I would agree with that. People dig their heels in. And I think the Seattle Times kind of does the same thing.

But they're going out of business to Seattle Times. I don't know. But, you know, it seems that they even publish every day. Is there a paper newspaper? Yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, I'm going to give the family credit, you know, the Bluffin family. You know, you can disagree with a lot of their politics.

but they are very adamant about keeping that paper going. So, you know, I'm going to give credit where credits do on that. So I don't know if they're going out of business anytime soon. This time next year, it'll be on the internet. Maybe. But, you know, it doesn't seem to matter how much negative feedback a lot of these articles get, or whether it's on Twitter or whether it's in the comments. They just don't really seem interested in changing their ways,

and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Are you going to stay in journalism now? I am, Bill. I got some good things on the horizon. I wasn't sure what was going to happen when I resigned, but I put a tweet out there and I wrote a substack and I've just got an overwhelming support. It's been really encouraging for me,

not just for me personally, but to know that people want this diversity of thought and to see how people on both sides of the aisle were disappointed that this column was spiked because I do think people, even who disagree. You wouldn't consider yourself a conservative, though. Would you, for what I've written? No, no, I mean.

I didn't see ideology in what, in your sports coverage. Yeah, no, I wouldn't consider myself a leftist. You know, I'm an independent. It really is an issue-by-issue thing for me. I don't really get tribal like that. So it kind of depends what it is. But I do reject kind of the far-left ideology that's taken over Seattle,

as I think a lot of people have, a lot of people do. And it was just, it was kind of a weird environment to walk into the office sometimes, and it was just not conducive for someone who wanted to think independently. Well, that's for sure. It's totalitarian. All right, Matt, if we can help you out at all, you let me know. And I hope you say in a business. And I'm sorry you had to go through this.

No problem. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Let's go a few miles north from Seattle up to Canada. Now, I've been to every province in Canada, except for the real northern ones, but I've been to Yukon. You know anybody that's been to Yukon? Okay. From Nova Scotia to Yukon.

I like Canada. I don't know why. It's beautiful. People are friendly, little crusty around Montreal and Quebec. They want to be French or whatever they want to be. I don't care to them out of me. But anyway, they're in a real intense brawl with President Trump over trade. So let me just give you the facts. In 2024, just two years ago, the deficit for trade between. In the USA and Canada was $60 billion. It dropped a $48 billion last year because the Trump came in and aggressively said, hey, your hos and are farmers, your charges way too much for your products.

Better stop. So Carney, the prime minister, dropped it a little bit. But that's more than $100 billion in two years, whereby their treasury, in Ottawa gets more money than our treasury in Washington, D.C. A hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. So Trump says, no, we're going to balance this. So you Canadians are going to have to buy more American products. What does that mean?

Do you force Canadians into the hardware store? No. That means that the wholesale people have to buy more from us, according to Trump. Or stuff's going to tariff them, which he did. So now we have a brawl. All right. So Canada, which is benefited by the trade deficit for years, decades, and Trump is Trump. society sees a bad deal and we're going to change it. But the media in the United States, and of course in Canada, the media is just as liberal as our media. The media in the USA, of course, sides with Canada.

Some of the biggest trading partners with Canada in the United States are those border states, Michigan, Wisconsin. Those are states with key midterm elections this year. And voters are already concerned about inflation, about the state of the economy. This adds another level of uncertainty and something that can potentially significantly raise prices. Well, it's true. Okay. What he said is in false that the border states are going to take it in a trade war.

Well, what's the alternative? Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search select historical occupational records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors.

Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. To keep the $100 billion deficit, that's the alternative? So, yeah, it's going to be more inflation. Yeah, because this is not a fair system. Now, Canada is not the only situation here. We got big deficit in Mexico.

$200 billion in 25 last year. $200 billion. Okay? That's twice. what the Canadian deficit is. And China is $200 billion. And China is

a whole different deal because of the militaristic aspect of it. But Mexico get away with... I hate to say getting away with murder when you know the cartels are down there, but Trump makes him furious.

And that's what's going on there. The American media is like, okay. See, and some of you might think this is a cheap shop, but it isn't. It's history. Biden didn't care at all. You want $500 billion deficit? I find. They didn't even look at it.

And that's what the liberal press wants. Turn away. Turn away. Turn away. Don't get involved. Don't royal anything. All right, Trump did get two victories in a Supreme Court. One, he can continue building the ballroom slash.

It's not just a ballroom. It's not just a social thing. There's a security aspect to it as well. So he doesn't want to have to go out of the compound, the White House compound, to meetings and things like that. He wants to use that new facility to be protected. Okay, Supreme Court, John Robert, says, you can do it. The three liberals on a Supreme Court absolutely went nuts.

But they lost. The second one is that Trump still believes and will always believe that the election of 2000 was rigged. And he believes it was rigged by mail-in votes. And, you know, this is going on for six years now. Okay? So there is a movement by Homeland Security to order the states to report to the federal government who's on a voting rolls. So who's on our voting rolls?

Who's registered to vote? And they're going to cross current those names they get with, are you a legal citizen? because if you submit a name and the name is on the rolls as voted, but the person isn't a U.S. citizen, all right, because the census would know that, then you can't vote. And you'll get prosecuted,

you Californians in particular, if you allow that person who's not a U.S. citizen to vote. It's a felony. So Trump wants to constrain, the mail-in votes, because it's a lot easier for people who are not eligible to vote to throw a thing in the mail, and the bundlers do it for them. And the Supreme Court says, okay, do you have the power to do it? You have the power to order the state's homeland security to cooperate with you on information.

Those are too big victories for Trump and the Supreme Court. Now, they're not permanent victories. Report always does this. Well, we're going to hear more and we're going to listen to blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. But did you hear any of those things reported? Very sparse. Very, very sparse.

ICE, D.C. So ICE has been ordered, and this is a good thing, to low-key it a little bit. All right? No more shootings, none of that. They don't want any of that, the federal government. And they rounded up in a two-week operation, Department of Homeland Security, 1,328 illegal aliens. And they announced it yesterday. 400 of those are felons, committed felonies in the United States.

Okay? Murder, rape, on and on and on and on. And ICE says it broke up gangs, whatever. What ICE does not do, and what would help? the Trump administration, if they would, is break down. Who got swept up and what's going to happen to them? So obviously, if you're a criminal, you're going to get deported right away. I wouldn't deport them right away. I put them in prison.

And then I deport them. But we don't know, we the people, which migrants already have deportation orders. Many, many, many of these people that are swept up that the liberal mob says are hotel workers and gardeners and all. They already had their hearing and the judge said, no, you can't stay. And that's what ICE, in addition to the criminals, sweeping up. But ICE doesn't tell us how many of those there are. Huge mistake. Enormous mistake.

Can't tell you why. Final thought? Coming right up. All right, here is the final thought. We're going on vacation. I got my staff and myself a break. So we'll be gone in two weeks. And we're back day after Labor Day.

And we're putting together lots of good stuff for you leading up to the midterms. And we got, we'll do it live stuff. and all that. In the meantime, I will be tweeting on billowrally.com. Big story, I'll weigh in. So please check in with us, but we all need a break. Working really hard. So I'm going to dunk in the ocean and decompress, as they say. We really appreciate your loyalty throughout the year. Thank you for watching No Spin News tonight. I'm Bill O'Reilly. We'll see you September 8th.