Clay Travis & Buck Sexton break down President Donald Trump’s major United Nations speech in New York City, focusing on American strength, national pride, foreign policy, military power, energy, technology and Trump’s argument that the United States is stronger and better positioned on the world stage. The hosts contrast Trump’s unapologetically pro-American message with previous administrations and discuss why they believe his willingness to impose consequences gives him leverage with foreign adversaries. That leads into the Russia-Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal and the enormous human and economic costs of the war in Ukraine, which Buck characterizes as a technologically advanced form of trench warfare combining drones, satellite communications and night vision with largely static front lines.

An in-depth conversation about DOGE, Elon Musk, federal government spending, waste, fraud, the national debt and government efficiency. Clay and Buck welcome Tyler Hassen, former acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior, former senior DOGE official and author of Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider. Hassen offers his firsthand account of working with Musk’s DOGE team and argues that waste inside the federal government is substantially worse than most Americans realize. He discusses DOGE’s reported savings, efforts to increase accountability for federal contracts and grants, and an initiative designed to improve information attached to trillions of dollars in Treasury payments. Drawing on his experience at the Interior Department, Hassen describes finding federal contracts for projects such as groundwater assessments in Mauritania that officials struggled to justify, while explaining the DOGE philosophy of forcing agencies to “defend the spend.”

Clay and Buck discuss public education, parental involvement, classroom discipline and school culture. Buck argues that successful schools depend heavily on parents who reinforce respect for teachers, rules, order and education at home. The hosts discuss the difficulties public-school teachers face when dealing with disruptive students and school fights, including concerns that educators may hesitate to physically separate fighting students because of liability and disciplinary policies. They also discuss federal education policy and disagreements over whether racial disparities in school discipline should be treated as evidence of discriminatory disciplinary practices. Their broader argument is that school discipline, parental expectations and peer culture can matter as much as, or more than, additional education spending.

That discussion leads to one of the hour’s most extended and humorous exchanges: corporal punishment and paddling in American public schools. Clay recounts growing up around Nashville public schools where students could be paddled for serious misbehavior, stunning Buck, who says such practices were completely foreign to his New York City upbringing. The hosts discuss the differences between Southern and Northeastern school culture, the historical use of paddles and “switches,” visits to the principal’s office and the deterrent effect Clay remembers corporal punishment having on classroom behavior. Their production team reports during the program that public-school corporal punishment remains legally permissible in a number of states, which prompts Buck to express disbelief that the practice can still legally exist in parts of the United States. Listeners subsequently send their own stories about paddling by teachers, principals and Catholic-school nuns, including accounts from Michigan, Ohio and Southern California.

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