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 further illustrated why school choice is more important as critical race theory dominates government run school curriculum.
Leahy: In studio the original star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, during the break, we were talking a little bit about this new book from Os Guinness, the great writer, great Christian political philosopher. He’s the guy who came up with the concept that our country is based on the Golden Triangle of Freedom.
And that Golden Triangle is the following: Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom. And it’s an ongoing circle. That was the character of America when we were founded. The problem is that character is being assaulted in our schools every day. And particularly through critical race theory.
Carmichael: And being assaulted by the government every day in states across the country and cities across the country where they’re trying to make it almost impossible for somebody to go to church or so uncomfortable to go to church, that people don’t go to church. And I think that they are doing that. That’s intentional.
Leahy: Os Guinness has a new book out called The Magna Carta of Humanity. We’re trying to get them as a guest. I think we’ll get him as a guest in the future. And I’m going to try to get them on a day that you’re here Crom because I think you enjoy talking with him.
Carmichael: Sure. There are two or three articles that are all about education and as I was driving in I was listening to your interview of Gabrielle Clark.
Leahy: Right. The biracial mom whose child refused to comply with an assignment in which he was compelled to admit that he was an oppressor as a mostly white person.
Carmichael: Here’s what was interesting about listening to that interview. She says that we have to stand up and fight. It cost her $200,000.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: If you go to a restaurant where your service is bad, you don’t need to go hire a lawyer. What do you do?
Leahy: You don’t leave a tip.
Carmichael: And you don’t go there anymore.
Leahy: You do a Yelp review.
Carmichael: And you don’t go there anymore. But the reason that she has to stand up and fight is she’s being forced. Her child is being forced to go to a particular school and to have a particular curriculum with which she disagrees. And this is what’s fundamentally wrong with our educational system.
We don’t have a choice. And if you had school choice and then the kids who attend the charter schools here in Nashville on balance do much better than the kids who go to what I’m going to call the regular government-run schools.
Our magnet schools may be pretty good, but our magnet schools operate actually more even like private schools because the charter schools can’t be selective and of who gets to go there. The magnet schools get to be selective on who gets to go there, and they get to be really selective on who gets to stay there. But in California.
Leahy: Uh oh. I know this is going to be a crazy story already. I don’t know what the story is.
Carmichael: It’s a sad story. California had gone for a number of years where they had worked seriously at improving the math skills of students who attended the government-run schools in California. At one time, I’m quoting from the article here in The Wall Street Journal.
‘At one time, California took the goal seriously and made immense progress. California Department of Education data shows that while only 16 percent of students took algebra by the eighth grade in 1999 by 2013, it was 67 percent. Almost four times as many.
Leahy: That’s surprising that they made progress from 1999-2013. That’s interesting.
Carmichael: But then that’s when things started to unravel across the state. And so they also had gifted classes, kind of like AP classes. And now they want to do away with all those because they’re claiming they’re racist.
And you have the schools for the gifted which they are strongly considering doing away with completely. And then changing the math curriculum so that it is almost impossible to fail (Leahy laughs) because they’re actually claiming that math is not something that needs to necessarily be specific.
Leahy: Try building a car with a non-specific specialization.
Carmichael: What’s Caltech going to do if kids coming out of high school are not proficient. Even the top ones are not proficient.
People who have the money to attend private schools their children are going to have an opportunity that the children who are going to the government and schools don’t have. And this is along those same lines. It’s not academically, but it’s about a school board. This is in Monroe County, Indiana.
Leahy: Monroe County, Indiana?
Carmichael: The school board passed a resolution that says that the school resource officers cannot carry a gun.
Leahy: What are they supposed to do, just point their fingers?
Carmichael: That’s a great question because one person said there’s no evidence ever that a resource officer ever had to use their gun.
Leahy: If you have a gun you may not need to use it.
Carmichael: As it turns out, that statement itself is false. And so there are instances where the resource officer had to use his gun to disarm a student that was identified as having a gun. But if nobody in the school is going to have security, that flies in the face of logic, because every place else where security matters. If you want to go into the Nashville courthouse, don’t you have to pass through security? Aren’t the security people armed? Yes.
Carmichael: Please go ahead.
Leahy: Would you like to hear the rest of the story?
Carmichael: Please.
Leahy: Guess where Monroe County is.
Carmichael: Where?
Leahy: Bloomington. Home of the University of Indiana.
Carmichael: Wow.
Leahy: Explains it all.
Carmichael: Wow.
Leahy: These are all probably a bunch of college professors on the board.
Carmichael: Could could be.
Leahy: Good news. Our listeners have been listening for, like, two and a half hours to get the first bit of good news.
Carmichael: No, we’ve had some other good news that we’ve talked about. But this is good news. In the state of Florida, a teacher was fired for not honoring the ban on teaching critical race theory. This teacher just ignored the ban and kept teaching it and enforcing it. And bam!
Leahy: Gone.
Carmichael: Gone. Got fired.
Leahy: Governor DeSantis is not fooling around.
Carmichael: If the CEO of a company puts out an edit, that is a logical edict and lawful and some employee essentially gives the CEO the middle finger…
Leahy: Boom! They’re gone.
Carmichael: And nobody questions it.
Leahy: Now, let me tell you what the potential difference may be here in Tennessee. We have a state law that the bill that the General Assembly has passed that would prohibit, in essence, the teaching of critical race. There. 14 tenants. Sources tell me that Governor Lee will sign that bill.
We’ll find out. There’s some time to see on that. But if it becomes law, it has a certain provision in it. And that provision says that if a school district continues to teach critical race theory, the Commissioner of Education has the authority to withhold state funds from them.
Something is about to be set up because our lead story at The Tennessee Star is Memphis City Council adopts a resolution opposing state band on critical race theory. So Memphis and Shelby County schools, I can tell you right now if the governor signs this bill, they will defy it.
Carmichael: Let me ask you a question. You said two things there. You said Memphis and Shelby County.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: Will they both, or will it be just the Memphis schools?
Leahy: This is from the City Council.
Carmichael: Memphis is in Shelby County.
Leahy: But it’s separate.
Carmichael: But there’s a lot of Shelby County that’s not Memphis.
Leahy: There’s a similar resolution before Shelby County. And sources tell me that it’s likely to pass. Memphis in Shelby County, I think, will be on the Shelby County and school directors already said I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna stop teaching critical.
Carmichael: Then the Commissioner can do what?
Leahy: Under the bill, the Commissioner will have the authority to do withhold state funds from Shelby County schools.
Carmichael: And that’s it. They can’t fire them?
Leahy: They can’t fire, but they can withhold state funds, which, in essence, would cripple the schools. Asterisk, many people are worried about Penny Schwinn. Many people are worried that she will not enforce that rule and that the Shelby County schools are going to say we’re going to teach it anywhere anyway. We’ll see how that turns out.
Carmichael: If they stick their finger in her eye we’ll see if she blinks. (Laughs)
Leahy: Yeah, I think she’ll blink. But we’ll see. Maybe give her the benefit of the doubt until it happens.
Carmichael: Absolutely we should do that.
Leahy: You are much nicer than I am.
Listen to the full show 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.
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 Metro Nashville’s City Council Member-at-Large Steve Glover to discuss Nashville’s budget timing and pointed out a recent Wall Street Journal article signaling Nashville’s fiscal trouble.
Leahy: In studio with us, Metro Council member at large, Steve Glover. But Scooter has a weather update for us. Lots going on out there. Scooter, Speaking of troubled weather and storms, there’s a fiscal storm going on in Nashville. It has for some time. We’re talking about that here with Steve Glover, Metro Council member at large, The Wall Street Journal pointed it out in a devastating article that is entirely counter to the way that Mayor Cooper presented the State of Metro on Thursday.
Glover: The sad part is, is the way that the State of Metro was presented. Then Friday, the joke of the way the budget was presented.
Leahy: Let’s stop and talk about it. Let’s be clear about how this works so our audience can understand. On Thursday, it was a press conference. Yackety yack.
Glover: Thursday was the State of Metro right at that point. And I’ve not known this to be the case that once the Mayor hands the budget over it’s the council’s budget.
Leahy: Got it.
Glover: And I didn’t see it handled that way number one.
Leahy: Part of the State of Metro is to present the budget. Correct?
Glover: Well, you don’t know. Not necessarily. Normally, once the State of Metro is completed, then they come in with the budget. But they waited a day and just said there wasn’t enough space. That’s malarky. Malarky. They could have adjourned upstairs, come down to the Davidson Ballroom, or whatever where desks were already set up for the Metro Council.
And they could have done a budget and a Council meeting and gone ahead and done it. They just chose not to. It’s just another way the legislative body just keeps giving up more and more power to the executive branch. And The Wall Street Journal article that you first started talking about in this segment is exactly right. And this is why we’re in the predicament we are in right now because the executive branch does whatever the heck it wants to. And the legislative branch says okay.
Leahy: Where’s my rubber stamp?
Glover: Doh dee-doh dee-doh… And they can get mad at me all they want to. I don’t care, because, you know, the thing that drives me the craziest is we are elected by the people who represent the people, and they have abdicated that to one office downstairs in the executive branch. The legislative branch, our forefathers had a great reason for the way they set up our Constitution and the way our government is supposed to work in America.
The Wall Street Journal article talking about Nashville being one of the five worst cities fiscally it should have been, and I think the article pointed it out, we should have been literally at the crest of being the best because we had every opportunity in the world.
Leahy: Nashville has everything going for it except for a very bad, reckless Metro government.
Glover: Yep. And as I said on Tucker Carlson about six months ago, whatever it was, it’s a lack of leadership. That’s our problem in Nashville. A lack of leadership. And whenever you have that kind of void, this is what happens. Oh, well, just like you’re talking about the American whatever, blah, blah, blah. They give them all these names and whatever.
They’re going to throw all kinds of money at things. And they’re not going to fix anything. And that’s been our problem. We keep throwing money, throwing money, throwing money. And we’ll talk about some of this as we go forward here on where I think we’re throwing money in all the wrong places.
Leahy: Wasting money.
Glover: In my opinion, it’s beyond wasting. And we’re not really focusing on where we need to be spending the money. The Wall Street Journal was exactly right. They come out last week and they said, oh, no, we fixed it. Everything’s golden. No, it’s not. Don’t think it is. And I’m not saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling. I’m saying that it’s raining pretty hard outside and you better get a frigging umbrella.
Leahy: And it’s mostly it’s largely these unfunded health care liabilities for retirees.
Glover: Well, the op-ed. So what they’ll talk about on that is that they fixed that and they’ve removed one point one billion dollars off of the financial sheets because they’re going to shift everything to this Medicare advantage thing. So we’re going to move it from the local government to the federal government. Yeah, that will fix it.
Leahy: That’s a joke.
Glover: So way to go, Metro. Oh, my gosh. You guys are just tremendous.
Leahy: This is very much how Liberal Democrats pretend two ‘solve problems.’ They just move the accounting for it from one side to another side or try to.
Glover: Let’s make sure we give credit do where it’s supposed to all be given. Don’t forget now and I think it was last hour or whatever you were talking about the George W. Bush thing.
Leahy: Oh, yeah.
Glover: He’s the one who did the Medicare Part D. And Clinton gave us Medicare Part C, which is Medicare Advantage. And then George W. gave us Medicare Part D, which is prescription drugs and has been a fiasco ever since. And so what we’re doing in Metro, apparently and I haven’t read the whole thing so it’s hard for me to tell you exactly what it looks like right now.
If you’re 65 plus, you have to go on Medicare Advantage. That means now you will have to take Medicare Part B, which is 136 or 140 or whatever it is a month that you’ll be required to pay. And so what my question is, well, okay, if you’re doing that and how much are you still going to have to pay off the insurance? I know people grind the axe on the Council members, but you got to talk about the retirees. We’re talking about folks who gave years about years upon years upon years of service.
Leahy: And there’s unfunded healthcare liability for those retirees.
Glover: Yes. And there is across the entire country. It’s not anything unique only to Metro.
Leahy: It’s just worse here apparently.
Glover: It is.
Leahy: Like, by a lot.
Glover: Well, it’s because we like to buy new, shiny toys every Christmas, as opposed to buying one toy every Christmas and making sure the toys we bought in the previous Christmases are kept operational, functional, and serving the purpose.
Leahy: This budget document you’re talking about that was not presented along with the State of Metro address, but was delivered separately.
Glover: Friday. It always is. That’s the way the bill is always filed on Friday.
Leahy: So it was delivered on Friday. And this is for what budget period?
Glover: Well, it will be for the FY ’22.
Leahy: And when does that begin?
Glover: July one.
Leahy: July one of this coming year?
Glover: Yes. July 21 of 2021.
Leahy: Until June 30th of 2022.
Glover: Correct.
Leahy: Now, how many pages is this budget?
Glover: I don’t know the number on the orders.
Leahy: A lot?
Glover: You got to look at the budget book. The ordinance only spells out the legalities.
Leahy: The budget then.
Glover: The budget book typically is about 1,000 pages.
Leahy: Are you going to read every page of that?
Glover: Pretty much.
Leahy: You’re kidding me?
Glover: No.
Leahy: That’s a lot of work.
Glover: I always do that. That’s what I do.
Leahy: You always do it. How many Metro Council members read the 1,000-page budget book?
Glover: I don’t know. I mean, you could ask each one of them. They could tell you whatever.
Leahy: So after the Mayor submits the budget, it goes to a committee in Metro?
Glover: It goes to the whole Council. The Budget and Finance Committee, which I’m a member of, we will take it, and we pretty much so do what’s going to be the hearings. But what I found most interesting is this year our chair, and look, she’s a nice person. Nothing personal here. It’s just the fact that only going to be one substitute. You can do amendments, blah, blah. Once again, we’re abdicating our responsibilities.
Leahy: So let me ask you this. The Budget and Finance Committee of Metro is very important. And you’re a Metro Council Member-At-Large.
Glover: Correct. I represent the whole city.
Leahy: But you’re not the chair of the committee.
Glover: No, I’ll never be the chair. If I was the chair, we’d start fixing things.
Leahy: You’re not the chair of the committee because…
Glover: I’m a Republican.
Leahy: Who picks the chair, the vice Mayor, the Vice Mayor. And how many people are on the committee?
Glover: I think there’s 13, 14, 15 of us.
Leahy: Wow, that’s a big committee.
Glover: That’s a huge committee.
Leahy: I think you’re having a meeting today?
Glover: Yes. At four o’clock. Four or four-thirty. Something like that.
Leahy: Tell us what is going to happen in that meeting.
Glover: Well, you’ll go through this week’s agenda and that’s what we’ll talk about. But we’re going to be convening this coming Thursday to talk about the budget. So here we are one week later, and we’re gonna start talking about the budget. We won’t be talking about it today or tomorrow. We’re going to wait until Thursday because no need to talk about something that’s kind of spinning out of control.
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 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 Metro Nashville’s City Council Member-at-Large Steve Glover to weigh in on Mayor John Cooper’s State of the Metro Address and recent Wall Street Journal article which highlighted the fiscal issues facing the city of Nashville.
Leahy: We are joined in studio with Metro Council member Steve Glover. Good morning, Steve.
Glover: Good morning, sir. How are you?
Leahy: Before we get to the two hours of Steve Glover’s view of the world, (Glover laughs) which I can’t wait to hear, we’re going to be joined. We want to get a weather update from Scooter. What’s going on weatherwise Scooter?
Scooter: We’re watching these storms right now that it’s kind of a light show in the borough at this moment. No warnings with any of this. This was the earlier cell that did prompt a tornado warning for Maury and Marshall County, but that is no longer in effect. And that is good news. But there is still a little kind of broad circulation with the storm.
So the winds are going to pick up, but there are no warnings with it. It’s a little bit like I said of a light show. And the back edge of this, at least for now, about to enter the Western half of Davidson County. It’s going to be a wet ride for this hour. But maybe as we get into the seven o’clock hour, we get a little break in the rain. The heavier rain as you get into Nashville from the West. But don’t worry, there are more storms on the way.
Leahy: All right Scooter, thanks for that weather update. Now, two things I want to get your reaction to Steve Glover, Metro Council member-at-large.
Glover: I’m getting larger over the last 12 months. Gained a little weight here buddy. (Laughter)
Leahy: Aren’t we all? So two things. Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a detailed article on the five most fiscally irresponsible cities in America. Nashville was in that list number one. Number two, Mayor John Cooper delivered a State of Metro address last week. Give me your reaction to both of those.
Glover: Let’s go backward. Let’s do the State of Metro first and then back into The Wall Street Journal. So the State of Metro, according to what the Mayor said, he’s done a phenomenal job. If you don’t believe me, just ask him. He has told us he has gotten us back to stability, et cetera. What I will tell you is the people of Nashville, and the 34 to 37 percent property tax increase is what got us back to stability because this Mayor is not doing anything to cut expenses.
In fact, he’s adding and adding. Now there’s a couple of areas I agree with wholeheartedly he’s adding 40 firefighters, 20 EMTs, and he’s adding 40 police officers. I get kind of deep in the weeds sometimes.
Leahy: He’s adding 40 firefighters.
Glover: 20 EMTs. And 40 police officers. What he said about Southeast Nashville is we’re gonna be opening up this new precinct. So he’s gonna put in 40 new police officers over there to take care of that take 66 minimum to run a new precinct. So we’re still going to be behind in Nashville. This is what they do all the time.
They get on there because they have the microphone so often and they brag about how great they are. And by the way, when they did the video presentation of the budget on Friday versus sitting down with the Council live. I’ve never seen this before. Last year, under the COVID thing, they had that cover.
That cover is gone. That cover is now gone. And so why we didn’t do it in person I don’t know. But we’re gonna do it this coming Thursday. We’re gonna start getting really serious about it. And then they’ll want us to pass this thing.
Leahy: Immediately. Without looking at it.
Glover: Yes. So The Wall Street Journal, let’s go back to that one. The things I said are the right things. As far as I’m concerned, public safety should be that education should be your number one thing. And we’re going to talk about teachers. We’re going to top up the pay increases and all that other stuff. The other things Mayor did there was added, added, added just put on more layers of expense. And for them to say that we have fewer employees than we did. Well, that’s true.
But it’s not the whole truth. And they didn’t Paul Harvey on it. Because now we’re going to talk about the rest of the story today as we’re here. The Wall Street Journal article is exactly right. If you go back and you start looking at 11,12, I kind of warned us, but ’12, ’13, ’13, ’14, ’15. And right on down.
Leahy: We’re talking about budget years.
Glover: I started warning us many years ago, almost a decade ago, if not a decade ago, that if we did not stop spending and this massive, massive capital outlay and continuing to grow our debt level, then we were gonna be in big trouble.
Leahy: We’re in big trouble now.
Glover: I did something really crazy. I looked at the numbers.
Leahy: Yeah, well, you can’t do that. You can’t do that.
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 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.
During the second hour, Carmichael analyzed the Sedition Act of 1798 from a historical perspective and compared it to today’s mainstream media attempts to compare situations between Trump supporters and those on the left that are not of equal value.
Leahy: We are joined as we almost always are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 a.m by the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning, sir.
Leahy: Did you have any trouble driving in?
Carmichael: Not today.
Leahy: Not today. Yeah, so not coming in from Nashville to the studio? Not a lot of snow on the ground?
Carmichael: Not from Green Hills.
Leahy: Green Hills. Well, when I came in earlier today there was some coming up from Spring Hill. Crom, you are a student of history. And one of the reasons we study history is so we try not to repeat the mistakes of the past over the weekend. I was doing a little research on a mistake of the past that it’s rearing its ugly head again. I speak of the Sedition Act of 1798 and I’ll read here from the history of the House of Representatives.
In one of the first tests of freedom of speech, the House passed the Sedition Act in 1798 permitting the deportation, fine, or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or publishing ‘false scandalous or malicious writings against the government of the United States.’ This was an era when the newspapers of the day were highly partisan and John Adams was President. He was part of the now-defunct Federalist Party.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were developing what was then called the Democrat-Republican Party. Which is the Democrat Party of today. So they passed this law that says you can’t criticize the president. And it was very unpopular. And ultimately that particular law had a life span that ended and when Thomas Jefferson was elected president in the 1800s when the Democratic-Republican Congress let that law expire. But here we are, gosh 220 years later and that issue seems to be coming up again.
Carmichael: Well, here’s the part that is kind of interesting about that. What I’d like to find out, Michael, is when the “Republican” of the “Democrat-Republican Party,” when that was dropped. I want to know when it became exclusively the Democrat Party and not the Democrat-Republican party. Because Abraham Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party.
Leahy: We call that today the Republican Party.
Carmichael: Because at some point between 1800 and Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency, the party of Jefferson dropped the word Republican. They had to have otherwise Lincoln couldn’t have been the founder of the Republican Party. But what is going on now I guess because I wasn’t alive then is very similar. But the Federalist Party at that time is from the Republican Party.
It says from the noted historian Gordon Wood who says the Federalist Party never thought that they were a party. They thought they were the government. And so any opposition to the government was then naturally considered to be seditious. And so that to me is the tie-in today. But here’s what’s going on now in the country.
You have you had that law of 1798 which didn’t last long and the public hated it. But now you’re seeing for example you’re seeing the left, and this isn’t just the politicians but it does include the politicians. Margaret Sullivan a Washington Post media columnist wrote this week, ‘corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away declaring that the outlet’s role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and its disastrous attack on January sixth has been deadly.’
And so therefore the competition of Fox News is literally trying to cancel Fox News calling on the advertisers to stop advertising. But they go further. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calls on cable providers to drop Fox News from their cable channels. First of all, I would imagine that there are contractual relationships between Fox News and the cable companies.
Leahy: Right. Which they come up periodically for renewal.
Carmichael: Yes, but I would imagine that dropping them might create some problems. But I don’t want to go there. I mean that would be like a professional sports team saying that the first-team all-pro quarterback for the other team can’t play in a particular game.
Leahy: Because he’s a bad person.
Carmichael: For whatever reason, they just disagree with him and think his play-calling is just inappropriate for the game. And then a former Facebook executive. So these aren’t small people. These aren’t no-name people. A former Facebook executive was more straightforward on CNN. We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences. And so what they want to do is make it impossible for the opposition to essentially turn the United States government into a version of the Communist Party of China.
Leahy: Exactly. And by the way, the keyword there and these guys on the left Crom they use language very specifically. And there are themes that come back. The operative word in that quote was ‘reach.’ We had a guest on here Dan Gainor from the Media Research Center at 5:30 am and he said the word of the day coming down from all the folks on the left is this. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
Carmichael: Okay, interesting.
Leahy: That’s why that guy said you’re going to hear this word, reach. Reach. You are going to hear it repeatedly.
Carmichael: And here’s the thing about The Wall Street Journal that and some of these other outlets just absolutely frosts me.
Leahy: Hold it. Hold it. The Wall Street Journal frosts you?
Carmichael: Their editorial page is mostly good. Their news section is mostly bad when it comes to their political section.
Leahy: I agree with that. I stand corrected. That’s exactly right.
Carmichael: Yeah, their business section is straight business. Economics is unless they get into a political area then they’re not very good on their political area. But this is in the opinion section. Here’s the last paragraph. The problems of polarization lies and political violence are real on both sides. Now, that’s where The Wall Street Journal loses me.
Because I’d like to have examples where it is where the so-called right did something that was exclusive to the right and they have the evidence that that’s all it was because I don’t believe it. Do I believe that there were some Trump supporters that there were in the Capitol? Yes. Do I believe that there were some Antifa and Black Lives Matter instigators who helped fan the fires? Absolutely yes. But to compare that one instance and even to make that a huge incident compared to all of the other things that happened this summer and say that they are equally bad, that’s where we get into trouble.
Leahy: Let me just add, I don’t disagree with you at all however, Crom what you’ve just described as being not an honest description of the comparing the two sides is not what we’re seeing at all.
Carmichael: I know that. I’m saying that here. The Wall Street Journal has a whole article that is attacking the left for trying to literally shut down the ability of frankly, of your show to reach its audience. The whole article is about that. And it’s not just one person. It’s across their whole spectrum. And then in the very last paragraph, it provides equal responsibility, which essentially gives credence to the entire argument.
Leahy: A very fine point. And I agree with it completely.
Carmichael: Now this is in The Wall Street Journal‘s political section. They ran a very long article almost seven printed pages. When you do the printing that’s a long article, most are two, but a short article where they are identifying the people who funded Trump’s rally. Trump’s rally. And they’re trying to tie the rally itself into breaking into the Capitol. And I want to talk a little bit more about that.
Leahy: That is a very good point.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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