Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there were three stories in three different publications that really caught my eye in they are they’re all related to our children. One of them is Stephen Moore’s column in BizPac Review, and the title of it is It’s Now or Never for School Choice Everywhere. But here’s what he points out and I’m going to give a few quotes here.
This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested proficient math. Twenty-three schools and not one and Hogan, who was the Republican governor of Maryland, actually thinks that he’s qualified to be president.
And here he is, the governor of the biggest city, 23 schools. Not one single student is proficient in math. And by the way, Baltimore spends $21,000 a student, which is college tuition for some colleges. But if you think that’s bad, it can actually get worse.
In Illinois, according to the data from the Illinois State Board of Education, reviewed by WIREPOINTS, an investigative journalism center, there were 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, that failed to lift even one student to grade level reading. Not even one student in 22 schools in the Chicago area.
Now, if you can’t read and you can’t do math, well, I take that back. If you can’t read or you can’t do math at any level that would be competitive with anything, your chances of being successful and happy in life are extremely remote. And these are institutions, by the way.
People talk about racism and whatnot, institutional racism, The 1619 Project, and whatnot. Well, these are government institutions where the data is known, and they won’t change anything. In fact, they promote their own people within the organizations because that’s all they care about.
And don’t blame the shortage of money in Chicago. Many of the Chicago schools are spending up to $30,000 a child. He concludes, though, he says, that there is a silver lining in that there are some states that are rapidly expanding school choice.
And he lists among those: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and West Virginia. And then, he also mentions kind of as honorable mention, Texas, Tennessee, and Utah. So that’s good. But then you read in The Wall Street Journal. Headline: To Increase Equity, School Districts Are Eliminating Honor Classes.
What you have now in these liberal areas across the country, AP, Advanced Placement, where children in those classes have an opportunity to excel and learn more in order to have equity in the schools, these liberal school districts and school boards are eliminating the opportunity to actually excel.
And mediocre is the ultimate opportunity in these school districts. And my last one, Michael, is this is a headline from and this is Lee Smith. You know Lee Smith at The Epoch Times. Why is CDC Pushing the Vaccine on Children When Fauci Already Said it Failed?
And we talked the other day about how in Florida that the Vars database is showing a 4,400 percent increase in bad reactions to the vaccine. Four thousand four hundred percent. And yet our government continues to try to force its will on children where the risk of serious problems from COVID is next to none. The liberal institutions and their bureaucracies continue to do harm and they don’t care.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Student” by Katerina Holmes.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Dr. Matthew Spalding, Vice President of Hillsdale College and the Executive Director of the 1776 Commission to the newsmakers line to discuss the dismantling of the 1776 Commission by the Biden administration and new resources for parents of K through 12 students.
Leahy: We are joined now on the newsmaker line by Dr. Matthew Spalding. Kirby, Professor in Constitutional Government at Hillsdale College and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government. Welcome, Dr. Spalding.
Spalding: Great to be with you. Good morning.
Leahy: The Hillsdale 1776 curriculum has been released. Tell us about it and its relationship to the 1776 Commission formed by President Trump and then disbanded immediately upon inauguration by Joe Biden.
Spalding: Well, a quick succession of things. The 1776 Commission, which was formed by the President, I took a leave and was Executive Director of that and we put out in 1776 Report, which you pointed out was immediately acknowledged by executive order because the Biden administration wanted to go in the direction of equity and pursue its racial policies, including things like critical race theory or various versions of that in the federal government.
What they were getting rid of was a traditional approach to looking at the founding, looking at the Declaration, and the Constitution in ways that saw those as driving the narrative of American history. And that’s what they couldn’t abide by. We are in a debate between what seems to be two versions of American history.
They want to go in a completely political direction to pursue their current racial objectives and policy. The report called for new curriculums and Hillsdale, which has been working on teaching and doing teaching and curriculum for decades.
And the college for over a hundred, almost 200 years now has been working on a curriculum. It’s been released two months ago. The 1776 Curriculum and it’s already had 50,000 downloads in a very quick amount of time.
It’s about civics and history meant to fill this immediate void and eventually draw out a full curriculum for anybody who wants to use it.
It’s all free of charge and we’re putting it out there to have an alternative to the absolute absurd curriculum and things being put out by public schools, by critical race theory, and what is going on over the country.
Now there actually is a great alternative for homeschoolers, private schools, public schools, and anybody who wants to use it.
Leahy: Where can people go to download this curriculum? You can go to the main college website, Hillsdale.edu. There’s also a K through 12 website that has other materials for people who teach and have kids. K12.hillsdale.edu.
Any of those you can download, click and there’ll be easy ways to find it and print it off yourself. It’s whole health and pages, all the lessons, questions, and everything would need to teach these materials from K through 12.
Leahy: How many public school teachers have downloaded this and are using it in their classrooms?
Spalding: It’s hard to tell immediately when people are downloading it, but I think probably the people who are downloading and using it immediately are the ones we talked to the most.
Charter school teachers, private school teachers, and home schoolers. But I can tell you we have some evidence and suggestions for people calling and talking with us that there are public school teachers who are stuck in these schools.
They’re being used to transfer this critical race theory stuff. There are some good people still in some of those schools who are looking for alternatives, and they’ll look to this whether public school will adopt this formally or not.
That’s another question. But now there’s something else that you look to in order to offset what they’re trying to make them teach. And let me just reiterate where to go to download this fantastic curriculum. K12.hillsdale.edu.
Leahy: Dr. Spalding, we have this little event here. We call the National Constitution Bee based upon a book that I co-authored, A Guide to the Constitution and Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students. This will be our fifth year. We have some experience in interacting with public school teachers.
And I can tell you it’s not been encouraging in terms of their interest in having traditional American constitutional civic values taught. And it seems to me that this is a systemic problem.
State legislatures around the country have laws that say you should be teaching the Constitution. I’m not seeing it implemented at K12 public schools. Do I have this right? And if I do what can be done to turn it around beyond making this great curriculum from Hillsdale available?
Spalding: No, I think in general, you’re absolutely spot on that’s correct. And you actually alluded to a very important thing that’s the key to the solution here. The federal government under the Constitution and by federal law has no role in curriculum.
As matter of fact, by law, the Department of Education is prevented from getting involved in curriculum. It’s a state matter. States have all the power. State legislatures can give guidance to their departments.
They create the curriculum, they control the public schools, and that goes from the states all the way down to school boards. The most important thing to change the politics of what is going on right now, because I think the debate in curriculum and K through 12 is a cultural manifestation of our national debate is get involved in those things.
If you have the where with all to be involved in a state legislature or have ways to get involved in anything all the way down and especially in school boards, where the decisions made about adopting curriculum are crucially important.
And there states and local communities and school boards have a lot of authority. Don’t want to assume the settle government is taking us over and can fix it, or is the problem.
You can’t think about it. Get involved in those things. It’s going on all over the country. We need more of that because that’s what going to upset the apple cart.
And I think there in those debates, people who are concerned and want to see a more traditional curriculum have not only a foothold but in many ways a great advantage given the people there.
The most interested are the ones that have the children who care for them as opposed to the teachers who often don’t and are merely implementing these bad curriculums.
Leahy: It seems to me that the way to go, if you want to have this great curriculum in your school is to go directly to teachers, directly to the school board, and directly to administrators and present it to them. K12.hillsdale.edu, that’s the short term. The intermediate-term would be by your state legislature to accept and promote this. What are your thoughts on that?
Spalding: No, I think that’s right. The immediate is a school board debate. State legislatures. There are a lot of states. I’ve been very involved in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, other states here in the process that either have and now they’re implementing or they’re changing their city rules and looking ahead.
Departments of Education, that is where the real higher-level political battle is going on and they make those decisions. They can’t then be overridden by the federal government. The federal government has no role here. So that battle is the battle that needs to be won.
Leahy: Why do so many school administrators promote a left-wing, we hate America version of the country?
Spalding: I think the answer there gets into the long-term effect, which, unfortunately, and many people have not been focused on are the teachers’ unions and the effect through the academy of shaping teachers and the creation of curricula.
And then what’s going on in state legislatures. As long as the progressive elements of liberalism, either intellectually or politically or through unions control the process, they’ve been working on this for some time, I think this critical race, which is a bridge too far to say the very least, has revealed what has been going on.
And with COVID we saw our children getting this stuff first hand at home, and I think it’s really kind of pulled back the curtain. Now we see this debate for what it is and have our opening despite the fact that they’ve been working on these things for some time.
Listen to the second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Southeastern Legal Foundation’s Director of Litigation Braden Boucek to the newsmakers line to discuss the antiracist training lawsuit filed with the Evanston-Skokie school district in Illinois.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line by our good friend, Braden Bosek, who is a director of litigation at the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Good morning, Braden.
Boucek: Good morning, Michael. A pleasure to be on.
Leahy: Well, when last we spoke, you were affiliated with The Beacon Center here in Tennessee. Now you’re the director of litigation at the Southeastern Legal Foundation down in Atlanta. Boy, do you have a case on your hands?
Boucek: We sure do. Yep. It’s been exciting.
Leahy: I read the outline of the allegations there and I’m gonna call these allegations “incredible.” That is hard to believe, not credible, that a school system would do what is included in these allegations.
I just go down the list of all the things that this White teacher in the Evanston-Skokie school district in Illinois says he’s being required to do. I mean, it’s a lot of stuff. He’s got to participate in antiracist training as evidenced by the lawsuit.
The training instructs teachers to accept that White individuals “loud, authoritative, and controlling.” Understand that being “less White.” “Less racially oppressive.”
Acknowledge that “White identity is inherently racist.” Denounce “White privilege and participate in, ‘privilege walks’ where they must stand in line and separate themselves according to statements relating to their race or color.” They aren’t really doing that in that district, are they, Braden?
Boucek: That’s exactly what they’re doing in the district. And you don’t have to take our word for it. It’s all based on documents that they publicly proclaim. It’s in their lesson plans.
It’s on their district’s equity glossary, which is on their website, and it’s in their vision statements. So they have bought in hook line and sinker into an antiracist training and they’ll publicly shout it from there after that.
Leahy: Again, I guess the word is incredible. I can’t believe it. It is so racist against this White teacher. What kind of reaction have you received after you filed this? And would you file this in federal district court? Where did you file the case?
Boucek: We filed this in federal district court in Chicago. And obviously, everybody is concerned about the sort of woke curriculum that you see here in Tennessee or in some of these other schools.
And what’s happening in Chicago is what happens when the woke curriculum that we see in Tennessee is allowed to grow up and bear fruit. And it was only a matter of time. But we’ve got to get these things before federal judges. We’ve got to allege the equal protection violation in the Civil Rights Act, and we’ve got to stop these things.
Leahy: Evanston-Skokie, isn’t Evanston a fairly affluent suburb of Chicago?
Boucek: Yeah, that’s my understanding as well. But this is an ideology that draws a certain type of progressive intellectual, and they find it irresistible. And District 65 has bought into it hook line sinker.
Leahy: The officials there are Devin Horton, who’s the Superintendent of the Evanston-Skokie school district. Latarsha Green, who is the Deputy Superintendent of District 65, and then Stacey Beardsley, who is the Assistant Superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
All three of those officials are part of the staff that put this together. And then there’s a Board of Education, right? Did the board actually approve this stuff?
Boucek: Oh, yes. This is a board-approved curriculum. And I’d invite anybody to go to our website if they want to actually see a list of these things because as you pointed out, they really just have to be read to be believed.
And you can go to Slfliberty.org, which is our website, and look for our coverage on this. Our complaint is there, which is the actual formal legal document that we filed. And in the third paragraph, we have an image from a book.
Leahy: I’m looking at it right now. (Chuckles) Describe it.
Boucek: The book from PreK. Well, the book is called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. And the image that you’re looking at that we put so prominently, no complaint is a picture of a White devil holding up a contract for stolen land and stolen property. And all you got to do is exchange your soul.
And the caption, says, “Whiteness is a bad deal and it always has been.” And again, that’s in the curriculum. And that’s shown to kids as young as Pre-K.
Leahy: I’m looking at it. Item three in your litigation in your complaint says what Superintendent Devin Horton means by ‘antiracist’ looks like the following image from a lesson taught to District 65 elementary school students.
And on one side of the page, it says, highlighted in red, Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was. And then it’s got one of these little air bubbles where it’s written in ‘dude, we can see your pointy tail.’
This is given to elementary school students. And then on the other page, it’s this White devil with a pointy red tail. And then it looks like a receipt with money on it. And it says, contract binding you to Whiteness.
You get stolen land, stolen riches, special favor. Whiteness gets to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color. Your soul, sign below.
Land riches and favors may be revoked at any time for any reason. This is what they’re teaching elementary schools in the Evanston-Skokie School District an affluent suburb of Chicago. How long have they been doing that?
Boucek: At least since 2017. And you’ve described in great detail what the curriculum looks like. But what it really is is it’s teaching non-White kids to hate. And it’s teaching White kids to hate themselves.
And all of it is unconstitutional. We’ve been through this before. There is a robust body of law about treating school children differently on the basis of race.
Leahy: You said something very significant. Our schools, at least this school system is teaching White children to hate themselves. We’ve seen a lot of reports here in Williamson County.
There’s a group I’m sure you’re familiar with them called Moms for Liberty. And they have brought in parents talking about their children who are upset with their own history. I think some even mentioned the kids were almost suicidal, didn’t want to go to school. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. It’s child abuse, in my view.
Boucek: It’s a dangerously destructive ideology. And I know the stories you’re talking about in Williamson County about the child of biracial parents that came home and said she didn’t want to be White anymore.
It promotes a view of race essentialism that lumps us all into various categories and then pits us all against each other. Oppressor or oppressed. And that just has no business in the school, whether in Tennessee or Chicago.
Leahy: It is, in fact, the antithesis of the American character of individualism and self-reliance, and respect for other people. You’ve got in your complaint, I think an excellent description of the difference between equity, which is all the rage these days among the elite, and equality.
Let me just read this and get your reaction. You say in the complaint, equity is very different than equality. Although the two are sometimes confused. Equality is a principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law through the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As District 65 in Evanston-Skokie, Illinois itself has recognized, equality is about sameness in treating everyone in an identical manner regardless of their race.
Equity is about so-called justice and individuals getting what “they need and deserve.” Said another way, equality strives for equal opportunity while equity strives for equal outcomes. How did equity replace equality?
Boucek: That’s exactly what’s going on is that they’re trying to swap out equality with equity. And we thought it was very important that we pull up these terms so people become familiar with them because equity is becoming a buzzword that’s being kicked around with a great deal of promiscuity these days.
And it’s an innocuous-sounding term. It’s even a noble goal. But the problem is, However desirable, equity, maybe equality is a non-negotiable constitutional command. Of all of the American freedoms, the self-evident truth that all men are created equal is the one that we have fought and bled for more than any other one. And I’m thinking about Valley Forge. I
‘m thinking about the blood-soaked fields of Antietam. I’m thinking about Marines rating across a coral reef and Tarawa. And I’m thinking about the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We have fought so long and hard to live up to the standard that all men are created equal based on race.
We just can’t and have afforded any kind of backsliding now. And that’s really what happens starting in 2017. They just decided we can’t wait anymore, we need to go ahead and tilt the scales to get to equity now.
But everybody needs to know what equity means. Equity is not equality. Equity is a license to punish Americans for their skin color. And it’s precisely why the Civil Rights Movement existed in the first place.
Leahy: Braden Boucek with the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Can you stick with us through the break? We’ll have more when we get back.
Boucek: Absolutely.
Listen to the first hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Braden Boucek” by The Federalist Society. Background Photo “Classroom” by Educators .co.uk. CC BY 2.0.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who weighed in on recent Arkansas legislation establishing the age requirement for sex changes and later had an equity solution for all those corporations that won’t speak up against woke culture.
(Governor Asa Hutchinson clip plays)
Leahy: So that is Arkansas Governor ASA Hutchinson trying to explain why he vetoed a bill that would prohibit unauthorized transgender surgery and treatment for youngsters under the age of 18. The Arkansas state legislature has overidden that. Now, what’s interesting is if you saw him on Tucker Carlson, did you see that?
Carmichael: I did see him on Tucker Carlson.
Leahy: And Tucker asked him a very important question. Did you talk to the guys at Walmart about this?
Carmichael: Right. Or Tysons and the big companies in Arkansas.
Leahy: His answer was sort of like humana, human, humana.
Carmichael: Well, and then he said no, and then Tucker pressed him on it. And then he said, I answered the question. The answer is no, I did not. That’s what I answered. No. That’s what he said. What’s more interesting is what he just said now trying to explain it away. And the question is, is the procedure going to be legal on minors or not? It would be akin to someone saying that anyone who wants to get drunk, regardless of age should be able to because it’s a cultural issue and our churches can deal with it.
We don’t need to have laws on those types of things. And by the way, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I know all the science on it. I’m just observing that I know we have laws that people under a certain age can’t do things without parental permission, and in other cases, they can’t do it even if they have parental permission. It’s an age thing.
So in the state of Arkansas, the legislature has decided that people should reach the age of 18 before they’re allowed to have an unalterable, life-changing sex change that you have to be 18. And science is very clear on one thing, and that is the female mind develops and reaches total maturity about five years earlier than the male mind. The female mind is in the early 20s fully mature, and the male mind is in the later 20s.
So the question is, do you want somebody to be able at the age of under 18 to be able to have life-changing surgery, or do you want their mind to mature at least to the age of 18 before they do it? And the legislature in Arkansas said 18 is the minimum age. And Asa Hutchinson disagrees because there’s a lot of woke executives who don’t want that law. For me, this is much bigger than just this law. This gets to what we were talking about before.
Leahy: The CEO and the leaders at Walmart are all in favor of having kids being able to be transgender. That’s one example. In our discussion off-air during the break, you said, well, look, there were 100 CEOs, Fortune 500 companies that had this call and that wanted to go woke and wanted to attack the very legitimate common sense laws in Georgia.
Carmichael: And I gave the reason why they’re doing it.
Leahy: Yeah, for fear.
Carmichael: For fear of the left. They want to be on the good side of the left. Just like Warren Buffett years ago figured out that if he just merely said he should pay more taxes, then Obama would call him his good friend Warren Buffett and the left would not attack Warren Buffett, as at that time, the wealthiest man in America and maybe the world.
But he was the wealthiest man in America, and he wanted to be loved and he didn’t want to be attacked. So the way to do it is to say I should pay more taxes. Now, he didn’t mean it. We know that for a fact, unless he was paying more taxes voluntarily and didn’t tell anybody. But unless he paid more taxes then he didn’t mean what he said, because all he had to do is write a check to follow through on what he said.
Leahy: By the way, apropos of nothing. I just discovered because, you know, I do a little genealogy for relaxation. I just discovered that Warren Buffett is my eighth cousin.
Carmichael: Oh, good.
Leahy: We both descend from John Dickinson, born 1623, died 1676.
Carmichael: Okay, well, there you go. You need to put in for part of the inheritance when he passes.
Leahy: Now I want to go back to what you said, which was interesting. You said there are an awful lot of CEOs that don’t agree with this woke culture.
Carmichael: But they won’t say anything.
Leahy: I was going to say now, I said to you, to which you had a strong reaction. We’re about to hear that again. I said, well, Crom, we need to help those CEOs who are opposed to woke culture and give them help, give them a voice. And you said…
Carmichael: I said, no, you got that exactly backward. And by the way, I’m not in favor of this. I just understand tactics. And I understand that we’re in a competition. And what I’m about to say is not something that I enjoy saying, but it’s something that needs to be done. The NFL, for example, needs to be needs to be told, required as executive order because of whatever emergency you want to claim the NFL needs to have 50 percent female players on the field at all times, and then the appropriate rules to protect their safety.
All players safety, not just the females, but all players. And the result is not that you have rules that are intended to have safety. The result is that there are no injuries. And all of a sudden, now the NFL owners and you say the players, you all were kneeling because you wanted equity. Well, now you’re going to have it. (Leahy chuckles)
Half of you all won’t have a job. By the way, also, everybody will have equal pay. This is equity. And then what you do for the larger corporations that are regulated by the SEC is you highly regulate the pay of executives and then you blame it on these woke companies. Well, then there is gonna be a lot of CEOs who didn’t agree with them but we’re silent, and they’re going to be calling those woke ones up and saying, what the heck are you’re doing? You’re destroying my life too you jerk!
Leahy: Tell us what you’re really feeling.
Carmichael: The jerk was a pullback. (Laughs)
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to weighs in on mask mandates, deplorable neanderthals, and going to the extreme of equity in all industries.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael, I’m trying to figure out if I am a neanderthal as Joe Biden describes me. Or if I’m a deplorable as Hillary Clinton described me. which is it? which am I?
Carmichael: While you actually one is an adjective. you can be deplorable and you can be a neanderthal.
Leahy: So you could be a deplorable and I guess a deplorable neanderthal. That is very clever.
Carmichael: If you are proud of either one you can say I’m going to double down.
Leahy: I think we’re going to go with that. The Deplorable Neanderthals.
Carmichael: That’s right. Here’s what is interesting about this and it really gets into the government overreach. Now, I’m going to ask you a question that I believe I know the answer to but I’m not 100 percent certain and if you don’t think we need one of those do for sure. In Tennessee isn’t the mask mandate determined by our governor? Has he said it’s county level?
Leahy: I think that is correct.
Carmichael: I believe that’s true. So that’s true. So according to our president, our governor is a neanderthal because he is allowing others to make the decision within the state. now Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida for months, Florida has not had a mask mandate. Now Texas and Mississippi are doing the same thing and that is what has provoked the neanderthal comment.
And his is very very important because it’s kind of humorous on one hand, but on the other hand, what you have is the present United States who apparently does not think he has the authority to demand a nationwide mandate to wear a mask. Apparently, he does not think he has that authority or he would. Or otherwise, he’s a neanderthal. He’d be a self-described neanderthal for not exercising his authority.
But he is calling those governors who aren’t exercising that authority a neanderthal. Now, this is important because the question is it appropriate for the government to make such demands? And I think it’s inappropriate for the government to make such demands especially under the conditions that we have now. But Florida has proven without having the demand.
It’s not saying we’re demanding that you don’t wear a mask. It’s a choice. And in Florida. They’ve not had the statistics in Florida or the science doesn’t show that Florida has had any worse outcomes than other states. In fact, some of the most masked states have had the worst outcomes. So the science on the masks is out. But it’s a nice gesture.
Leahy: It’s a theatrical gesture.
Carmichael: I look at it as a gesture.
Leahy: And by the way, if you out there of your individual choice if you want to wear a mask all day every day anywhere go ahead and do it.
Carmichael: I’ve had the first dose of the vaccine and I still wear a mask because I don’t want other people to feel uncomfortable. That’s just a nice thing that I do.
Leahy: Well, you’re not a deplorable neanderthal then?
Carmichael: Apparently.
Leahy: You are a polite deplorable.
Carmichael: Thank you. I appreciate that. I need to be called a Deplorable Neanderthal. But here’s what’s more interesting. At the federal level what you see are these appointments that Biden is making to the head of the SEC and all of these different committees and these different agencies of government. This gets back to what Neil Gorsuch wrote in his book A Republic if You Can Keep It.
Now you have these people who in testimony are saying that they believe that the SEC which regulates all publicly traded companies has the authority to mandate certain requirements that are not in the law in terms of global warming and climate change and demands for ESG which is environmental social and government points. And all these different things.
This is a very interesting phenomenon. And let me ask you this Michael. There will be a lawsuit over this. And then the Supreme Court is going to have rule over whether or not a federal agency has that kind of authority. In the name of equity, FCC overseas TV, and all that kind of stuff, could they reach all the way down into the production?
Could they reach all the way down into the production of TV shows and say that in the name of equity you no longer can cast and you can no longer have tryouts for acting jobs? You have to take anyone who applies and draw them by a lot. And then train them. And then the argument would be everybody knows that anybody can act. (Leahy laughs)
Everybody knows that because Harvey Weinstein proved it. Harvey Weinstein made any woman who would do his bidding a star? So it has nothing to do with their acting capabilities. And so in the name of equity we no longer can select our actors and actresses for shows. And in fact, you could extend that as far as you wanted to within the entertainment industry including singers and all kinds of things.
And then you could say that all professional sports teams in the name of equity must choose their players by a lot. And then just simply coach them. What I’m saying is this sounds a little preposterous, but nobody would have thought ten years ago that biological men could simply identify as female and participate against women. Nobody would have thought that but yet that’s what we now have. In fact, in Tennessee, we just passed a law saying that you participate in the sport that where you were biologically born.
Leahy: The House passed it, the Senate will pass it, and the governor says he’ll sign it.
Carmichael: Now that shows me that this is protecting women. But you have advocates of the LGBT community and some women’s organizations that are saying that Tennessee will be denied certain conferences and what not and they will not come here because of that law. And so I’m saying okay if we’re going to do this and we’re going to have this kind of equity let’s just go ahead and really extend it. And let’s even say to CNN. Well no, you can’t do it to CNN because they are cable. But you can do it to ABC, NBC, and CBS because they are regulated.
Leahy: Should we have an equity lottery for all-star panelists on the Tennessee Star Report?
Carmichael: No. Are you regulated?
Leahy: We are broadcasted. FCC regulates.
Carmichael: Well I suppose they could. (Leahy chuckles) For those three major networks, you have to pick your broadcasters by lot. In otherwords, you can take it to its logical conclusion and you do it quickly and it will get people’s attention.
Listen to the full second hour:
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Photo “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” by Joe Biden.
