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 all-star panelist Roger Simon in studio to comment on the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and how it could invoke nationwide digital currency.
Leahy: In studio right now, our very good friend, all-star panelist, and my former boss at PJTV. That was 14 years ago.
Simon: Is that what it is? I can’t count that far back.
Leahy: Fourteen years ago when we first met. Also an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. In addition to being a novelist and depending on the day, the most-read columnist at The Epoch Times, Mr. Roger Simon. Good morning, Roger.
Simon: Good morning to you!
Leahy: It is a delight, as always, to have you here in studio. You have a very interesting column just published at The Epoch Times about where this current banking crisis, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, is going to lead us. And it’s not a very good place.
Simon: No. And it’s not just the Silicon Valley Bank, as everybody knows. It could be your bank and Credit Suisse and various other things. And something called Signature, which is about as woke as you could get. The problem I’m talking about is, you remember how this guy, Ram Emanuel said, never miss an opportunity for a crisis to do something new and dangerous.
Well, there’s a crisis going on, as we all know, and the thing that I think a lot of them have in mind is moving us all off of the banks that we may love or hate to digital currency. That means no cash and lots of conveniences, everything happens very quickly, and it means every single penny you spend even a candy bar at a 711 is recorded and known by the government.
Leahy: I cannot think of anything worse than to get rid of cash.
Simon: As I say, it’s communism beyond the wildest dreams of Karl Marx.
Leahy: Yikes.
Simon: Really, if you think about it, I mean, everything is under their control now. Then they can shut anything off if they don’t like a single thing you do. Boom. It’s gone in a second. Is your carbon footprint is too high? You can’t get gas today. That’s an example.
Leahy: Yes. They can control everything if we go to digital currency. How does that happen in a worst case scenario?
Simon: The famous phrase is, I think it’s from, how did you go bankrupt? It’s in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Slowly, but then all of a sudden, or something like that. That’s how it would happen, I believe. I think we’d wake up one morning, and it would be like that.
Biden or whoever runs Biden is doing everything by Executive Fiat. They might find a way to do that. They might declare another crisis. It’s COVID time and I guess because there’s a new pandemic it simplifies everything if all the currency is digital, and we can keep an eye on who is getting them the new shots or not.
There are lots of ways this could happen. And I think that everybody listening should be on what we used to call the French kevee, or something like that should really pay attention. Because this could happen in a lightning second.
Leahy: What a wonderful way to start the program.
Simon: On the other hand, spring will eventually come.
Leahy: Everybody’s drinking their coffee thinking, you know, Roger might be right here. Oh my goodness! But let’s try to see, well, okay. We see that as a possibility. What can be done proactively to stop that possibility?
Simon: Putting it out in the public and that you hate the idea. That’s really it.
Leahy: I totally hate the idea.
Simon: So do I. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written the column.
Leahy: Thank you. I get my Captain Obvious award for that one.
Simon: So do I. I think that’s all we can do at the moment. I think it’s essentially evil, and you have to just keep your eye on evil because it’s everywhere in our culture right now.
Leahy: And growing.
Simon: Speaking of the spring, it just popped into my head that one of the things that have been canceled is one of my favorite songs. Zippity Do Dah.
Leahy: That’s been canceled?
Simon: Song of the South. That wonderful moment. You know, I remember as a kid when I watched it, I was just so happy.
Leahy: Why was it canceled?
Simon: Oh, because it’s a black guy singing it, and it hearkens back to slavery.
Leahy: But there’s nothing in the lyrics.
Simon: No. Nothing in it.
Leahy: Oh my goodness.
Simon: No. It’s just cancel culture.
Leahy: Okay, we’re gonna come back with some more positive opportunities for the future.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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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 all-star panelist and senior editor-at-large at The Epoch Times, Roger Simon, in-studio to speak about his latest piece addressing the need for citizens to take back America by running for their school board.
Leahy: We are joined in the studio by our very good friend, my former boss at PJTV. Also Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and now a senior editor-at-large for The Epoch Times, Roger Simon. Roger, good morning.
Simon: This is a good morning because the coffee is good here. (Giggles)
Leahy: I made it, especially for you.
Simon: Because I complained.
Leahy: You must start the day off with good coffee. And as our listeners are there getting up, most of them are brewing their coffee right now. And they’re starting to pour it. And so, like us, we are enjoying coffee as we have our morning discussions.
Simon: I was just going to say one thing about coffee. Woody Allen said life is 90 percent about showing up. Actually, it’s not even said about a coffee.
Leahy: Coffee helps you show up and get the day started.
Simon: You have a terrific commentary at The Epoch Times. Theepochtimes.com. I’d like you to talk about it. I think this is the central point of what’s happening in America today. You write, to save America, run for school board.
Simon: Yes. I don’t think there’s anything more important John Q or Jane Q citizen can do other than run for school board at this point in the history of the United States. Ironically, as I say in the piece, it’s more important than running for Senate or Congress or any highfaluting job you can think of it. It’s the grassroots of the grassroots.
What’s interesting about it is that one of the commenters on my piece already – and it only went up at 11 o’clock last night, but it’s really getting a lot of traction – it reminded us that Lenin said to give him four years of educating any young person and he would have them for life.
Leahy: And I think those four years kind of go up to fourth grade. By fourth grade, they’re 90 percent formed, I think.
Simon: I think you’re right.
Leahy: Of course, we have actually some educators out there who may comment on that note. Just as an aside tonight, Roger, I’ll invite you to join me at this event. It is an open house for Thales Academy in Franklin at 6 pm.
If you come, you might want to write about it at The Epoch Times. This is a fabulous private school. It’s a chain now of eight.
Simon: People have been telling me about that for a couple of years, and I am anxious to see it.
Leahy: They use direct instruction as the most effective way to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since it’s most effective, the teachers’ unions hate it. But it’s very effective.
And they have a classical education based on the values of Western civilization. They learn about American values and it’s a great place. The tuition cost is just a little over $5,000 a year.
Simon: That’s pretty good.
Leahy: That’s really good. Tonight on Carothers Parkway in Franklin.
Simon: This is all about running for the school board. And I learned a few things from my colleague and from my wife but also from my colleague Trevor Lauden at The Epoch Times who’s been studying this.
If you’re going to run for school board, which is a very important thing to do considering what’s happened with schools, where they’re teaching Critical Race Theory and all the rest of the absolute Marxist lies to your children, you should do two things: Do not run by yourself and try to run with four or five other people.
Leahy: A slate. It’s easier to organize campaigns that way. If you’re running by yourself, the opposition, basically a bunch of lefty groups, particularly here in Williamson County for years, have been doing this.
That’s why of the 12 members of the Williamson County School Board, about 10 are lefties and two are just struggling to deal with all that pressure from the left.
Simon: As we have heard, and there’s been a lot of research on this, that people get slanted very easily in campaigns when they’re by themselves because in the last three days they publicize, you know, when did you stop beating your wife or one of those kinds of things.
Leahy: And you got a parking ticket you didn’t pay 20 years ago. You are a scofflaw.
Simon: One of those things. You have no time to reply and you have no allies in making it good. So do it as a group. And I’ll tell the second thing.
Leahy: Alright, we’ll hold off till after the break.
(Commercial break)
Leahy: A great piece to Save America, Run for School Board. Now you were giving advice to people running for school board. I think Trevor Loudon is a guy who suggested this. Number one, run as a slate with others. Great advice.
Simon: That one came from my wife. But the second one comes from Trevor. And it’s true. And that is not just criticize, which we have to do and highlight Critical Race Theory and the rest of the nonsense that’s being inculcated in children.
But also come up with and have a program that you want to replace it with. A specific one. Thales Academy is one good example. The place that leads the country in all this is Hillsdale College. And if you go online, you can see their K-12 programs.
You don’t need to run with super details of this. Four or five bullet points are plenty for everybody to digest. But you’ve got to have something when you run for all or the people to say, oh, what are you going to do? Well, this is what we’re going to do.
Leahy: Implement this curriculum. Classic education curriculum, a pro-American history. Honest pro-American history.
Simon: And not this nonsense like two plus two don’t equal four because they’re racist or the other extreme stuff that’s being thrown out there right now.
Leahy: I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you this, Roger, but you are a very good writer. I’m just going to read two paragraphs from your piece. You’d be saving America from turning into the bleakest socialist Communist state imaginable, because that is what our current educational system, K-12 is designed to do.
And sadly, has been successful in doing literally for decades. And it’s only getting worse. You would in the process also be a true revolutionary in the tradition of the founders of our country in bringing back truth, justice, and the American way to our children and our children’s children.
Simon: That is rather good.
Leahy: No, it is great. It’s a lyrical salute to America.
Simon: Well, thank you. It took me a while to get there having had a left-wing path.
Leahy: (Laughs) But everybody has a left-wing path. You know, the famous quote from Churchill. “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart. And if you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you don’t have a brain.”
Simon: Right.
Leahy: Except the problem is a lot of people kind of get stuck in that liberal stance because as we’re talking about the schools.
The John Dewey approach to schooling is a propaganda approach, and we have a generation of children who have come through schools where they aren’t taught to think independently, but rather to kind of anticipate the answer the teacher is looking for.
Simon: That answer is so dull and socialistic. And it’s quite sad what’s happened, because of the self-replicating system. The people who become teachers have been taught that, too, for years and years and years. So what we need is you, John Q citizen, to get out there and run for school board.
Leahy: And yet, Roger, you know, just thinking about this independently right now, I will say for those in our listening audience who are saying, yeah, I’ll run for school board. Then they think about it a little bit. It is a daunting task, given the current structure.
Let’s think about Metro Nashville Public Schools. Right now there are nine members of the school board. Eight of them are lunatic, left-wing ideologues. And one friend, Fran Bush, actually has a brain and is an intelligent person and has common sense. But it’s very difficult. She’s been our guest here in-studio many a time.
And when you look at the kind of groupthink conformity, left-wing ideology promoted by the school board director and their focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then, headline at The Tennessee Star this morning: Metro Nashville Public Schools Director Calls for Board to Issue New Mask Mandate.
Simon: Here’s the irony in the whole thing. The United States spends more money on public education per capita than almost any country in the world. I believe Switzerland was once more. It varies, but we’re pretty close to the top and we’re getting terrible results. Think about that.
What a war on black people that is. Teaching equity and inclusion and all the rest of these buzzwords that are nothing but political power or fraud is an insult to the very people they’re trying to help.
They are the people who get screwed. Any Democrat out there should be ashamed of themselves. I used to be a Democrat, and I’m saying that. I mean, grow a brain.
Leahy: The problem is so they don’t think, they don’t analyze data, they just drop into almost a zealous religious approach.
Simon: Totally religious.
Leahy: It’s the religion of the left of totalitarianism, and it’s extraordinarily dangerous. We talked about this. The Judeo-Christian principles of Western civilization, that really is the building block of our American constitutional republic.
Simon: Of course it is. But sometimes they’re hard to follow. It’s easier to follow the leaders of the left who are going against that on every level. But you can save the country and yourselves by waking up to this. And I’m talking to liberals like I was. Some of them might be listening to this show.
Leahy: Our friend Karl, to whom I lost a bet because he bet that Joe Biden would be inaugurated. And I bet that it would be Trump. And I lost that bet. Took him out and had a steak dinner with him, bought it at Rafferty’s. Karl’s a great guy.
He got his start as a waiter at Rafferty’s and now has his own business, basically hauling junk and trash away from folks and very successful. But still, he’s got a certain worldview that’s different from ours. But he listens and we’re delighted he does.
Simon: Hello Karl. (Leahy laughs) We’ve never met.
Leahy: He is a nice guy.
Simon: But getting people to change their politics is very hard because most people have a whole network of reasons that they can’t change and that they won’t face or look at including work, including family, including friends. And it goes on and on.
And I’ve seen that all over the place. And I think most of us have. And right now we’re in a very bad place in our country because a lot of us are hating each other for reasons that have nothing to do with reality and have everything to do with being manipulated.
Leahy: But that’s an intentional effort at dividing the country, don’t you think?
Simon: Absolutely.
Leahy: This is what the Democratic leadership and I’ll go on, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Chinese Communist Party, to me, all seem to be aligned in promoting American division.
Simon: Oh, absolutely. And they’re doing a good job, unfortunately. So it’s up to us. And that’s why back to the school board. That’s one of the places that any reasonably educated person can get in there and try to stop it.
When you were talking about how skewed the Metro school board is here, eight to one, and so forth, don’t let that stop you. Go, as I mentioned earlier, get three or four or five friends to run with you.
Leahy: As a slate.
Simon: As a slate. Don’t do it by yourself. Then you’re just running into a wall and it’s silly. But everybody’s got a few friends who are like-minded and do it together. First of all, you’ll help each other.
Secondly, you get more money that way from supporters. And that’s what you can do. And if we do that all over the country, the country is going to change.
Leahy: That’s a very good point. I think it’s an organizational challenge to a degree. Because it does have some similarities, I think, to the Tea Party movement…
Simon: It does.
Leahy: Way back when in 2008, 2009. You and I were involved.
Simon: You more than I.
Leahy: But it was putting people together and focusing them on a common goal. So we’ll see how it all plays out. Very insightful, Roger
Listen to the full third 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 “Board Meeting” by KOMUnews (CC BY 2.0).
Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 discuss Joe Biden’s right to rule as a Marxist with hopes that Republicans will exert their power once the tables are turned in 2024.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Good morning, Michael. Yesterday afternoon, the legal but not legitimate current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden, gave what I thought was one of the most divisive and ignorant, dishonest speeches by a modern American president in some time. I don’t know if you saw it all. Did you see it?
Carmichael: I saw sound bites.
Leahy: He claimed that January 6 rioters are worse than slave-owning Confederates in the Civil War because they breached the U.S. Capitol.
He also said that basically everybody who supports Donald Trump is an awful person because they actually want to have election integrity laws that make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. It was extraordinarily divisive and mean.
Carmichael: Let me just ask, Michael. Of the sound bites I saw, not one of them surprised me. Are you actually surprised?
Leahy: Well, not that he believes this crime, but that it is his overt strategy to be so dishonest and divisive at a time when supposedly can’t we all get together.
Carmichael: But he’s always been like that.
Leahy: I agree. He has.
Carmichael: I think it’s instructive. And actually, I take a little bit different position than you do. I agree that it was reprehensible what he said, but the American people need to have a choice.
And Joe Biden, if you want the biggest, most oppressive, most regulatory, high-taxing government, perhaps since FDR – and let’s remember when FDR left office, the top marginal tax rate was 94 percent – and Biden wants to be what he considers to be greater than FDR.
I suppose in Biden’s perfect world, we’d be a Marxist state, that Washington, D.C. would control all the means of production. I have some friends who were anti-Trumpers, and they wouldn’t discuss the possibility of a Marxist Democrat party.
They wouldn’t discuss it because if they discussed it, they had to agree that Trump was better than that. And it’s a really interesting thing when you discuss things with people.
If they are uncomfortable talking about the alternative, then they’re not willing to think through the choices that we have.
And what Biden is doing both by what he says in this case – not all of the things, a lot of things he says are distractions – but his deeds calling for a whole-of-government approach.
Now, we’re going to talk a little bit later in the show.
In fact, we could talk about it right now. There was a guy that Trump appointed to be head of the Social Security system. That’s no big deal except that you’re appointed for a term.
Leahy: Right.
Carmichael: Biden has fired him.
Leahy: I didn’t know that. On what grounds?
Carmichael: Because he can. And I’m okay with that. Let me say why. When Trump was president, the media believed that he didn’t have the authority to fire people.
I hope that the next president, assuming that when Republicans take charge again and have control of the executive branch, it’s my hope that the next president takes Biden’s approach where he will use the whole of government, he or she, to rein in the government and to fire people who do not carry out in the executive branch.
Every employee in the executive branch is under the chief executive. There are people who disagree with that. There are people who say that the union contracts say that the President cannot fire somebody who’s a civil servant.
And my argument is I don’t think that’s been constitutionally tested if somebody will not carry out the policies of the administration and whether or not they can be fired.
Leahy: The whole point of having an election and having a president to head the executive department is the people are saying we support the policies of this president. And he should be able to fire people who don’t implement his policy.
Carmichael: Right.
Leahy: I agree with you on that principle.
Carmichael: And so what Biden is saying and making it clear to everybody, that he wants Washington to be the end-all and the be-all of government.
He doesn’t want people in Tennessee to have the right to live the way people and, under the laws, that the people of Tennessee want to live.
That’s what he is saying. I’m glad he is saying that because it shows there’s no obfuscation at all. My word of the day. Obfuscation.
There’s no obfuscation at all as to what the Democrat Party stands for. I have said over and over again, the Democrat Party is the party of government.
Leahy: Absolutely. And, in fact, Crom, if I could just add to that point, Mark Levin has a new book out called American Marxist.
Carmichael: I have ordered it. I don’t think it’s in print yet. Maybe it is.
Leahy: Here is what we ought to do, because we know Mark Levin and Mark Levin is a friend of ours. I’m going to invite them to come to Nashville.
And maybe the three of us could have, like, an evening that – with Mark Levin. An evening with Mark Levin, Crom Carmichael, and Michael Patrick Leahy.
And we’ll talk about American Marxism. Because let us be honest about the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is American Marxism.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: That is exactly what it is. And Mark Levin is totally on point.
Carmichael: Let me say this. You’ve heard the old expression. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and whatever else it is, it’s probably a duck. It’s a duck.
And so just because Democrats claim that they are not Marxists doesn’t mean that they’re not Marxists. If it walks like a Marxist, if it governs like a Marxist, if it talks like a Marxist, it’s a Marxist.
Leahy: Now, that’s very good, Crom. That’s very good.
Carmichael: Thank you. You’re having low standards today.
Leahy: No, no, no. I don’t think anybody’s quite taken that twist on it. But it’s good.
Carmichael: Well, thank you. What Biden is doing, the question is, is whether or not it is legal and whether or not the president has a right to place people in positions of power to carry out their policies and to remove people who resist their policies.
And I believe that the President of the United States has that authority. You also have Neil Gorsuch who talks about how we need to be very concerned about the bureaucratic state.
Well, under Biden, the bureaucratic state will control everything including elections, by the way.
Leahy: Oh, yeah. The national bureaucratic state.
Carmichael: Yes. He would like to control everything. And when you look at the industries that the FTC is now trying to regulate.
In fact, I would challenge somebody to name a large industry that Biden doesn’t want to regulate from Washington. I would challenge them to pick a single large industry.
Not a company, but a large industry that Biden does not want to regulate. And so we’re seeing what Biden wants and what the Democrats want.
Therefore, when Republicans retake power and if the Democrats are unsuccessful at changing the election process and making it so that there’s a permanent party.
Leahy: The permanent cheat. Because, that’s what the Democrats – that’s what they want to do. They want to codify cheating for Democrats.
Carmichael: So if they’re unable to do that…
Leahy: We hope they are unable to do that.
Carmichael: I said if they’re unable to do that, Republicans retake the House in 2022 and control the Senate and the presidency after the 2024 election, then it’s my great hope that the next president – be it Trump or some other Republicans – uses the power of the executive state to shrink government.
Another thing Biden has done is the Congress appropriated and Trump signed a bill that allocated two billion dollars to complete the wall. Biden chose not to spend that money.
Leahy: He’s violating the law.
Carmichael: No, he chose not to spend that money. If he were violating the law, he would be impeached, or there would be a lawsuit or something.
There would be criminal activity, which shows you that if Biden has the right as president to not spend money appropriated by Congress, then that means that a Republican president would have that same right.
And so I think it’s a fascinating thing to think about all the different things that Biden is doing. And then the next president can simply say: Biden did it. I didn’t think that what he did was right, but I think he had the right to do it. Therefore, I’m doing it my way.
Leahy: A very interesting point.
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 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 national security expert and Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute David Reaboi to the newsmakers line to discuss the origins of critical race theory and the hijacking of the American education system.
Leahy: We are joined by our friend Dave Reaboi, who is a very interesting Renaissance-type man. He’s a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a bodybuilder, a jazz enthusiast, and an original thinker. Dave, thanks so much for joining us today.
Reaboi: Great to be here. I appreciate that.
Leahy: So you live in Miami, Florida?
Reaboi: I do. In Miami Beach.
Leahy: Well, it’s a great place. I noticed that you had a tweet. (Chuckles) I just have to talk about this. You said I’ll take Ron DeSantis over former Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels any day. Tell us what you mean by that.
Reaboi: To be honest with you, I don’t have really much of anything against Mitch Daniels. I mean, true, it’s been a long time since he was relevant, but I think that’s the point. The point is that it’s a little weird for people to be fetishizing sort of long-departed Republican governors when you have someone like Ron DeSantis here.
Leahy: Yeah, I agree with that. DeSantis has been a leader in pushing back against the forced instruction of the destructive critical race theory. In fact, I think that under his influence, the Florida Board of Education has voted to ban its teaching down in Florida. Have you followed that issue, David? And what are your thoughts on it?
Reaboi: Yeah. I’ve been following this for many, many years, actually, decades, because this is not something new. Critical race theory is the racial component of critical theory, which comes out of the Frankfurt School in Germany in the early part of the century and then was sort of imported here before the Second World War.
And it sort of established itself around the New School in New York City. And these guys wouldn’t understand themselves. They were cultural Marxists. And they were trying to figure out a problem which is that, how do we apply the idea of class warfare to different subjects?
How do we make Marxism more palatable to more types of people? And one of the things that they came up with was a critical theory, which is using everything but economics in a kind of Marxist argument to tear apart a non-Communist society.
Leahy: I think that’s quite right. And you said something important. Crom Carmichael wants to ask you a question about this.
Carmichael: That’s a very interesting point that you’re making that they’re not trying to push Marxism on economic grounds because that’s already proven to fail. Now they’re pushing Marxism according to you, and that really makes sense, on a cultural ground to try to divide sexes against each other, races against each other, and in some cases, just the idea of truth against fiction.
For example, in all this stuff, now where you’re not allowed to use pronouns, gender-specific pronouns. They’re actually just trying to attack the truth in the name of their higher-order of Marxism. Would that be accurate?
Reaboi: Yeah. You could say that. You could say also in regards to the pronouns, I would say that they’re trying to pick fights. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to pick fights sort of everywhere and even on the smallest tiniest thing. (Inaudible talk)
Leahy: They’re picking fights, dividing us, and that’s their intentional strategy to dominate. Would you agree with that?
Reaboi: Yes. And so you have this critical theory on one hand and critical race theory which is an academic pursuit. A very niche academic pursuit. And what happens then is it kind of married the social media explosion.
So you had very fringe ideas that were only really known on college campuses and places like Berkeley or San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin. Places like that. And then social media-enabled these ideas to spread everywhere.
So that’s really what happened. Plus, you want to add the other ingredients, which is the fact that the millennial generation has a very specific set of characteristics. They are very judgmental and self-righteous, sort of as a group, as a group characteristic. And then what you get from all of that is sort of a horrible stew is Cultural Revolution two point zero?
Leahy: Let me follow up on that. That very insightful. I think many people perceive that as well. You’ve articulated very well at your website, Davidreaboi.com. I want to follow up with this.
In Florida, DeSantis has banned the teaching of critical race theory. There’s a law that was passed here in Tennessee that would ban the teaching of the tenants of critical race theory.
And yet, Dave, we see many teachers in the unions that are saying, I don’t care what the law is. I’m going to teach critical race theory. Come and get me. What do you make of that?
Reaboi: Well, long ago the American education establishment went Communist. For a long time, the most important figure in the world of education theory was Bill Ayers the former Weather Underground terrorist.
And today he’s in Chicago. And he is known across America and the world as one of the great figures in education. So it’s not a surprise. My personal opinion is that most of the time and, of course, there are exceptions, but teachers contribute massively to the problems in America. I wish there were 90 percent fewer teachers or more because we’d be better off.
Leahy: I think that’s a very good point and a point for further discussions next time you come on. Crom has a brief question for you.
Carmichael: In Florida, how effective is DeSantis in fighting critical race theory?
Reaboi: So, I mean, the laws are going to be, as you said, the teachers are crazy. The teachers are going to dissent and push this very hard. But the primary advantage of this critical race theory bill and all the things that DeSantis is doing on this issue is it’s lighting this up for parents. Parents are finally going, what are my kids learning? And they’re looking into this all around the country. And Florida on a grassroots level.
Carmichael: Can parents in Florida sue a teacher who is violating the law?
Reaboi: That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer to that.
Carmichael: That way if they could, that’ll stop it. (Chuckles)
Leahy: That would be one way to go. Hey, Dave Reaboi, on the web at Davereaboi.com. Thanks so much for joining us again.
Carmicheal: Great call. A great interview.
Reaboi: Thank you.
Leahy: Crom, now there’s an independent thinker. We like Dave.
Listen to the full third 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 “David Reaboi” by David Reaboi.
Live from Music Row Tuesday 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. – guest host Ben Cunningham contemplates the results of the Marxist ideology and the effect upon young generations who don’t understand the consequences in the pursuit of their natural need of purpose.
Cunningham: I’m with the Nashville Tea Party. You can find us at nashvilleteaparty.com. And at Facebook. We hope we are still on Facebook. They take us off from time to time when we do naughty things. They did throw us off LinkedIn completely. We’ve just got back on LinkedIn, so hopefully, we’ll stay in their good graces for a little bit.
Henry: Who did you have to pay to get back on that one?
Cunningham: Yeah, (Chuckles) we may have to at some point. Free speech may have a monetary price. Grant, Henry, in this morning, we are co-hosting and trying to fill the big shoes of Michael Patrick Leahy, who’s away on vacation. But my goodness, the threats to the American experiment and what we think of are all these foundational documents, foundational ideals are. I know we say this a lot. This time in this place, we have more threats to the American experiment than we’ve had in a long time.
Henry: It’s paradigm-shifting time.
Cunningham: It is.
Henry: It really is.
Cunnigham: We have this critical mass of people in academia who believe in some form of Marxism, and that’s what we were talking about earlier. And it’s just depressing and pathetic that this great country where people can come and be anything they want to be.
And you pull a ship up to any port across the world and say, we’re going to take you to America. You fill up that ship in 10 minutes. And it is a beacon of hope. And yet we’ve got this toxic, toxic Marxism and all its varieties.
Henry: My wife’s family rather fled communism from Armenia.
Cunningham: Oh, really?
Henry: So they will tell you endless stories about not just what it’s like to flee. That not just what it’s like to live under that, but the selective history that we choose to remember here in America. It baffles them and blows their mind that we just can’t remember anything past about 40 or 15 years ago.
Cunningham: And in so many ways they don’t teach that in the schools. And that’s what’s depressing. And then we have this Critical Race Theory coming along now is in fact just very thinly veiled Marxism trying to divide us up into virtuous victims and evil oppressors.
Deroy Murdock, one of the great Black conservatives wrote a great article in The Daily Signal. And I just want to quote this because it just encapsulates it so beautifully. Critical Race Theory may be the Democrat left’s filthiest ugliest big lie.
It defines America as inherently and irredeemably bigoted denounces all whites as racial oppressors and diminishes all Blacks as racially oppressed victims. Lies, lies, lies. The third lie is the worst.
Black Lives Matter, the diversity, police, and other systemic racism mongers relentlessly claim that white privilege and white supremacy blockade Black success. Blacks think, yes, we can.
The Democrat left replies, no, you can’t. And that really is the essence of Critical Race Theory again dividing us up instead of what Marx said, the proletariat and the bourgeois. This divides up by race and says, if you’re white you’re an evil oppressor.
And if you’re Black, you are a victim. And it just is absolutely antithetical to everything, and it will ruin this country if we allow it to. And you were talking earlier about all of these utopian visions couched in good intentions and that so many young people love that they love being identified, and it gives their lives some meaningful purpose.
Henry: Purpose.
Cunningham: Marxism is an awful way of governing, but it’s a hell of a way of selling an ideology. I mean, Marx, he personally was just a wreck of a human being. He didn’t even attend his own wife’s funeral.
And he was just an awful person. He basically was a kept person. He had other people that supplied his income. Probably the reason he came up with this idea that the state can provide for you.
And it’s just awful every time it’s been tried. And one of the great quotes, I just wanted to get this in real quick. One of the great quotes that always impresses me is from Pol Pot. Pol Pot was one of the Marxist dictators in Cambodia. One of the many Marxist dictators.
He actually traveled. Not us dung he thought owned the moon. And he traveled to China before he came into power with the Khmer Rouge. And they were just in power for four years and killed 2 million people.
A quarter of the population of Cambodia destroyed them. And some journalists found him out in his jungle hideaway after he had been run out of town, basically. And they asked him, they said, your government has killed a bunch of people.
What do you have to say to this? Pol Pot still said this. He said he was asked by journalists to comment on reports of mass killings during his period of power. Pol Pot replied, “Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people.”
Henry: Wow.
Cunningham: His motivation in terms of his good intentions after he killed 2 million people. And it’s just mind-boggling. And it is so instructive with all this utopian thinking by these young folks.
They never think about what the results are. They think about the moment and identifying with something that’s noble and worthy. It is one of the most treacherous and murderous ideologies ever to come along.
Henry: The ideology to itself become so pervasive as you’re seeing now, whether it be through Critical Race Theory infecting all the way through primary education, or whether it be something at the university level or even with our careers right now.
I think if you’re still asking yourself, what is the allure? How are so many people drawn to this? Look at what Victor Frankel said. So we’re talking about motivating human beings. Adler said You motivate a human being through their desire for power. Maybe.
Jung said you motivate a human being through their desire for pleasure. Well, that’s just Hedonism. And we’ve tried that before. Victor Frankel was a philosopher who was a member as a Jewish individual in the Holocaust.
He didn’t have an opportunity to do either power or pleasure, clearly. So he distilled his worldview down to you really motivate a human being through their desire for purpose.
That’s why they feel like they have a purpose in this fight. But I’m telling you one more time then and right now, I truly believe conservatism has that real motivating purpose behind it. That’s what we need to get back to.
Cunningham: Absolutely. And we need to be unapologetic and courageous in stating it.
Listen to the full third 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.
