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Aug. 24, 2025 10:00-13:03 - CSPAN

03:02:45

Washington This Week

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john mcardle

cspan 34:13

peniel joseph

32:02

rich lowry

23:36

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al green

rep/d 00:06

charlie daniels

00:02

donald j trump

admin 00:03

ernest ramirez

00:07

jim marrs

00:22

patty murray

sen/d 00:10

sean duffy

admin 00:04

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john in mexico

callers 00:04

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unidentified		Of the day.
		Ham will discuss President Trump's claims about mail-in voting and election security with Michael Morley, an election law expert at Florida State University's College of Law.
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john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		It's Sunday, August 24th, 2025.
		A three-hour Washington Journal is ahead.
		We begin with a question on how you picked your political party.
		New York Times analyzed years of American voter registration data and found the Democrats are quickly losing their long-held voter registration edge in states around the country.
		This morning, we'll dive into that story.
		And as we do, we want to hear from you.
		Let us know when and why you picked your political party.
		Here's how we split our phone lines.
		If you've only ever been a Democrat, 202-748-8000 is the number to call.
		If you've only ever been a Republican, 202-748-8001.
		If you've only ever been an Independent, 202-748-8002.
		And if you've switched parties at some point in your life, 202-748-8003.
		That's a number you can also send us a text on, and you can catch up with us on social media.
		On X, it's at C-SPANWJ.
		On Facebook, it's facebook.com slash C-SPAN.
		And a very good Sunday morning too.
		You can go ahead and start calling in now.
		This is the story from last week from the New York Times, the headline, the Democratic Party faces a voter registration crisis.
		They write the party's bleeding support beyond the ballot box.
		That, according to a new analysis, Shane Goldmacher is the reporter, the lead reporter on that story.
		In the video he produced for the New York Times, he explains his findings.
unidentified		If you want to assess the health of a major political party, take a look at the voter registration numbers.
		And for the Democratic Party, it's not looking good.
		We looked at 30 states in America in Washington, D.C. that allow voters to register with a political party.
		And in those 30 states, in the last four years, the Democratic Party lost ground to the Republicans in every single one.
		Fewer people are now registered with the Democratic Party than there were on Election Day 2020.
		And more people are registered with the Republican Party than there were four years earlier.
		The Democratic brand isn't appealing to voters the way it used to.
		Fewer and fewer people are actively saying, hey, when I sign up to vote, I want to be a Democrat.
		There were a lot of political strategists who had noticed these numbers heading into the 2024 election, and a fair number of Democrats who waved them off and said, this isn't something to be worried about.
		This is just voter registration.
		This isn't how people actually will vote.
		But it turned out last year that the trend on voter registration pretty closely mirrored the results in some of the most important states.
		Florida was once the quintessential battleground.
		And in the last four years, Republicans swung the state by more than a million registered voters in the Republican direction.
		And other swing states are headed that way.
		North Carolina and Pennsylvania could tip to a Republican registration advantage in the coming years.
		For years, the left has used a patchwork of nonprofit groups to register voters.
		And they don't ask whether you're a Democrat or Republican.
		They're just signing up younger people, Latinos, black voters.
		And the presumption has been, well, most of those people are going to end up being Democrats.
		But the way that Donald Trump won in 2024 has undermined that presumption.
		Now the Democratic Party is kind of flummoxed and divided over what to do next.
		There's a wing of the party that says we should start spending more money to convince those communities to be Democrats.
		And there's another wing on the left that says we need to keep working to register these voters.
		And the political party itself needs to find a better message separate from that.
		It's a question of where do they spend the money.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Shane Goldmacher for the New York Times, that's his story of the headline, The Democratic Party faces a voter registration crisis.
		It came out on August the 20th last week.
		We're talking about it in this first hour on the Washington Journal today.
		And as we do, this is our question for you.
		How did you choose your political party?
		When and why did you choose your political party?
		Again, phone lines for if you've always been a Democrat, always been a Republican, always been independent, or if you've switched parties at some point in your life.
		And we'll take you through Shane Goldmacher's story more throughout this hour.
		But we'll begin on that line for those who have switched parties.
		David is one of them in Traverse City, Michigan.
		David, what are you now?
		What did you used to be?
unidentified		Well, I am a Republican now, and I used to be a Democrat.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And when and why did you switch parties?
unidentified		I switched when I felt the Democrat Party was using population control, basically, to flood our country.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And when did you feel that way, David?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What time frame?
unidentified		In 2000, it appeared that after the J6 situation and after Merritt Garland decided to come out with this narrative over white domestic terrorism and then the J6 thing, how that was framed, and then having Nancy Pelosi knowing that she was ultimately the one that didn't allow the 10,000 troops to come into DC was disappointing, to say the least.
unidentified		And then to see how they've reacted and kept on sticking with, you know, just flooding our country full of people from other countries that just happen to be brown and black that vote Democrat.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You know, why did you originally consider yourself a Democrat?
unidentified		Well, I originally considered myself a Democrat because they were normally for the working man, for the normal, you know, your everyday American.
		And they were more about freedom.
		They really were.
		And now I feel with the installing of DEI, just penning that in, just implementing that without any feedback from the United States electorate, I think they really took a path down a very, very destructive road because I believe the way that was installed, okay, even though it may have had the greatest means or intentions in the world, right, it wasn't implemented, right?
		It put white people on the defensive.
		It told them that they are inherently racist and entitled.
		And I don't think they'll ever be able to, I don't think they're going to be able to come back from that class.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's David in Michigan.
		Patrick is in Pittsburgh.
		Always been a Republican.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		It's wonderful to be able to participate in this.
		And the man who just spoke really hit the nail on the head.
		You know, when I look at the fundamentals of the Democratic Party and the establishment, the elite establishment especially, they have literally eviscerated the country.
		Over the past 10 years, we've seen a systematic destruction of all civil liberties in the United States.
		We've seen the complete annihilation of free speech.
		We've seen major corporations, especially in big tech, become the arbiters of our entire political system.
		And of course, we saw how the manipulation of the elections have been rolled out.
		What is stunning is the before and after of America when it comes to the George Floyd phenomenon.
		And I, ironically, as an IP specialist, I was doing a study about the participation of black people in media in the United States.
		And this was before George Floyd's death.
		Now, if you look at the demographics of black people in media in the United States, over 40% of all media, this is across the entire board, 40%.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Not to go down your media studies road, we're talking about voter registration now and your story on voter registration.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What do you think about those numbers from the New York Times?
unidentified		I'm completely unsurprised.
		When you are turning the United States into a European, dystopian, European version, these numbers play out essentially.
		If you would have let me finish, if you declare war on 60% of the U.S. population, which is white, and you have now 80% of all commercials, 80%, contain only black people in commercials in America.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All right, got your point.
		That's Patrick.
		This is Carmen in Florida.
		Good morning.
		Always been a Democrat.
unidentified		Hey, I don't.
		Yes, first of all, I was a Democrat because my family was.
		I was also poor when I was a kid in Philadelphia.
		I was born and raised most of my life in Philadelphia City.
		And I have to say that it, like, from the last two comments, I'm kind of shocked.
		I really am.
		And then I'm not.
		And the reason is I'm a big advocate on since the first Trump election.
		And the other gentleman highlighted a little bit on it was corporations.
		Until we get the lies out of media, it's going to continue going this direction.
		I think there's a lot of people that are not bright enough to not understand how the politics works.
		And I really think that they think by swinging over to the, and especially young voters, swinging to the voter of the Republican group is like the end thing to do.
		It's like, you know, it's going to support them, and it's not.
		The reason I'm still Democrat is because it does do everything for democracy and the working people.
		And the Republican Party is the opposite.
		And for the life of me, the reason I'm shocked is because people are swinging to the Republican Party against their own demise.
		So the only thing I can think of is that I'm kind of like with my head in his hand, thinking that, you know, all the information that I'm listening to is correct, when in reality, the majority of the public in America is listening to fake news.
		And I know that sounds stupid, but it's true.
		Shit in, shit out.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		They're listening to that.
		Got your point, Carmen.
		Don't need to use the language.
		You talk about younger voters.
		This is from that Shane Goldmacher piece that spurred this question this morning.
		More younger voters are opting for the GOP.
		The numbers look bad for Democrats among younger voters, he writes.
		People under 45 years old accounted for 65% of new registration in just the past seven years, and a once-sizable Democratic edge among those new younger voters has disappeared entirely.
		In 2018, nearly two-thirds of new registrants under 45 who had picked one of their two major parties were Democrats.
		In 2024, Republicans were an outright majority.
		Democrats lost ground among older new registrants as well, he writes, but the decline was far less severe.
		The Democratic share of new voters under 45 dropped three times as fast between 2010 and 2024 as it did among older Americans.
		Again, Shane Goldmacher and the New York Times digging into the 30 states in Washington, D.C. around the country that allow registration by party.
		20 states don't.
		For example, Virginia is one of them where you don't register by political party when you go to vote.
		But the 30 states that did in Washington, D.C., those are the numbers that are the basis of this story by Shane Goldmacher that got so much attention last week.
		Again, spurred our question this morning.
		This is Linda out of South Carolina.
		Linda, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		How are you today?
		First of all, I want to say that I was born in Washington, D.C. I'm third generation Washingtonian.
		I lived there until I was eight, and then we move graded into Montgomery County.
		I grew up 11 miles from the White House.
		So I was a Democrat.
		And then after I watched what they did to Montgomery County, I switched parties.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What did they do to Montgomery County, Linda?
unidentified		Well, for one thing, they let a lot of up.
		We had a really big uptick in migrants come in.
		I don't know if it's illegal or not.
		But also the molestation and the rape of little brown girls got rampant.
		Plus they started doing all these, you know telling people if you're smoking outside for the government people to tell on them.
		And I don't know.
		I just, I couldn't deal with it anymore.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		That's Linda in South Carolina.
		This is James in Louisiana.
		Always been independent.
unidentified		Why?
		Good morning.
		Registered independent, back and forth.
		I voted for both.
		I'm a black man in America.
		So when I, for some reason, I thought, I guess culturally, that I was supposed to be a Democrat until I graduated from college in 81.
		But I read an article that was written in 1968.
		I don't remember where it's from.
		It was from Ebony or Jet magazine.
		The title, which was Taken Advantage of by one and ignored by the other.
		And they were talking about the two political parties.
		And that kind of made me start watching how they look for black people as a group.
		And I said, okay, I'm going to get in the middle, and I'm going to decide to vote for who's right, who's moral, who's good, who's trying to service us.
		And I think we've lost that today.
		And the callers before me, it seemed like we're doing what I did wrong, is associating race and color with political parties.
		And I understand you can't do anything unless you win.
		But I think these parties are more worried about winning than doing what's right.
		And we don't have sense enough to understand that by dividing ourselves, we help destroy this experiment called democracy.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		James, has this philosophy worked for you?
unidentified		Yes and no.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you feel like you're getting the elected officials that you want?
unidentified		Yes, but as with anybody, nobody's perfect.
		And I have had buyers' remorse or voters' remorse.
		But that's not the point.
		The point is, we should be trying to vote for people that are going to adhere with the program, that are going to adhere with the rules, our Constitution, and what's best for most of us, not just me and my pocketbook.
		We have to live in this thing together in my opinion.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		James, thanks for the call.
		It's Harvey, Louisiana.
		Another James is in Florence, South Carolina, that line for folks who have switched parties in their lifetime.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Hi, John.
		How are you doing this morning?
		Doing well.
		Yeah, well, I used to be a Democrat.
		I voted for John Kerry.
		Then I switched to Republican.
		But I recently switched to Independent because of a lot of stuff that Donald Trump is doing.
		I mean, using the National Guard the way he is, you know, just a lot of the horrible decisions that he's making.
		Not to mention the fact that I'm the working poor.
		I make a little too much for food stamps, but I don't make enough to buy groceries.
		So I have to depend on food banks or go to the Dollar Tree to buy groceries.
		It's just a terrible situation, no matter which political party you're shooting for.
		I'm independent because I see good on both sides and I see bad on both sides.
		You know, it's just all up in the air right now as far as political parties go.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		James, you talk about the National Guard, Donald Trump, and the National Guard.
		The lead story in this Sunday morning's Washington Post reads this way.
		The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago.
		The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States, another troop deployment here at this time to Chicago.
		What do you think of that?
unidentified		I'm totally against it.
		The National Guard should not be used to fight in our own country.
		They're there to be used to fight in other countries.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And to James in South Carolina, this is Barbara out of Philadelphia.
		That line for those who have always been Democrats.
		Barbara, good morning.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		So I just don't, yes, I've always been a Democrat, but I never even got involved in politics.
		I'm ashamed to say, until I retired.
		And I'll explain why.
		I was busy.
		I was working.
		I had two children.
		This is what happens.
		People aren't even understanding what's going on.
		And then I lost my insurance because my husband went on Medicare.
		He's five years older.
		All of a sudden, I have no insurance.
		And so I fought for the affordable health care under Obama.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That was when you first got involved in a political cause, Barbara?
unidentified		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
		Because, you know, all of a sudden, I needed something.
		And unfortunately, it seems like that's the way with some people, me included.
		I'm ashamed to say.
		I needed something, and all of a sudden, up became important.
		But be that as it may, I just don't understand why people are against the Democrat Party and for, I mean, how could you be for the Republican Party, regardless of anything the Democrats are doing.
		If you look at everything Democrats gave people over the decades, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Democratic Elizabeth Warren established the Consumer Protection Bureau or was involved in that heavily that Musk and Trump just destroyed.
		Now, the Republicans want to take that all away.
		They want to take it all away.
		Just look at the big beautiful bill, please, and Project 2025, and you will understand who these people are.
		The other thing people should understand: Republicans are all alike.
		I'm sorry.
		Most of them are white, and maybe they're racist.
		I don't know.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Barbara, what do you think of the gains?
		You said most of them are white.
		What do you think of the gains that Donald Trump made in the 2024 election, specifically in the Hispanic community, in the black community?
		If your assumption is that they're all white or mostly white, how do you explain the appeal there when it comes to getting more voters among those groups than he did in his previous two attempts?
unidentified		All right, gotcha.
		But I think they were just disillusioned, and maybe they didn't understand what the Republican Party had in store for them.
		Maybe they didn't realize and know about Project 2025.
		Maybe they didn't pay attention to tariffs and what tariffs really are and what they really do.
		Now, people, you know, they don't pay attention to this stuff.
		I'm retired.
		I sit at the TV all day long, and now I know what's going on.
		The other thing I wanted to say about...
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Well, Barbara, I've got more people waiting, but that's Barbara in Philly.
		Let me go to James in Irwin, Pennsylvania.
		James, go ahead.
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		I just want to say I was a Democrat when I was younger.
		I'm from Pittsburgh.
		But as time went on, I turned to the Republicans for one reason only.
		The Democrats are not for the working people today.
		And I know that Trump has his faults.
		Both Republicans and Democrats, they do.
		The main problem is no term limits.
		You have a bunch of 70 and 80-year-old people live in gated communities.
		Let's be honest.
		All they want is power and money.
		If the American people could do what they do, insider trading, how much is Pelosi worth?
		700 million?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure the numbers that high, James, but I don't have the numbers on me.
unidentified		I don't know.
		This is what I heard.
		But, John, the problem is Americans have to come together.
		The Democrats, what do they stand for?
		They let 20 million people under Obama and the Bible.
		Although Obama did get rid of 3 million, supposedly.
		But look what Joe Biden did: 10 to 20 million.
		We can't afford that.
		If the Democrats want to let all these people in, there will not be any Medicare.
		There won't be any.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You think 20 million people came in illegally under Barack Obama and another 20 million came in illegally under Joe Biden?
unidentified		Between both of them, John.
		And even if it's half, let's even go 10 million.
		John, we can't afford this.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So, what does it mean?
		You said Democrats aren't for the working class.
		What does it mean to be for the working class?
		Colour brought up the one big beautiful bill.
		Is that for the working class?
		And if so, how?
unidentified		Okay, for an example, if Karmala Harris would have got in, if you own property and you sell it, she didn't want 20%.
		She wanted 40% taxable.
		Who is going to invest in any property to try to get a return on it if you lose 40 cents out of a dollar to the government?
		And then the illegals, they get food stamps.
		They're up in New York.
		Roosevelt Hotel, $500 a night.
		We're $37 trillion in debt, John.
		Let's just be honest.
		The Republicans are the Democrats.
		They're never going to solve the problem.
		But at least for right now, Trump is doing something.
		We needed the tariffs because all the other countries think that we have nothing here but money.
		And then when these people come here and they understand they have to go to work to make a living, then things change.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's James in Pennsylvania.
		This is Shane Goldmacher.
		We showed you the video he made for the New York Times.
		We showed you a story on the New York Times.
		Here's his series of tweets about this story.
		Again, it got a lot of attention last week when it came out on August the 20th.
		The story, again, analyzed the 30 states plus Washington, D.C. that allows for partisan registration.
		He found that between 2020 and 2024, Democrats lost 2.1 million voters in those states, and Republicans gained 2.4 million voters.
		And you can see the various states that allow for partisan voter registration in the chart.
		The story dives into specific states.
		In North Carolina, Republicans erased roughly 95% of the registration advantage that Democrats had held in the fall of 2020 as of this summer.
		The Democrats' edge is now less than 17,000 in the Tar Hill state.
		That's down from nearly 400,000 in the year 2020.
		Then there's Pennsylvania, the quintessential battleground, he calls it.
		Democrats had a registration advantage of 517,310 among active voters in November of 2020.
		As of this summer, that advantage just down to 53,303.
		Democrats, again, with historic voter registration advantages in most of these states.
		And Shane Goldmacher has tracked how that's changed and changed pretty dramatically, specifically in the past four years.
		This is Ed back in Philly.
		Good morning.
		Ed, you with us this morning?
unidentified		You know, I called in the Zayl and Change Parties line because I've been over a couple of years about my life.
		And I'm finally ready.
		I didn't vote in the last election.
		I am finally ready to just go ahead and either declare myself an independent, waiting for a third party to finally emerge, or I will vote for the Democrats because I'm tired of this cognitive dissonance.
		And the things that the Republican Party claims to stand for are just simply no longer the case.
		It's become fully a cult of personality.
		If I could offer an answer as to why young people appear to be edging out the Democrats and why those margins are dwindling, I would say that it's largely because the people who constitute the base of the Democratic voters, the younger people, the issues they are concerned with, their quality of life, the genocide in Gaza, trying to hold people who are blatant violators of the law accountable.
		None of those were addressed during the last election cycle whatsoever.
		And I would also argue that some of the younger people who were leaning conservative and becoming more fascinated with not classic conservatism, but this sort of social media, Instagram,
		Reels version of conservatism, I think that the source of that is owed to the headlock that our discourse is being held in by tech companies and the algorithms that feed people information that is based strictly on extreme feelings.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And what is that social media reels version of the party, and how is it different from the actual party in your mind?
unidentified		Well, I would say for one thing, John, that it would previously have been unthinkable to have the White House's public affairs office via Twitter post a AI-generated meme of a crying woman who is about to be deported to a country that she never lived in with like alternating upper and lowercase letters who said stuff like cry more lib.
		I mean, like the bar is very low in terms of discourse.
		And we have Fox News and Donald Trump to thank for that.
		But the thing is that this man won't be president forever.
		And we're all going to have to clean up this mess eventually.
		And I think, honestly, that many of these young people are really just lining up to try to get their piece of the pie once this sort of Putin-esque oligarchy that Trump has set in motion fully takes effect.
		It's really all about money.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And you said you're waiting for a third party to emerge or an independent party, I think you said, to emerge.
		When do you think that happens?
		Will it happen?
unidentified		I would love to see a party that actually tries to organize people based around the idea of a more perfect union, the idea of actually unifying people towards a common purpose and something that can speak in actual truth about rejecting what the Republican Party has been chasing since Ronald Reagan said,
		make America great again, which is to say a past that never existed, a world that exists solely in fiction.
		The reason why some of these young people are lined up and embracing, what they're embracing is the reality of what modern conservatism offers them, which is brutality and cruelty.
		Those are the results that they are seeing.
		That is the dopamine that they are getting vis-a-vis the smartphone channels.
		It's the same principle.
		It's things that they can experience triumph from, but they don't have to actually get their hands dirty with.
		But that can only last for so long.
		You just discussed National Guard troops.
		I read that HagSet is going to allow the troops in D.C. to be holding firearms.
		And they're talking about sending people to Chicago.
		This is blatant violations of the Proxycombatitis Act.
		We have laws for this.
		Do we not?
		That's what I would love to see a third party do.
		I'd love to see someone hold these people accountable and speak truth to the lies.
		And I think that's what we all want.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Ed in Philadelphia.
		Back to the Pelican State.
		This is Jane in Kenner, Louisiana, has always been a Democrat.
		Why?
unidentified		Actually, I'm born in the 50s, and I grew up in the 60s.
		My parents were military, so I never even understood segregation until I got back in the United States and out from the area of the military, which has always been integrated, at least as far as kids were concerned.
		But then in the 60s, the civil rights and the marches and everything like that, the 70s with the anti-war business.
		All of this is very Democratic and I've marched and everything.
		In the 80s, I think we've got internet lies, really bad lies, lies that have not been answered.
		I mean, they wouldn't even use the word, that's a lie, on the news channels, knowing full well that 50,000 people have just invaded, you know, Washington, D.C., that's a lie.
		And just come right out and say it.
		And it's just gotten worse with George Floyd and the videos of PD, with police officers and stuff beating up people.
		And then when the 2000s came in, there was health care and infrastructure and clean air and clean water and all this really great stuff that for some reason or another, the Republicans went, no, thank you.
		And they proceeded to downgrade everything that the Democrats have tried to do for people.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Jane.
		That's Jane in Louisiana this morning.
		We've been focusing on this New York Times story that got a lot of attention talking about voter registration trends.
		And they specifically looked at the 30 states where you can register by party.
		Those trends changing dramatically in Republicans' favor, especially over the past four years.
		Though, as Gallup notes, that Democrats still hold an overall advantage in party affiliation.
		Their latest look finding that those who identify or lean Democratic account for 46% of Americans.
		Those who identify or lean Republican account for 43%.
		Those numbers ticking up in this most recent report from Gallup.
		Here's their analysis of those numbers.
		American party affiliation has flipped back towards the Democratic Party after the Republican Party had held advantages for most of 2023 and 2024 when they polled on this.
		However, they write, these changes in party preference are occurring at a time when the Democratic Party's image is at an all-time low and slightly worse than that of the Republican Party.
		Further, Americans are no more likely to believe Democrats are better than Republicans at managing the federal government or bringing about the changes that the country needs.
		Gallup, with their survey on Americans' feelings about the two parties, we're asking you in this first hour of the Washington Journal simply, how did you choose your political party when and why?
		And we've got phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and those who have switched parties over the course of their lifetime.
		This is Bob in Tennessee, Republican.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Because I believe in the Bible.
		And Because it the Bible says do not murder babies, do not mutilate little children, do not allow boys and girls private spaces, the bathroom, locker road.
		And you need rich people because without rich people, you would have no money, no job.
		They create the jobs.
		Why would I want to hurt rich people when they support our country?
charlie daniels ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's stupidity.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Bob in the volunteer state.
		This is Mark.
		St. Paul, Minnesota has switched parties.
		When and why?
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		I'm 64.
		I was, my family was not particularly political.
		In fact, I never even, as a young person, I never actually knew who my parents actually voted for.
		I used to be an atheist Marxist socialist because I felt that the Democrats are more compassionate.
		The Republicans were all for big business and the fat cats and whatnot.
		I ultimately ended up.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You considered yourself an atheist Marxist socialist.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's what you identified as.
unidentified		Yes, I was.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Why was that something that you identified as?
unidentified		What did you like in that philosophy?
		It was the organized religion really never worked for me, so that's how I ended up being an atheist, I guess.
		And then you have started, like I say, it was the, I felt that the Republicans were all for big business and fat cats.
		I thought the Democrats are more compassionate.
		I felt that the Democrats were more for civil rights and the environment and things like that.
		And those were issues that I had a concern about.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And then what happened?
unidentified		I ultimately, I became a divorce lawyer.
		I ended up being a volunteer lobbyist up at the Capitol in the St. Paul on father's rights issues.
		And that was apparently perceived as being anti-woman or something like that.
		And everybody assumed that I was a Republican.
		And my first vote that I cast for president was for Jimmy Carter.
		And then I voted for straight Democrats all the way down through Bill Clinton.
		And because after Bill Clinton beat George Bush, the attitude of the other members of this, I was on a governor's commission on family law issues.
		And the other members of the committee were all government employees, clearly Democrats.
		And they were all very condescending and arrogant towards me after George Bush lost his reelection bid because they were assuming that I was a Republican, which was completely wrong.
		And that really turned me off just their overwhelming, overbearing arrogance and condescending attitude towards me.
		So finally, I ended up in the 2000 election when Nel Gore pulled out his October surprise that George Bush got a DWI with Rod Labor or something in Ken and Bunkport, Maine.
		I was just so disgusted by that.
		It's like, so you're stooping to this level to try to win an election.
		I really turned me off.
		I ended up voting for George Bush II.
		And now I used to hate Ronald Reagan as well because being a socialist Marxist.
		And I drank the Kool-Aid of the Marxism.
		I was a political science major back in college.
		And I remember one of doctorate.
		I was saying what I think the professors wanted me to hear.
		I was indoctrinated into the Marxist thought.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Where did you go to college, Mark?
unidentified		Hamlin University in St. Paul.
		I remember one of my political science professors was a real advocate for socialism.
		I recall he was standing up in front of the class one day saying, now, if you become a socialist, you're going to lose friends.
		You'll alienate other people.
		So he was really a recruiter for the cause, basically.
		And you're trying to get good grades in college, I suppose.
		So you say what the professors want to hear.
		And ultimately, because of, like I say, because of the condescending and arrogant attitude that I was met with by the self-righteous Democrats that ended up alienating me from their party.
		And I'm now here.
		Like I say, I despise Ronald Reagan.
		I was a member of the National Lawyers Guild back when I was in law school, which is a very, very left-leaning lawyers group as well.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's in Minnesota.
		Thanks for sharing your story, Mark.
		Timothy is in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
		Good morning.
unidentified		The National Lawyers Guild.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Timothy, it works better if you turn your TV down and speak through your phone.
unidentified		Yes, can you hear me now?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, go ahead, Timothy.
unidentified		Yes, I am apostle, came at the Eurobar.
		I'm God's choice.
		And I'm Democrat because I'm a servant of God.
		And it's our job to preach the gospel, not entwine ourselves with politics, especially when they break the covenant from God.
		Both sides of the aisles is not true worshipers of God.
		If you're going to represent homosexuality and all this LGBT BTQ stuff, you ain't of God.
		You're on the other aisle.
		They're talking about they for pro-life and for not killing children.
		And then they go out and promote girls to do the exact thing they say they're against, murdering little kids.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You describe yourself as an independent?
unidentified		No, yeah, I'm an independent.
		Yes, I am.
		I'm not evil or I say I'm a servant of God.
		So how could I agree with America pledging allegiance to us slaughtering children in schools?
		And I suppose to be a Christian and a follower of Christ.
		And you got a Republican party who pledged allegiance to political violence.
		So how are you for pro-life and the keys?
		And Republicans didn't give a hoop about people getting killed in the streets.
		And it's up people because they promote them assault.
		The Republicans.
		Every time I seen the Democratic Party, we need to remove these girls from the street.
		What would Republican Party do?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		It's Timothy in North Carolina.
		This is Walter, Penrose, Colorado.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		Always Republican.
		I, too, was born in the 50s, grew up 60s, 70s, half of my life overseas, born overseas.
		I develop my Republican attitudes by working with Germans in Germany.
		Mainly, I was paid by the American government.
		And at that time, the Germans were paid by the German government as kind of reparations for rebuilding their country.
		And long story short, they usually had about twice the amount of holidays that I had.
		So a good dozen days out of the year when I was working, I found myself working all alone because all the Germans had holidays.
		And, you know, I'm not against paying taxes, but not half of what I earn, which is the attitudes developed by Europeans and even Canadians.
		And it's just a lot of these people think these entitlements are free.
		Well, they're paying for them.
		And it just, I saw what it did to the German people.
		It turned them from an industrious, energetic people to a country of lazy bones.
		They still make good products, but their working attitudes and stuff like that is everything.
		The government owes me everything.
		And the Democrats always lean back on this.
		Well, the Republicans are for the rich.
		They're racist.
		And they have nothing positive to say about the other side.
		And always Republicans.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Walter, when was that?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When was the last time you were overseas and interacting with foreign workers?
unidentified		Well, that was in the 70s.
		I graduated in the mid-70s, but I have interfaced with German people here in the United States on vacation, and they still have that attitude of entitlement.
		And that's just a bad thing for workers.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What line of work are you in?
unidentified		I'm retired now, but I was, I worked 25 years for Hewlett-Packard.
		Then after that, the Department of Corrections here in the state.
		But I've been retired for the last six years.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Walter out of Penrose, Colorado.
		About 15 minutes left in this segment.
		And this question this morning spurred by this New York Times look at voter registration numbers across the country, the 30 states who allow voters to register by party.
		The headline of their piece, the Democratic Party faces a voter registration crisis.
		Here's one of Shane Goldmacher's findings from that study, looking at the gender gap being a growing problem for Democrats.
		The split, he writes, between men and women or the gender gap is decades old, but it's been particularly pronounced in the Trump era.
		Women have tended to support Democrats at higher rates, while men have backed Republicans, if by smaller margins.
		But the analysis of voter registration data tells a different story, one in which Republican strength among men far outpaces the Democratic edge among women.
		The story notes, in 2024, the Republican advantage among men who were newly registered to vote with a major party was double the Democratic edge among women.
		More than 60% of men who registered with a major party became Republicans in 2024, while only 55% of women became Democrats.
		That's roughly a 10-point edge for Democrats among new female voters.
		Last year, it's down drastically from 2018 when the party enjoyed a gargantuan, he writes, nearly 38 percentage point advantage.
		Just one of the findings of that study of voter registration data.
		This is Cindy out of Lexington, Kentucky.
		On that line, for those who have switched parties, when and why.
unidentified		Yes, John.
		I switched parties.
		I was an independent.
		I became a Democrat.
		I'm a moderate Democrat because I'm originally from Florida, and I don't like what moved into Florida.
		White supremacy, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Heritage Foundation, Trump, all that white supremacy, Ponzi schemes down there in Palm Beach, all the white-collar crimes.
		I'm originally from St. Petersburg.
		And we were nothing but a bunch of working beach bums.
		That's all we were.
		Servicing the retirees.
		And now the retirees can't even afford Florida or St. Pete anymore.
		They are raising the poor neighborhoods, building multi-million dollar skyscraped condos.
		I don't like what has been done.
		I started complaining about the overpopulation and the Florida northern open border.
		And those Republicans would say to me, if you don't like it here, then move out.
		You don't deserve Florida.
		So they're taking over now.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You say you're a moderate Democrat.
		Who's in charge of the Democratic Party right now?
		Would you say it's a party of moderate Democrats?
		Would you say it's more left-leaning?
		Where does a moderate Democrat fit right now in terms of the direction of the Democratic Party?
unidentified		I'm not really sure.
		I think it's too divided.
		But I don't like what the Republicans have done to my native land of Florida either.
		And that's what I'm fighting against.
		They're destroying the environment.
		Alligator Alcatraz, please.
		We fought for the Everglades.
		I was literally over the toilet when I heard that.
		They don't care about the environment.
		They don't even study the environment.
		There's over 80 ecosystems.
		They're just trashing it up.
		Nothing but tar cement and human beings.
		Farmlands are being slaughtered.
		And people say, oh, that's being done everywhere, but not like in Florida.
		Every grain of sand, every blade of grass, they're just developing over.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point.
		That's Cindy in Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee.
		Rick, line for independence, always independence.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Oh, good morning.
		Boy, I woke up to a lot going on this morning.
		I wasn't planning on calling him, but I'll get with it anyway.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Born in the early 50s, an old hippie, went to California, go west, young man, and you could live out there and you could just have a heck of a time.
unidentified		It was drugs, rock and roll, free sex, and everything was going to be a utopia.
		Found out now, fast forward 40 or 50 years, which I'm up in my 70s.
		We went through Vietnam, hate Ashbury, all the hippies we went through, all of that.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		And all the music, Grateful Dead, this is Jefferson Starship music, and then they got to be making big money and they sold out.
unidentified		Everybody sells out to the almighty dollar.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		The young black man or the older black man that you had on a few callers back, he was exactly right about overseas.
unidentified		And you come to this country, you work.
		And when I was growing up, the rich were the Republicans.
		The poor were the Democrats.
		And the only Democrats that really had any money was the ones that were lucky enough to have a family member or knew somebody that would get them a good union paying job, whether it was in the government or whether it was in a private sector like the construction jobs.
		Now you fast forward to today, you've got these far-left progressives that are going overboard with everything.
		I want a Democratic Party.
		I want a Republican Party.
		I want it to be right in the middle where we can communicate.
		But there's no communication no more in this country.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When was the last time we were able to communicate?
unidentified		When was the last time I was able to communicate?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When was the last time we were able to communicate with each other, where the two parties were able to communicate with each other?
unidentified		Well, I would say it was probably somewhere around the early 80s, the mid-80s, is when it really started falling apart.
		Because, see, what happened is the people that came back from the wars had trouble getting jobs even then.
		You're seeing it today with some of the stuff going on.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So, Rick, we've been falling apart for 40 years?
unidentified		We've been falling apart for a long time.
		It's just now caught up with us.
		And, you know, both parties are guilty of it all.
		Both parties are guilty of everything that's going on in this country, from racism to slavery to everything you want to count on.
		So when you point one finger, two fingers could come back at you.
		And all I'm saying is that America is a great country.
		If you've ever been out of this country, I don't care if you're a rock star or you're a veteran or whoever, a business person, when you come back and set soil on this land, you know what true freedom means.
		It's all about freedom at the end of the day.
		And I'll give you an example.
		I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
		I've lived in the same house for almost 30-something years.
		We get a Democratic mayor, guess what?
		He raises property taxes 34.5% on us.
		Most people are having to sell their homes.
		Investors are coming in, just like the lady said down in Florida.
		It ain't a Republican.
		It's investors.
		Overseas investors, everybody.
		I got two houses that went up for sale that are rented across the street from me.
		Nobody can afford them.
		They either rent too high or, and I live in a house.
		I pay $60,000 for my house, and it's worth about $400,000 now.
		No one can afford to rent the house, but nobody can afford to buy it anymore.
		So we're in a quandary of what's going on in this country.
		Create jobs, get the job.
		And oh, by the way, I actually am one of those people that saw the jobs go to China.
		I know one of my jobs went to China.
		Your unions have been broken up.
		Your unions, right?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What job went to China that you had, Rick?
unidentified		An engineering job.
		I had other jobs that went to China in manufacturing.
		All the shoe factories in the South from South Carolina to Mid.
		Now, you may say, well, they don't pay anything.
		Well, they created a job.
		It got them off welfare.
		There's a lot of people.
		The reason FDR and Social Security came into play was Social Security came into play years ago to help those people who couldn't get a job where the farmland is gone.
		You look at everything that's going on in this country.
		It's politicians that screwed it up.
		I was born in northern Indiana, close to Chicago.
		I was raised in the South in Alabama, and I went through the George Wallace crap.
		And then I went to and lived in LA for a long time.
		So I'm very diversified.
		And I know about what you're saying about it in Florida.
		It's not Republicans.
		There are Republican voters down there because they got money, but there's as many Democrats doing it too.
		And I've got friends right now that live in Florida all their lives, and they're independent.
		And they'll tell you both parties, it's investors coming in.
		They're overseas investors.
		If you go to Miami, it's all investors.
		The American people are.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point, Ricky.
		You said we're in a quandary right now.
		Are you optimistic we're going to be able to get out?
unidentified		Well, if I said anything good about Donald Trump, I'd be called a MAGA.
		I'm not a MAGA.
		I'm for the good old United States.
		You know, my favorite team, I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
		My favorite baseball team is the Los Angeles Dodgers, Dodgers.
		When I watch them and some of the stuff that they promote and do, I get a little frustrated.
		I'm old school, but I'm one of those old hippies that had to become, sooner or later, you got to go to work, make a living.
		Your mom's going to die.
		Your dad's going to die.
		And the money and the inheritances are gone.
		And you better hope somebody's in your corner.
		I love Democrats, the working Democrat.
		But if you're looking, and I love the working Republican, but if you're looking for me to give you the shirt off my back, I will give it to you.
		But if you try stealing it from me, I'll fight you tooth and nail.
		Oh, one other last thing, and I'll let you go.
		My trash can, my trash can is broken.
		After 20 years of having these new trash cans that they pick up, they're big hard plastic.
		The hook that comes down to the truck driving.
		I talked to the driver.
		They busted it up.
		I've called the trash people here for the last two months straight, every day, because I'm retired.
		I can't get a trash can.
		And then I talk to the trash man.
		You know what he says?
		He said, tell them that I damaged it.
		I said, I've been telling them it was damaged by the hook on the truck.
		And they won't send me one.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So he said, where are we going with this story?
unidentified		Well, here's what it is.
		A Democratic mayor, Freddie, the one that's just been in the news about the illegals here in this town, he will not send another trash can.
		And I went through the neighborhood and started looking at it.
		A lot of them were worn out.
		Trash falling on the street.
		And then I find out that if they send me one after raising my property taxes 34%, I'm going to have to pay $65 for the trash can that they destroy, and I can't get one.
		So what I'm going to do is I'm going to load it up in the back of my pickup truck, and I'm going to go dump it on the courthouse because after all, I live in the capital.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Be careful.
		Don't do anything illegal, Rick.
		That's Rick in Tennessee.
		Glenn is in Detroit, Michigan.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hey, good morning, John.
		Yes, I'm a Democrat, but I'm very disappointed, Democrat.
		I'm definitely looking at independent.
		I was watching your show a year ago, and I saw this guy interviewed named Chase Oliver.
		He was an independent, and I forgot what host interviewed him, but you're 38 years old.
		So if he's running again, he'll be 42, which would be perfect.
		I don't know if he's married, but he said he had nephews and nieces.
		He's against the war in Israel.
		He's also been in the food industry since high school.
		He's a working man.
		And I really like the guy.
		He got good ideas.
		And ready to make a move.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Your memory is pretty darn good there, Glenn.
		Chase Oliver was on this program almost exactly a year ago, August 27th, 2024, talking about his Libertarian Party presidential bid.
		Has been on C-SPAN six times over the years.
		If you want to watch any of them, you can watch that at our video library at c-span.org.
		Just a couple minutes left in this first hour of the Washington Journal, simply asking you when and why did you pick your political party.
		And we've got a phone line for Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and if you switched parties over your lifetime.
		David switched from Maine, Raymond, Maine.
		David, when did you switch and what are you now?
unidentified		I am a Democrat now.
		I used to be an Independent.
		I switched when Donald Trump won the first time.
		And that was because in our state, as an independent registered voter, you can't vote in the primaries.
		And in the following election, I wanted to be able to vote in the primaries and I wanted to vote for a Democrat.
		It's been a very interesting program.
		I thank you for taking my call.
		I find it, well, disturbing.
		I'm 66 years old, and I would agree with some of the people here and disagree with a fair amount, especially the Republicans.
		It's almost, I say, unique, where you can hear some of the rhetoric from the Republican people here, where I would have to assume that they watch a lot of Fox News.
		I've occasionally tuned into it, and I can probably catch maybe 20 seconds of it before.
		There's just so much lie and discourse.
		I think that I'm a little bit concerned about that stat that's in this report.
		I do hope that there's a lot of mistakes in it, because if that is the case, then this country has probably seen the start, and it will see the conclusion of a free republic democratic election system.
		I've been to a few other countries early on in my life, but nothing in the last 40 years.
		I was in England, and I definitely appreciated their form of government, thought it was quite unique.
		But I really think that I am absolutely amazed that Trump won a second term given all of the lies and just the craziness of the incompetent people that he's put in in this second administration.
		I don't know.
		I fear about this country and I do hope that that stat changes really quickly.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		David, you said you hope the numbers are wrong.
		Shane Goldmacher, a pretty darn good reporter and certainly shows his homework when he does these kinds of stories.
		There's data that you can link to in the story.
		But here's a little bit more from the story just to get your take on this.
		And this is looking at specifically battleground states in America.
		Between 2020 and 2024, the Democratic Party lost its long-held registration advantage in states such as Florida and New Hampshire.
		According to state records, that means registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats in those states.
		If the current trend holds, more states are going to flip.
		Nevada briefly tipped into the Republican column this year, though it has seesawed in the months since, with Democrats now clinging to just a 3,700 voter registration edge.
		Simply put, Democratic edge in the swing states has been vanishing.
		5.3 percentage points gone in Pennsylvania between 2020 and 2024.
		3.5 percentage points eroded in North Carolina.
		4.5 percentage points erased in Nevada.
		In Arizona, the only swing state where Republicans held a registration edge in 2020.
		The Republican advantage has now swelled by 3.9 percentage points in 2024.
unidentified		Right.
		Well, and I don't, I'm not going to disagree with his findings because obviously he's done thorough work on it.
		I just, I guess it's part of the optimism in myself here with these types of polls or data investigations where I do hope there's a certain amount of percentage that aren't showing up.
		But I also wonder if there's a manipulation on the Republican side as we're seeing it currently with all this gerrymandering is also the rules that some of these Republican states are putting in effect where they're denying or they're erasing people from the voter registration and forcing them to go through hoops in order to re-register.
		And of course, that probably disappoints a lot of people.
		But one thing's for sure, I'm glad that C-SPAN is still around.
		And I hope that Trump doesn't somehow find a way to eliminate your program or make it become a fascist one.
		That's all I can say.
		And have a wonderful day, folks.
		And I do hope this country can resolve its issues here in a quicker fashion than they are doing it right now.
		Thanks.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's David in Maine.
		And he's our last caller in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
		Stick around, though.
		Plenty more to talk about this morning.
		A little later on today, we'll be joined by the University of Texas's Peneil Joseph.
		We'll discuss the Trump administration policies on culture and portrayals of U.S. history.
		But up next, it's Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of the National Review, a discussion on the Trump administration and some of the latest news of the day.
		Stick around.
		We'll be right back.
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		Washington Journal continues.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Back with us this morning for a Sunday morning conversation.
		It's Rich Lowry.
		He is the editor-in-chief of the National Review, of course, author as well, and a C-SPAN guest over the years.
		Mr. Lowry, I want to begin with that story we were talking to viewers about in our first hour of the Washington Journal today.
		It's the New York Times story about voter registration numbers from 2020 to 24, that changes distinctly in Republicans' favor over those four years.
		Did you read that story?
		What's your take?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Pretty stunning stuff.
		It shows that the Democratic Party is losing appeal pretty comprehensively.
		A lot of reasons for that.
		I think the foremost one is the party is so out of touch on cultural issues and has convinced people it just has bizarre priorities that make no sense to them.
		And the Republican Party has been gaining appeal at the same time, which is really, if you look back from the perspective about a decade ago, 12 years ago, you'd ask the average Republican, what does the Republican Party need to do to gain ground among young people, to gain ground among voters of color, especially Latino men and black men?
		And the answer would have been: soften your tone on cultural issues, soften your tone on immigration.
		You can be a fiscal conservative, but don't talk about any of the other stuff.
		And Donald Trump has obviously taken exactly the opposite approach and made the Republican Party more appealing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		In terms of what these numbers actually represent, we've known for a while this country is very divided and sometimes it feels like almost exactly evenly divided.
		So in some ways, are these numbers not surprising?
		The fact that the long-held voter registration advantage that Democrats have had is now come down.
		Is this just a lagging indicator of where we are as a country?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it's a symptom of a division and a pretty even division.
		But I mean, they clearly, they're shedding voters and Republicans are gaining voters, and there has to be reasons for that.
		And again, I think that the biggest is that they've seated, in effect, the center.
		I know this blows a lot of people's minds, but Trump on many issues is a moderate, right?
		During the campaign, they want to portray him, oh, you're extremists.
		You're bringing up this issue of women competing in women's sports.
		How crazy of you.
		You're so radical.
		Most people go, no, you know, 10 years ago, again, that wouldn't even have been an issue.
		It wasn't even part of the conversation.
		So by going so far left, they've seated Trump the center on that.
		Also on immigration, certainly on border enforcement.
		Just blowing up the border, getting a de facto open border for a certain category of immigrants.
		Just made no sense to no one.
		The effects of it were felt all over the country, including big cities where you had Democratic mayors complaining about it and Trump just saying we're going to seal the border.
		Again, that doesn't feel extreme or radical to most people.
		So I think that the Democratic Party needs to recalibrate in a way that's going to be painful on some of these cultural issues, and I'm not sure they get it yet.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Other borders in the news as well, the district borders for House seats, redistricting battles around the country from Texas to California, perhaps other states now getting involved in the months to come.
		There's another story in the Washington Post on that.
		Missouri could be next.
		What do you think about this sort of rising war of redistricting in states around the country?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I think it's a bad idea to do mid-decade redistricting the way Texas has setting off this arms race.
		I think it's better to just do it regular fashion right after the census every 10 years.
		But if you look at the map that Texas has produced, my understanding is after this map is in place, Democrats will win, on average, about 40% of the overall congressional vote in Texas and to get about 17% of the seats.
		That feels like a pretty big partisan skew and slant, right?
		But then you look at Illinois.
		What happens in Illinois?
		Republicans win about 44% of the seats, sorry, the vote, and get about 17% of the seat.
		California, prior to Newsom wanting to gerrymander on top of the current gerrymander, Republicans get about 40% of the vote and 17% of the seats.
		So it can't be that this is okay for big blue states to do and not for big red states.
		So again, we have an arms race.
		California, I expect this new map will pass.
		There's some opposition to it.
		There's some procedural hurdles.
		I expect they'll get through that.
		They'll counter Texas plus five R seats with plus five D seats.
		Then we'll go to other states.
		And I just think there's more juice to squeeze from Republican states.
		So net net Republicans will end up benefiting here, but not a great process.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So if this is an arms race, Republicans have the advantage.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And at what point, or do you think at some point the federal courts will step in or Congress could step in, which oversees federal voting?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so the court, Supreme Court has ruled, and there are more decisions, there's more to be litigated here, but basically this is just a political process and the courts shouldn't have a role in drawing the boundaries or saying what's fair or what's not.
		Obviously this process goes back to the very founding of the Republic, 1812 state Senate seat in Massachusetts there.
		That's how we get Governor Gary, Jerry, I think, Gary, actually, but now it's mispronounced, gerrymandering.
		But that's how we get the term.
		Yeah, so the courts, I think, will take a pretty hands-off role.
		You know, ideally, this is never going to happen.
		Well, one, I think Congress could pass a rule just saying you got to do it right after the census.
		You can't do it mid-decade.
		Beyond that, you'd hope eventually we'd just get some system where AI or a computer comes up with a formula that you can apply in every state in the country and you have more competitive districts rather than less.
		I think that's good for the country, good for our politics.
		But even if you came up with such a system, one state would eventually say, no, we're going to ignore this model and do it our own way.
		Then every other state would do it their own way as well.
		So I think this is just an inherent part of our republic.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Staying on voting for a second longer, mail-in voting.
		Is mail-in voting good for our country, good for our politics?
		Donald Trump has been particularly critical of mail-in voting recently.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I prefer same-day, in-person voting, in that you vote the same day, you vote on election day, you know every event that's happened prior to you making your final call.
		In-person voting is the most secure.
		It's also the most mistake proof for the voter.
		You know, if you're confused by something or you do something wrong, there's someone right there to correct you or guide you.
		But that system is long gone.
		We've had absentee voting in the country forever.
		We've had mail-in voting, no excuse mail-in voting for a long time.
		I think California is the first state, maybe in the 1980s, that began to say you can vote absentee without actually being out of the state or having a reason.
		You can just do it.
		And of course, those Western states are also the first to adopt so-called universal mail-in voting, which I'm really not a fan of, which is you send a ballot to every registered voter.
		So you have all these live ballots kind of floating around.
		I prefer the system of Georgia, Florida.
		You're a registered voter.
		In Georgia, you request the ballot.
		You have to provide ID or a proof of ID.
		Then you send the ballot, and there are all sorts of security measures.
		And you've got to do it in time, right?
		They're deadlines for this.
		Again, California, I think they'll accept ballots like a week after the election.
		That's how you get this bizarre thing where we're all sitting waiting around to get the results in congressional districts weeks after the election, which is just not a good process.
		So I think there are ways this can be tightened up, but it's going to be with us for the duration.
		And what all Republican operatives believe is that as long as it exists, you have to take advantage of it.
		It's a huge disadvantage to your turnout operation if you have a universe of voters, none of whom are voting early, none of whom are voting by mail, and 75% or 80% are going to vote anyway, but you have to keep contacting them up to the election because you're not sure, right?
		So it's an enormous waste of resources.
		It's much better if your high-propensity voters vote early, you strike them off your turnout list, and then you can focus on the people that are harder to turn out.
		If one party is doing that and the other isn't, it's a huge disadvantage to the party that isn't, which is why Republicans got Trump to kind of produce this hostage tape last year telling people to vote by mail.
		They played it constantly at the convention, even though obviously he's not a fan, which we saw evidence of again this past week.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rich Lowry, our guest this Sunday morning on the Washington Journal.
		He's the National Review Editor-in-Chief, of course, has several books out as well, and he's always happy to take your phone calls.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Democrats 202-748-8000.
		Independents 202-748-8002.
		As folks are calling in, Mr. Lowry, I did want to ask you about the lead story in today's Washington Post.
		The Pentagon is now drafting plans to dispatch troops to Chicago after this latest deployment to Washington, D.C. What's your take on National Guard troops in American cities?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I think it's probably going to happen, right?
		Trump's talked a lot about it publicly.
		I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentagon has plans to do it, and I kind of think it's going to happen.
		I think Trump just likes the optics of it, likes the feel of it.
		I don't think National Guard troops make a huge difference.
		You know what they've done in Washington, D.C., maybe provided an additional sense of security for people, maybe free up at the margins some police resources, but they're standing in front of federal buildings.
		That's their role.
		And parking their vehicles out in front of Union Station, standing in Union Stations, standing on metro platforms.
		And again, I think probably most D.C. residents appreciate that, except for the radical fringe of activists.
		But you'll see that in Chicago as well, maybe other cities.
		It'll be hugely controversial.
		It'll be explosive.
		You get all sorts of denunciations from the local and state of Democratic officials.
		You get protesters yelling at them, and they're just going to stand there.
		So I think the thing that can move the ball is more federal resources in these cities.
		But the difference is, right, the federal government ultimately runs D.C. and has all these powers for direct rule in D.C. that don't exist in a city like Chicago.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And I should probably note that if you head to the opinion page of the Washington Post this morning, A23, there is a column by Greg Pemberton.
		He's the chairman of the D.C. Police Union.
		He writes, President Trump's Donald Trump's takeover this month of the D.C. police was a drastic but necessary step saying that the president's takeover validates what our union has been saying for five years.
		City police can't function under the current conditions in D.C. If you want to read that column, it's in today's Washington Post.
		If you want to chat with Rich Lowry, he's with us for about the next 30, 35 minutes this morning.
		And Doug's up first out of Newcastle, Delaware, Republican.
		Doug, thanks for calling.
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
		So good to be on the line with you.
		I'm really excited to have this opportunity.
		The first thing I'd like to say is I think it's pretty comical to have somebody who operates the flagship of William F. Buckley just so commonly just basically dismiss the complete contravenance of conservative thought that inserting armed military troops into American cities based strictly because the president likes the optics of it represents.
		I think that's really silly.
		You know, we're all up against quite a bit right now in this country, and there's not enough money to go around.
		I keep hearing this president talk about all the money that's supposed to be coming in, most notably, in my opinion, with this, frankly, socialist takeover of the company Intel after determining that, you know, basically flip-flopping on the fact that the CEO needed to resign, he's compromised, and then what?
		You know, he gave the country $11 billion worth of stock.
		So now we took over the means of production, and that's supposed to make us smile and nod.
		Where is all this money going?
		How's it being accounted for?
		It's a waste.
		This is the opposite of what conservatism is supposed to be.
		I've seen Mr. Lowry on here fairly often smiling and nodding his way through the problem.
		But you got to eventually stand for something.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Doug in Delaware.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mr. Lowry, give you a chance to respond.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, the Intel thing is a very, very bad idea.
		This is a company that's been struggling for a long time, and no one has ever said, oh, what we need to do to make our company more profitable or more adept or shrewd in terms of the market is have a federal stake in our company.
		So I don't see any justification for this.
		I do think, you know, Trump, it's this weird combination.
		A traditional business-oriented Republican who wants to cut taxes, who wants to deregulate, at the same time, has a very interventionist view of the federal government's federal government's role in the economy.
		And I think this just really has to do with his personal predilections, right?
		This is a guy who likes power, likes wielding power, has a very personal view of the presidency, and we're seeing it play out across all sorts of areas, and Intel is one of them.
		But I agree with Color, it's a very bad idea.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The caller brought up William F. Buckley.
		There's a big new book out on William F. Buckley, Sam Tannenhaus' Buckley, The Life and Revolution That Changed America.
		Have you read that book?
		Any thoughts?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I have, yeah.
		Look, it's an exhaustive book.
		It's a thousand pages.
		So it was even hard for me to get through, right?
		And I have more interest in Bill Buckley than the average person.
		My hats off to the author, Sam Tannenhaus, for just it's a formidable act of research, but I think could have used more editing, could have been 500 pages and just as good or actually better.
		It kind of ends roughly in 1980, bizarrely, given how exhaustive it's been on every aspects of Bill's life prior to that point.
		I don't like the judgments it makes about Buckley in various ways, but in the end of the day, from a left-to-center guy, Sam Tannenhaus, it's an admiring book.
		So if you're very, very, very interested in Bill Buckley, you might want to pick it up.
		But it's, I hate to say it, it's slog.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Sam Tannenhaus is going to be speaking about that book at the National Book Festival here in Washington, D.C. C-SPAN's Book TV covering the National Book Festival this year.
		And it'll be nine hours of coverage from Book TV on September the 6th, if you want to join us on C-SPAN 2.
		This is Steve in Florida, Democrat.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I tend to vote Democrat.
		I am not a Democrat.
		And ever since the Reagan administration, since the 80s, all the communication outlets have painted a caricature of myself and most of the people like me who tend to vote Democrat.
		And I'm here to dispel those myths.
		I work hard.
		I've worked one to two jobs all my life.
		I've raised a child.
		I have a faith.
		I'm not an advocate for teaching socialism in the schools and trying to take faith out of the schools like a lot of the Republicans who called in this morning suggest.
		And I'm not trying to indoctrinate an ideology to the schools.
		I just I'm pretty much 99% like any given person who votes Republican.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Steve, what would you say the Democratic Party's biggest selling point is right now?
unidentified		Right now, I'd say the biggest selling point is the anti-woke movement is laughable.
		I mean, in this country of 300 million people, maybe somewhere in some school, somebody tried to indoctrinate a certain ideology.
		And now, in Oklahoma, any teacher that wants to apply for a job has to take an anti-woke, anti-DEI test here in Florida.
		My gosh, I could go on forever in Florida.
		Prospective college students have to declare their political feelings.
		They're banning books.
		They're making teachers teach anti-communism in class.
		I mean, in what universe is the anti-woke movement, if you're going to use it in context of a got your point, Steve.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Let me let Rich Lowry jump in.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not familiar with the Oklahoma situation.
		I have looked at a lot this notion that Florida is banning books.
		And what that really means is you go through the school library, and if it's a book that seems to be inappropriate for that age level, you put it in the age level for more advanced, for older kids, or you just take it out of the school library, and it's not banned, right?
		You can go to the local bookstore and get it.
		You can go to probably the local public library and get it.
		It's just not appropriate to present to school children.
		I think just basically these decisions about what kids are reading, about what the curriculum is, it should just be a consensus down-the-middle curriculum.
		You know, math, reading, and a consensus view of U.S. history that acknowledges our sins, and there have been many of them, but also does not obsess over them and does not portray them as defining entirely the American experience.
		And there's been much too much of that across all areas of American life.
		And Florida's been a leader in this regard.
		There's just been pushback.
		And this goes to what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about the voter registration situation.
		So the left tends to portray, oh my gosh, it's a culture war by Ron DeSantis.
		They're taking out this book about queerness that's in a library for second graders, right?
		Most people are like, no, he's not the aggressor there.
		He's just playing defense.
		It's just a common sense judgment.
		So again, I think unless Democrats get this, they can win an election, a national election again, but it's going to be hard and be very dependent on circumstances working their direction.
		I think kind of the model for the party is someone, I'm not saying him himself, but someone like Senator Fetterman, who can, in a very pungent way, kind of flip off left-wing protesters, show his contempt for them.
		At the same time, he's on the left on the vast majority of issues, but he feels commonsensical.
		He feels independent.
		He feels unafraid.
		And I think that kind of model would be one that would work for a Democratic candidate in 2028.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		On the book bans issue, how do you figure out what's appropriate or what's not appropriate for a school library?
		And I take your point about that these books are still available in other places.
		But should any parent be able to get a book removed from a school library?
		There's stories, and I'm sure you've read them too, about a very limited number, handful of individuals being responsible for hundreds of books being taken out of libraries in Florida, Oklahoma, other states as well.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and you hear about the ridiculous cases, I don't know, taking out a biography of Jackie Robinson being woke.
		Now, maybe there are woke biographies of Jackie Robinson out there, but I kind of doubt it, right?
		It's a fundamentally American story.
		So, you know, it's kind of a subjective thing inherently, but I think just a common sense test.
		And if you have a committee of reasonable people, there may be one or two, like, yeah, Jackie right, we can't tell that story.
		It's too disparaging on the American experience because someone from the St. Louis Cardinals yelts racial abuse at them, and we can't have kids exposed to that or whatever.
		But most people say, no, that's fine.
		So, yeah, at the margins, you're going to make wrong calls, or you're going to have extreme judgments.
		But the basic idea that the vast majority of books should be acceptable to the vast majority of parents, I think, is one that makes sense to most people.
		And also, I think there's a tendency to believe, you know, we see this in the Smithsonian debate a little bit as well, that politics and parents should have no say on what happens in public institutions, right?
		So it's one thing that you want to find, you know, you want to do your private school and you want to have whatever books you want there, and you want to have cutting-edge woke material, and the parents are into that, and that's what they're paying for.
		It's fine, but that's not what in public schools is inherently a government institution.
		So government has a role in deciding what the curriculum is, what the subject matter is, what the reading materials is.
		So you want it to be commonsensical, but there's nothing wrong inherently with parents having a say in this.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So how does that translate to the Smithsonian debate and what's in our national museums here on the mall?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Well, these are federal institutions with an element of independence, but they're government institutions.
		They're national museums.
		So I would go back to what I was saying about curriculum.
		It should be just a consensus view of U.S. history.
		Of course, we shouldn't expunge every reference to slavery.
		That would be perverse and wrong.
		That's part of our history, a shameful part of our history, how we overcame that.
		And racial discrimination is an inspiring part of our story.
		But what you want to avoid is trigger warnings about everything, an obsession with these issues.
		And again, the idea that somehow this country is inherently sinful.
		And that's really what defines us instead of the inspiring positive aspects.
		And I'm hoping in this review of Smithsonian materials, that's the attitude the administration takes, and that's what the outcome is.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rich Lowry is with the National Review Editor-in-Chief there with us for about the next 15, 20 minutes or so.
		It's nationalreview.com where you can see his and his colleagues' stories.
		This is Ashley out of Calverton, New York, Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		And I don't want to give up.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You there?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You there, Ashley?
unidentified		Yeah.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You don't want to give up.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Can I speak?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, ma'am.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Rich Lowry.
unidentified		Yeah.
		All right.
		Hi, Mr. Lowry.
		How are you doing?
		I'm calling because, you know, I hear a lot of people, I'm an independent.
		I hear a lot of people, you know, declare their ideology related to party.
		I think that, especially as a New Yorker, I mean, Donald Trump was a Democrat for years before he became a Republican.
		So much of what Democrats are doing alienated Democrats, okay?
		And nobody in the Republican Party in New York is so wonderful either.
		You have to be an independent.
		You have to think for yourself.
		You have to look at all the facts.
		And let's face it, Donald Trump is consequential, effective.
		He's doing things.
		You don't always like every single thing that somebody does, but his overall performance has been very effective.
		And he does get things done.
		And he says what he's going to do.
		I think it's so sad to go back to that whole William Buckley thing.
		Yeah, he was a conservative.
		He made some inroads.
		But he was really not nearly as consequential as Donald Trump is.
		And somebody writes a thousand pages about him.
		That's, you know, there's so much more that can be said about all the things that Trump has done, and people know it.
		And this idea that, you know, New York Republicans, they can't even get out of their own way.
		I cannot be labeled as a Republican or a Democrat.
		I have to be who I am, independent.
		I voted for either side at different times.
		It doesn't matter about party affiliation.
		And people need to really think independently.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Ashley in New York.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		A lot there, Rich Lowry.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I'm in favor of thinking independently as well, but I've come down where I've come down, but you should always be open to new evidence and changing your mind on things.
		Bill Buckley was, in terms of public intellectuals, was highly influential, but he wasn't a president of the United States.
		And I agree at the caller just on how consequential Trump is.
		Now, people, when you say that, he's highly consequential.
		He's been highly effective for his own purposes.
		He's done a lot of important stuff.
		That's not necessarily an endorsement of all that he's done.
		But you just look at the first seven months here.
		What he's done on trade alone, which I tend to oppose, is going to endure.
		We're going to have higher tariffs for a very long time.
		And this is a position that when he came down that Elvir in 2015 was a minority, certainly within elite precincts of both parties.
		And he utterly changed it.
		This is something he talked about for 30 or 40 years and he's done.
		If he'd done nothing else the first seven months, that would make the initial part of his presidency highly consequential.
		And then you get immigration, which we've talked about a little bit.
		Then you get the fight with the universities, which is also a big deal.
		The pushback against DEI, which is also a big deal, bombing Iran, which again, alone, if he'd done nothing else, we'd be talking a lot about that today.
		And it would be a big event in the first six months of his presidency.
		And there's more besides that.
		So there's no doubt he learned from his first term.
		He knew what he wanted to do coming into the second.
		And the emphasis has been on governing ambition.
		Again, like it or not, literally from day one.
		And I think he's created a different model for how presidents are going to operate going forward for better or worse.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned day one.
		Donald Trump said he could end the war in Ukraine on day one.
		Has he been effective in that effort over the past couple weeks?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I think it's been pretty effective.
		We've got to see what the result is.
		If there's a result, obviously, saying he was going to end it in day one was crazy and an exaggeration, and that was never going to happen.
		And he's inevitably acknowledged, well, this was tougher than I thought.
		I think he has catalyzed things.
		He has been moving somewhat.
		I think it's reasonable to look for a settlement here because Ukraine is not going to push Russia out of its territory entirely, unfortunately.
		I wish they could.
		And unless there's an unforeseen collapse in Ukrainian lines, Russia is not going to sweep to Kyiv the way they wanted to in the initial weeks of the war.
		So it makes sense to draw a line somewhere and try to come up with some somewhat durable settlement.
		But I believe you're not going to get that unless Trump is pushing Putin even more than he has to this point.
		I think he gets Putin to Alaska by making these threats about secondary sanctions and the like.
		I think unless he's actually imposing more of those, we briefly had him on India.
		Unless he's doing more of that, unless he's providing Ukraine more weapons with less restrictions, that it's unlikely that Putin's going to conclude, well, you know, I need peace because he's advancing on the battlefield slowly, painfully.
		I think at some point the Russians maybe become exhausted, but we haven't reached that point yet.
		So I think he needs to promise more pain for Putin to really shake something loose here.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if you read Peggy Newton's column yesterday in the Wall Street Journal.
		Her point is that try something.
		At least he's trying here.
		She ends with an interesting story.
		And I'll just read the last two paragraphs and get your thoughts.
		She said, I close with an attitude toward history that can be a helpful attitude towards life.
		It's an old folk tale.
		A horse thief is arrested and found guilty.
		The king sentences him to death at dawn.
		The thief says, Wait, please, there's something I've never told anyone.
		I don't only steal the horses, I have the power to make them laugh.
		It's a gift.
		Give me one month and I'll train the king's horse to laugh at all of his jokes.
		And the king agrees.
		And days later, a guard, seeing that the thief is getting nowhere with the horse, asked why he'd make such a stupid promise.
		And the thief said, well, in a month, the king may die, and everyone might forget why I'm here, or they might release me, or I may die, or the horse might laugh.
		She says, take a chance, try something new.
		You never know.
		Maybe the horse will laugh.
		She's talking about it, but in a very serious context here with Ukraine, of just try something.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that's right.
		As long as you're not so desperate for a deal, you sign off on a bad deal or go along with Trump with Putin's stringing things along.
		So I think the highest risk here was that Putin would find a way to split Trump from Ukraine and for Europe, which would be a geopolitical and diplomatic disaster.
		After the meeting last Monday, that seems very unlikely.
		Then the other downside is he just stringed things along without consequences and grinds it out and takes more and more of Ukraine.
		That's something Trump needs to guard against.
		And then the final downside is even if you get a deal, it's an extremely favorable deal to Putin, not just in terms of territory, but in terms of the state of Ukraine going forward.
		Putin wants Ukraine to be defenseless, to be open and vulnerable to a third bite of the apple, which Putin is likely to want to take at some point.
		So it has to be a deal worth having.
		I mean, it's obvious to me Ukraine has to give up territory.
		It's going to be very painful for it.
		But it does need security guarantees.
		It does need a robust military going forward.
		Because what Putin wants, again, is a vulnerable and hopefully failing Ukrainian state.
		Because one motive for this war in the first place was he couldn't tolerate the model of a somewhat successful democracy on his borders.
		And he wants to keep that from happening.
		And I think it'd be good for the West and obviously Ukrainians if we find a way to make it happen, even if it's ceding territories and it's east.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Smithfield, North Carolina, this is Tom Republican.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Rich Lowry.
unidentified		Oh, yes.
		Good morning, gentlemen.
		Thanks for taking my call.
		I'm a registered Republican.
		The last color from New York, I believe, was an independent.
		But I think independently as a Republican voter, I listen to both sides.
		I look at all the media sources.
		We have media sources that are divided, leaning towards Democrat and Republican.
		And I think that's what creates a lot of the social confusion that we have today.
		People are confused.
		When you have grammar school children being indoctrinated, not knowing what is a boy and what is a girl, that's very confusing.
		We're missing the boat on patriotism in our country.
		We have to educate our new generations.
		Patriotism, you were born and raised here, and you adapt to the American culture.
		And that's the way it should be.
		As far as Trump is concerned, the man's a businessman.
		Business people are cut and dry.
		If things are wrong, they need to be corrected.
		And he's made some good progress on this trade deal, especially with China.
		The Intel thing that you guys were talking about earlier, I think the CEO of Intel is playing both sides of the fence if he's selling chips to China that potentially are compromising to our strategic advantage.
		And I think that the stake in Intel hopefully secures that part of it so we're not selling away our military chips to China.
		But basically, that's all I have.
		The lady in New York was very well spoken.
		And we all have to think independently.
		And when we see a lot of things that just don't make common sense, we have to make a choice.
		We have to make a choice through our own judgment.
		Is that right or is that wrong?
		But I think our country is headed the right direction.
		We just need to bring jobs back to have something for our next generation to do.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rich Lowry.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is a confusing time.
		Certainly in terms of the information environment, and I just totally endorse, obviously, the view that you need to think through for yourself.
		You need to read all sources and kind of triangulate to what the truth is and then come up with what your own view of the truth is.
		I think in terms of the media environment, it's the best of times and the worst of times.
		I mean, there's more good content more readily accessible than any time in our history.
		And there's more terrible content that's presented in a more alluring way than any time in our country.
		So it's incumbent on individuals to go out and seek the best sources of information, though obviously a lot of people aren't necessarily doing that on any given day.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Pep on X has this question for you looking ahead to Congress's return after the August recess.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mr. Lowry, do you think a Republican resistance against Trump will return to Congress this September?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		No.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		No, definitely not.
		Trump has a complete grip on his party in a way that in recent memory is totally unprecedented.
		I don't know when actually have we seen anything like this.
		Maybe FDR in the 30s when he had those huge super majorities.
		But even then, he was dealing with a significant faction of his party that wasn't into the New Deal, Southern Democrats and others.
		But this is totally different.
		And it all stems from his grip on Republican voters.
		They adore the guy.
		They think he's a legend.
		They are inclined to agree with whatever he says or does.
		And then also Trump's willingness to directly target people in extremely harsh ways, in ways they're going to feel immediately.
		If you're a Republican congressman and he's truth-socialing a critique of you, you know, you're going to hear about it at your next town hall.
		You're going to hear about it when you go to your coffee shop.
		So the tendency of most Republicans is just like, I don't want to deal with that.
		You know, even if I don't like something he's saying or doing, I'm just going to either duck and cover or I'm going to go along with it.
		So that's an extraordinary power.
		And I'm not sure when it's going away.
		I'm not sure.
		Usually you become a lame duck because members of your own party realize, oh, you're going to be gone soon, and I don't need to pay attention to you anymore the way I used to.
		I'm not sure whether that'll ever be the case with Trump, certainly not until January 2029 when he's leaving.
		And then you'd have to guess, unless something crazy and totally unexpected happens, that his endorsement will be dispositive in a Republican primary in 2028.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		To Ty out of South Carolina Independent, just a few minutes left here with Rich Lowry.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ty, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Yes, I see exactly why Donald Trump did not want anyone to be in the room with him and Putin and nobody to hear anything.
		Now, Dalbite on this right quick.
		He's in there talking to Putin about million voting and how to steal an election.
		So he was in there.
		He wasn't talking to Putin about ending the war.
		He was in there talking to him about something else.
		So I see why he didn't want none of them wanting that.
		But the main reason I called...
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ty, you're talking about Alaska.
		The original meeting was a three-on-three.
		Mr. Wickoff and Marco Rubio in the room with Donald Trump as well.
unidentified		No, no.
		He had another meeting when he was by himself with Putin.
		Do you not know that?
		And he refused to let anyone in there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about Helsinki back in 2018?
unidentified		No, he had a meeting with Putin.
		The first meeting he had with Putin was him and Putin only in Alaska.
		And he was there with Putin, and nobody was in the room.
		And they didn't let anyone know what Putin was talking, what they was talking about.
		And then all of a sudden, he comes out and say that Putin told him that mail-in voting wasn't right.
		So he was talking about voting and stuff with Putin.
		Now, I don't want to take up my time because this is a real important thing I want to get to.
john in mexico ▲ ● ▼		Because the Democrats, the registration is really going down.
unidentified		And I'm going to tell you exactly why.
		The reason why is because nobody don't want to look at this and everything.
		And you might cut me off when I really tell the truth because people don't like to hear the truth.
		But it was because of the genocide that's going on in Gaza.
		That was one of the biggest things.
		And then when our kids started to protest, they couldn't even protest.
		There was an arrest in them and everything like that.
		So the young people, and then you had the, hello?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Tyg, still with you, but I'm going to let Richard Lowry jump in just because I'm running short on time.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm with you.
		I think that's he's referring to Helsinki.
		I'm not aware of Trump being alone with Putin except for in the beast, and I think it's unlikely that they're exchanging views on how to steal elections.
		I don't think Trump should be citing Putin's endorsement for his views on mail-in voting favorably.
		That doesn't make any sense to me.
		But yeah, I think the colours are a little off base there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Let me head all the way out to Hawaii, Donald, up either very late or very early.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Donald.
unidentified		Yeah, thank you for taking my call.
		Mr. Lowry, we have a problem here in Hawaii where you have mail-in ballots.
		And if you can't do your signature because you're either blind or you have a Parkinson's, you can do a witness and the witness can sign for you to do your ballot.
		But then when the clerks for the different islands, the counties verify, if you do it the same day in the drop box, they don't have time to verify the witness.
		I don't know why they don't have the person who can't sign register their witness so that they have verification.
		That's a big problem right there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mr. Lowry, something you've looked into at all?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it could make sense, but I don't know anything about it, so I hesitate to comment.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Two minutes left.
		It's nationalreview.com.
		Mr. Lowry, viewers can see all your work there.
		What are you going to be writing about this week?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to be working on a piece on whether it made sense, would have made sense for us to ally with Hitler to fight Stalin in World War II, which is Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show that unloosed, uncorked this view, which doesn't make much sense to me, but does raise some interesting historical questions.
		So I'm looking at that.
		And I also think, you know, I don't really decide what I'm writing for my Monday columns.
		I write two syndicate homes a week until Monday and see what's breaking and what's hot.
		But looking at what seems to be a major decline in the immigrant population, such that we may have the first time when we have net negative migration from the United States in the last 50 years.
		And that would be not just because of the enforcement efforts that have been going on directly, but because illegal immigrants are deciding to leave on their own, which I think would be a very welcome outcome.
		So I've penciled that in as a subject, but I can't make any guarantees.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And we've talked about your books over the years, Legacy, Paying the Price for the Clinton years, your Lincoln book, Lincoln Unbound, The Case for Nationalism, the most recent one.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you have another book in the works?
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		I occasionally have ideas.
		I find it, though, so book writing is so painful.
		It's so difficult, especially when you have a full-time job.
		My hat's off to working journalists who produce major books, which happens all the time.
		I find it extremely difficult.
		So eventually here, maybe I'll come up with an idea that I find at least so compelling that I'll make the leap again, but I'm not doing it currently.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Well, when you do let us know, we'll talk about it on book TV.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rich Lowry is the editor-in-chief of the National Review, and we always appreciate your time.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Always enjoy it.
rich lowry ▲ ● ▼		Thanks so much.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Coming up in about 30 minutes this morning, a discussion on the civil rights movement, on how we portray history.
		Penil Joseph, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, will join us for that discussion.
		But up next, it is time for you to lead the discussion.
		Open forum.
		Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now's the time to call in.
		The numbers are on your screen, and you can start dialing in, and we'll get to your calls right after the break.
unidentified		I see you interviewed the other night.
		I watched it about two o'clock in the morning.
		There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happened to have a little rerun.
patty murray ▲ ● ▼		Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week?
patty murray ▲ ● ▼		Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape.
unidentified		Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor.
al green ▲ ● ▼		I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN.
sean duffy ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of things that Congress fights about, that they disagree on.
al green ▲ ● ▼		We can all watch that on C-SPAN.
unidentified		Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN.
		That was a made-for-C-SPAN moment.
		If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
		And welcome forward to everybody watching at home.
		We know C-SPAN covers this a lot as well.
		We appreciate that.
		And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell.
		This is being carried live by C-SPAN.
		It's being watched not only in this country, but it's being watched around the world right now.
		Mike said before, I happened to listen to him.
		He was on C-SPAN 1.
		That's a big upgrade, right?
		And past president.
		Why are you doing this?
		This is outrageous.
patty murray ▲ ● ▼		This is a kangaroo quarter.
unidentified		This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity, Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins.
		Join political playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground.
		ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides only on c-span america marks 250 years and c-span is there to commemorate every moment
		From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America.
		Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can.
		America 250.
		Over a year of historic moments.
		Only on the C-SPAN networks.
		Washington Journal continues.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And it's time now for our open forum.
		Any public policy issue or political issue that you want to talk about, now's your time to call in.
		Republicans, it's 202-748-8001.
		Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		Independents, 202-748-8002.
		As you're calling in, here's one story from last week that may spur some discussion in open form.
		It is from the New York Times, but it's in plenty of newspapers last Wednesday.
		Over the past two decades, there's been a steady decline in Americans who read for fun.
		According to a new study that was published on Wednesday, researchers from the University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16% in 2023 from a peak of 28% in 2004, a drop of about 40%.
		It declined around 3% each year over those two decades.
		There's evidence, the story notes, that reading for pleasure has been declining since the 1940s.
		But researchers for the project called the size of the latest decrease surprising, given that the study defined reading broadly, encompassing books and magazines and newspapers in print, an electronic or audio form of reading as well.
		That story from the New York Times, but again, it was a study that was widely circulated last week and got plenty of headlines.
		We can talk about that or any public policy issue that you want to talk about.
		Barbara is up first in Open Forum out of San Angelo, Texas.
		Republican, good morning.
		What's on your mind?
unidentified		Well, I've been watching this morning and Americans have become so lazy.
		I worked all my life.
		Nobody ever gave me anything.
		I never asked for anything.
		I always figured that I should work for what I get.
		I look at these unfortunately young people that stay on their computers, on their phones, on PlayStation, instead of getting out and trying to make something of yourself to educate yourself, to read.
		I don't understand these young people so much anymore.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Barbara, that study that Americans are reading less for pleasure, do you take that as a sign of more laziness or less laziness in your critique about a lazy America?
unidentified		I think we have let our brains become lazy.
		We don't read, we don't study.
		We stare at the TV.
		We go through our phone hour after hour after hour.
		We watch the boob tube.
		I am amazed that people listen to all of this garbage that's on TV.
		And I'm not saying just the Democrats or the Republicans or the Independents.
		These people have an agenda and they want you To adhere to that agenda.
		And so they preach to you day, day after day.
		You don't use your own brains.
		You don't think for yourself.
		Yes, I'm a registered Republican.
		I have never voted a straight Republican ticket.
		I study.
		I look at who I'm voting for.
		Why do people just say I'm a Democrat, hit the Democrat butt or the Republican and run?
		I don't understand this type of thinking for yourself.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Barbara, we'll take your point in Texas and head up to Minnesota.
		Alan's waiting next.
		Democrat, good morning.
unidentified		Hey, John.
		It's been a little while since I talked to you.
		I'm just disappointed in 77 Americans that voted for a guy that's mentally ill.
		And I just can't think that their independent would be a third party because the MAGA is the third party.
		There's no Republicans anymore.
		And I also talked with some neighbors, and they're disappointed that they fell for Donald Trump and what is going on in our country with authoritarian policies.
		And that's just all I got to share this morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Alan, when you say your neighbors are disappointed, they fell for Donald Trump.
		He ran for president three times.
		What surprised them this time?
unidentified		This time, Donald Trump 2.0, he has taken over his party so strongly that it's more like an extortion.
		And he does that with the universities, police departments, and now he's got his own paramilitary, Homeland Security, with a $170 billion budget.
		It just goes on and on.
		And people are missing their neighbors with masked men, military coming into the cities.
		It's just these kind of things people don't like.
		And so, you know, what people wish for, they might not always get.
		That's all I got to say.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Alan in Minnesota.
		You mentioned military in cities.
		This is the story of the lead story in today's Washington Post.
		The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to the city of Chicago.
		The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, includes, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States.
		More in the Washington Post, Dan Lamoth with that story today.
		This is Keith out of Sellersburg, Indiana, Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		My comment, pardon me.
		I don't know how old you are, but I remember when oil was $147 a barrel, and we were paying between $4 and $4.50 a gallon.
		But now it is below $64 a barrel, and we're still paying over $3 a gallon.
		In my simple math, gasoline shouldn't be more than $2,210 a gallon.
		And I don't know why anybody hasn't brought this up.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Keith in Indiana.
		This is Rosemary in North Ridgeville, Ohio.
		Republican, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		It's Rosemarie.
		I've become very attached to my name since my parents are now deceased.
		But I miss the Cleveland.
		I grew up in Cleveland.
		We had two newspapers.
		One got delivered in the morning, the other in the evening.
		And I look forward to both of them.
		They covered the different news, you know, where one left off, the other one covered.
		But I miss the newspapers and reading for fun.
		I agree with the caller about there is no Republican Party.
		There's the party of people who love America and love Americans.
		That is the MAGA party.
		Now, the reason I dialed in is about assimilation.
		I know that immigration was suspended by one of the presidents in the 1900s so that the immigrants could assimilate.
		Today I run into, and this is just fact.
		If it was something different, I would say so.
		It's not because of who they are.
		There are no medical specialists in my area who are not Muslim.
		Some of them speak clearly and I can understand, including, I'm talking about pharmacists, nephrologists, cardiologists.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you ask them their religion?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess I'm asking, how do you know they're all Muslim?
unidentified		Okay, let me say that they're from Muslim countries.
		And I do, you know, the women wear the head covering.
		Now, did I ask them if they're from Czechoslovakia and that's a babushka they're worried?
		Well, I know a babushka and they're not babushkas.
		There's that head covering and they're not nuns or sisters.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		That's Rosemary.
		This is Ann in Akron, New York, Democrat.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, I would just like to refer to when Rich Lowberry was on.
		You did miss something, I'm afraid, that Putin and Trump did have a private meeting in The Beast, and that's where they did talk about mail-in voting.
		It was Trump getting advice on how to steal an election, not referring to Helsinki, which was also a disgrace.
		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ann in New York, this is Rich in Broadheadsville, Pennsylvania, Independent.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you for taking my call and keep up the good bipartisan right down the middle broadcasting that you do and the stories you do and what you do during the week.
		First thing I'd like to say is, in the words of President Teddy Roosevelt, and please hear me out, a true patriot is loyal to the Constitution, is not loyal to a party or a person.
		And that is where our country's problem is today.
		You have these far-right MAGA.
		This is open forum, so let me say what I'm going to say, that think that this Donald Trump, I've never seen an error.
		I'm almost 62, and I grew up in a split family of Republicans and Democrats.
		Back in the days when Tip O'Neill and a Republican president got wrong, or when things were actually being done in this country.
		Now, you know, I like to talk about the gentleman that called, I believe he's from North Carolina, talking about the schools.
		Schools are not to teach patriotism.
		Schools are to teach how to prethink, learn education.
		If you want to become a patriot, join a military school or go join the service or be a policeman.
		My thing with this whole police state is people got to wake up.
		What he's doing is so similar to what happened in Germany in the 1930s.
		You wipe out your enemies.
		He's just doing it finely.
		He's not doing it like the Nazi did.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rich, on your patriotism point, is being in the military or serving in the police the only way you can be patriotic?
unidentified		No, but what I'm saying is our schools are not a place to be indoctrinated.
		We used to sing patriotic songs, you know, in our music part of the elementary school, but we want, you know, we didn't have this separate, this divide in this country that if you don't have American flag on your house, you're, you know, you're anti-MAGA or you're anti-Republic.
		My father wasn't in the service, but my grandfather was in World War II.
		My father-in-law was in World War II.
		My uncle was in Vietnam.
		I couldn't serve because of medical problems.
		But damn it, I'm a patriot.
		It means, but I'm not going to go around and bust on somebody just because they're a different color or they don't believe in what I believe in.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a flag on your house?
unidentified		Yeah, I do.
		I had my father-in-law's flag that on Rest in Peace.
		We lost him a couple of years ago.
		He was a 93-year-old, died World War II vet in the Navy, Okinawa, on the carrier Gilbert Island.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Has anybody ever assumed something about your political persuasion because of the flag on your house?
unidentified		Yes.
		Not on my flag, on the house, no.
		But I have been ridiculed at jobs because I don't have, I don't get into conversations about how great Trump is and how wonderful he is.
		You know, the thing is, what's going to happen when three years from now he's out of office?
		Are all these pro are the police still going to be roaming?
		Are the military still going to be roaming our cities like the Brown shirts?
		Are we still going to have this negative feel about us?
		What's happening in this country is, my God, if anybody's a historian, look at what happened in Italy back in the 20s and 30s.
		Look what happened in Germany and Europe in the 1930s.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point.
		That's Rich.
		This is Elizabeth out of Florida, Line for Democrats.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Morning.
		Hi, good morning.
		I just wanted to speak on the article that you mentioned about the reading for fun.
		Sure.
		Thank you.
		I think that I think it's very much a sign of what's going on as far as the media shifting from print-based to image-based.
		There's more substance in print-based.
		The question isn't whether we're reading for fun, but whether are we reading for substance?
		And just reading, not just reading for fun, is filled with substance.
		Now we have the bite-sized computers.
		Now we have the bite-sized shiny diamonds that can be dangled to confuse you so easily because it's one word.
		It started with Reagan, who was a movie star, say-no-to-drug slogan.
		Obama actually is not, he did the change.
		Trump has his taglines as well, make America great again, you know?
		So if that's the substance, right, that's being looked at and being, you need to understand there's a value in reading, sitting down, reading a book.
		It takes time, it takes discipline, and you're finding information any way you can.
		Not to go too far off topic, I'll be done.
		But reading, sitting down and reading, strengthens the amygdala, the part of the brain where you can decide or look at other viewpoints.
		So if we're not stimulating that by sitting down and reading and talking about reading for fun is a problem, just reading and reading, you know, the newspaper's gone.
		Why are we limiting the reading fun in schools?
		We just need to promote reading, the whole public, so they can choose and have the tools to choose.
		And that's all I want to say.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Elizabeth in Florida.
		Here's a story in a newspaper about an author who wrote a whole lot of books.
		It is the obituary for Greg Isles.
		Greg Isles, a Mississippi-bred novelist whose best-selling late career thrillers explored the toxic racism that historically blighted the Jim Crow South, died on August the 15th at his home in Natchez, Mississippi.
		He was 65 years old.
		The cause was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
		Mr. Isles' southern-based books sold more than 10 million copies, and 17 of them were New York Times bestsellers.
		About 15 years ago, he moved from straightforward crime thrillers into a more thematically powerful territory.
		The New York Times writes through the influence of the crusading journalist Stanley Nelson and writing about the South and Natchez, Mississippi.
		That's the obituary for Greg Isles.
		If you want to read more of it, it's in today's New York Times.
		This is Robert, Lynchburg, Virginia, Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		And look, I have a couple of things that I would like to say.
		First of all, we were talking about Putin and Trump meeting.
		Trump was, he's telling Putin one thing and telling the other president something else.
		He's telling Putin he's not going to stop him from going when they behind closed doors that he can do whatever he want in Ukraine.
		And also that the people that doing this redistricting in Texas and in California, what the people need to do is let them do the redistricting, but turn around and have some Democrats, the Republicans and Democrats and Independents vote more Democrats in than Republicans, even after they do the redistricting.
		And that's the way to cure this problem that we are facing under Trump because he wants to be a dictator and he's laying the work groundwork if people look at it, but it's still another election and stay in power.
		That's what he's doing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Robert in Virginia.
		This is Patrick out of Canton, Georgia, just about five or six minutes left in open forum.
		Patrick, go ahead.
ernest ramirez ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you know, I hear people calling in talking about, you know, Donald Trump wants to be an authoritarian and everything.
unidentified		And, you know, he's a threat to democracy.
		But I have not heard any stories in the media, any media.
		And I was wondering if Washington Journal maybe has access to a story about what's going on with the Fulton County Commissioners in Georgia, Fulton County, Georgia.
		There are Democrats that sit on the board of commissions in Fulton County, and they are refusing to seat two Republicans on that board, on the independent board for elections.
		The judge Has issued an order that they must vote because it is the law that says they must vote and seat two Republicans on that commission, and they're refusing to do it.
		So they are actually breaking the law and they're not following the judge's orders.
		So the threat to democracy is the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.
		That's what I see.
		They say that they're doing this because they don't want to vote against the will of their constituents, but yet they have Republican constituents and they are ignoring the will of those constituents.
		So I can't, you know, I can't understand how Democrats call in and say that Republicans and Donald Trump are the threat to democracy when the threat to democracy is playing out right now in the Fulton County Board of Commissions.
		And I was just wondering if you had any stories in the media about that because I haven't seen any.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Patrick, have you tried Googling it?
unidentified		No, I have not.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So if you do, WABE is the PBS NPR station.
		There's a story.
		Fulton County commissioners disobeyed Georgia judges' order to appoint members to the election board.
		So wabe.org, if you want to read the story.
unidentified		Yes, I know of WABE.
		Yes, I haven't seen it.
		I don't particularly watch Western media.
		I watch a little bit just to stay on top of what they're talking about.
		But most of the media I consume are independent journalists and international media.
		You have to take media with a grain of salt, any media that you watch.
		Thank you very much.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		It's Patrick in the Peach State, the Sooner State.
		It's Clyde in Lawton.
		Good morning.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		How are you doing?
		Good morning, C-SPAN.
		I thought you all talked to you.
		No, I'm in history if you look at it.
		We had a Dust Bowl.
		What did they do then?
		They put people to work to solve the problem.
		The elephant in the room is $37 trillion.
		How are you going to pay that?
		You put people to work.
		You don't fire them.
		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Gary, Connorsville, Indiana, Independent.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Morning.
		And before I make my point, I just want to say that I want to extend kudos to Elizabeth in Florida for her point on reading.
		And it is good for the mind that not enough people do it, unfortunately.
		But my main point is this.
		This is an area of grave concern, man.
		We're going through a major shift in our economy.
		Very unbalanced economy anymore.
		I mean, when you look at, for example, ticket prizes at NFL games, the parking, even the parking alone is outrageous and everything.
		And everything is tailor-made so only the rich people can afford this.
		But, you know, back in my day in the 70s, you know, we can, even us middle-class people can go to, we can afford to go to a Reds game or a Bengals game, and it wouldn't kill our budget or anything.
		And it's like it was in the 1890s, man.
		You know, the Robert Baron era.
		Well, that's all I got to say.
		Peace out, America.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Gary, before you go, you mentioned the story we started with on reading.
		Fewer people are reading for fun, according to that study.
		What are you reading right now, Gary?
		And we lost Gary.
		David is in Morganville, New Jersey, line for Democrats.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thanks for having me.
		Yeah, a lot of great topics and conversations here today.
		I actually am a former registered Republican, one-time regretful Trump voter.
		So I did enjoy that topic.
		I am in the state of New Jersey.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So which election did you vote for Donald Trump in?
unidentified		2016, and I forever regretted it, especially the way it reformatted the courts.
		Also, I spend my life in science.
		And one topic that I don't think gets discussed enough is the way the current administration is literally trampling on biomedical and scientific research.
		And I wish it got more attention.
		I think it goes to the larger point of what I wanted to discuss about this administration.
		I hear a lot of people say he's a consequential president, which I differ.
		To me, a consequential president does not rule by fiat.
		They get Congress to and the Senate to pass laws that we as a nation can depend on, not a four-year transfer of power to the next fiat.
		But you see now an administration that's kneecapping everything from the media, the arts, the libraries.
		You're listening to your last guest, I think, Mr. Lowry, saying, Yeah, we should talk a little bit more about books.
		We have experts, and this is the part that gets me, especially as someone in science.
		Everybody thinks they're an expert in everything now.
		When it comes to children, we want children, behavioral psychologists weighing in on the impact of how this administration's philosophies on wokeism and the attacks on LGBTQ affects them.
		Everyone thinks that they're an expert in everything, but you're seeing attacks on the media outlets.
		If they don't like the way the media is being reported or not using the Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico, they're banned.
		You're seeing those who are most vulnerable losing their nutrition benefits.
		We talk about this Maha movement and make America Healthy Again.
		It's a laughing stock.
		This is an anti-infectious disease leader.
		He wanted to put a moratorium on research on vaccines, infectious diseases.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So, David, what you seem to be getting to is a lack of trust in the experts, right?
unidentified		Yes, this is an administration that talks about them bringing transparency, but they're doing just the opposite.
unidentified		They thrive on faith.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So, why do you think Americans lost trust in experts?
		Do you think it just happened with a Donald Trump administration?
		Or do you think it goes back farther than that?
unidentified		I think this goes back to the shifting voters.
		This is a Trump effect.
		This is not a Republican effect.
		This is a Trump effect.
		He leads with this strongman iron, like, I'm here to protect you.
		Might is right.
		That's not what politics is about.
		Politics is nuance.
		It's understanding diplomacy.
		It's understanding U.S. history.
		It's understanding the history of what made America great.
		And we've lost sight of that.
		We've lost sight of what experts mean to this country.
		We don't listen to our doctors.
		We depend on Dr. Google.
		You know, the media is influenced by non-editorialized news.
		And so when I hear all these people that call in, in fact, on the last half hour of your show, I don't just listen to one source.
		I listen to all sources.
		I immediately tune those people out because that suddenly thinks that that gives them credibility.
		And nothing irks me more because I study based on science and facts, just like we want most people.
		I see an administration that's leading on faith.
		They lose sight.
		Even look at what they're doing with the labor statistics folks.
		They want to fire Goldman Sachs statistical leaders.
		They want to fire the labor statistic leaders.
		They don't like numbers that don't conform to their narrative.
		They are twisting facts.
		And the sad part is, I believe all media can skew things that favor them.
		So I don't want to get into this.
		I listened to this that the problem is we've lost sight of nuance.
		Everything is about optics.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point.
		That's David in Morganville, New Jersey, our last caller in Open Forum.
		Stick around, though.
		About 45 minutes left this morning.
		In that time, we'll be joined by Penil Joseph, professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
		We'll talk about the history of the civil rights movement and how history is portrayed today.
		We'll be right back.
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john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I enjoy hearing everybody's opinion.
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		I think C-SPAN should be required viewing for all three branches of government.
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john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And author and professor Penil Joseph joins us now via Zoom.
		His latest book is Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Movement.
		And Professor Joseph, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, we're talking about 14 years of a civil rights movement.
		Why is 1963 sort of the focus of this book and the pivotal year of that movement in your mind?
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Well, John, when we think about 1963, that's going to be the peak year of the heroic period of the civil rights movement.
		So when we think about civil rights in America, this is not just those 14 years.
		We're really talking about decades and centuries of struggle for civil and human rights.
		But what's so important is that the period between 1954 and 1968 are the critical decades of America's Second Reconstruction,
		where so many of the principles of equality and multiracial democracy that were first really articulated and attempted to be institutionalized after the Civil War during Reconstruction are finally institutionalized in our multiracial democracy.
		And what's really incredible about that period in 1963 is that 63 is the high point of the heroic period of the civil rights movement where we create a 50-year racial justice consensus on citizenship, dignity, freedom, and multiracial democracy.
		And we do it from both the bottom up and the top down.
		So we see people like the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s and Malcolm X, but we see cultural figures like James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry.
		We see organic civil rights leaders like Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland.
		And we also see the Kennedy administration, John F. Kennedy, the president, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, and other figures who are very, very pivotal in institutionalizing really a third American republic.
		Because if we think about the end of the Civil War as the Second American Republic, like my colleague Manisha Sinha has said and written about in a brilliant book called The Second American Republic, then when we think about the second reconstruction, it really is the creation of this third republic where for the first time we institutionalize citizenship for all Americans.
		And we really do so both through policy, but we also do so through culture and a rhetoric that acknowledges black citizenship and dignity as the beating heart of multiracial democracy.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		For viewers who are trying to remember their history here, run through just some of the key civil rights events of 1963.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Oh, certainly.
		So 1963 is going to be the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.
		So there is a commemoration and celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation that year.
		1963 is a year where initially civil rights activism in Greenwood, Mississippi is front page news in March of 1963, where there's a group of young civil rights workers who are connected to a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which is the most important grassroots multiracial democratic movement, I think, in history.
		And they are pushing for voting rights and civil rights in Greenwood, Mississippi.
		They're going to be attacked and look for the Justice Department to help them.
		And that's front page news.
		But the events that are really going to overtake the events in Greenwood are the events in Birmingham, Alabama.
		So in April and May, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is going to be assisting a local movement led by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, Alabama.
		And we think about Birmingham in 1963.
		It's really a dying steel city, the heart of the former Confederacy.
		Birmingham is a place that's racially segregated.
		Black people are economically impoverished and experience police brutality.
		There's a commissioner system there, and the city commissioner is Eugene Bull Conner, a notorious anti-communist and former sports broadcaster who is going to sick fire hoses and German shepherds on peaceful demonstrators.
		And so when we think about April to May of 1963, this is where Dr. King is imprisoned on Easter Sunday of 1963.
		He's going to write his famous letter from Birmingham Jail in Birmingham.
		And the images of Birmingham, the ugly images of German shepherds attacking African American children, women, and men are going to be broadcast nationally and globally and really spur the Kennedy administration into more action.
		1963 is also the year where Medgar Evers is leading a movement for racial justice in Jackson, Mississippi.
		He's an NAACP activist.
		He's a World War II veteran, and he's really one of the most powerful speakers and eloquent and talented civil rights leaders of his generation, just 37 years old.
		He's going to be assassinated just a few hours after John F. Kennedy on June 11th gives really an amazing speech.
		John F. Kennedy's finest moment as President of the United States is June 11th, 1963, where he gives a speech at 8 p.m. Washington time, 17-minute speech, some of it extemporized, some of it written with the help of his brother Bobby Kennedy and his speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, where Kennedy says that civil rights is a moral issue as clear as the Constitution and as old as scripture.
		And he says those who do nothing invite shame as well as violence.
		Those who recognize, who act boldly recognize right as well as reality.
		And in that speech, John F. Kennedy talks about the rates of Negro infants, black infants, then called Negro infants, versus white infants thriving in the United States.
		He talks about the fact that when we seek soldiers in the military, we don't think about color when we send them to Vietnam and Germany and other places.
		Really an extraordinary speech, but one of the words that stands out to me is where he says, we preach freedom around the world.
		And then he pauses and he says, and we mean it.
		And he pauses because there's so many huge contradictions between America's articulation of freedom abroad and discrimination and segregation and prejudice and bias at home.
		1963 is also the year of the March on Washington, August 28th, 1963.
		But a few months before the March on Washington, as John F. Kennedy is in Germany speaking in Bonn in Berlin about freedom, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. does a speech in Detroit on June 23rd, The Great Walk for Freedom, which Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown, makes a record out of King's speech, where he first uses the lines, I have a dream, on June 23rd, 1963.
		And of course, the March on Washington for jobs and freedom becomes the largest civil rights demonstration in the history of the Republic up to that time.
		And that march is extraordinary.
		King does his very famous I Have a Dream speech.
		But that's the first time that Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy listen to Dr. King doing an entire speech, and they're going to be hugely, hugely impressed.
		And so that's a high point in 1963.
		1963 is also the year of the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
		And we're going to see four children killed on September 15th, 1963, four black girls and two little boys are going to be killed in separate incidences.
		So six children in one day.
		And that's going to be an extraordinary crisis.
		There's going to be really weeks of racial justice demonstrations following those crises.
		And of course, the death of John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963.
		Kennedy becomes really that year's final martyr to the second Reconstruction of that year and the high point of the second Reconstruction with his assassination in Dallas.
		And even though Lee Harvey Oswald is going to be looked upon as the killer, Dallas, Texas is a hotbed of right-wing conservatism, the John Birch Society, and people who were spinning wild conspiracies saying that the president of the United States was a traitor and a communist, none of which was true.
		These were all falsehoods and lies.
		But you can see the drumbeat of conspiracy theories that are going to come down the pike in the age of Trump and MAGA and QAnon and the age we're living in now.
		We see the roots of that in 1963, and not just with the far, far right, but even with people who are considered respectable conservatives like William F. Buckley and National Review.
		So 63 is an extraordinary year that really provides lessons, both good and bad, for what we're facing as a multiracial democracy today.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You used the term extraordinary, an extraordinary number of events stuffed into just a 12-month period.
		You can read all about them in Freedom Season, How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Movement.
		The author is Dr. Peneil Joseph joining us this morning and taking your phone calls on phone lines split as usual, Republicans, Democrats, Independents.
		We'll put the numbers up on your screen.
		You mentioned James Baldwin earlier, and I want to come back to him.
		We've been talking about books quite a bit this morning on this program in various forms.
		The book, The Fire Next Time, why does it figure so prominently into your book and into what was happening in 1963?
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Well, Baldwin's extraordinary figure, black, queer, Harlem-born August 2nd, 1924, but leaves for France in November of 1948.
		And Baldwin really becomes the most important and eloquent articulator of this idea of black dignity and citizenship connecting to notions of American identity.
		When we think about The Fire Next Time, it's two essays, a short essay, which is a letter to his nephew, which has inspired extraordinary writers from Tanahasi Coates to Amani Perry and others to work in a similar vein in future books.
		And then the longer essay is an essay called Down at the Cross, which had originally been published in the New Yorker in November of 1962 as a 20,000-word essay, the longest essay ever written in the history of the New Yorker called A Letter from a Region in My Mind.
		And so what Baldwin is doing in The Fire Next Time, which comes out January 31st, 1963, immediate bestseller, the New Yorker issue had sold out immediately and is an instant classic.
		He's really talking about racial slavery, dignity, citizenship, and the lies and the politics of dehumanization that have created this racial divide in the United States.
		So, for Baldwin, before we can even talk about policy, before we can talk about civil rights bills, he looks upon race and so-called race relations not so much as a Negro problem or a black problem, but as something that's very much rooted in the original sin of the United States, which is racial slavery, and an inability to confront that sin.
		He looks upon blacks and whites not as enemies and adversaries, but as estranged kin, as long-lost family.
		And in so many different ways, what Fire Next Time does is really provide a very intimate analysis of the politics of racial injustice, the politics of white supremacy, but the deeper history of the United States.
		And Baldwin's solution is for us to confront these histories rather than shy away from them and really confront the lies that the United States has erected to efface and obscure that history.
		Because for Baldwin, for much of his life, he had been running away from African American history and Negro history.
		And he really finds himself paradoxically in Paris, spending nine years in Paris from 1948 to 1957.
		And starting in 1957, Baldwin really makes these pilgrimages to the United States where he goes to the South, goes to Arkansas, he goes to Georgia, meets up with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
		He goes to Florida and meets up with student activists connected to the Congress of Racial Equality Corps and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC.
		So he does all these extraordinary trips to find out what's going on, right?
		And he has brilliant reportage in places like Mademoiselle Magazine, in places like Harper's, and in other places.
		And in so many ways, Fire, the Fire Next Time, is really the culmination of this extraordinary self-discovery and this deep work that Baldwin has been doing.
		Because Baldwin always recognizes that the political is very, very deeply personal.
		So for Baldwin, he only wants to write out of his own experiences.
		Whether those experiences are painful or traumatic, the healing begins once we express what we've experienced.
		And in so many ways, when we think about the fire next time, you know, Baldwin ends that book by saying that we have to get together those relatively few conscious whites and blacks to reimagine the nation state.
		And he talks about ending the racial nightmare and achieving our country.
		You know, what does he mean by achieving our country?
		Baldwin always uses, since his start as a writer in the late 1940s, the term we when he talks about America.
		And so he connects himself with the idea of America, but in a reimagined multiracial democracy where dignity and citizenship for all people is at the core, the beating heart of that multiracial democracy.
		So Baldwin doesn't look upon himself as an outsider to the American tradition, even though he's aware that there are groups of people who look upon him as an outsider to that tradition.
		He thinks of it as part of his Birthright and not this negative inheritance of being a non-citizen, as black people are relegated to in much part many parts of the country, because there is no second class of citizenship in a democracy.
		That's always a misnomer that people articulate.
		Democracies have either citizens or non-citizens.
		So the idea that black people had second-class citizenship is always a mistake to say and reiterate.
		And I think Baldwin really, really understands that.
		So what fire does is really inspire a debate and a dialogue all across the political spectrum in the United States.
		So conservatives read that, liberals read that, progressives and radicals read that.
		The president of the United States and the Attorney General read that.
		And so Baldwin becomes this pivotal, pivotal figure that year.
		And he even meets up with Bobby Kennedy alongside of a group of Black intellectuals, including Lorraine Hansberry and Harry Belafonte and Dr. Kenneth Clark and others on May 24th, 1963.
		So I would say that the person who's articulating a moral revolution, a cultural revolution in 1963, and this idea that we can't have citizenship without dignity, and Baldwin defines dignity as something that we are all born with, that is God-given, and that we all deserve, and citizenship as merely the external representation of that dignity that we already have.
		Baldwin becomes the key figure and really, in my mind, still the best articulator of an aspirational American identity for us all.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Baldwin, writing about history and the American tradition, you're a historian who's writing about the civil rights movement through this one year.
		I want to bring it to today.
		As a historian, how do you think America's museums and specifically the Smithsonian institutions, how do you think they do in telling this story, the history of the civil rights movement, and what the American tradition is?
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		No, I just was at the Smithsonian, both museums, Museum of American History and the NEMAC, the National Museum of African American History, just this past summer.
		And I think that they do an excellent job of looking at the entirety, the entirety of that experience.
		So it's a panorama.
		So they both look in an honest way, examine slavery, segregation, racial violence, but they also simultaneously examine the way in which black people, alongside of white allies, alongside of really multiracial allies, transformed these negative institutions into positive institutions.
		So they do look at success.
		They do look at the power of coalitions.
		They do look at the power of, for example, black women as organizers and as leaders, as intellectuals, as business leaders, as politicians.
		They do look at the black family.
		They do look at and examine the relationship between black Americans and Africa and the Caribbean.
		So I do think they do an extraordinarily good job with something that's very, very delicate.
		And I also think that telling the entire history is always vital because that history is not just a negative history.
		That history is a history of overcoming.
		It's not just a history of tragedy.
		It's also a history of triumph.
		It's not just a history of violence.
		It's also a history of great beauty.
		And it's not just a history of despair.
		It's truly remarkably a history of enduring hope.
		And I think somebody like not just Baldwin, but Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright of A Raisin in the Sun and LeBlanc and the sign in Sidney Brunstein's window is a great example.
		Her work looks at all of this panoramically.
		And so the way in which our museums and our cultural institutions have looked at slavery of late and looked at civil rights and segregation of late.
		And I'm thinking the last 25, 30, 40 years is really the consequence of that heroic period of the civil rights movement and really primarily the consequence of 1963 because 1963 tremendously shifts the way in which we are going to converse about these things and how we're going to write about these things and how we're going to teach these things because 1963, there's no black studies departments in the United States in 1963.
		You have some people who are learning about African American history, but as the 60s progresses, that's going to be institutionalized, 1960s and 70s and 80s and 90s.
		And now we've come to a point where we have a national museum of African American history.
		We have PhD programs in African American studies at both University of Texas at Austin, where I teach, but also at the Ivy League institutions, very august institutions like Harvard and Yale and Princeton and other places.
		But we also have Black studies at City University of New York and San Francisco State College where it first started.
		So we've changed and we have women and gender studies.
		We have queer studies.
		We have Native American and Indigenous studies and ethnic studies.
		All that is good because we are a multiracial democracy.
		So at our best, we try to explain how all these stories intertwine because they actually do.
		You can't talk about racial slavery without talking about Chinese coolie labor that also helped build up the transcontinental railroads in the United States.
		You can't talk about the black working class without talking about Mexicans who came to the United States and also helped build up the country, even in the 19th century.
		You can't talk about voting rights for black people and not talk about the suffrage movement and voting rights for white women and black women, right?
		So all these stories are intertwined and learning those stories actually strengthens our commitment to multiracial democracy and is not polarizing and does not lead to division.
		It actually leads to strength.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So then what was your reaction, if you saw it, Donald Trump's true social post, I'm sure you did, talking about the museums in Washington, D.C., saying the museums throughout Washington, but all over the country are essentially the last remaining segment of woke.
		The Smithsonian is out of control, the president said, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been, nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.
		We're not going to allow this to happen.
		And I've instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities where tremendous progress has been made.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say that I did see that.
		I did see that post.
		And I'd say that the whole rhetoric of anti-wokeness is not just an assault on black people.
		It's an assault on multiracial democracy and an assault on the second American Republic that was earned through the crucible of over 700,000 Americans dying in the Civil War.
		So I'd say that first of all.
		And I'd say that President Trump understands that culture is really the key to policy and politics.
		And that's why when we think about 1963, the reason why that year is so important is that that's the first time in American history where advocates of multiracial democracy, who I call Reconstructionist, won the narrative war against advocates of the racial status quo, the segregationists, who I call redemptionists.
		And redemptionists had lost the Civil War, John, but they won the narrative war after the Civil War.
		And that's how you get convict lease system, racial segregation, sharecropping, peonage, and the ouster of black people from Congress, the ouster of black people from having access to local politics in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, the former Confederacy.
		That's how we get that.
		And so what's extraordinary about the Trump attack is that since 1963, 63 ushered in at least a 50-year racial justice consensus, which is how you get not only Barack and Michelle Obama, but it's actually how you get Hillary Clinton.
		It's actually how you get Dolores Huerta.
		It's actually how you get Oprah Winfrey.
		That racial justice consensus provided more access and opportunity for marginalized communities and underrepresented communities in the United States than ever in the history of the Republic.
		It wasn't perfect.
		Paralleling that racial justice consensus was mass incarceration, different forms of prejudice and poverty and discrimination, but it was the best the country had ever done.
		And what this president is trying to do and actively doing right now through policy and politics is reverse all those positive trends of the second Reconstruction.
		But he understands that culture is how we do it.
		The story we told ourselves as a country after President Kennedy was assassinated was that civil rights was a good thing, that civil rights was a moral thing.
		It was the right thing to do.
		Not everyone believed it, but we created a consensus around civil rights, a bipartisan consensus with both Republican and Democratic administrations supporting the Voting Rights Act.
		So it wasn't just Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.
		It was also Richard Nixon.
		It was also Gerald Ford.
		It was Jimmy Carter.
		It was Ronald Reagan.
		It was George H.W. Bush.
		It was Bill Clinton.
		It was George W. Bush.
		And finally, Barack Obama, which was this huge, huge achievement because it was the first black president in the history of the Republic.
		What Trump is doing is attacking that cultural consensus that civil rights is a moral and political good and a policy good.
		And instead, reversing and retconning and really trying to appeal to our worst instincts.
		Because when we think about American democracy, we have our best instincts.
		And as an aspirational country, when we think about the Second World War, we think about the civil rights movement at our best and other movements, disability rights, LGBTQIA protests, when we think about trying to end anti-Semitism and the great work that Jewish activists and other activists have done.
		At our best, we are a transformational nation.
		At our worst, and we think about racial lynchings, we think about anti-Semitism, we think about Islamophobia and xenophobia against immigrants.
		At our worst, we cannibalize each other.
		At our worst, we are divisive and polarizing and violent.
		And so what's so extraordinary about 1963, what the Kennedy administration did and later Lyndon Johnson that same year is really appealed to the best of us.
		It really appealed to our sense of the world as a place that's big enough and bold enough for all these different groups to get together and create the world's first multiracial democracy, which also happens to be the world's strongest democracy.
		And the Trump administration is doing something exceedingly negative.
		But what I would tell people, and I say this to students and friends, is that democracy is something that's organic and living and breathing.
		So we are the democracy.
		These institutions do not function without us.
		So we have to work and strive towards a multi-racial democracy where we listen to each other, where we celebrate each other, where we stand in solidarity with each other, and we understand that everyone's story is connected to our own.
		So when we do that, and Baldwin is a great example of this, Baldwin pushed us to love other people's children as much as we loved our own.
		Because once we did that, there were no strangers.
		And so Dr. King did the same thing, and he called it the beloved community.
		But that beloved community was based on not just loving and hugging each other.
		It was teaching us that what justice was going to look like in public, that first of all, that love was what justice was going to look like in public, but that the only way we could get to that justice and those public displays of love was by confronting the negative parts of that history so we could all bask together in the joyful and the beautiful parts of that history.
		That's why Dr. King, when he speaks out against the Vietnam War in 1967, says it's going to be a bitter but beautiful struggle.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Before we run short on time, let me get some calls for you.
		And there are plenty waiting.
		This is Ralph in Warner Robbins, Georgia.
		Ralph, you're on with Dr. Peneil Joseph.
unidentified		Thank you, Mr. Joseph.
		Hey, thank you for that history.
		I am an individual.
		What I'll have to say is that where do I go from here?
		I can't afford to get out there and march and demonstrate because I don't have enough money to pay for my court appearances.
		But I lived through the overt racial behavior, the covert racial behavior.
		And now we're back again at overt because of this administration.
		This did not start from my point of view, did not start with Trump.
		It started when the passing of the civil rights bill, as you talk about what happened.
		I witnessed the George Wallace who said segregation now, segregation forever.
		But to push forward, it was said, these people who are called mega were the people after the passing of the civil rights bill went to the Republican Party.
		Once there, they began to do things covertly, which meant that had to keep it undercover, but we went on and continued and continued.
		As a black man, I worked in equal opportunity sexual harassment.
		I was a counselor in the prison when I was drafted into the military.
		I worked as the inspecting general office.
		I also were equal opportunist sex harassment.
		But the thing is that covert behavior, because even me myself, would get 10 adaboys.
		And as a black person, I could get one all S, I will say, and then it was all man.
		But these people were covertly went back to covert behaviors.
		Now, all of a sudden, it is now coming out to be overt again where these behaviors are coming out again.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ralph, got your point.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Joseph.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		So, Ralph, I understand what you were saying.
		I think that what you can do is make your voice heard where you are.
		You know, so whether that's voting, whether you're able to attend political or civil rights meetings, nonprofits, your local city council or aldermen or legislation, whatever you can do to support, because I believe that our most powerful role is as citizen, beyond being parents and husbands and wives, and sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers.
		We are citizens.
		And so, those of us, and including people who might not have the status as citizen, who are undocumented, there are ways you can make your voice heard.
		So, I would say to, you know, one, keep the faith.
		You've been a veteran of this struggle, and you've seen it go from overt to covert and now back to overt.
		And it means that, you know, history's tides don't go in one direction permanently.
		So, even though this is a massive backlash that we are experiencing, it doesn't mean that it's going to be permanent.
		I believe it won't be permanent.
		So, just make your voice heard wherever and whenever you are able to.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		To our independent line, this is John in Malta, New York.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Dr. Joseph.
unidentified		John, thanks for taking my call.
		I found that pretty interesting, what Dr. Joseph is saying.
		I was born in the late 40s, grew up in the 60s.
		I was there for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.
		I saw the affirmative action clause passed.
		And what that leads me to believe is that this country is definitely moving forward and trying to correct some of the abuses of the past.
		So, I look, in essence, I'm an optimist.
		But there's a couple other things.
		A lot of this gain is being compromised by the fact that in recent years, what we've seen is an explosion in violence.
		We see things from the Ferguson effect, we see the BLM riots.
		And I think what that has done is it's creating a dangerous moment in our history.
		And what I mean by that is the fact that it's not just deepening racial divisions.
		For many people, it's probably making them permanent.
		These acts of violence further complicated by the fact that the BLM organization, you would hope, would be made up of activists that really want to make a difference.
		But the founder, the woman, I think her name was Kalours, happened to buy three houses.
		There was a $60 million shortfall.
		So that makes people wonder what exactly is going on.
		And you want to see racial harmony, but in light of these things, it makes it difficult.
		And there's a couple other things.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Well, John, let me let Dr. Joseph comment on that.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Well, I say when we think about violence, especially over the last 15, 20 years, the Black Lives Matter movement grew out of protest against police brutality and violence in neighborhoods and communities like Ferguson.
		Ferguson uprising happened because of the murder of Michael Brown, a young 18-year-old black man whose body was left in the street uncovered for four hours in 2014.
		There were murders of other black people, whether it was Eric Garner or Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and in the trial in 2013.
		So I think I would push back against this idea that Black Lives Matter is a violent movement.
		And I would look for sources that are trying to be balanced.
		BLM is by no means a perfect movement, and there's never been a perfect social justice or any other movement in the history of the world.
		So that's a hard standard to judge an organization by.
		I would say that this idea that somehow there's rampant violence and lawlessness in the United States, one is untrue, but two, is the cudgel that the current administration is using for more and more authoritarian measures, including sending National Guard to 19 American cities that the president or 19 American states that the president deems are violent states, and even sending,
		federalizing certain portions of the National Guard and troops from southern states.
		It's an extraordinary misuse of power that is going on right now.
		But certainly it's connected to a false narrative about our reality.
		So for those of us who are students of history, we are at our full-blown Orwellian moment.
		When we think about George Orwell, who was the poet and the writer of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and in books like Animal Farm in 1984, George Orwell made the argument that the hardest thing to see was that which was right at the tip of your nose, which was right in front of you.
		So when you see a president who's lawless ordering a crackdown on this notion of disorder and chaos, that is the tail wagging the dog.
		When you see a very, very corrupt administration and somebody who's a felon who's in office, all these different felony accounts, right, who's been accused of all these different things, saying that we're going to get to the bottom of woke history.
		All this stuff is absurd.
		And if we were in a more serious and sober society and country, none of this would fly, right?
		As soon as somebody said and tried to articulate all this, that person would be sidelined.
		And so we're just at a very, very critical moment.
		And I would just urge that caller to look for multiple sources of information.
		So not to look for just along the left-right access because the caller called on the independent line.
		Look for, you know, read long essays and articles where the people are giving you a much more balanced opinion.
		Yes, critical of BLM, but also showing the full breadth of that movement.
		And you could see some positive aspects and see what's really, really going on.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Peneil Joseph, we always run short on time when you join us.
		But the name of the book for viewers who want to learn more about 1963 freedom season, how 1963 transformed America's civil rights revolution.
		It came out in May, available in your bookstores and Amazon.
		And we always appreciate your time, sir.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, John.
peniel joseph ▲ ● ▼		I enjoyed it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And that's going to do it for us this morning on the Washington Journal.
		But we'll, of course, be back here tomorrow morning.
		It's 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific.
		In the meantime, have a great Sunday.
unidentified		Coming up Monday morning, we'll talk about the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war with McCain Institute Executive Director Evelyn Farkas and then Political White House reporter Maya Ward previews the week ahead at the White House and other news of the day.
		And we'll discuss President Trump's claims about mail-in voting and election security with Michael Morley, an election law expert at Florida State University's College of Law.
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