S04E04 – Assassination Attempt on Trump and Outing Transgender Kids to Their Parents

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, Ryan and Tom tackle two topics. First, we start with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Tom asks Ryan a number of questions related to the attack, from whether he thinks the attack was staged (as some conspiracy theorists have started to argue) to whether this was a massive failing on the part of the Secret Service to whether Donald Trump is divinely protected. Ryan’s answers to these three questions were all “No,” but there are a number of additional questions. We mostly agree on the responses, though Tom notes at the end of the discussion that he is pretty skeptical about a lot of the information available at this point. We then turn to a recently signed bill in California that makes it so public schools do not have to report to parents the preferred pronouns or gender identities of students. Tom thinks that schools should have to report this while Ryan prioritizes the safety of the children and pushes Tom on the idea that some homes are not safe places for LGBTQ kids. There is actually a fair amount of agreement between the two on this, but this is also an issue where we fundamentally do not agree.