The Derek Hunter Show · WMAL | CMLS Washington DC

Hour 3 March 16th, 2026

·35 min·2 clips

A woman tells viewers to aim at Washington, D.C. and Mar-a-Lago, not New York City.

Derek starts with a gripe about how schools handle closures now versus when he was a kid. Back then, if school was open, you went and stayed put through drills and bad weather. He uses that contrast to set the tone for the hour. Then he jumps to the Oscars. Jane Fonda is the first target, and a red-carpet interview becomes his excuse to go after Hollywood people and the press around them. He says the interviewer is obnoxious, and he treats the whole exchange as another example of Hollywood and its coverage being out of touch. That turns into a broader media critique. The next stretch becomes a fact-check. He says someone was talking as if Trump had made HIV medication harder to get, but when he looked into it, the story he found was really about California. He points to a March 7, 2023 UC Berkeley School of Public Health piece about California pharmacists facing barriers to offer HIV medications, and he questions why anyone would frame that as a Trump-era issue. He then pulls an older article from the Colorado Sun dated November 18, 2020, about pharmacists being able to prescribe preventive pills in Colorado, and uses it to argue that access had gotten easier in 2020, not harder. He says the newer reporting never fixed the mismatch or asked the obvious questions. From there he broadens the attack. Actors, he says, can do well without knowing much, and sometimes that ignorance helps them. He makes the same point about public-facing elites talking with more confidence than they have earned. The show then pivots again. Derek reaches for Paul Ehrlich and the population-bomb warnings, quoting the old fear that government control would follow if population was not reduced voluntarily. He reads a Wall Street Journal letter from Kenneth Imad, who says the dire predictions never came true and that he now has no grandchildren, and Derek takes that as proof that Ehrlich was wrong. The hour ends in classic talk-radio fashion. One topic gives way to the next without much ceremony. He closes with the traffic center and signs off, promising to be back tomorrow with phones.

As heard by us

A brisk, combative hour that moves from homeschooling and Oscars mockery into a corrected California health-policy story.

The hour opens with a homeschooling anecdote, then shifts into Oscars chatter and a sharp jab at Hollywood's red-carpet interviewing. It later turns toward HIV medication access, and the cleanest point in the discussion is the correction that the story concerns California, not…

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Why you'd press play

You want a fast, combative hour that tears into Hollywood spin and a few bad claims along the way.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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