Crom Carmichael on the Polarization of the United States of America

Crom Carmichael on the Polarization of the United States of America

 

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 the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who referenced a recent article by Byron York about the polarization in America and his take on market impact.

Leahy: We are joined now by our good friend, the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning.

Carmichael: Morning Michael.

Leahy: Crom, you know I’m taking the next week off. A week from today is Memorial Day. We will have a best of programs. And Scooter we have so many great programs it’s going to be hard for you to pick the best of? (Laughter) Like there are so many great programs.

Then on Tuesday and when Wednesday sitting in my seat, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report, Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party. And if all goes well, Thursday and Friday, co-founder of The Tennessee Star, Christina Botteri, will be sitting in for me on Thursday and Friday. So Crom, you’ll have a guest host on Wednesday and Friday of next week. I know you’ll miss me. Yes, I’m sure you will miss me desperately.

Carmichael:  Hope wherever you are it’s successful.

Leahy: So do I. Well, you are busy reading, as you always are. And you read a column by Byron York. A very good writer. Tell us about that column.

Carmichael: Well, what Byron York points out is that over the last gosh six decades and after 100 days, there are polls that are taken on the approval and disapproval or actually, it’s not even approval of disapproval. It’s the approval of the President.

Leahy: After a hundred days?

Carmichael: Yes. And they divide it by GOP and Democrat. And under Biden, the approval rate among Republicans is nine percent. The approval rate among Democrats is 90 percent. So the gap between the two is 81 percent.

Leahy: 90 percent approval of Democrats for Biden.

Carmichael: So don’t focus on that. Focus on the gap between the two because with Lyndon Johnson who was a pretty polarizing guy, the gap was 15 points. Now with Nixon had got to 39 points. Then it went back down to Gerald Ford 31.

Jimmy Carter was 27, and Reagan was 45. But then after that, it dropped back down to 39. And that was George H. Bush in ’89. So that’s three decades ago that it’s gone from 39 to 57 to 62 to 63. Trump was 77. Biden is 81.

So it shows that our country, this is the point, it shows that our country is becoming incredibly polarized. This is what is very disturbing. And this is what I talk about a lot since you had me back on the show. And that is that the Democrat Party is the party of government and those affiliated with the government.

And the Republican Party is the party of everybody else. If you perceive yourself to be affiliated with the government or benefiting from government and you don’t think you can benefit from government in a free society with less government, then you’re going to support Democrats.

But the effect of that over the last 20 years certainly is that the deficit. And the way Democrats have maintained their influence among voters is they just throw around money. And there is a limit to that. I don’t know what it is, but when we reach it, we’ll reach it in a hurry.

Leahy: Things will start really falling apart. Economically.

Carmichael: In my lifetime we’ve had at least five Black Swan event-type of things. In the ’70s there were two liquidity crises. Then you had in ’87, you had a real estate debacle. Then you had the dot com boom-bust.

Leahy: Boom then bust.

Carmichael: Boom then bust around the year 2000. Then you had 2008 to 2010 once again, real estate debacle. And when those things occur, everybody is surprised. For example, I have been asking, I have friends and then I meet people who are in the investment business.

They’re professionals with investment banking firms. And I asked them, I said, what is your firm’s position on how the market is. Where does it sit and where is it headed? And I get the same answer from every literally the same answer from everyone.

As long as the Fed is accommodating and interest rates stay low, then the market will go up. When all the professionals in the market and I’m not saying all of them, but a majority when all of them think the same thing, typically, whatever it is they think turns out to be incorrect because markets are contrary.

When the people are incredibly bullish, that means people are fully invested. So there’s not a whole lot more to drive the markets up. And as these people point out is that when you have the Fed providing liquidity, then there is a lot of money chasing assets. But if inflation pops up…

Leahy: Which it’s doing.

Carmichael: Well, if it pops up even more and it’s longer-term than one or two months, then all of a sudden the Fed will have to adjust its behavior.

Leahy: Interest rates will have to go up.

Carmichael: They’ll have to push them up and they’ll have to tighten liquidity. And when that happens, then that’s when the markets will adjust, because the investment community thinks that the Feds are going to keep interest rates down and provide liquidity.

If they do, then the markets will continue to go up when everybody thinks the same thing is going to happen. So I want to get back to what this article is, which is so interesting to me is that even Democrats invest in the stock market. Republicans invest in the stock market.

But you see this huge difference in opinion. The Democrat party is now revealing itself in that it does not look right now from where I sit, I think that Biden’s tax package is all but dead. I think that his infrastructure program is all but dead.

And if those two things are all but dead or actually are dead, then his family Bill will never even get on the runway. And so what we’ll have is we’ll be going into the midterm, where the leadership of the Democrat Party was pushing an incredibly reckless agenda.

But it was three or four Democrats in the Senate who stood their ground silently, along with Republicans who stood their ground vocally. They kept the left that controls the Democrat Party now from doing some things that would just wreak havoc on the economy.

It will be interesting to see if things don’t do well. First of all, if Biden doesn’t get his big tax package passed and doesn’t get infrastructure and doesn’t get anything done, whether or not he will remain as popular among Democrats. I think a big part of his popularity among Democrats is he’s not Trump.

Leahy: Bingo.

Carmichael: And as long as Trump exists as a political force, which is going to be…

Leahy: Unless something happens.

Carmichael: Unless something happens to him, he will, then Biden’s popularity among Democrats. There are still Independents’ out there, which probably represent among these people who are polled. I’m going to say maybe 15 to 20 percent who don’t claim they’re not either one.

In which case they don’t participate in the poll, as long as Trump is out there than Biden’s popularity, regardless of what he does. And this is to me, what’s a little bit different because when George W. Bush was President, he lost his popularity in his last two years with Republicans.

When he left office, his popularity was 29 percent. And that’s because everybody had lost confidence in him. And I was among those. And the more time passes, my sense of it is he will be as a President.

Leahy: Absolutely. His ratings are going to continue to plummet.

Carmichael: And he’ll be down in the bottom third of presidents all the time fairly soon. And I think he’ll continue to drop below that. There are some people who think the world of George Bush. He was a fine gentleman. And even when people attack him, he would respond by turning the other cheek. And some people see that as a virtue. I think it’s virtuous in some professions.

Leahy: No not at all.

Carmichael: I don’t think it’s effective as a politician, especially as President. I think if you don’t fight for what you believe in, then the public soon begins to believe that you don’t believe in anything at all. This poll with Byron York shows the polarization in the country, and we’ll talk about that more when we get back.

Leahy: I completely agree. The question is, what does this mean for the future? We’ll talk about that.

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.
Photo “Crom Carmichael” by Crom Carmichael.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crom Carmichael: ‘A Free Society Cannot Stand for Long When People Are Treated Unequally’

Crom Carmichael: ‘A Free Society Cannot Stand for Long When People Are Treated Unequally’

 

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 the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who commented on the recent banning of the conservative social media app Parler and explained the importance of equal treatment necessary to maintain a free society.

Leahy: We are joined on Monday here at 6:30 by our good friend the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Good morning, Crom.

Carmichael: Michael, good morning, sir.

Leahy: Well Crom, you and I have been friends for about 30 years. I have a sense that we are in the process of watching a huge change in this country.

Carmichael: I think you’re right. And you know, I want to go back to kind of some first principles that we’ve been with that we’ve talked about for quite a while. There are two in particular. One is equal treatment. Not just under the law but equal treatment as a general principle.

Leahy: Not just the law but let’s say business practices for instance or interacting with other individuals.

Carmichael: Yes. And if people are treated unequally for example, and this is an extreme example, but it’s an accurate example. In the days of slavery, Black people under the law were treated very unequally in the South. And then even after the Civil War was over in the South. The Jim Crow laws and all the other laws that were on the books treated people unequally.

And a free society cannot stand for long when people are treated unequally. And today what you have is you have a government. You have a Big Tech complex. You have colleges, universities, and K12 that are all now treating people very very unequally. And I’m sure you may have discussed it earlier this morning. I heard the last 20 minutes as I drove in that Parler has been shut down.

And it’s an effort by a number of companies that acted in concert and they couldn’t have possibly acted separately and done so in the manner that they did it and it swiftly as they did it. Parler has been essentially removed from the planet. And Amazon. I was getting little messages from Devin Nunes yesterday kind of giving the countdown. I assume that as of now Amazon has shut Parler off of its servers. And I have no idea if Parler still exists. But it was taken out of the Apple Store. It was taken out of Google’s store and so it’s been eliminated.

Leahy: So if you go to Parler.com right now. You can’t download the app from the Apple store right now, right? But if you go to Parler.com on the web.

Carmichael: You may be. But try and make the app work.

Leahy: Let me tell you what it says. But Parler.com right now says this site can’t be reached. I’ll do some research on that.

Carmichael: But again are you are aware of what I’m talking about?

Leahy: I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m saying this is additional to what you’re talking about.

Carmichael: The Parler app was hosted on the Amazon Cloud and Amazon has shut them down. And Google shut them down. But the way Amazon shut him down is particularly interesting because they gave him 24 hours notice on a Saturday. Which meant that they had a Sunday. It was intentional. It was very intentional to do what they did.

Now in addition let’s just go through a few other stories to kind of add too much worse the point. That I’m trying to make here and that ABC News calls for the cleansing. That’s a quote. The cleansing of Trump supporters in the wake of what happened at the Capitol. Now, let’s review very quickly what happened at the Capitol. You had 300,000 people who went there to protest the election results without an investigation.

Leahy: On the mall.

Carmichael: On the mall. That’s what they did. Then many of them marched down to the Capitol. And protesters have marched to the Capitol countless. So they march to the Capitol and the Capitol Hill police were essentially not present.

Leahy: Not present.

Carmichael: They weren’t there. And by the way, the head of the Capitol police has resigned. The Sergeant at Arms of the House has resigned. The Sergeant Arms of the Senate has resigned. And by the way, you know who supervises the Capitol police?

Leahy: I would imagine it’s Speaker Pelosi.

Carmichael: Yes. And it’s as if this was a setup.

Leahy: As if.

Carmichael: To have the House actually invaded. And perhaps and we don’t know this but we have in history had many examples of one side-dressing up like the other side. In fact in our own country the Boston Tea Party. It was a great example of Americans dressing up as Indians or Native Americans. And then they destroyed the chests of tea in Boston Harbor. And then in Germany, they did the same thing. Hitler did the same thing.

Leahy: That was the example I was thinking. What came to mind but not exactly a parallel was the burning of the Reichstag.

Carmichael: There are just not two examples in history. There’s there would be numerous examples. And so and did did did some Trump supporters going to the Capitol? Yes, they did. Did they think it was funny? Probably. Where they wrong? Yes. Okay. However, if you’re a Trump supporter and you look at how the officials reacted to the burning of Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Portland, and then you looked at how everybody reacted. Including Speaker Pelosi who said people will do what they do.

That was her quote. People will do what they do when they were destroying the federal courthouse in Portland. But I don’t want want to dwell too much on that because there are some other things that are happening. Pelosi calls Trump unhinged and personally talks to the military chief in an attempt to thwart Trump’s power.

Leahy: And that by the way, those actions of her personally talking to the military chief could be considered unconstitutional.

Carmichael: Could be but it doesn’t matter. You have to have the power to do something. And if the power to do something doesn’t do something guess what? Something doesn’t happen. Trump passes and signs executive orders taking aim at China’s digital totalitarianism. So he has signed an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese apps including Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Leahy: WeChat Pay. Interesting.

Carmichael: WeChat Pay. But there are eight of them. It’ll be interesting to see if Biden when he becomes president, is inaugurated whether or not he undoes that executive order. Now, this went completely under the radar as far as I know, but the Communist Party of China has arrested 50 people, the opposition to the Communist Party. 50 people in Hong Kong. So the entire opposition of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong.

These are political people, have now been arrested by the Chinese Communist Party. The Catholic Church according to The Epoch Times has been infiltrated by globalists. You can put quotes around that. ‘The Chinese Communist Party.’ Let me go back to my point that if people are treated unequally and the Trump people are being treated almost as if they are the 50 people from Hong Kong.

And all of the organizations associated with the Trump people. Parler is it is probably the most prominent example, but I would imagine that what will happen in the next 12 months. And it may happen sooner rather than later, is it there will be language passed in Congress that that essentially stifles talk radio. Because all of the channels that the people who support the ideas of Trump, and that let me make something clear.

Trump was elected in part because of Obama. And Trump probably was re-elected. What’s interesting is Trump was ranked the most admired person in America followed by Michelle Obama. Biden with way down the list. Now you’d think that somebody who’s just won an election by millions of votes would be very high up on the list.

Leahy: Hmm. It’s kind of curious that he’s not.

Carmichael: But Biden is not he’s not admired. He’s not even admired by the people who voted for him. We’re in a very delicate situation. And when I say delicate I see this as a football game where all the referees have been told to throw flags on only one team.

Leahy: Yeah. That’s what it feels like.

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.