Dylan Gwinn, Breitbart Sports News Editor Joins!

**Nigel** (0:00)
My name is Nigel, Jason Hammer, right over there. We'll go straight to the hotline and bring on Breitbart News Sports Editor, Dylan Gwinn. Dylan, thank you for coming on, on this Breaking News Friday, huge news. The Bears are moving their stadium project from Chicago to Hammond, Indiana. Big picture, what happened here? What does this mean? What do you think?

**Dylan Gwinn** (0:23)
I think it's an incredible, historic move. Obviously, my first reaction, I'll be honest with you guys, when I saw this, it brought me back to Talladega Nights. When Will Ferrell and his wife are explaining to the kids that they're getting divorced, and the kids jump up and say, oh, two Christmases.
And here you have the Bears and the state of Illinois getting divorced, and people in Indiana can jump up and say, okay, two football teams. All right. It's historic, guys. It's probably not a great day if you're on the other side of the border there in Illinois, if you're a fan of the Chicago Bears. But for Indiana, I think this is a tremendous boom. It's going to bring, I think, a lot of economy. It's going to bring a lot of money to that area, jobs, so on and so forth. I think it's a very good deal.
I'm really surprised that it even happened, though. I got to be honest with you, because right now, you know, yeah, if you watch the reaction to this from the mayor of Chicago, Mayor Johnson, and you watch Governor Pritzker, they're all, we're not going to give up any more, you know, no taxpayer funds for these billion-dollar stadiums that are going to be owned by billionaires. And, you know, they're setting themselves up there as, you know, the champion of the little guy here for preventing people from getting fleeced by these giant billionaire NFL owners. But that's not really what happened here. The Bears were always inclined to stay in their ancestral homeland of Chicago. I mean, I think they wanted to the entire time. What the Bears were asking for here was not necessarily tons of public funds to build the stadium in Arlington Heights. What the Bears were asking for primarily was tax certainty, not, you know, funds. They wanted to know what the tax rates were going to be for the foreseeable future. They wanted to know that it wouldn't fluctuate.
They wanted to be able to plan, you know, for the long term with the stadium build. And there was a vote in the Illinois Senate that failed recently. The mega, they called it the mega something. I forget what it was called. But it was a vote to provide, you know, funds for these kind of stadiums. And they scrapped that and they came up with a supplementary bill, a last ditch effort, you know, to provide some tax certainty for the near future. And they couldn't even pass that. So, while politicians in Illinois are going to thump their chests and they're going to say that they're protecting the little guy, what this really came down to was that the Indiana legislature was able to provide some certainty on the taxes. They were, hey, this is what you're going to be paying. This is what it's going to be for the foreseeable future. They were able to give the Bears a firm foundation to start from and plan from. And that's really what cinched the deal. Even if the Bears had stayed in Chicago, they would have put up $2 billion for the stadium project, which is actually a lot of money. The Bears, I mean, you look at what Tennessee put up for their stadium. The Bears are putting up a lot more of their own money for this stadium project. So yes, it was a little bit about public funds, but mostly it was about public certainty. Indiana gave them the certainty, Illinois did not, and now you have the Hammond Bears of Chicago.

**Jason Hammer** (3:49)
That's right. That's right.

**Dylan Gwinn** (3:51)
That's the border.

**Jason Hammer** (3:52)
Jason Hammer here. And so if you live in Indiana, there's a good chance one of your friends or family members is an obnoxious Bears fan, right? So I've got friends that live in Chicago. I texted my buddy today, DJ, huge Bears fan. His response was this, we're not mad about it.
We avoided a bad deal that would F over the taxpayers. It's literally a better drive for us to get to Hammond at Arlington Heights. It's super easy for us to get there and we didn't have to pay for it. You're on the hook. What's your response to my buddy's message that lives in Chicago?