The Philip DeFranco Show - The Candace Owens Podcast Situation Exposes A Lot, Leaving America, & The Problem With Public School

Starting point is 00:00:00 What up, you beautiful bastards? Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show. It is Friday, which means you're getting a very special edition of the show. It is from the bastards. So what that means is that you have control. Y'all said in questions or topics you want us to break down and we do our Philip DeFranco Show thing and get it out to you.

Starting point is 00:00:16 So hey, hit that like button and let's dive into our first question and topic. And first up today, we've got Nick, who's actually worked as a teacher in Dallas, asking a question I think a lot of parents are genuinely wrestling with right now. In the past 10 years, the education system doesn't seem what it used to be back in the day.

Starting point is 00:00:29 It kind of scares me to see the way it's been dissolved as far as what we're allowed to teach kids and what we're allowed to allow them to learn. And it's kind of surprising to me. As a parent, would you allow your kids to go to the public school system that they have nowadays? So this hits close to home for me. My wife's even running for the school board here because we really, really care about the public school system. But before I give you my answer, let's actually look at the state of public education in America because the data is actually pretty sobering.

Starting point is 00:00:57 And we'll start with the most straightforward measure, Are kids actually learning? Right, and to answer that question, we need to take a look at results from National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a series of standardized tests, widely known as the nation's report card. When you look at the most recent data from 2024, it shows that 12th grade reading and math scores, it hit record lows. Just 35% of high school seniors were proficient in reading, 32% scored below the basic level. And math was even worse, only 22% of seniors were proficient and nearly half scored below basic,

Starting point is 00:01:22 half. So the gap between the highest and lowest performing eighth graders, it's the widest it's ever been. An experts largely point to the pandemic as the primary cause, but it's also not the only one. Chronic absenteeism, more screen time, shorter attention spans, and a decline, and kids reading longer form content are all contributing factors. And here's the thing that makes it worse. The Trump administration has cut roughly a dozen national and state student assessments through 2032. So on top of scores dropping, we're also going to have less visibility into how much they're dropping. And the people inside of the system, they are not optimistic. A Pew Research Center report from 2024 found that 82% of teachers said that the overall state of public K to 12 education, it has gotten worse in the the past five years.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Where than half said that they wouldn't advise a young person to even enter the profession. You had a 2025 Gallup poll finding that 73% of Americans said they were very or somewhat dissatisfied with the quality of the U.S. public education system. And overall, the percentage of adults who were still satisfied is the lowest it's ever been since Gallup started asking the question back in 2001. Also about half of all U.S. adults say public K to 12 is going in the wrong direction. And then, you know, there's the curriculum debate. And that's been its own firestorm.

Starting point is 00:02:21 I mean, from 2021 to 2024, nearly one-third of states have banned K-12 school curricula that, but offer critical perspectives on America's racial history. During that same time period, legislatures in at least 40 states introduce more than 200 pieces of legislation to restrict what teachers can discuss and actually punish them for teaching what some call divisive topics.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And supporters argue this protects kids from political indoctrination, but critics argue it does the opposite, that limiting complex, honest conversations about history, it leaves students with a simplified and distorted picture of the world. So with all of that context, you know, what are families actually doing?

Starting point is 00:02:52 Well, a lot of them, they're leaving. Private school enrollment? It has surged post-pandemic, with roughly 40% of private school is reporting enrollment increases in the 2023, 2024 school year. And a big driver of that has been the expansion of school choice programs, government-funded vouchers that let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for private school. Right before the pandemic, just over half a million students were using those programs,

Starting point is 00:03:10 and now, I mean, that's above 1.3 million. And you're seeing things like an Ed Choice survey finding that 50% of parents would send their kids to private school or homeschool if given the option. Now with that, you know, private schools do consistently outperform public schools and standardized tests and college placement, but researchers are very quick to add here. There's important context. When you control for socioeconomic status, that achievement gap shrinks dramatically. In 2018 analysis found that a student's success is less about the type of school they attend and

Starting point is 00:03:34 more about the attributes of their family, parental education levels, income, access to tutors, having a quiet space to study at home, things like that. So essentially, private schools often look better on paper, partly because they serve wealthier students who are likely going to do well regardless. But that said, the post-pandemic achievement gaps between public and private schools, they've just grown and lower-income communities are bearing the brunt of all of it. And then, you know, it can get complicated. Critics of the school choice movement, they argue that pulling students and the funding tied to them out of the public schools, it's just accelerating a death spiral for those institutions. So you see things like between 2019 and 2023, enrollment declined by 20% or more at nearly 1 and 12 public schools. Around 1,000 public schools close every year. And also as Stanford analysis found that majority black public schools are far more likely to be among those closures. And the argument being, you drain public schools of students and money that the quality then drops, more people leave, the quality drops further, and eventually the school just shuts down. This is happening disproportionately in communities that already have the fewest options. And so this question of whether you send your kid to public school, it ends up not just being a personal one. It becomes a deeply political one with real downstream consequences for

Starting point is 00:04:33 communities that don't have the option to choose. And so for us personally, we've decided to send our kids to public school. You have the money to go private, we've done it in the past, but this is what feels right to us right now. And you know, part of that, it's also connected to my belief that the best school for you, especially K to 12, is the one that's closest. The schools, the infrastructure, the staff, all of that, it matters. But also something the data has shown is that kids are really able to thrive when they're able to maximize the time they have out of school. And so part of that's connected to how much time are you losing on the drive or the the bus into school and back. Or the kids, your kids are around at school, also close by, is there

Starting point is 00:05:05 sort of a community thing? And a lot of that it's connected to, you know, we're stronger and better together. There's also a whole thing I could talk about with kids being lonelier than ever. And so it's important, you know, that we're maximizing and doing things that that help socialize and benefit kids outside of school. So, you know, again, while I understand, you know, what you do with your kids, it is a very personal issue. This is how I currently look at it. And I want to try and help build up something rather than strip something down and run away. And then there's more we're going to dive into based off of your questions. But first, let me take a minute to thank a sponsor and say, you know, remember when changing

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Starting point is 00:06:20 plus four extra months free when you use my link. Right, and it's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. Just scan that code or go to NordvPN.com slash Phil. That's NordvPN.com slash Phil. But then next step today, we've got Maddie from Canada coming in with a question that I think honestly a lot of Americans have thought about at least over the last year and a half. Hey Phil, I was just wondering if you would ever consider leaving America

Starting point is 00:06:42 if things get really, really bad. So where I'll start is with polling. Because the numbers, they've shifted dramatically in a very short period of time. A 2025 Gallup poll found that roughly one in five Americans want to move abroad permanently. And while that sounds like a lot, and yes, it definitely is, here's what really makes it crazy. That is more double the number who said the same thing a decade ago. Right, there's been a steady climb since 2014,

Starting point is 00:07:01 and then it's just been accelerating. A Harris poll last year found that foreign 10 Americans have either considered or are actively planning to move outside of the United States. And the people surveyed specifically pointed to dissatisfaction with current political leadership as a primary reason. Also a big thing, I'll say the generational splits pretty stark. Two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 34 say they've thought about leaving,

Starting point is 00:07:19 and that's from an American Psychological Association survey. More than half of all parents polled said the same. You also had Gallup flagging something that they They called a record. 40% of women aged 15 to 44 said that they wanted to leave the United States in 2025. And also with the situation, you have Rainbow Railroad, a nonprofit that helps LGBTQ plus people escape state-sponsored violence saying that it has received a record high number of requests for help from U.S. citizens since Trump's reelection. And so, yeah, you have people saying they want to leave, but are they actually doing it? And this is where I'll say, you know, it gets harder to track. You have experts saying that permanently leaving a country, it's genuinely difficult to measure.

Starting point is 00:07:49 But the indicators we do have, they're pretty telling. Write a report from CS Global Partners estimated that 1,285 Americans renounced their citizenship in just the first quarter of 2025. There was a 102% increase compared to the previous quarter. Also, prior to 2009, only a few hundred people totally renowned citizenship per year. But the numbers now appear to just keep going up and up, and this as relocation firms and expat communities are reporting a surge in interest. Where you had one citizenship and residency advisory firm reporting a 400% increase in American clients in the first quarter of 2025 versus the year prior. A record number of U.S. citizens applied for UK PAC. in the first three months of last year. Also, Ireland, they saw American passport applications soar during the same period and notably Ireland reported the number of Americans who actually moved there this past spring

Starting point is 00:08:30 doubled in the year before. And so it's not fully all talk, but also experts are quick to point out that a lot of the passport applications They're more of a break glass in case of emergency move right people securing options not necessarily booking flights But the fact that you have this increasing number of Americans building an exit ramp that itself is significant and then actually there's a domestic version of the same phenomenon You have people who aren't leaving the country but they're absolutely leaving their state And this actually has a name, it's called The Big Sort. It's the trend of Americans increasingly moving to places that match their political beliefs, and it's just been accelerating for years now. Right, Kennes that voted Republican in 2020, they saw net population gains of 3.7 million in the three years following the election.

Starting point is 00:09:04 And a New York Times analysis found that broadly, more Democrats moved to Biden's states, while more Republicans moved to Trump states, though it varies by location. Right, in Florida's the headline example, over 200,000 registered Republicans moved there between the last two presidential elections, more than twice the number of Democrats. Meanwhile, after Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia in almost 30 years, as Democrats actually outnumbered Republicans moving into Georgia between 2020 and 2024. Right in that as Democrats have also made small migration gains in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. California though, I'll say, has seen more Republicans leave than any other state,

Starting point is 00:09:33 most heading to Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. Now, not all of that is purely political, right? A cost-living and pandemic era or remote work shifts, that has played a role as well. Though yeah, you could argue that as political in just a different way. But also a survey from early 2025 found that nearly half of Americans considering a move cited the political climate as their primary motivation. And so yes, clearly politics is a major driver. And so the picture that ends up getting painted here is that you have a country sorting itself geographically, culturally, and politically. People are voting with their feet, whether that means moving to a rather suburb, a bluer city, or a different country altogether. And as for my answer, no, I'm not, I'm not going anywhere.

Starting point is 00:10:04 Like, I think a lot of people who have jobs like myself, I have a planned out a skate plan, if need be. You know, I love my country. I've loved the last two states that I've lived in, whether it be California or now Georgia. I want to be a part of the change that I want to see in this world and in this country. But yeah, at the same time, I'd be lying if I said, sometimes I didn't get kind of nervous. But the government's been weaponized against anyone who wants to stand against Trump or even speak truth to power. So for me personally, there are a few different canaries in the coal mine that I won't specifically

Starting point is 00:10:30 call out that, you know, I just, I always keep an ear open for it. But the next ever of that, we've got a guy named Phil. Fantastic name, by the way. Who asked why I decided to launch new podcasts. I want to know what made you decide to go back to podcasting. I would love to know your thought process behind starting a podcast. and where you think they're gonna go from here as a medium. And actually where I'll start here is, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:54 the podcasting world, it is kind of fascinating. And I also don't think people fully appreciate what's going on in the space. Because despite what you've seen maybe a stray headline say here or there, podcast is not dying, it is absolutely exploding still. Yes, the pandemic era gold rush of people launch and shows it, that's largely over. We saw over a million new podcast launch in 2020,

Starting point is 00:11:12 another 750,000 in 2021. And then launch has kind of fell off a cliff, down 80% by 2022. And that can sound bad on the story. surface, but what those numbers actually tell you is that the hobbyist bubble burst. So it's left are real things that might have core, staying power, at the very least, are not these kind of fickle things. And actually, new show launches have been ticking back up. Around 205,000 new podcasts were launched in 2025, which is up from roughly 198,000 the year before. But also more importantly, the audience

Starting point is 00:11:37 never stopped growing. In fact, it's been growing faster than almost anyone predicted. Right now, roughly 584 million people worldwide listened to podcasts. And that's more than double than what it was six years ago. Right, analysts projected that that number is just going to keep going up and up. And in the U.S., specifically, more than half of all Americans, over 12, they've watched or listened to a podcast in just the last month. Four in ten, they did it last week. Monthly listeners have more than tripled in the last decade. Weekly listeners, they've more than quadrupled, and the money, it's followed accordingly. Right, the global podcast market was valued at roughly $47 billion in 2025, and projections have it nearly quadrupling to around

Starting point is 00:12:09 171 billion by 2030. This can start as, yeah, a hobby, but the whole thing, it's not a niche hobby. It's a genuine media industry. And also I'll say, a huge driver of that growth now is video. Or the shift to video podcasting, that's been a massive accelerant. 130 U.S. podcast consumers now say that they prefer shows with video, and the markets responded. The number of shows posting full videos on YouTube has more than doubled since 2022, with over half of all podcasts now uploading video content. You got YouTube reporting over a billion monthly podcast viewers as a 2025,

Starting point is 00:12:36 and by some metrics, they've now surpassed Apple and Spotify as the top platform for podcast consumption in the United States. And it's also become the number one place of people discovering new shows. also say this is where it gets really interesting from a cultural and political standpoint. Right, because podcasting, it's not just entertainment anymore. It is arguably the most influential media outlet in the country right now. I mean, a few survey found that a third of Americans now get at least some of their news from podcasts, up from just 22% in 2020. And the ideological makeup of the audience, it's shifting. Edison research data shows conservative listeners jumped from 23% to 30% between 2019 and 2024. And actually some 2025 data

Starting point is 00:13:09 suggests that conservatives now outnumber liberals among news podcast listeners. Right, and with all of this, we saw how consequential this got with the 2024 election, a race that was widely dubbed the podcast election. Trump went on 20 individual podcasts between July and November of 2024. He had Flagrant, Theo, J-R-E, full send, impulsive, and more. But a lot of the same guys that are like, oh my God, I can't believe he's doing this, even though everyone warned me. Then also, as far as Harris, she appeared on eight. And also, many of the hosts that Trump spoke with went on to endorse her vote for him. Right-leading podcasters, they were widely credited with helping Trump close the gap, especially with younger male voters. And then, of course, we fast forward to more recent times and you have people

Starting point is 00:13:42 looking at Zoran Mamdani. He's a very progressive candidate with a lot of populist ideals, and of course that is a big chunk of the reason why people voted for him. But also you have to know that he appeared on 31 podcasts including Flagrant, whose host Andrew Schultz, voted for Trump. And all the while, you have top charts across platforms continuing to be dominated by news adjacent shows. Rate the Daily, Tucker Carlson, J.R.E, Theo Vaughn, Candice Owens' Podcasts, ranked in the top three for downloads and views both for month and for episode earlier this year. And then, of course, on the left, you've got Pod Save America, first, the Midas Touch podcast, and more. And you know, the election, many have had a wild ride at times unseeding Rogan at the top of the

Starting point is 00:14:15 YouTube charts. You know, it's one of the reasons I've been covering big right-wingers like Owens and more on the show. A lot of people I know still think of her as a side show and don't realize not only how the right has taken over such a huge chunk of the space, but how they're moving in these spaces. Sometimes, yes, it's to highlight how they're fighting and the basis fracture. But also it's because we need to highlight what's informing millions of people perf platform in our country compared to mainstream sources in the past. And many of them do it. Owens and Ben Shapiro come to mind first by trying to hit pop culture moments hard, right? These non-political things and they slowly transition their audience and or they

Starting point is 00:14:45 battle some sort of big bad. So for Owens, that could be everything that's been happening with TPUSA in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder or the president of France because she's alleged his wife's actually trans. Right, they benefited from the second term of Trump as sort of resistance podcasts. And so the point is, you know, this space, it's not shrinking, it's consolidating power. People who are still here, they're building real audiences, real influence and real money. And that influence on culture and politics, it's just going to keep growing. So to bring all of that to now my personal answer, a bit of it was emotional and mental, and a bit of it was strategy. But he reached out to Alex Perlman to start our podcast, crashing out,

Starting point is 00:15:15 wanted a place to kind of shoot the shit and also be able to genuinely crash out or go more opinion than just kind of talking about what is factually happening. The Philip DeFranco Show, which yes, is also a podcast, is news, news, news, a little bit of opinion. Crashing out is kind of the opposite. So for me, that was something I emotionally and mentally needed, but also it happens to kind to fit in perfectly with our strategy of trying to reach more people, different people. And then as far as my podcast in good faith, that again, it's a little bit of a mixture. It's weird saying this as someone who's been talking for a living for 20 years. But for who I am at my core, like just 90% of the time, I would rather be asking a question

Starting point is 00:15:47 and listening rather than just talking. So initially, I launched that to have kind of more long-form conversations with people in the political space. But as we're setting up for the 2026 season of that show, it's going to be a little more of a mishmash. Yes, some people in the political space, but also having a taste of what I had with my really old podcast of conversation with where I was really just kind of sitting down hanging, learning about a person and it almost being built more for their audience and a little for my own.

Starting point is 00:16:09 I think over time I want in good faith to be kind of less blatantly political and that could just kind of be something in the background because of course everything is politics. And while there's definitely an appetite and a need to stay on top of what's happening politically now, I get a lot of joy from, but then insert strategy, there is a lot of power with news adjacent show with news adjationship, news adjacent shows. But that, my friends, is the end of your Friday, Philip DeFranco show, the end of From the Bastards for this week. If you'd like to set in your own question or topic, I've got a link for you in the description. I know a few of you are shy, you don't want to share your voice, so you can also leave a question in the comments that might get picked up.

Starting point is 00:16:43 But hey, where I'll leave you for now is to say, thank you for watching. I love yo faces. If you want more to watch, you can watch last night's Philip DeFranco show or the newest episode of crashing out. But whatever you do, I'll see you right back here on Monday with another full Philip DeFranco show. I'm going to ask you a question here in a second, and you can tell me to go fuck myself. and cut it. No focus. Just gonna preface that.

Starting point is 00:17:03 You're thinking. That's a great one. How did you find that? What kind of research are you doing? You won't get used to, you'll never, the pain will never go away. Nick gave me a really good piece of advice. I was horrible. The one time I've been fired from a job.

The Philip DeFranco Show - The Candace Owens Podcast Situation Exposes A Lot, Leaving America, & The Problem With Public School

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