Live from Virginia Wednesday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia; WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 p.m.) Hampton Roads; WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke; and weekdays 6-10 a.m. and 24/7 stream – host Fredericks welcomed Dr. Oz to the show to solidify his endorsement and discuss the disconnect between the hedge-fund elite and the average working-class American.
Fredericks: Dr. Oz, thank you for being with us. I know you’ve got a very busy day. I had President Trump on my show yesterday. I encouraged him to give you his endorsement. I think if he does that, you’re going to win this nomination and then you got to win the seat in Pennsylvania.
And I said, look, one thing you know about Doctor Oz, he’s going to have our back. He’s got the back of working people, not the hedge-fund guy. What’s your response to all this, Dr. Oz?
Oz: First of all, John, I appreciate very much your passionate defense of the working person. People who bravely get up every morning, do what needs to be done to keep our country running. They get ignored over and over again.
President Trump respected those people. You’ll never hear this from the legacy media. And I’ve learned the fight where you learned to fight, right? The biggest stage there is, which is in media.
And when you fight in media, you go against people who are illogical and illiberal. They don’t let you speak because they don’t like what you’re saying paradoxically, because the First Amendment is about all of us being able to speak.
And part of the passion that I have for the working person is I know how difficult life is, and I witnessed it hosting my show for 13 years. I go around the world and I see this. I appreciate what President Trump was able to do to give people hope.
And I’ll tell you something that’s fascinating. When you travel to other countries, what they beg you to do is to save America. And I would say, well, why do you care so much about my country? I love it. I’m going to serve it. But why do you care?
They say, because we struggle with democracy in whatever country we’re in. But we look to you and we say, my gosh, those guys figured it out based on a piece of parchment 250 years old.
They work day and night, bravely supporting the Constitution, and that’s allowed them to achieve greatness in America. We forget that sometimes when people keep hammering us for not being what we are. And sometimes that happens because you got these rich hedge-fund guys who live in a separate universe and in a parallel world.
They are living it good, not facing the consequences of issues and topics that they’re not willing to tolerate. They don’t care about work. This doesn’t hurt them. Immigration is not a big deal if you’re the biggest hedge-fund manager, because guess what?
Immigrants are not going to take your job. It’s not really a big issue if your schools don’t turn out high-quality kids because your kids go to private school anyway. And on and on and on, you witness why these two different worlds now have begun to clash.
And I appreciate your interview yesterday with President Trump. You’re a wonderful broadcaster. I can say that as someone … I’ve won my share of Emmys.
You are very talented at what you do. And you allowed him to say his piece. And I appreciate your kind words about me regarding the endorsement. And then, may I say it right now?
Fredericks: Yes.
Oz: I tweeted this out. I got about 13 million people on social media. I want to make sure everyone knows that John Fredericks, God bless you, has endorsed me for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania. Thank you, my friend.
Fredericks: Listen, I’m honored and excited to do that. I look forward to being the emcee at your rally. I think it’s on April 21st. Dr. Ben Carson is going to be there headlining it. I’m excited about it. And look, here’s the bottom line.
I went through the 2008 crash, where my wife and I and my family lost everything we had. Everything. When I say everything, it’s a relative term. We were homeless for two years. For two months we lived out of a car. We had a child. So I get this. I lived this.
I lived this whole thing. I lived it through Wall Street. And then I turn around and I’m trying to sweep floors to get $5 to buy a chicken for my family. And I turn around and I see the bailouts. And people like McCormick’s firm bailed out.
And then they’re taking sales junkets to Carmel on our money. And then they take the money and they buy up the little banks so they can raise rates. Look, I have lived this. Two years homeless.
No money, no job, nothing. And then this guy says, I want to just read what he says, okay? This is what really fries me about McCormick. He tells a reporter at Bloomberg, he said, well, you know, Trumpism, it’s important to recognize the frustrated masses.
Oh, really? The frustrated masses? Like people like me and my wife, homeless with a child, couldn’t pay for their college. The frustrated masses that Trump tapped into. What do you mean tapped into?
The economy crashed. People got their homes foreclosed on, and their cars were taken away. They had nothing. They had no jobs. Unemployment was 12, 12, 15 percent.
And I’ll tell you the other thing. You couldn’t get a job if you didn’t have good credit, and your credit crashed. So good luck in that environment. And he tapped into that? What the hell does that mean? This guy has no clue about what happened.
Meantime, he’s up there in Wall Street making billions of dollars, shipping jobs to China so that people are now unemployed. This guy has never met anybody with dirt under their fingernails.
And I tell you, Dr. Oz, this is the choice; I know from talking to the president, and I told him this. I said, look, 2025, Dr. Oz is in the U.S. Senate. He’s a guy that you’re going to depend on. He’s going to have your back.
And I said, you look at the number of people who have sold you out over the last six years? (Chuckles) There’s not enough paper in the world to put all the names down. And I know you’re going to have the back of the working man and woman. That’s why I’m for Dr. Oz.
Oz: God bless you. And I tell you the story thickens and the plot thickens. It always does when you talk about these folks who are trying to game the system. McCormick did something else that I don’t talk about much, but I’m going to share it with you because you’d understand it.
His fund was responsible for the Pennsylvania pension for the schools, and they took over half a billion dollars in fees. Think about that. In fees! The results were so bad that I and every other taxpayer are putting up an extra half a billion dollars in money.
Our property taxes went up half a billion dollars so that he could get paid more than half a billion dollars in fees. And I look at this and say, guys, are you kidding me? We’re putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
They’re going to rape and pillage the system because they don’t care. And that’s what you’re tapping into, John, so brilliantly. They literally don’t care because they’ve never experienced it. It’s not that they don’t want to care. They weren’t born without compassion.
But if you’ve never lived the challenges that America has faced over the last 15 years, if you didn’t go through 2007 and 8 and see the bottom fall out of everything you had and your savings wiped out, and then when people bail out the big banks, and he was one of the architects of that, and was applauded for bailing out the banks. Meanwhile, Main Street got nothing.
Listen to the full interview here:
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Photo “Dr. Mehmet Oz” by Dr. Mehmet Oz.
