Given where the state is right now, is it strategic to be for, especially for some of these Democrats, to be openly saying anti-trans statements?

statements?I think in their minds what they're doing is being politically strategic.

Yes, they're engaging what inside the world of political creatures they call real politic, and that is where the creatures convince themselves that you can sacrifice the humanity of others in order to latch onto whatever, uh, hot button issue there is and try to exploit it and to manipulate voters.

Now, this is the realm, as I said, of ghouls and cretins and political creatures who play these games and eschew their own humanity and their own morality to do so.

And obviously, what's ha- y- I don't know if you all read the Democratic 2024 postmortem, um, and part of that, they talked about how Trump's and the Republicans' relentless anti-trans messaging, uh, was effective in, in their minds according to this report.

Now, the report itself is very long, and it doesn't have many citations.

It doesn't have a lot of sources.

How would you briefly describe to our listeners the state of voting here in the state of Ohio?

And on sort of international measures of free speech, schools are falling down.

Yes, that's true.

So Especially for a political movement that at one time jawed so much about government censorship, to actually wield the levers of government power to inflict open government censorship of higher education institutions, such as we've seen in Ohio, is just rank hypocrisy, first of all.

But it's also really dangerous, because these are our foundational ideas, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of exploration of ideas, not ideologically motivated, but true methodological exploration of ideas and open debate and an open forum and public agora.

When you use government power to regulate and create a culture of Fear on college campuses of uncertainty about what professors are allowed to talk about or what they might be sued and lose their job over.

I mean, this is textbook authoritarian stuff from pretty much every totalitarian regime we've seen from the far right to the communists of the far left.

It's suppression of thought and ideas.

And

Is John Husted getting tons of money from somebody?

so it's interesting john hughes said we are actually going to do a campaign finance story here uh in the next couple days about that race specifically and brown is out raising husted but uh there's a couple things at play that really matter that people need to know about and one of them has to do with a supreme court decision recently based on a lawsuit out of ohio thanks to jd vance So the first thing to know is that, yeah, Brown's campaign is outracing Husted.

14 million in second quarter donations alone.

Husted's campaign only reported 3.4 million in direct donations in the second quarter.

So there's a lot more money going directly to the Sherrod Brown campaign.

But...

the other thing that's going on is we've seen this incredible rise of dark money since the citizens united decision back in 2010 there was very well let's go back to 2006 the first time that shared brown won election to the u.s senate there was very little dark money happening back then it was something like fifty thousand dollars back then in the u.s senate race After Citizens United happened in 2010, by the time you get to 2016, 10 years later, it was the most expensive Senate race in the country because it was up to 60 million.

Has Mr. Husted gotten Donald Trump's endorsement or any campaigning from Trump on his behalf?

How do y'all, uh, walk, walk customers through with, with funding options?

Well, you know, most, most of the time they come to us and we just give them information, uh, that they would need for a certain grant.

Certain grants ask for certain different things, like a, what we call a generator, uh, certification data sheet, basically stating that we have sized the generator up, this is what it's gonna take, this is the voltage, this is the fuel it's gonna run off of.

Um, I think something EPA requires on stuff is, like, ground disturbance.

So we gotta give them, uh, we're gonna have a pad this size, and it may have to cut into the ground about three, three inches or whatever to, to level it up and, and things like that.

Um, but here recently, this year, um, we have, um, uh, Spencer Pope that's at our facility in, um, Lewisville, who is, has reached out to Mississippi Rural Water and also to MEMA or any of these real small water associations that may need help navigating that grant system.

Yeah, yeah.

And how, how have y'all seen that working? 'Cause, 'cause I've, I've started dealing with some of those companies that are actually coming to these small water associations that don't have the funds, but they do, and they are putting generators on these real small water systems to get them up to date and stuff like that.