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 who analyzed White supremacy in relation to the current media narratives and federal officials wielding of power.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original All-Star panelist, Crom Carmichael. And as you know, it’s Wednesday. So, of course, it’s time for Crom to be in studio. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Morning, Michael.
Leahy: Well, so much to talk about. So little time.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: We’re talking a little bit about journalism in America. Where does it stand?
Carmichael: Well, I want to connect two dots. One is journalism in America. We talked about it Monday. And then on Monday, when I got home, I was reading The Wall Street Journal.
And there’s an article by Gerard Baker, and he essentially said exactly the same thing we were saying. And I’m going to quote a couple of things from the article. It says these days, proliferating lapses and journalism judgment and standards are not simply forgiven by the editorial establishment.
They are rewarded as long as they are the right kind of error by the right kind of person. He says even Jeffrey Toobin is in fact, the indispensable legal mind CNN evidently believes he is, his reinstatement last week must surely fill some of his colleagues with misgivings. I don’t believe that a single person at CNN has any misgivings about Jeffrey Toobin coming back.
Leahy: Because he’s in the club that’s vastly overpaid.
Carmichael: He’s in the club and they don’t care.
Leahy: As long as they have they get paid and they get their agenda out.
Carmichael: They have a narrative. And I would imagine that there are other people at CNN who are equally as disgusting as Jeffrey Toobin. But then it says, but his restoration to a more salubrious on camera roll is a helpful reminder of the rules that now govern the news.
The medium is no longer the message. The new reality is that the mission is the message. As long as your work furthers the mission, no failure in behavior, no error in reporting or editing, no corruption of the truth or evidence will go unrewarded.
All data and facts, all judgment about stories and people who produce them are subordinate to the mission. Now, I want to take all of this and tie it into this new thing of White supremacy. What is White supremacy?
How would one define White supremacy? Is it White people, primarily males, who are trying to use the government to have control over other people, especially minorities? Would that be the definition of White supremacy?
Leahy: Crom, yeah, it would seem to me that would be a good definition of White supremacy.
Carmichael: Then Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are right up there. (Leahy chuckles) They are right up there.
Leahy: I could see that one coming a mile away.
Carmichael: Oh, my gosh. I don’t know if you’ve seen what Merrick Garland is now trying to do in Arizona. You have an investigation in Arizona by officials in Arizona. Legal officials.
Leahy: Authorized by a state judge.
Carmichael: Yes. And Merrick Garland is trying to say that what they are doing is wrong. Now, let me say this. That’s a White supremacist if I’ve ever heard one. Because here’s another thing.
This shows you why Mitch McConnell and the Republicans were so wise and not even holding hearings for this political hack. He apparently was a circuit court judge. The Washington circuit.
He should understand the Constitution. He should know that states have the authority over elections, not the federal government. He should know that. But he doesn’t, apparently, or even worse, he knows it and is ignoring it.
Leahy: Let me just step back for listeners just to remind them when Crom was talking about Mitch McConnell refusing to hold hearings for him, it wasn’t a hearing for his confirmation as attorney general. He was nominated for the Supreme Court after the death of Anton Scalia.
Carmichael: Yes. Thank you for that. We are talking now two years ago.
Leahy: 2016. And rightfully, Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told President Obama it’s an election year. You nominate somebody, we’re not going to hold hearings.
Carmichael: Right. And that’s exactly what Joe Biden had publicly announced in 1992. And that was even when a sitting President was running for reelection. In the case of 2016, you didn’t have a sitting President running for re-election.
But I really want to dig into this question of what is a White supremacist. Might a White supremacist be the head of the FBI who inserts, as we learned from Tucker Carlson last night.
Over a dozen FBI operatives into the organizations that were coming to Washington to listen to Donald Trump talk about the elections and whether or not there was cheating in the elections.
And now we’ve learned that the FBI from Tucker Carlson that the FBI, some of these people who insert themselves actually agitate and actually come up with ideas of insurrection, encouraged the insurrection and participated in it.
Leahy: There’s a word legal word for that. I think it’s called entrapment.
Carmichael: Yeah, I think so. I think so. And so now you have people who are sitting in jail in solitary confinement in Washington, D.C. who won’t be tried and whose lawyers are not being given access to the evidence.
Now, think about this for a second. Is Christopher Wray White? Yes. Is he trying to use the power of government to crush other people, some of whom are minorities, some of whom are women? One of the Capitol Hill agents shot and murdered.
Leahy: Murdered Ashli Babbitt.
Carmichael: Who was unarmed. A 14-year veteran and we can’t even find out who that person is. That person is not even going to be tried. Apparently, there was not even a Grand jury.
Leahy: How does that happen?
Carmichael: It when you have White supremacists who have power. And that’s what we’re looking at here. Whether or not they’ll be able to use that power to leverage taking over the government, I think, is in great question because I don’t think they can.
But I think they were trying to. We have Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to thank. I think there are other Democrats in the Senate, but they wouldn’t stand up. Those two did. They stood up and said, enough, we’re not going to do away with the filibuster.
We’re not going to do away with our Democratic system. We’re not going to do away with our Constitution. And so because of that, Biden’s whole agenda has stalled. I don’t watch CNN.
And so I wonder whether or not they applauded Joe Biden for being able to walk up and down the steps of Air Force One without falling. Because for CNN, that’s about all he has to do to have a successful trip abroad.
Leahy: There’s something I wanted to point out first about the Australian media. The Australian media has observed the fawning of the American establishment media over Joe Biden in these G7 meetings in Europe. And they are just utterly disgusted by it. They’ve reported on that.
Carmichael: Yeah. You’ve heard the old baseball story about Shoeless Joe. I’m going to say, Clueless Joe. That’s a new name for me. I listened to some of his answers to very easy questions.
And one of the questions because Biden, showing how tough he was during the election, said that Putin was a killer. So a reporter asked him during the election campaign, you called Vladimir Putin, ‘a killer.’ Do you still stand by that? Do you still call him a killer? (Imitates Biden)
Leahy: I think your imitation of Joe Biden presents him more articulately than he really was.
Carmichael: (Imitates Biden) (Laughter) C’mon man. That was yesterday. What’s tomorrow? Who is tomorrow? It’s embarrassing on one hand. I just have a suspicion that the midterms and I have great faith in the American people, in crowds, the wisdom of crowds.
And I think that the people are looking at what’s going on now and looking at Biden. And by the way, he’s giving everything to China that China wants. Everything. So the fix is in there. In fact, domestically, I can’t think of anything that China would want Joe Biden to do domestically that Joe Biden isn’t doing.
Leahy: Open borders.
Carmichael: Open borders, trying to trash our Democratic process, trying to divide the country,
Leahy: Trashing Americans who supported Donald Trump while on European soil. By the way, Politico, talk about the media. Here is their headline two days ago about Joe Biden in Europe.
Biden Flourishing in Foreign Policy. I gotta look at the dictionary. It’s sort of like the Democratic definition of infrastructure. What is the Democratic definition of flourishing?
Carmichael: The answer is walking up and down the steps here Air Force One without tripping. (Leahy laughs) That must be it.
Leahy: That is very good Crom.
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 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. – guest host Ben Cunningham welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who weighed in on Joe Biden’s claim that white supremacy is America’s greatest threat and a myriad of Democrat Party power plays.
Cunningham: And joining us in the studio this morning, Grant Henry with Americans for Prosperity. Grant, thank you again this morning for driving up from beautiful Spring Hill, where you kind of have a new battery plant down there? General Motors?
Henry: All kinds of things going on through there in the Columbia area. It’s the up-and-coming site in Galeton.
Cunningham: I drive every day. We’re talking about Facebook. I drive by the construction entrance to the billion-dollar Facebook data Center in Gallatin when I’m going to take my walks.
Christina Botteri, the Chief Technology Officer of Star Media in from California, to join us in the studio. Christina, thanks so much for coming in this morning so early. I appreciate it. And the original All-Star panelist, Mr. Crom Carmichael. And Crom, we have got the question of the day for you. Are you ready for the question of the day?
Carmichael: Okay.
Cunningham: Is white supremacy the major threat to the United States of America, above China, Russia, Al Qaeda, you name it. White supremacy is the greatest threat, our President just told us. Is that true Crom? (Laughs) Think about it.
Carmichael: Well, I’m having a hard time identifying the name of a white supremacy group that is burning down buildings and mostly peacefully protesting.
Cunningham: Yeah.
Carmichael: I’m having a hard time finding that.
Cunningham: Peacefully jumping on top of police cars.
Botteri: I think you’re talking about Antifa, right? (Chuckles)
Carmichael: That would be Antifa. And they are not a white supremacy group. Neither is Black Lives Matter. And that is another protesting group that’s mostly peaceful. The only thing that I can say is they generally need to have lots of fires going on around them.
Cunnigham: To warm them?
Carmichael: So they can see. They don’t want to be blinded by darkness.
Cunnigham: The illumination.
Carmichael: They illuminate the landscape by setting things on fire.
Cunningham: But really, seriously, how depressing is that our President of the United States just elected, recently and talked about unity and he takes every opportunity he can to split us apart and to create this Marxist class separation between the virtuous victims and the evil oppressors. It’s depressing.
Carmichael: There are so many other things that are similar that are going on in California. The House passed a bill called the Equity Act in California.
Cunningham: That sounds ominous.
Carmichael: The Senate has not passed it, but in California, they have passed it. And what they’re doing in California under the Equity Act is they are transferring transgender prisoners who are formerly men who now claim to be women.
They are now transferring them to women’s prisons even if they have not done anything to transform themselves, including even taking hormone pills. If the men simply claim to feel like a woman, they are being transferred.
Some of them are as tall as 6’5 and weigh 300 pounds. They’re being put in rooms with female prisoners with eight in a room. And they are confined in there together 24 hours a day.
Cunningham: How did we get this far? This insanity.
Carmichael: But they’re no feminists.
Cunningham: Grant was just making the where are the feminists defending the women? And what we now know is that the feminist organizations, the way old ones actually did care about women.
The newer ones in the last 10 to 15 years care only about liberal far-left policy. They don’t care about women at all. They just care about far-left policy.
Cunningham: How can you be a person and deal with that kind of cognitive distance within your own mind and believe two separate things at the same time.
Carmichael: It’s not difficult at all. If what you lust for is power, if that’s your primary objective, then whatever it takes to get power is what you should do. And that is the nature of the left.
I’ve said since Michael started having me on the show that the Democrat Party is the party of government. That’s all it is. Plain and simple. Anything that expands government is good.
Anything that shrinks government is bad, period. And anything that expands unions is good. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but unions now currently are taking 11 million dollars a year in dues and those are compulsory dues.
And under the ProAct, which is the Labor Union Expansion Act, which is also past the House, it would go up to 20 billion dollars a year. 20 billion dollars a year.
Cunningham: And most of that recycles back to Democrats.
Carmichael: 99 percent. 99 percent.
Cunningham: 99 percent.
Carmichael: 99 percent of all political contributions made by unions. There are many other contributions that unions make to the Democrat Party that are not financial, that are simply time.
In fact, that might even be stronger and more politically powerful is that they employ tens of thousands of people at the local, state and national level to advance the Democrat Party agenda.
And that’s why Nancy Pelosi can pick up the phone and call the heads of five unions. I call them the five families. And call them and say this particular Democrat in the House is getting out of line.
I want them primaried and beaten in the next election. And that’s why Nancy Pelosi can treat her Democrat Party members more or less as indentured servants. One might even call them slaves.
Cunningham: It’s like an on-call hitman ready to take out your enemies.
Carmichael: Or compliant. Whatever you want to call it. They’re just compliant.
Cunningham: And what’s scary to me is that the unions are getting even bolder in their far-left policy.
Carmichael: This is government unions. We need to separate because the private sector unions to the extent they still exist, and they’re not that many of them.
Cunningham: No. It’s like eight percent now?
Carmichael: What I’m trying to get at is in the old days, the automobile unions ran the factories. They literally ran the factories. If management came up with a better way to build a car and if the union didn’t agree with it, it did not get implemented, period.
Well, once all of the car manufacturers went bankrupt, the unions gave up that privilege. They gave up running the factory floors. Now they still negotiate on behalf of all workers for the big three. The transplant companies are not unionized. For example, Nissan here in Smyrna is not unionized.
Cunningham: Right.
Carmichael: And so the private sector unions, they’re not terrible. In fact, many of them supported Trump or they support Republicans.
Cunningham: Absolutely.
Carmichael: Like the Teamsters, for example. They represent truckers. And then the Keystone Pipeline. Biden just snapped his finger in 11,000 union jobs disappeared. Those union jobs were worth over $80,000. each.
Henry: And that distinction is important there. It’s all about compulsory action. The ProAct you’re talking about. It would do away with right-to-work States and for listeners right now, a right-to-work state says if you want to join a union, fine.
But you can’t be compelled to do so at the condition of your employment. It’s a major distinction of the aspect of free choice, free will.
Cunningham: So this act would, in effect, nationalize the no right to work. You don’t have a right to refuse union membership.
Carmichael: That can only pass if 10 Republicans go along with it, and that’s not going to happen. And so there are certain acts in HR1 and S1 Senate bills. This is the one that they’ll essentially nationalize all election law and just ignore what the Constitution says. The Constitution is the document of convenience for the Democrats. That’s all it is.
Cunningham: If that.
Carmichael: They are perfectly happy to cite it when it’s convenient. When they don’t like it, then it’s inconvenient and they disregard it. But I don’t think the Democrats are going to be able to accomplish nearly as much as they would like to.
But this should be an eye-opener to everybody about what the Democrats would actually do if they had 51 senators. Here’s what they would do if they had the Senate and the House and the presidency. They would destroy the country as we know it.
Cunningham: That is their fervent wish to destroy the Republic.
Carmichael: And Republicans do a terrible job. I have to say this. Republicans do a terrible job of understanding the nature of the opposition and how to respond to it because they will not respond in kind. And I will tell you something. An armed Army facing an unarmed Army. I will go with the armed Army all the time.
Cunningham: Every time.
Carmichael: They will win.
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 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 President of the National Association of Scholars and author Peter Wood to the newsmakers line to discuss what prompted his new book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.
Leahy: We are delighted to be joined on our newsmaker line by Peter Wood. He’s the President of the National Association of Scholars and the author of 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. Welcome, Professor Wood.
Wood: Well thank you for having me.
Leahy: Well, look, I was watching CSPAN the other day, and there you were making a logical response. Very compelling. I was delighted to hear you talk about your response to The 1619 Project. Tell us a little bit about The 1619 Project and what’s wrong with it.
Wood: About a year and a half ago, in August of 2019, The New York Times ran a special edition of its Sunday magazine. They titled it The 1619 Project. So literally what the project is, is it’s a 100-page newspaper supplement. What it did was declared that the real history of America began in the year 1619, when a ship brought 20 some slaves to what was then Jamestown, Virginia. That was the claim made.
And from that point on, according to The New York Times, and its principal author of this a woman named Nikole Hannah-Jones, America was a slaveocracy. That was the beginning of White supremacy and the beginning of 400 years of misery, oppression, exploitation of black people by White people. This wasn’t just an ancient history lesson, though.
The claim was that everything that’s happened since then has been through the filter of White supremacy. So The 1619 Project goes on to declare that America’s founding principles were a sham and illusion that were never intended to be taken seriously. That the American Revolution was fought by the White colonists in order to preserve the institution of slavery from the threat that the British might abolish slavery.
That Abraham Lincoln was a racist who created the Civil War in order to exile Blacks from off the shores of North America and on and on. This is kind of an elaborate fantasy that tells the tale of things that truly never happened and distortion of things that really did happen.
Leahy: How can such distortion of fact be presented by The New York Times as fact and then be sent into virtually every one of our K-12 public schools around the country?
Wood: Well, it’s a wonderful instance of how propaganda works. You set up some lies and you repeat them endlessly. You pay people to repeat them for you, and then you recruit people who don’t know any better to amplify them. So what The New York Times did was link with the Pulitzer Center to turn this into a curriculum and then recruit school districts around the country and history teachers to start teaching it. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
The New York Times has spared no expense. Many millions of dollars. It did a television advertising campaign for the first time in the history of that newspaper. It has been presenting it as fact to all the world. And low and behold, the Biden administration has bought into it. So we now have a presidential endorsement, as well as all of the apparatus that a wealthy newspaper can bring to the table.
Leahy: So I guess you’re based in New York City yourself now aren’t you? Isn’t the National Association of Scholars in New York? Are you based in New York?
Wood: I certainly am. My offices are on Madison Avenue, right in the heart of Midtown. So I’m in the belly of the beast.
Leahy: You are in the belly of the beast. By the way, I’m just going to put a plugin here for this. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Nashville, Tennessee has become a center for conservative media. The Daily Wire with Candace Owens, run by Ben Shapiro is in Nashville. Sean Davis of The Federalist is in Nashville. Out Kick the Coverage with Clay Travis and Jason Whitlock are here in Nashville. Of course, The Tennessee Star Report is in Nashville. I’m just going to give an open invitation to the National Association of Scholars to please consider moving to Nashville.
Wood: (Chuckles) Well, stranger things have happened. I have noticed that Nashville, Tennessee has become one of the islands of sanity, relatively speaking, in this dire time.
Leahy: More specifically, it would be Middle Tennessee in the state of Tennessee. The city of Nashville is a little bit woke, but you can come here and help fix that. By the way, just in case you’re considering it, we have no state income tax in Tennessee. (Wood moans) Nor is there any city tax. So just think about it. How did you decide that you’re going to take the effort to put together 1620: A Critical Response.
Wood: Well, it wasn’t a hard decision. For my sins I get The New York Times delivered to my door every morning. So I woke up that morning and read what was in this magazine. It was a jaw-dropping experience. I know enough American history to recognize falsehoods when I see them. So the next day, I called my staff together at the National Association of Scholars.
That was before we’ve been shut down and sent to the four winds. And we decided that we needed to make a concerted effort to repute this thing. We started calling up historians and getting them on tape and interviewing people about it. And after a few months of that, it was clear that there was enough going on that something more was needed. So I began working on that book.
Leahy: So the book 1620 A Critical Response to the 1619 Project as a counterpoint to what happened in 16 19 in Jamestown, Virginia, when 20 African Americans or Africans were brought to Jamestown, you focus on 1620 when something else happened.
Wood: Yes. In November of 1620, a small ship had made its way across the Atlantic had been blown off course and ended up off the coast of Massachusetts. We know that ship is the Mayflower. It had on board about 102 passengers. And of those, fewer than half were people that we now call Pilgrims. The rest were settlers that were hoping to become farmers in Northern Virginia.
They were very unhappy to be off the coast of Massachusetts and declared that they were going to go their separate ways. The religious centers, the pilgrims that originally were from Holland thought that was a bad idea. They negotiated. They quarreled. But ultimately they came up with a short agreement that we call the Mayflower Compact, which set up rules.
Basically, they decided since they were now outside the territory controlled by England, they were going to have to be self-governing. And that meant figuring out a way to live together despite their religious and political differences. So what that did was it became something like an early version of the Declaration of Independence. It was a charter for how to govern themselves. Despite their differences, it pointed to basic religious freedom.
They decided they were going to tolerate one another. They were going to live under the rule of law, and they were going to respect those laws by electing their own leaders and legislating their own rules. That Mayflower Compact eventually became the template model for how Americans would govern themselves. First in New England and around the rest of the country. It’s set up the pattern of a small town that was essentially self-governing and never got forgotten.
Leahy: Exactly. Now, Here’s what’s interesting. My question to you. So your pushback on 1620 was published in November. What has been the response to your pushback?
Wood: Well, the conservative response has been tremendous. The book has sold very well and is getting lots of interviews like this one. The response from The New York Times has been crickets. Of course, they don’t take notice of anyone who criticizes them. I would say that it’s becoming clear to many millions of Americans that this thing is in their schools. Their kids are coming home with very strange stories about the American past. Almost everybody now has heard of critical race theory and these ideas that America is a slaveocracy or White supremacy has invaded everything and that implicit racism is everywhere.
The 1619 Project was the launching platform for those ideas where this stuff first entered the mainstream, so to speak. So I think we have a culture war. The old culture war is back with a vengeance. This time around it’s trying to throw sand in the eyes of Americans. To understand our past we have to understand it as a place that is fundamentally and deeply unfair, and that racism is at the heart of everything that goes on. I think there’s an appetite by Americans to push back against 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.
