WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 26

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about this week's Supreme Court arguments over transgender athlete bans, a new bipartisan omnibus bill, an executive order withdrawing the United States from over 60 international agencies, and more.

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 this week's Supreme Court arguments over transgender athlete bans, a new bipartisan omnibus bill, an executive order withdrawing the United States from over 60 international agencies, 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 to talk about some Supreme Court arguments over the issue of transgender athlete bans

in different states, particularly in Idaho and in West Virginia. The two cases were heard together, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ, the plaintiff there are known as BPJ because they're a minor and not wanting to use their full name. The first case, the one dealing with Idaho, the plaintiff whose name is Lindsay Hecox, I was challenging an Idaho law that was adopted in 2020 that prohibited transgender women, so biological men, from playing women's sports.

Lindsay Hickox was then a student at Boise State University. He still is a student at Boise State University. He's now 24 years old. He's not graduated. It's a bit of a flimsyer case than the West Virginia case. And I don't really understand why the lawyers chose to pursue this case in particular. Now, one of the legal analysts pointed out that there were like hundreds of these cases of people challenging. these laws in Idaho, West Virginia, and other states.

I don't know why this one was chosen to be taken all the way up to the Supreme Court. Because if you look at the facts of the case, the individual Lindsey Hickox was at Boise State University, wanted to try out for the women's track and cross-country teams. So, first of all, this is not somebody who came into college on scholarship. Boise State University has Division I athletics, and they're mostly very good athletic programs. So for somebody to come in and try out to make those teams, it's just not like. likely. And Lindsey Hickox did try out for the men's teams for the track and cross-country

teams and didn't make either of those teams and later played club sports at Boise State University. So it's a very flimsy case on its own right there because he wasn't really prohibited from playing. He just didn't make the men's teams and then tried to try out for the women's teams and then was denied the opportunity to try out for the women's teams because of the Idaho law that was adopted in 2020. So that's the one case. The other case, which has a little bit more of a shot of succeeding was in West Virginia filed by somebody named Heather Jackson, the mother of the one known as BPJ, who's the student in question, 15-year-old transgender high school student in question here. BPJ has taken puberty blockers to prevent the onset of male puberty since the third grade, as well as hormone therapy with estrogen.

So it's a little bit different case according to the justices. The justices are looking at this and saying, well, this individual BPJ has taken drugs in order to change their biological hormone makeup, so as to make it a little bit more fair than the other case. Now, people who were at the arguments observed that the Supreme Court seemed extremely likely to uphold the state laws. So after the three and a half hours of discussion, most of the Supreme Court justices appeared as though they were going to side with the states and not with the plaintiffs and uphold the laws prohibiting transgender women. biological men from competing in women's and girls' sports. People also observed that the court's

three Democratic appointees appeared to recognize where this case was going. So even though they showed support for the plaintiffs, their questioning was more focused on getting one of the cases thrown out, specifically the Idaho case, trying to get that thrown out, or limiting the court's decision to a narrow one so that the Supreme Court decision only applies to the states in question here and not as a universal rule. So just to take a brief look at the history of these cases, a federal appeals court in San Francisco barred Idaho from enforcing its law. They agreed with the plaintiff that the law violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause,

which is meant to prohibit discrimination based off of gender or sex. The appeals court argued that the law was intended to, quote, categorically ban transgender women and girls from public school sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. The West Virginia law was struck down by a U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, saying that the law violated Title IX, which is a federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding. So they were saying that the West Virginia law violated Title IX because it discriminates against BPJ on the basis of sex. Now, that's entirely different from the Idaho case. The Idaho case used the term gender identity.

And going back a couple of years, the Supreme Court has already ruled that gender identity is not the same as sex and gender in the 14th Amendment or in Title IX. So you can't use the phrase gender identity. That's not the same thing as gender discrimination or sex discrimination. That's one of the reasons why the Idaho case is a lot weaker than the West Virginia case. The West Virginia case is claiming that it discriminates against the individual on the basis of sex. Now, the lawyer for the state of West Virginia, the Solicitor General Michael Williams, argued that, well, states have long divided students to different sports teams by sex. That's just how it works. And that's obviously true, right? I mean, if you look at high school sports, they're divided up into men's sports and women's sports.

In a way, that is sex discrimination, but that has been legal under the Constitution for forever. He argued that the West Virginia law was intended to ensure that women and girls can safely and fairly compete in school sports. Now, the lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that if transgender athletes like BPJ and Lindsay Hickox do not have the biological advantages that the laws target in the name of fairness, they said that there's no reason that their clients shouldn't be able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity. And for the most part, the justices of the Supreme Court didn't really seem to buy that. And for good reason. So what they're basically arguing is that if they take the hormone blockers, if they take estrogen,

then they don't have the biological advantages that the laws were claiming that they would have. So the lawyers for Idaho and for West Virginia were claiming, well, obviously it's the case that biologically speaking men have certain physical advantages over women. And that's part of the reason why we separate them out when separating athletes to play sports. And that's one of the reasons that the laws were created. But the plaintiffs are arguing that, well, if they take the hormone blockers, if they take estrogen, then they don't have that biological advantage. And for the most part, the Supreme Court justices seem to disagree with that. And the main reason they seem to disagree with that is, well, how in the world

can you tell whether they have a biological advantage still or not? You can say, well, the testosterone levels weren't as high after taking the hormone blockers as they were before. You could make that argument. You can make the argument that, well, if this biological male takes enough hormone blockers to have a lower testosterone than the average male, well, that seems to fail because there's a, there's a very wide spectrum of testosterone ranges among men. But that doesn't change their physiological bill. That doesn't change the fact that biologically speaking in bones and muscle structure and all that kind of stuff, there are distinct advantages that men have when competing in sports. And so the Supreme Court didn't really seem to buy that just since a transgender individual

takes hormone blockers or lowers their testosterone level to a certain acceptable amount, whatever that might be, that that completely mitigates the biological advantage that the laws were made to prevent. Surprisingly, the one justice that seemed to kind of buy into that argument was Brett Kavanaugh, who's a conservative appointee. He suggested that the Supreme Court should stay out of the debate right now, given the, quote, scientific uncertainty and the, quote, strong assertions of equality interest on both sides. He also made the argument that because half of the states in the United States are allowing transgender girls to compete in women's sports, that the Supreme Court shouldn't jump in and constitutionalize a rule for the whole country.

So he was citing with the Democratic-appointed justices that the decision that the Supreme Court delivers here should be very narrow, should be specific to Idaho and West Virginia and should not be a national rule. Kavanaugh seemed to be suggesting that he's open in the future to an argument about whether transgender women, so biological men, can have their testosterone. Lacerone lowered enough or their hormones managed in a certain way that would make it allowable for them to compete in female sports, which I think is interesting given Kavanaugh's track record as one of the more conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas pointed out that there's not really much of a difference between somebody who was a, for example, a lousy was the term he used, a lousy male tennis player who didn't make the men's tennis team and wants to try out for the women's tennis team.

And the lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that that was no different. And that was what Clarence Thomas kind of backed them into saying was he got those lawyers to agree that that situation that I just described is no different from being required to allow transgender women to play on the women's tennis team. So the big difference between the plaintiffs and the defendants seems to be the definition of gender identity. Seems to be acceptance of whether gender identity qualifies under Title IX and the 14th Amendment as gender discrimination or sex discrimination. Really, whether somebody's gender identity is real, whether it exists. biologically, and the Supreme Court justices, for the most part, seem to be on track with the defendants, that gender identity does not define biology, which is obviously the case, and they seem to be on track to uphold the Idaho law and the West Virginia law, allowing states to prevent

transgender women from competing in female sports. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that was passed through the House of Representatives last week, entitled Breaking the Gridlock Act. So this bill is kind of an omnibus bill, and I know that, term gets thrown around a lot for the big budget packages, appropriations packages that get thrown together by Congress all the time these days. This omnibus package is a little bit different in the sense that it's not like $2 trillion worth of spending in the bill. There's about $6 million of guaranteed spending. There's a bunch more spending that will be involved in the bill that's not

explicitly laid out. But I want to kind of just give a quick breakdown of this bill because I think it's a little bit of positive news. The intention was to combine a bunch of different issues that were bipartisan and just put them together in an omnibus bill that everyone could really agree on. And that's why it's called Breaking the Gridlock Act. Now, there's a bunch of different things that the bill does. And that's why it's called an omnibus package in the technical sense. It was sent to the Senate where it had some kind of procedural issue. It was not clarified what specific procedural issue there was, but it was sent back to the House to clear up the procedural issue before they send it back to the Senate for a vote there. But it has passed

the House. And just to break down the bill, there's 16 different titles within the bill all doing different things. See, I'm just going to highlight a few of the coolest things. First of all, and I think probably the coolest thing that I've seen Congress do in a very long time, is to create a congressional time capsule. So the omnibus bill here provides funding for Congress to create a semi-quincentennial congressional time capsule to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States to be buried at the U.S. Capitol on July 4th, 2026. And it's going to be opened in another 250 years on July 4th, 2276. The contents are to be to be determined, but the bill does say that the time capsule will include, quote, a representative portion of all books, manuscripts, miscellaneous printed matter, memorabilia, relics, and other materials relating to the United States semi-quincentennial, copies or representations of important legislative and institutional milestones of Congress during the time before the time capsule is buried, so from the first 250 years. So that would assume that would include the Declaration of Independence. It would include the Constitution. It would probably include the

emancipation proclamation, just different things, different important legislative successes of Congress over the last 250 years, important milestones from the United States' history. It's also going to include a message from Congress to the future Congress when it will be opened and anything else that Congress deems relevant. Now, I think this is just a really cool thing to do. It won't be open for 250 years, so just think of how different the world is going to be, how different the United States is going to be by then. Will the United States still exist by then? I think it will. I sure hope it does. But it's just really interesting to think what the 2276 American Congress will think of the 2026 American Congress and the things that happened in the first 250 years of the United States history. I mean, my first

thought when seeing this was like, man, just how cool would it be to open a time capsule from the first Congress today? Like what kinds of things would be in there? What would they think would be important for us to hold on to? And I think doing something like this now is a great way to pass down the cultural memory of what makes the United States the United States, what shapes our cultural fabric, and what do we want to pass down to the generations that come after us? I think this is a great way to do that. So some of the other things that the Omnibus Bill does is it directs the state and defense departments to submit a five-year regional strategy to counter Boko Haram, which is the jihadist group

that has been committing a genocide against Christians in Nigeria. It increases funding, creates a task force to look into increasing funding for a lot of different veterans issues. It includes an index for inflation on veterans' life insurance, so it's going to be. to reevaluate the maximum life insurance that's given to veterans and index it for inflation. The bill also prohibits data brokers from giving U.S. individuals sensitive personal data to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, other countries that might be considered adversaries or businesses that are registered in those countries. So that's a really important aspect of the

bill. And there are a bunch of other things that it does, but those are the most important things. I think this is a really great way to start 2026 to look around and see, hey, what are some bipartisan and things that both sides can agree on. Let's take a bunch of those priorities that might not be important enough to create their own bill around or might not get priority if we just made one bill talking about the time capsule or something. And put all of those things together into one bill. We can vote on all of them together because we all agree on them.

I think it probably will pass the Senate relatively soon whenever they fixed whatever procedural issue was going on with it. But that was something that was uplifting. I think that we can be encouraged by that as something both sides decided to unite around starting 2026. 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 an executive order signed by President Trump, January 7th, 2026, entitled Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations,

conventions, and treaties that are contrary to the interests of the United States. So going back to February 4th, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Secretary of State in consultation with the representative of the United States to the United Nations to review all of the international organizations of which the United States is a member, all of the different organizations that were involved in, partially through the United Nations and through other organizations, and to review those organizations and the Americans support to those organizations, to see whether they line up with the interests of the United States, to see whether their actions and the way that they're spending our money is in alignment with our foreign

policy goals. So that was almost a year ago now. The results are in, so to speak, and the recommendations of the Secretary of State and the U.S. representative to the United Nations has led President Trump to decide that the United States is going to withdraw from 66 international organizations to which we contribute as of right now. So 35 of those are non-United Nations organizations, and just a few of those include the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Federation of Arts, The International Lead and Zinc Study Group, and there are, of course, many, many others. Those are among the non-United Nations organizations.

There are 31 United Nations organizations that we're withdrawing from in this executive order, and they're mostly what are called policy coordination research or advisory entities. So it doesn't include any of the major recipients of U.S. funding within the United Nations. So like UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council, we're not withdrawing from any of those things. But just a few of the UN organizations that we are withdrawing from in this executive order or withdrawing our funding from in this executive order would be things like the UN Alliance of Civilizations, the UN Democracy Fund, the UN Oceans Organization, the UN University, the UN entity for gender equality

and the empowerment of women, and many, many others. So according to the best estimates that I could find, withdrawing our support and our participation from these organizations should save us about $7 billion per year, which is small income. comparison to the $7 trillion that we spend per year, but is a meaningful amount of money that would be cutting. But that's not the most important aspect of this action. It is in alignment with the National Security Strategy document that I talked about in the fall, in which President Trump basically told European nations that they were going to need to carry their own weight a

little bit more, that the United States wasn't going to be bogged down in a lot of these international organizations that are highly bureaucratic, have a liberal or globalist tilt, and are not necessarily beneficial to the United States. President Trump's national security strategy has basically said, we're going to leave those things to you, Europe, as an allied body of nations at this point, and we're going to only involve ourselves in organizations that support the direct interests of the United States, and isn't just the United States giving donations to the rest of the world in exchange for nothing. And so in large part, this executive order is in alignment with that national security strategy, lessening the ties between the United States and some of these international organizations.

organizations that are growing so bureaucratic and so large. It does cut some funding from the United States budget every year. And I think what may be the most important part of this is it sends a message to the United Nations and to the other international agencies that we're a part of that were not just the world's wallet. We need to be getting something out of any deals that we make with other nations. And I think that that's a very important foreign policy strategy. And I think it's a very important aspect of maintaining U.S. global supremacy in the face of a rising Russia and arising China, among others. The last piece of news I have for you this week is that the Supreme Court just decided to hear a new case called Shetri v. United States involving the use of something called Geoffence warrants. It's a Fourth Amendment case about the legality of law enforcement officers going to companies like Google or Apple who have location services for their customers to help them find someone who's a suspect in a crime. So the defendant in the case is O'Kello Shetri, who was convicted of, robbing a bank outside Richmond, Virginia. At gunpoint, he stole $195,000. Law enforcement went to Google with a geofence warrant, which they got from a judge, and they demanded that Google give them access to everyone who was in the particular area of the bank at the time that they believed someone had held up the bank. So that's kind of what a geofence warrant is. It's a geographic

boundary and a time window, and then the judge gives the warrant. It's most often Google, but it can be a of other ones as well. And then Google then has to provide law enforcement with device IDs for everyone who's inside the area. Now, the problem with this is that ends up giving law enforcement data on a lot of innocent people as well. So that's part of where the constitutionality problem comes in here. But as far as the defendant goes, he was found because of this geo-offense warrant. The case was brought against him. He pled guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Now, the defendant is challenging the conviction on the grounds that the geofence warrant is illegal by the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction saying that the search in this instance wouldn't really trigger the Fourth Amendment.

It wouldn't be an unlawful search and seizure because the defendant had voluntarily turned his location services on. He had given his information voluntarily to Google so that they could track him. Obviously, geoffense warrants make the job of law enforcement a lot easier. So I think that that's a great thing. It's a great way to be able to find somebody if you can pin down their location services using one of these tech companies. But there are two things that the Supreme Court is going to be worried about when signing off on these geoffence warrants. First of all, that it does, in fact, gather data on innocent people who law enforcement are not searching for, which is kind of like a general warrant, which is the thing that the Constitution was trying to prohibit with the Fourth Amendment. They did not want law enforcement to be able to issue a general warrant. warrant on a particular area to go and search everything. They wanted search and seizure to be

very particular, to be allowed by a judge in the context of evidence and specificity and narrowness around a particular person alleged of a particular crime so as to limit the capacity of law enforcement to just generally search people or areas. But it seems likely that the Supreme Court is going to uphold the constitutionality of geoffence warrants, partially because of the free agreement that people enter into to give their location services to these companies and partially because of the effectiveness of these geofense warrants in helping law enforcement find suspected criminals. So to recap this week, we had a bipartisan omnibus bill that includes a congressional time capsule. We had an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international organizations

and agencies, and we had two Supreme Court cases, one likely to uphold state bans on transgender athletes, and one likely to allow geofense warrants. 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.