WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 14

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about President Trump’s latest effort to make Washington D.C. safer, an executive order aimed at putting an end to flag burning, a Supreme Court case about whether states are constitutionally allowed to punish students for using the wrong bathroom, and more. I’m your host, Luke Miller, and on this show we’ll cover the news you didn’t catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome, to “Under the Radar.”

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about President Trump's latest effort to make Washington, D.C. safer, an executive order aimed at putting an end to flag burning, a Supreme Court case about whether states are constitutionally allowed to punish students for using the wrong bathroom and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller,

and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. While they're covering the president's latest tweets, Here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by the President August 25th, entitled Measures to End Cashless Bail and Enforce the Law in the District of Columbia. In the executive order, the administration states there is a crime emergency in Washington, D.C., that is impeding the operations and responsibilities of the federal government.

D.C.'s government's pretrial release policies, which include prohibiting cash bail, contribute to the disgraceful conditions of the city, as law enforcement must arrest the same individuals multiple times, and dangerous criminals are sometimes rapidly released. This leaves such criminals free to endanger American citizens visiting our nation's capital, federal workers, and citizens of D.C. trying to live their lives safely. So the first thing to point out here is whether there actually is a crime emergency in D.C. According to Citidata.com's Crime Index, the crime rate in Washington, D.C. is almost two and a half times higher than the U.S. average. Also, it's higher than 98.5% of U.S. cities. It has been rising rapidly since 2017. This year and 2024 have been little dips actually in crime, with 2020 through 2020-203 being a massive spike in crime in the Washington, D.C. area. At its peak in 2023, there were 264 murders, about 20,000 thefts,

4,000 robberies, 3,000 assaults, 7,000 auto thefts, just in that one year. So the crime numbers are not good in Washington, D.C., and it's relatively small compared to some of the other major cities in the United States as far as population goes, but they're experiencing really high crime numbers per capita compared to those other cities. Also, as of September 2025, there are almost a thousand registered sex offenders living in Washington, D.C. Now, there's a couple measures in this executive order aimed at addressing these bad per capita crime statistics. First of all, a big part of this is intended to keep people who have been arrested for violent crimes in jail until their trial. D.C. currently has a cashless bail system. They have prohibited cash bail because they believe that

cash bail is disproportionately beneficial to wealthy people who could get out of jail even with high cash bail prices, while poor people might not be able to pay cash bail even for smaller crimes. So what they've replaced that with is this cashless bail system, which is based off a flight risk. So if a judge rules that you're not that big of a flight risk, you'll just be let out of jail awaiting your trial. What the Trump administration is stating in this executive order is that law enforcement is having to arrest the same individuals multiple times because they keep getting released pre-trial and then committing the same crimes again and again. They're committing a lot of thefts and robberies over and over again when they're being let off in this cashless bail system. So the

executive order is trying to put federal pressure on the government of Washington, D.C., which it has the power to do, to withhold funds and if necessary, send in the National Guard to enforce this policy that the federal government would like to see the D.C. government implement, which is the cash bail system because the federal government believes that a cash bail system is more likely to keep dangerous criminals in jail until their trial, which is another part of the executive order, which might even be more important than the cash bail side of things. The federal government would like Washington, D.C. to completely restructure its policy in accordance with the attorney general, to restructure how they give cash bail to violent criminals and nonviolent criminals who are at a higher

likelihood of committing that same crime again. So for example, like thieves and robbers who have a track record of committing those same crimes over and over again, the goal being to implement a policy in Washington, D.C., where those criminals who are likely to commit the same crime again, get a cash bail that would be very hard to pay in order to keep them in jail until their trial. So it's just another measure to help try to keep Washington, D.C. safer in the hopes that, one, people will be disincentivized to commit those kind of crimes in the first place. And second of all, the law enforcement officials won't have to arrest people multiple times for committing the same crime when they're not actually being punished for it yet. Now, there are a lot of people who are opposed to

measures like this that the Trump administration has been taking to essentially take control over Washington, D.C. and deal with this crime problem. Washington, D.C. is no longer just this place where representatives from all over the country come to meet in their congressional delegations a couple times a year and then go back home. That's not what Washington, D.C. is anymore. In the most recent data, Washington, D.C. has about 700,000 permanent residents, which is over 100,000 more people than the entire state of Wyoming. In 23, according to the Office of Homeland Security, there were about 40,000 people granted permanent green cards in the D.C. metro area, which means that there is a good bit of immigration going on into the D.C. area. But Washington, D.C. is not a state, so it doesn't have a state government to help it deal with all of this. And with the relatively large increase in population over the last 10, 20, 30 years in particular,

it's really hard for a city government to deal with all of that without the help of state funding or state authority. And that was entirely intentional. I mean, in the Constitution, power of enforcement over the D.C. area was given entirely to Congress because they didn't want any one state to have undue influence over the federal government. Now, since then, a lot of the power has been shifted from congressional control over to executive control, of the D.C. area, and that's why the federal government is stepping in an executive capacity to help D.C. deal with its crime problem, particularly using emergency powers. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the President August 25th, entitled

prosecuting burning of the American flag. The administration writes, the American flag is a special symbol in our national life that should unite and represent all Americans of every background and walk of life. Desecrating it is uniquely offensive and provocative, the clearest possible expression of opposition to the political union that reserves our rights. Burning this representation of America might incite riot and violence. Flag burning is also used by groups of foreign nationals as a calculated act to intimidate and threaten violence against Americans. Now, this executive order is extremely carefully worded. It is a touchy subject about whether burning the American flag constitutes freedom of expression,

as defined in the First Amendment. All throughout this executive order, the administration is very careful to say that when flag burning violates content neutral laws that cause harm unrelated, to freedom of expression, trying to stay consistent with the First Amendment. The administration does not want to violate people's First Amendment rights in this. That's very, very clear and very much emphasized all throughout this entire executive order. The actual measures taken to combat flag desecration are that the Attorney General can work with states to prosecute people who burn the flag in violent crimes, hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of American civil rights, and crimes against property and the peace,

as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate and aiding and abetting others to violate such laws. Now, the executive order acknowledges this explicitly, but the reason it has to be so careful in its wording is a landmark Supreme Court case from 1989 called Texas v. Johnson. The case was about a man named Gregory Johnson, who went to the 1984 Republican National Convention, where in an act of political protest, he burned the American flag. He was trying to convey a specific political message. He was arrested immediately and convicted, under a Texas law that prohibited the desecration of a quote-unquote venerated object, which included the U.S. flag. So Texas had a law where you couldn't destroy things like the Bible or like the American flag because the state of Texas believed there were certain things like that

that should be held at a certain level of respect. And so destroying those things was not freedom of expression, but a symbol of hate. His case was taken to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government can't prohibit the expression of idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. The court said that flag burning is protected symbolic speech under the First Amendment, and so the Texas law was a violation of Johnson's constitutional rights, which basically set the precedent that in political protest,

when it's not inciting people into a riot, or when you're destroying somebody else's property, you are allowed to burn the American flag. Now, I bring this case up because the executive order clearly cites this Supreme Court case and says, notwithstanding the Texas v. Johnson case, the Supreme Court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action, or that is an action amounting to fighting words, is constitutionally protected. So I think the administration is going to have a

hard time legally enforcing this executive order. They're having to do a lot of workarounds for this Supreme Court precedent to try to enforce this law. If they're trying to redefine what it means to burn the American flag in a way that insights violence or is destruction of property or disturbs the peace or something like that, if they try to redefine what it means, they're going to run into a lot of legal trouble in an attempt to further the enforcement of the laws that are already on the books. And if they're not trying to further enforcement of the laws already on the books, then what was the point of the executive order in the first place? I don't know. Now, I think it's very telling that the executive order brings up the fact that foreign nationals have been burning the American flag at anti-American protests, particularly the pro-Hamas protests that have been going on over the last year or two in the

United States, there have been a lot of people burning the American flag as a political statement, and a lot of those protests have turned into riots. So I think that part of what the administration is doing here through this executive order is trying to crack down on situations like that, where there are anti-American protests going on, and flag burning starts, and it turns into a riot eventually. I think what they're going to try to use this executive order for is to say things like that are disturbing the peace to try to cut it off before it gets to a place of breaking out into riots. And so if you can define flag burning as disturbing the peace before it gets to a violent state, you can try to cut it off before it happens. Now, if that's what they're doing,

they're going to run into some legal trouble doing that because in political protest, the Supreme Court has already ruled that it is okay to burn the American flag. So I think the administration is going to have a tough time enforcing this, at least in the way I think they want to, but we'll have to see what direction they take it. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case called South Carolina v. Doe, which is challenging whether the state of South Carolina has the right to punish a student for using a bathroom that does not correlate with their biological sex at birth. So the case is about this 14-year-old transgender boy who has decided for this case to go only by John Doe,

transgender boy meaning born a biological female, and now identifies as transgender. gender. Last year during the 2024-2020-school year, this John Doe, who was then in eighth grade, was suspended for a day for using the boys' bathroom. School officials basically told the parents that Doe could be expelled for continuing to use the boys' bathroom. Doe's parents then decided to pull their child out of school and start using online school options for the rest of the year. But for the 2025-2020-6 school year, they decided to return to in-person schooling. And so the parents filed this case on behalf of this teen, only known as John Doe, suing the state of South Carolina for this law and for the punishment corresponding with it, basically saying that it violated their child's constitutional rights and violates the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating based off of biological sex. Now, the South Carolina law explicitly states that students must use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex at the time of birth and that school districts that don't adhere to this rule face the loss of 25% of the state. funding that's allocated to that district. Now, there have been a lot of cases like this recently,

whether it's in high school sports, whether it's about the bathrooms issue. There's lots of cases about this issue that have come to the Supreme Court recently. The reason I bring this one up in particular is to mention two other cases that are going around that play into this case and could make this South Carolina case a major precedent for this issue. So first of all, Doe's lawyers that are suing the state of South Carolina are appealing to the Grimm v. Gloucester County school board case from 2020, which decided that a Virginia school district that refused to allow a transgender boy to use the boy's bathroom violated both federal law and the Constitution. Now, from all appearances, the South Carolina law is almost identical to the Virginia law that the 2020 case was

dealing with. So if you're dealing purely off of precedent here, it would seem that the Supreme Court is going to decide with that 2020 precedent. However, the reason that this case was just put on the emergency docket for the Supreme Court was that the lawyers for the the state of South Carolina were seeking emergency relief because the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Doe against the state. And the state was looking back to another Supreme Court case that was decided in June that I didn't get to talk about on this show called United States versus Scermetti, in which the Supreme Court upheld the state of Tennessee's ban on certain medical treatments for transgender teens. In that case, the Supreme Court basically said that that

ban that that law did not violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that it was not discrimination on the basis of sex for Tennessee to have that state law. And so the state of South Carolina is citing that ruling from just a couple months ago saying, well, that overrules the 2020 Grimm case. And so they're seeking emergency relief from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on behalf of John Doe in this South Carolina case. Now, John Doe's lawyers are basically saying you really need emergency relief for a decision from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that applies to only one student. And I think that's another thing worth pointing out here, too, is that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals didn't just say the law is completely overturned.

What the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said for some reason is that this one particular person can violate this law, at least until further litigation is passed or at least until another appeal reaches to the Supreme Court, which is interesting. I've never seen another high appellate court decision like that, which only applies to one person. That seems rather unique in the judicial world. So this case is on the emergency. docket for the Supreme Court, they'll likely be hearing it this week, and it could have some pretty major ramifications for these states that are passing laws about transgender students, and whether they are or are not discrimination on the basis of sex, this could overturn that 2020 grim case

and allow a lot more of these laws to go on the books. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that was signed into law a couple of weeks ago, entitled Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act, which is quite the name, but the bill requires the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security to report every year to Congress the export control licenses that they give out, which is basically a fancy way of saying that it's requiring mandatory reporting on export licenses that they give out to restricted entities in embargoed countries for dual-use goods, which basically means American companies that are exporting goods that have both civilian and military use. So, for example, if Lockheed Martin

is building drones, or let's say you have an American steel manufacturer that is exporting steel. We want to know if that company is exporting steel to Iran or to Cuba or to Syria or countries that are embargoed, which basically means that we have limits on exports to those countries for things that can be used to build weapons like steel. So the most recent list that I could find of U.S. embargoed countries includes North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia, Syria, Sudan and Venezuela. So what this piece of legislation is establishing is that those companies that have licenses to export goods that are dual use that have military and civilian uses, those companies are going to have to file a report with the Bureau of Industry and Security that gives

them their license to export. And in that report, they're going to have to include the name of the company where the item is being exported, whether that item is being exported to a particular government or to a private company, whether they're using a third party, a middleman to get the exports to their end destination, various things like that that the Department of Commerce needs to report every year to Congress, so Congress can keep tabs on whether there are private American companies exporting things that can be used by those embargoed countries, which are basically all our enemies, to build weapons or for various other military uses. We just want to monitor whether our private companies are supporting that. This law seems to

to make a lot of sense to me. In a perfect world, American private companies wouldn't be supplying our enemies any sort of materials that could be used militarily, but we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where private companies are often influenced by money, and foreign governments can offer a lot of money for those kinds of goods that are hard to get domestically for them. So Congress is basically putting this restriction on the licensing for exports for American companies, requiring them to submit a report, which will eventually get to Congress, giving them information about whether any of that material might possibly be going to our enemies to build weapons. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order.

This one entitled Use of Appropriated Funds for Illegal Lobbying and Partisan Political Activity by Federal Grantees. This one signed August 28th. In the Executive Order, the administration states, federal funding reviews by my administration have revealed that taxpayer funds are being spent on grants with highly political overtones. In addition to being a wasteful, abusive, and potentially fraudulent use of the American people's money, the possible use of federal grants as slash funds for political and legislative advocacy raises serious legal concern. So is there any merit to these claims that non-governmental organizations are using taxpayer

money for political advocacy? Well, it seems to be true. The Republican-led House Committee that released a report on some Biden-Harris administration federal grants, which are, of course, made of taxpayer money. For example, distributed $3 billion in what they called environmental justice grants with the Inflation Reduction Act. These grants were given to environmental activist groups that were charged. with political advocacy and door knocking and things like that.

Environmental advocacy being paid for with taxpayer dollars kind of blurs the lines between what you are and aren't allowed to do with the federal grant. Another example from a Heritage Foundation analysis showed that there was a CDC grant of $125 million to public health institutes for racial justice competency training, which also is a concern given that those CDC grants were funded by taxpayer dollars, and there are a lot of taxpayers who don't want their public health institutions. doing racial competency training. And just to clarify, the problem with these two examples

wasn't that the CDC was doing this training or that the EPA was doing this activism. The problem is that those two governmental organizations gave out grants to private groups to do those things on their behalf, which supports their political agenda and their political candidates. And that's where you blur the lines between what a non-governmental organization can or can't do with taxpayer money. So there's a very good reason that these kinds of laws are on the books already in the United States. Obviously, the federal government has to use taxpayer dollars for whatever they do. That's their source of revenue. That's where they get their budget. However, that federal government gets to spend taxpayer dollars because people voted for them. People did not vote for nonprofit organizations that the

government gives federal grant money to. That's the difference there. So if the federal government decides to give a grand out to a non-profit organization, that nonprofit organization can't lobby on behalf of a particular candidate or of a particular policy that's being hotly debated at the moment with taxpayer dollars because the taxpayers didn't vote for that non-governmental organization to do that with their money. Now, those two examples that I cited are just a couple of the ones that you can find out there that kind of blur the lines between what you are and aren't allowed to do with federal grant funding. And what this executive order is calling for is an investigation into those kinds of things so that they can make sure that the use of federal grant money is completely legal and above board. It's worth noting that the executive order charges the attorney general with investigating the cases. that they've found reports of.

So this could just be investigating the Biden administration federal grants. But if they made this an annual report assessing all federal grants, I could see this very easily passing as a bill through Congress that I think would be excellent for federal transparency and accountability. So to recap this week, we had a Supreme Court case which could further state's ability to enforce transgender laws and schools. We had a bill that aims to prevent private companies

from exporting material that could be used by our enemies for military purposes. And we had three executive orders, one which aims to end cashless bail in Washington, D.C., one which expands protections against burning the American flag, and another which investigates partisan spending of federal grants. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller. here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.