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--:-- John Bickley: California mom Ann Funder brought the tens of thousands of attendees at the RNC to tears and to their feet last night when she told the tragic story of losing her 15-year-old son Weston to fentanyl. The blame for his death, she said, ultimately falls on President Biden and his administration. Our lives were shattered and our baby was gone. This was not an overdose. It was a poisoning. His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him was ripped away in an instant. And Joe Biden does nothing. I hold Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the borders are. What a joke. And Gavin Newsom and every Democrat who supports open borders responsible for the death of my son.
--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, we sit down with Anne to discuss what led to the death of her son and what steps we can take to prevent such future tragedies. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Wednesday, July 17th, and this is an RNC Extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Anne Funder, a mother from California who lost her 15-year-old son to fentanyl and who's putting the blame on President Biden and his administration and the governor of her state, Gavin Newsom.
--:-- Ann Funder: Thank you so much for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: You courageously took the stage last night at the RNC, gave a very powerful, emotional statement about your son and your family and the tragedy you guys suffered. I know it's difficult to discuss, but for the sake of our listeners, can you tell us about what happened to your son, Weston?
--:-- Ann Funder: Well, Weston was a really good kid. We did everything right. We put him in sports and I was room mom. We had such a great relationship and he was my perfect little bouncing baby boy. He taught me what love was, an unconditional love like I had never known existed other than my own parents. And having, you know, he was my firstborn son. It just teaches you that love is so strong. And for the first time, I understood what that meant when I looked at him and held him in my arms. He was my everything. He really was.
--:-- Ann Funder: I was so active in his life. His father was active. Both of us, we did the family things. We had outings together, fun vacations. I mean, we had a nice life. Private school, you know. I think it's things like we got him braces. He just had braces, and you know, just everything that you do to set somebody up for like the perfect life, 3.5 GPA, you know, football, hockey, friends, you know, and fentanyl still found him because kids fall into peer pressure. And as many conversations as I had with him. He's a teenager who, you know, came into his own independence and decided he wanted to fit in with a new crowd at a new school. He had always been private schooled. He wanted to, you know, try public school too. And I think he just wanted these friends that were just fun, you know, and I guess he fell into their peer pressure and got a hold of them and that killed my son.
--:-- Ann Funder: You made a striking statement last night. You said, look, this is, it's murder in a sense. Absolutely, it's murder. Can you unpack that for us? Why do you feel that way?
--:-- Ann Funder: Because the people who deal this know that fentanyl kills. When you try fentanyl one time, it is not a question of if you are going to die. It's when, once you try it, it is very hard to get off of it and never do it again. These drug dealers are like sexual predators. They groom children. They know that if they can get a child to try it once within three hours, they're going to get withdrawal symptoms that range from bone aches to fevers, to cold sweats, to bowel issues, to headaches, just things that make chemotherapy recovery look like a picnic in the park. And it's just a very, very difficult thing on the body. Within two of three hours of the first time of trying it one time, it's 50 times more addictive than crack. And these drug dealers know that. And that's when they come around and say, I got what you need to kind of ease this pain. So if the child survives the first pill, now the drug dealer has a client and everyone asks, well, why would they want to like kill their client? Because there's like a million other, it's so addictive. They're going to have business. If they can get someone to try at one time, they're going to have business. So most kids don't live more than a couple of weeks. And they, when I say it's a groomer mentality, they know they can't tell their parents. They've gotten them to do something wrong. They're afraid. They're struggling with an addiction that they never wanted just because they tried something one time. And by the way, they don't know they're trying fentanyl. They think they're trying something like a Percocet or a Xanax, you know, which is very popular, unfortunately, with kids these days, as a party drug. And it's pure fentanyl. There's no Xanax. It's a pressed pill with blue powder that you can buy off of Amazon where someone who's probably on drugs himself is packing these pills. It's like a chocolate chip cookie. There's all these little chocolate chips of fentanyl in it. And you don't know which side of the cookie is going to have the most fentanyl. And if you get that dose, 7 out of 10 pills are deadly.
--:-- Ann Funder: Were there any warning signs?
--:-- Ann Funder: No. My son was a really good kid. I mean, he you know all kids start walking in a high school situation. You want to make sure they making the best choice. We had conversations, you know, that was really you know not a good choice the other night. But for the most part, nothing that I thought was concerning enough. And I'll tell you what, I don't know if I was just blind or I just never imagined in a million years this would happen. I think every parent, I've got two young girls. The most terrifying thing to me is this sense that you cannot see this coming and how sudden this is. And it really struck me when you spoke last night, that sense. And it strikes terror on every parent. It should.
--:-- Ann Funder: You've blamed two administrations, the Biden administration and the Newsom administration for this tragedy. Can you tell us why?
--:-- Ann Funder: Because President Trump had the factories in China closed that produced the precursor chemicals. He had the borders secured as well as he could without some of the democrat border cities putting a stop to their border walls. But for the most part, he did as much as he could to like get that border wall shut. Um, he had ICE, he had everything on lockdown at the border. He was doing everything he could to stop it. Now, there were democrats that you know are doing their democrat thing and not following along with what they're supposed to be doing. But, you know, so fentanyl still got over the border, but he was stopping it. I mean, he really was coming down on this hard. And President Xi knew he was business, and he knew that he couldn't get away with things with Trump. So when President Biden came in, I mean, the borders just opened. You saw caravans flooding over. We don't even know who these people are coming into our country. The cartels have just run wild. He allowed those China factories to be reopened under the Biden administration. I mean, this is their exasperated tragedy. They did this. I mean, there is no way to look around this. I mean, they opened the borders. They do nothing, nothing to stop this crisis at all. They did more to stop you from taking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during COVID than they are doing to stop people from coming in with fentanyl. And Gavin Newsom, he should be ashamed. He has children, young ones. And California is the wild, wild west. They will find a car of fentanyl, someone drug running fentanyl. And they arrest them. Judge lets them out and says come back in two weeks. How many people do you think come back? These people should be tried for attempted murder if they kill someone. They should go to jail for life. And look at like what Sarah Huckabee Sanders did. She said if you kill a child, you're looking at the death penalty. When you get strict penalties on this, you will see the fentanyl statistics drop dramatically because drug dealers do not want to go to jail and be sentenced to life. My son's case was clear cut on video. They knew who it was, second person the person had murdered. And nothing, not even a slap on the wrist, nothing happened. And if they're not going to prosecute people, then why should? It doesn't make sense. It's almost like they want this to happen. It's like they're, you know, our youth has so many challenges with all of the indoctrinations going on. It's just one more thing they're doing to hurt us and just bring down our youth.
--:-- Ann Funder: You're a dad of girls and they're everything. Your children are everything. They are everything. They are indeed. It's not only hard to hear the tragedy. It is very hard to hear that there's no accountability, that there's actually no repercussions for these horrific crimes, as you've described. What can be done to reverse this?
--:-- Ann Funder: Close the borders. Number one, shut the borders. Let's increase our ICE officers because there are no resources there. Biden has just done a number on ICE and he took away the fentanyl machines that were at the ports of entry, which is a secondary kind of precaution because drug dealers don't go through the front door. Right. But he did put some of those back in this weak fentanyl bill. That's all he did in the fentanyl bill. But he did give money to the Ukraine in that bill. And that's really what that bill was about. It was such a weak bill. It was embarrassing. The cartels need to be labeled foreign terrorist organizations. This is a war on American soil and more people are dying than all of our recent wars combined on American soil. 9-11, we attacked a country because they had 3,000 people on American soil die. Where is the attack on the cartels? They are killing our children. And why aren't we holding China accountable? Fentanyl needs to be considered a weapon of mass destruction. And every community needs harsh, strict laws. You want to deal fentanyl, you're going to jail, period. Zero tolerance whatsoever. You're going to jail. And if you kill someone, you're going to jail for life or looking at the death penalty. And if you kill a child, you will look up a death penalty. These people know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. And they're still pushing it on our children. And they don't care about your kids. They don't care if they die. You know, these pills come to your door for $7.50 through Snapchat, through Instagram. They are ordering them online underneath your doorstep. Leave $7.50. They'll come straight to you. They know they have an income. They have so many clients and they're all expendable and there's more behind them.
--:-- John Bickley: As you have made clear, this is a true crisis. Something has to change.
--:-- Ann Funder: We thank you so much for sharing your personal tragedy so that some action can be taken. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
