Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - No Spin News - Weekend Edition - April 26, 2025

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

Listen to this week's No Spin News interviews with Clayton Cranford, Anson Frericks and Brian Townsend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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673 a day in March. That's it. Okay, that was down from 5,000 in March 24 under Biden. 5,673, 94% lower because Trump's just enforcing the law. And he got Mexico to put their troops. on the northern border. That's why. But apparently illicit drug seizures are not down. What? So some stats, 49 million Americans are involved with substance abuse. 27 million of them drug addicts. That's a big market, 27 million. Okay. USA spends 46 billion to fight the drug problem

every year. 86,000 died from overdoses in the latest stats. 178,000 died from excessive drinking in the latest stats. That's in a year. That's horrendous. I mean, a quarter of a million people biting a dust. Joining us now from Springfield, Missouri is a former special agent of the DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency. He served in law enforcement years. Brian Townsend, who is an expert on the drug situation. All right, I don't understand. So if you seal on a border down and illegal migrants, many whom were carrying illegal narcotics with them

for the cartels, smuggling them in, why aren't drugs, why are drug seizures actually up from the Biden administration? Yeah, thanks, Bill, for having me on. The problem is these cartels, these criminal networks, are highly adaptive, they're very sophisticated, and they're going to respond to our movement on the border and the decrease in apprehensions in a way that makes them successful and unfortunately. Well, it's specific, specific. I mean, if they're nailing down all of the illegal crossings,

in the night over the river, into the desert, there's a truck, picks them up, takes them to Chicago. If all of that is stop, how are the herons? heroin, the cocaine, the methamphetamine, the fentanyl. How do you get in? Well, the legal points of entry, the same roads and highways that we would take to go into Mexico are the same ways that they're bringing a lot of the drugs into the United States. They're trying to overwhelm our resources there with just the high volume of traffic. And, you know, fentanyl is, it doesn't take a lot to do a lot of damage.

I mean, so, you know, multiple small loads is just as effective as, you know, one or two large loads. You know, they'll use tunnels. They'll use, you know, the ocean, Canada. I mean, they're going to, they're going to adapt. They're going to figure out ways to. All right. I got it, but it should, I'm stunned that the drug importation is up while the migrants have been largely stopped. Now, fentanyl is usually mixed in with heroin or cocaine, and that's how it's sold on the street. The price of drugs on the street is pretty cheap right now throughout the United States, right? It is. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a rise in our prices. It means they just saturate the market and they continue to do so. They're very good at that. They control the supply chain, the distribution chain. And yeah, we haven't seen a reduction in the prices, unfortunately. The demand is too great. Yeah, the demand is huge and it's not expensive now to buy a lot of drugs, even though crimes are committed to get the money by the addicts. My thing has always been, you're not going to win the importation war. You're not going to stop the drug importation. It's just too much corruption, too much money, and you're always going to get it in. If I'm wrong, tell me because 30 years in this

business, you know more than I do, but you can't stop it, particularly when you have almost 30 million Americans wanting to buy it on a daily basis. But the demand side, you can't stop. And that's what they did in Singapore, where I did my thesis at Harvard on. They stopped the demand side where if you are caught in Singapore, which is a fascist country, with drugs in your bloodstream, you go to mandatory drug rehab, 21 months. So you're gone. You can't buy any drugs anymore. And they took the market away. So there's no drug problem in Singapore. You couldn't exactly do that here, but you could replicate some of it. Am I wrong? Yeah, we could absolutely do more here to reduce the demand.

We, you know, first of all, let's let's have the serious conversation and let's fund it, you know, instead of putting band-aids on this situation. I mean, we have such a small portion of the world's population, yet we consume the majority of drugs. I mean, we need to figure that out, you know, by far. More than anyone else. Right, because we have money. But you say fund the drug rehab, you've got to want drug rehab. Most of these addicts don't want it. And that comes from the rehab studies.

They don't want to get off it. They want to be high every day. And you can take them in and try to rehab them and they back out and they want to use. Right? Yeah. Unfortunately, we know it does take, you know, numerous attempts through rehab to break through, right, to help them. So why am I doing that? I don't want my money doing that.

I don't want to spend money on those people. I want to take them, put them someplace for a period of time. all right isolate them and then if they do it again then the period of time gets more and then they'll stop because they can't get their drugs I don't want to be paying for 15

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They're using it because they want to get high. That's why they're using it. They want to get intoxicated. I don't care whether they had a bad. bad childhood. All right? Well, I mean, it may not be our problem, but we can be human towards them and fund that problem because we know that that trauma, the abuse, those things are, you know, if we can

solve the root problems, we can help them. You can't solve the root problem. This is like migration. You can't sign a root problem. The root problem is they're poor in Honduras. We're wealthy. That's the root problem. Ask Kamala Harris.

She was in charge of the root problem. The real problem of taking drugs is weakness, cowardice. These people are weak. They want to get high. They don't want to live in the real world. That's what drives me crazy because we as a country won't admit it. Last word. I know we look at this as a moral failing,

but I think there's more than this than that. And the stigma and the way that we treat folks because of this, you know, make it difficult for them to get treatment. And I think if we look at this a little differently, Yeah, we might spend a little more money on the front end, but I think on the back end we're going to be, one, is saving people, and number two is ultimately saving money. All right. Resources. Well, you and I have a gentleman's disagreement, and you talk about stigma?

What about the stigma of these people mugging some old lady going to the bodega trying to get some food? You know, is that okay? Yeah, no, absolutely. What about ruining the city of San Francisco? What about shooting up heroin in your neck in front of children? What about all that? Does they always feel sorry for them? I'll tell you what, I'm in charge of this, Mr. Townsend.

You give me six months. I'll cut it by half. But these people aren't going to like what happens to them. I'm not going to be mean to them. Not going to abuse them. They're not going to be isolated. And that is the only way to do it. We appreciate your time very much.

You're listening to the NoSpin News Weekend Edition. the Trump administration. My God. So the president doesn't like Harvard. I can tell you that because I attended Harvard and he knows it and, you know, it gives me jazz. All right. So 2.3 billion is gone. Harvard's going to lose that from the federal government. Now he's, he may freeze another billion dollars and Harvard's fighting back. President is named Alan Garber. Okay. And Garber is now ordered his counsel at the school to sue the Trump administration. Quote, these actions of stark, real-life consequences of patients, students, faculty, staff,

researchers in the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government's authority, I encourage you to read our complaint. Harvard will lose in federal court, but it'll have to go to the Supreme's. they'll go all the way up but I think they'll lose because we the taxpayer have no obligation to fund ideological schools according to the student newspaper the Crimson which is

decent it's run by lefties but they try 82% of the Harvard faculty is liberal or far left 82% how does that happen it happens because the people doing the hiring at Harvard University are only hiring left-wingers. I guess there aren't any smart conservatives or traditionalists or libertarians. There's no smart people in those categories. 82%. So you get an ideological college.

That's what you got. And my tax money is supposed to go there? I don't want Rush Limbaugh University financed either. Okay? If you're an ideological school, you're not entitled to public tax money, period. That's the Constitution. The public money is for the public good.

Promoting far-left tenants isn't the public good. It's an ideological good. So Trump's right. And Harvard should try to come to some accommodation. All right, joining us now is the guy who graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA. His name is Anson Fredericks. I got him on for two reasons. He's got a new book out called Last Call for Bud Light,

the fall and future of America's favorite beer. But he did go to Harvard. He's a smart guy. He's a president of Strive Asset Management, and he knows the turf about Harvard and about Bud Light. So we'll get into both of those. First, Harvard, did I make any mistakes in my commentary on it? No, Bill, I think that you nailed it. I think most importantly is, you take a step back. I think we would be asking ourselves should the federal government, should your tax dollars be going to fund universities in the first place? This is sort of a relic of an older time. The U.S. government never funded universities really until World War II. Okay, let me stop you, though.

The government asks Harvard. Harvard doesn't ask the government to fund their research. The government asks Harvard to do it because the smartest people, or very smart people, are at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Penn, and they have areas of expertise. So the government comes in and says, look, we want you to find a cure for Alzheimer's at the Harvard Med School. and we're willing to fund your research and try to find that cure. That makes perfect sense to me. It doesn't make sense to you?

I think it might have made sense maybe 50 years ago when, again, you didn't have venture capitalists, you didn't have a lot of money that was going into trying to solve cancer or trying to create the next great thing on the Internet or trying to do AI because you had a very kind of nascent sort of private markets at that time. And Harvard, with $3 billion that used to spend in 1970s, they could actually help create the Internet, that help create these technical advances. Today, the government's spending over $60 billion a year. Like, you know, most things the government starts spending money, and it just keeps spending

more and more and more. And we're seeing less than less that's actually coming out of these universities. Much more is coming out of the private sector. So I actually think that the federal government, they should be incentivizing more private companies, whether it's be a tax breaks, whether it's being private. I mean, look, in both cases, the folks watching us should know that nobody's held accountable if you fail. So the government's financing a doctor to research a disease and he doesn't come up with anything. The doctor still gets a federal money. There's no performance clause in the

private sector or in the academic world. And that troubles me a little bit. All right, let's pivot over to Bud Light. So this was one of the dumbest things, and everybody knows it was dumb. You hire a trans person and Dylan Mulvaney, right? Now, Kaz was looking at your book last night to sell a beer. that's consumed mostly by men, straight men, macho men, sportsmen, and there is this Dylan Mulvaney person smug promoting Bud Light. And middle America goes, no, we're gonna punish Bud Light. That's essentially what happened, right?

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Actually, this is really much related to what happened at Harvard. One of the reason that Harvard and Trump is rescinding a lot of the funds is you recall that under the Civil Rights Act in 1964. You can't discriminate if it's of race, sex, religion, etc. Yet two years ago, you had Harvard's president, Codding Day, after Israel was attacked by Hamas, could not say if calling to the genocide of Israelis was hate speech. And this is because you had people on the left,

like Harvard, and this whole cadre of what I call the DEI complex. You had McKinsey who was pushing DEI studies. You had BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, pushing DEI and ESG. You had the universities doing it, and they essentially kind of follow the money bill. They were the ones that were directing large corporations. I mean, Anheuser-Busch became the essentially the poster child of what went wrong in corporate America, but a lot of other companies were essentially putting money towards supporting very progressive, very alive. Okay, but it doesn't make any, it was Anheuser-Busch was the one that just became the one that became the poster child of what went wrong. When you're in Harvard Business School, they're teaching you how to make money.

It's a capitalistic thing. I know there's DEI. But Bud Light, Anizer Bush, and you worked for them for 11 years. Are they that stupid? That's a question. Are they that stupid? They were because, you know, when I worked there, you never would have gotten Bud Light, the largest beer brand in America that was enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike. You never would have had a touch anything that was close to a political issue.

You wouldn't have a touch transgenderism. You wouldn't have a touch abortion issues. Well, what happened? All right. So you had horses. You had Clydesdales dragging the beer thing around. Budweiser frogs. Real men of genius, the was-up guys.

And you got it. Like, that's what beer was. It actually brought people together. That's what excited people. That's what brought people together. But when you had this ideological capture, a lot of companies, you remember, you know, Disney got involved in the parental rights issues down in Florida. Right, right.

Coca-Cola got involved in voting rights issues. This became kind of... But here's what I don't understand. Why would the board of directors, why would the president, CEO of Anheiser-Busch allow something that could backfire so badly. Surely they had to know that there was risk in putting this transgendered individual in their ad campaign. Surely they had to know that. This was ideological capture at finest, though, Bill, is that you have this a European company now. So what a lot of don't realize is Anheuser-Busch is owned by a European company. This European company, InBeb, has boards of

directors that believe in more of this stakeholder capitalism philosophy, where businesses are supposed to get involved in social and political issues. That's the purpose of a corporation in mind. They want every company to be like Ben and Jerry's. That's the product. Those are not American values. That's not how most companies act here in the U.S. That's where the company got into trouble. And that's where the company still hasn't apologized to this day, because it's really captured by, I think, a lot of Europeans and European thinking that businesses are supposed to be kind of part of social enterprises working with the government, not for the benefit of share. I got it. And the one that benefit was Modelo, the Mexican beer.

So the book is Last Call for Bud Light, Anson Freericks. You might want to check that out. it's fascinating on how to destroy your profit margin. Thanks, Anson. We'll talk again soon, I hope. This is the NoSpin News Weekend Edition. I got a letter from a concierge member who lost $200,000 in a scheme on the internet and is coming to me for help. $200,000.

And I read the case, he sent me the case, and there was not much I could do. The FBI is this guy's only hope. And whether the FBI is going to help him or not, I'm going to try to encourage that, but I can't force them to do it, the FBI. They've got big things going on. And this is 200,000 is a big thing for this guy, but it's not terrorist. Anyway, I don't know, I'm a Luddite, as I told you at the top of the program. I don't deal with the Internet.

Nobody gets my private information. I go into Walgreens, and they want a phone number after I give them my credit card. And I go, I'm not giving you up my phone number. You don't get anything for me. Okay, I don't want this stuff out. And they take my money, of course. But nobody gets any of my private information ever. because there is so much crime on the Internet now.

Listen to these stats. 2003, the FBI received about 900,000 complaints about crimes on the Internet. Losses exceeding $12.5 billion. Okay? California is the worst state. 80,000 complaints, $2 billion in losses. This is all cybercrime. All right?

The big thing is fishing schemes. Fishing schemes, P.H. I had no idea what that is. What it is is a type of internet scam where criminals send you fraudulent emails to try to trick you into revealing sensitive information like your credit card numbers and things like that. Fishing. Now, my question is always simple. How do you stop this? It was a good article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Nicole Nguyen. And we wanted to get her on tonight. And she was totally. disrespectful to us, so she'll never appear on this broadcast. I have to say the Wall Street Journal in general is disrespectful to our operation. I don't know why, but they are.

But we got a better at guest. His name is Clayton Cranford, joins us from California. He runs cybersafetycop.com, cyber safetycop.com, which is solutions to this horrendous problem. Okay, I'm 10 years old now, so you know that, Clayton. I don't know anything. Why, how? This is a better question. How do cyber criminals get to people in the first place? How do they do that?

Well, if you are in the digital world, if you have an email address, if you have social media, if you have a text, a number that people can text you, you are available, right? Your information's out there, and for them, it's a numbers game. They'll just blast these, you know, fishing emails or fishing text to thousands and thousands of people, and they just need a small percentage of those people to take the bait, and that's really what... Well, give me an example of a debate. An example of debate?

Well, they send you something that is urgent, right? They want you to panic a little bit, and it could be that, you know, your bank account has has been frozen because of fraudulent activity, you must log in here to restore it or something like that. So they want you to panic and they want you to click on that link and it may take you to a website that looks a lot like your bank account, but maybe it's a website that is, you know, spoofing that site and then you enter your information now they have it. So they're really kind of betting on people just emotionally responding to things and that's maybe

the first thing we should say is when you get these things. to just stop, take a breath and carefully read it because there are some tell-tale signs that these are phishing emails or text messages. Okay, here's what I do. I never respond to anything that I don't know. Okay? So my bank does not email me or does not text me, ever. My insurance doesn't, my lawyer doesn't, and when I get something like that, I just delete it immediately. There's no downside to doing what I'm doing, is there? With PayPal, I can pay now or paying for no interest and no fees now feature ears on this prime cut musical meat you can pay your own way don't just pay pay pal subject to approval eligibility fairs and learn more at paypal dot com slash pay and four

hey it's sean spicer from the sean spicer show podcast reminding you to tune into my show every day to get your daily dose inside the world of politics president trump and his team are shaking up washington like never before and we're here to cover it from all sides especially on the topic the mainstream media won't. So if you're a political junkie on a late lunch or getting ready for the drive home, new episodes of the Sean Spicer Show podcast drop at 2 p.m. East Coast every day.

Make sure you tune in. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. No, that's the right thing to do because you're right. These institutions do not ask for your personal information. I mean, that is standard. And if you're not sure, give them a call. Go to their reliable website.

bank or whatever, has to speak to the bank manager and whatever. But the fact that you're clicking on the fraudulent website, the criminal website, doesn't that give them some access to you? Well, it can. If it's a link that's executing a application on your computer, I mean, they could install some spyware on your computer. That's possible. But, you know, it's not difficult for them to do this. This is happening, like you said, at, you know, epidemic rates. And it's a lot of more elderly people who maybe aren't as internet savvy that are often the victims of this. But you had for the guy who lost 200,000, he had to send money. I don't know whether he sent at PayPal or what, but he had to send these people money, right? Yeah, you got to wire them money. You've got to

send them money. Who would do that? And oftentimes, yeah, well, they ask you to do it in ways that are a little weird. They're like, hey, buy some gift cards and send me the numbers for the gift card. So sometimes even when you're doing it, I've talked to victims, they're like, it just seemed weird to me. You need to listen to that voice. When you feel like something's not quite right, you need to hit the brakes and look at it a little bit closely. When you say listen to a voice, isn't most of it's done in print? Well, yeah, but what I mean is like just when I talk to victims, a lot of times, they just have a gut feeling that there's something not quite right. And you should listen to that feeling.

Why are they just blow it off? I don't understand why people don't, why they engage anyway. It's like when someone calls you on the phone, my line is I don't do business on a phone, have a good day. Click. That's it. I'm not doing business on a telephone with somebody I don't know. That's an amazing policy. Yeah, absolutely. And like on social media, I have a very locked down private social media account that the only people who get under people I know in real life, like friends and family. And when I get a request from someone I do not know, it's an instant block.

And so if people do that, they've removed a lot of the lot. All right, so you can do an instant block. And that's what your outfit, CyberSafetyCop.com does, right? Shows you how to protect yourself. Yeah, and we do a lot of education for families with children because a lot of children are being victimized, you know, in other ways online as well. Oh, sure.

I mean, there's no doubt about that. Evil is all over the place. Final question for you. when you lose 200,000, even if the guy goes to the FBI and reports the crime, because it's cyberspace, it's almost impossible to catch these criminals, correct? Yeah, a lot of that money's being wired overseas. And once the money leaves the bank, it's kind of impossible often to get it back. If you can, if the local law enforcement, their cyber crimes, if they can alert the bank before that money,

clears, then they can get it back. But once it's gone... Once it's gone, it's gone. And the FBI is, I would assume, overwhelmed when you have 900,000 of these reported crimes a year. I mean, that's just incredible. Last word. Yeah, it's heartbreaking for a lot of people. That's a life savings for someone, and there may not be any chance of getting it back. All right. Thank you very much, Claytony. Well, website again is cyber safety cop one word dot com thank you for listening to the no spin news weekend edition to watch the full episodes of the no spin news visit bill o'reilly dot com and sign up to become a premium or concierge member that's bill o'reilly dot com sign up and start watching today