Three hours. More insight. More laughs. More music.

Saturday mornings are where we have time to go beyond the headlines. It’s three hours of news, lively conversation, thought-provoking guests, your phone calls, and, of course, some great music mixed in along the way. We connect the dots, challenge the conventional wisdom, and explore the stories shaping our country with a little more depth—and a lot more fun—than the weekday clock allows.

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Crime is down. New York’s excuses aren’t

The numbers President Donald Trump brought to the Nassau County Police Academy were extraordinary. Murders down. Rapes down. Robberies down. Assaults, burglaries and thefts down. Deaths of law-enforcement officers in the line of duty at an 80-year low.

The latest FBI crime report found that homicides fell 18.1% in 2025, reaching the lowest national rate since 1956. Overall violent crime dropped 9.3%, property crime fell 12.4%, and preliminary data indicate the decline has continued into 2026.

The experts will debate exactly who deserves credit and when the decline began. Trump’s answer was considerably less complicated: Secure the border, support the police, remove dangerous criminals and stop treating law enforcement as the enemy.

“Together, we’re showing what is possible when you finally have a president in the White House who supports our police, who lets you do your jobs and who always backs the blue,” Trump told the crowd.

The room loved it.

Trump also reminded the police officers that he had directed federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty against people convicted of murdering law-enforcement officers. That brought one of the loudest ovations of the day.

It was a rallying moment, but the most powerful part of the event came when the room became quiet enough to remember why statistics are never the whole story.

Trump introduced the parents of Jacob Freytes, the 12-year-old boy killed by a stray bullet in the Bronx while riding his bicycle near a bodega. Police say gunfire erupted during a fight, and Jacob—an innocent child who had nothing to do with it—was struck and later died.

Jacob was the son of a retired NYPD sergeant. His mother, Migdalia Martinez, and his father were in the room when Trump called their names.

The applause rose as they stood. Then Trump walked over and embraced Jacob’s mother.

It was one of those moments that does not require a panel, a pollster or a political consultant. A grieving mother had lost her 12-year-old son because armed criminals turned a New York street into a shooting gallery. The president held her while a room filled with police officers stood and applauded.

According to local reporting, a 45-year-old man has been charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in connection with the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.

Jacob’s mother has called for tougher punishment when criminals kill children and has spoken about seeking a law in her son’s name.

She should never have had to become an advocate.

That is the terrible limitation of celebrating falling crime numbers. Every decline represents thousands of Americans spared from violence, and that deserves recognition. But behind the remaining numbers are families such as Jacob’s, for whom the crime rate did not fall.

For them, it became 100%.

This is why public safety cannot become merely another political slogan. One repeat offender, one revolving jail door or one prosecutor treating a violent criminal as a misunderstood social-work project can destroy an entire family.

Trump used the Nassau County speech to hammer Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York’s cashless-bail system. He traced much of the state’s public-safety deterioration to the moment Albany decided that requiring bail was somehow less compassionate than repeatedly returning dangerous people to the street.

The Left calls that reform.

Families burying children may have another word for it.

Not every person released without bail commits another crime, and not everyone sitting in jail before trial is guilty. But any system that becomes more concerned about the inconvenience suffered by an accused criminal than the danger faced by an innocent citizen has misplaced its moral center.

Trump put the question directly to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican challenging Hochul:

“How the hell can you lose to that?”

It drew laughs, but it was not a frivolous question.

How does a governor defend a system that repeatedly produces stories of suspects being released and accused of committing new crimes? How does the party that promises to protect every vulnerable group explain its resistance to policies protecting commuters, shopkeepers, police officers and 12-year-old boys riding bicycles?

New York voters will answer that.

The speech also offered a reminder of how differently the media treats anyone associated with Trump. FBI Director Kash Patel was warmly received at the police academy, and rightly so. The administration says the FBI has accelerated the capture of wanted fugitives and placed renewed emphasis on violent crime.

But much of the press prefers to discuss Patel’s trip to Hawaii and the fact that he went scuba diving at Pearl Harbor during a conference. He participated in an authorized activity available to other visiting officials, but because the name was Kash Patel, a recreational dive became a constitutional crisis with oxygen tanks.

This is the media formula: Ignore the arrests, investigate the flippers.

The crime discussion led naturally into another growing concern for American families—whether the basic systems they rely upon still work for them.

A friend recently told me about the difficulty of getting an appointment with a specialist. Call today and you may be offered a date next February. Some doctors are not accepting new patients at all.

For years, Americans were warned that government-run health care would bring Canadian-style waiting lists. Then Obamacare arrived with promises that families could keep their doctors and reduce their costs.

We remember how that turned out.

America does not have full government-run health care, but too many patients are already experiencing one of its worst features: You supposedly have coverage, yet cannot see the person who can treat you.

There is something deeply wrong when an insured American with a legitimate medical need must wait six or seven months for an appointment. People who can afford it are increasingly exploring treatment in Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and even Thailand—not because American medicine lacks talent, but because access has become its own diagnosis.

Now the socialist answer is Medicare for All.

And, right on schedule, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has acknowledged that his plan would require taxes. The word “free” always seems to grow an asterisk once the election is over.

Socialists insist everyone should pay into the system because that creates a sense of ownership. That is a very elegant way of announcing that working Americans will receive another deduction from their paychecks in exchange for an appointment sometime around the next presidential inauguration.

Before America expands government’s control over health care, perhaps somebody should explain how adding millions more patients to an already strained system will produce more doctors, more nurses, more hospital beds and shorter waiting times.

A waiting list does not become compassionate merely because everyone is standing in it together.

That is one of the pleasures of the Saturday Morning Extravaganza: We have enough room to connect these issues instead of shouting through a seven-minute cable-news segment.

Public safety and health care appear to be separate subjects, but both come down to whether government remembers whom it is supposed to serve. Citizens should not have to beg the system for protection from a repeat criminal. Patients should not have to leave the country to obtain timely care.

And amid the politics, statistics and arguments, Saturday still needs some soul.

We remembered Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer who died on this date in 2008 at age 91. Wexler coined the term “rhythm and blues” and helped shape enduring records by Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and others.

He produced Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” worked on Dylan’s Slow Train Coming—which earned Dylan his first Grammy—and helped create music that still sounds alive decades later.

The singers became famous, but producers such as Wexler built the rooms, found the sound and captured the moments that became history. Remembering the people behind the music is part of what makes the Saturday show different.

Politics tells us what America is fighting about. Music reminds us what America has created.

That mix—the serious, the infuriating, the funny and the unforgettable—is the Saturday Morning Extravaganza. You can listen to the complete show here. The written wrap gives you the heart of it, but the music, the clips and the moments between them belong in the audio.

And when Monday arrives, Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour picks up the pace. Monday through Friday, we race through the day’s hottest political stories, breaking news and media absurdities in the fastest hour in American media.

For my daily news stack delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for The Daily BS here. It is free, arrives daily and provides considerably more useful information than the average six-month medical waiting list.

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