C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (12/16/2025) examines rising global violence—from the Reiner murders in Hollywood to Bondi Beach and Brown University attacks—while callers blame Trump’s rhetoric, media desensitization, or systemic failures like gun laws and congressional corruption. Keith Self defends cartel designations as terrorism but dodges questions on immigration and Pelosi’s insider trading, while Brigham McCown criticizes NEPA delays stalling energy projects, linking Ukraine’s cyber-resilient infrastructure to U.S. grid vulnerabilities. Harvard’s John DeLa Volpe reveals Gen Z’s economic despair: 30% expect better lives than parents, 59% fear AI job displacement, and 52% report anxiety/depression, prioritizing stability over foreign policy amid institutional distrust. [Automatically generated summary]
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And we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal.
We begin today on the spate of high-profile killings in America and around the globe, from Hollywood to Brown University to Syria and Bondi Beach, Australia.
Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the bloodshed on television and social media, we want to know how it's impacting you and whether you think we've become desensitized to violence in America today.
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And a very good Tuesday morning to you.
You can go ahead and start calling in now.
Just want to show you the front page of this morning's Wall Street Journal headlines from top to bottom about violence in this country and around the world.
At the top of the page, the troubled son is arrested in Rob Reiner's killing in Hollywood.
The middle of the page, we were just sitting ducks, how chaos unfolded in Sydney, Australia.
The bottom of the page, police hunt for Brown University killer.
A picture of agents fanning out in Providence, Rhode Island, looking for the shooter in that Brown University attack.
That front page, not even all the headlines today about the bloodshed in this country and around the world.
There's the story of the National Guard soldiers and translators killed in Syria, and also a story about potential future bloodshed that was averted forecharged by federal officials in a plot for a New Year's Eve bomb plot in California.
All those happening and converging in this country right now.
And it leads to this question about violence in society, how it's impacting you.
And when it comes to all these high-profile stories that you can see wall-to-wall on social media and television, have we become desensitized to violence in this country?
There was an op-ed in the Desiree Morning News last month before any of these stories happened.
But Steve Pierce is the author of that op-ed.
He's a political strategist and consultant in Utah.
Let's choose now to stop being more desensitized to violence, is what he wrote back in November.
This is part of what he said in that column.
Make no mistake, violence is not new to this land.
Our nation was born amid bloodshed and wars and forced removals and lynchings and brutal institutions of slavery.
But until the acceleration of technology in recent decades, much of the violence could be held at arm's length in distant battlefields in short snippets on the nightly news in spaces that we deemed other.
Over time, though, he writes, we've let violence seep into our living rooms and our schools and our churches and perhaps most distressingly, our minds into the very fabric of our ordinary lives.
And now we've arrived at a moment of reckoning, an era in which we no longer recoil from violence, but in some staggering numbers consider it a possible means to an end.
Steve Pierce's column goes on from there in the Desiree Morning News.
We'll delve more into that over the course of this first segment of the Washington Journal today.
But asking you this morning, is American society becoming desensitized to violence?
Phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and we will begin in San Jose, California.
Rose, Democrat, good morning.
unidentified
Hello.
I just want to say, yes, to a great extent, I believe we are desensitized due to Donald Trump's first and then the second election.
However, this past few days has been a mountain, a mountain range, not just a mountain load, a mountain range of terrible, awful violence and murder.
The murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, I think, has brought it home to many of us, being that he's a pillar of our community in collective society.
And what I want to say is another thing: we have been desensitized to Donald Trump's reaction and uninvited remarks that he's made about many people who we love.
I believe this last remark that he has made fits into today's conversation.
We've been desensitized to violence and now to his remarks.
But this is the straw.
This is the harvest of the straw that has broken every camel's back.
And we're saying, where is the line?
Where is the line?
He jumped across the line the first time he campaigned for office and he made fun of the disabled journalist.
He had already crossed the line.
He's been acting on that side of the line ever since.
We are responsible to stop this.
It's our fault that this is happening with his reaction and causing us to become a cold, selfish, brutal, now a warmongering, violent people.
We are not that, and we are spewing him out of our mouth today and saying this is enough.
The comments from the president that Rose is referring to have gotten headlines of their own.
This is also the Wall Street Journal.
President offers vitriol instead of condolences when it comes to the death of Rob Reiner, noting his truth social posting about Rob Reiner.
Said Reiner, a critic of the president, was tortured and struggling, attributed the death of Rob Reiner to the anger that he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump derangement system syndrome.
Of course, it was Nick Reiner, the son of Rob Reiner, who has been arrested in the death of Rob Reiner and his wife.
The response by President Trump drawing pushback, the story noting, including by members of Congress, Congressman Mike Lawler, a centrist New York Republican, they write, said on X that Trump's statement is wrong.
It's a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.
President Trump yesterday spoke with reporters about his true social posting about Rob Reiner.
This was that interaction.
unidentified
Mr. President, a number of Republicans have denounced your statement on true social after the murder of Rob Reiner.
President Trump yesterday from the Oval Office, asking you this morning in this spate of bloodshed, both in the United States and around the country, about its coverage in the media and whether you think Americans have become desensitized to violence.
This is Tad in Burlesville, Rhode Island.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, John.
Thank you for taking my call.
No, we have not become desensitized.
The thing is, gun control, the problem is Americans are not good connecting the dots.
Now, the reason that we don't have effective gun control is that the special interests are buying our Congress.
Okay?
They're spending more money.
And I asked, you know, the friends, have you donated any money to any political leaders?
Oh, no, no, we don't do that.
Well, they have different paymasters.
The special interests are their paymasters.
And that goes also for health care.
The reason we have the worst health care in the developed world is because our Congress is bought.
What we need to do is to get the money, the campaign contribute, and campaign contributions.
Our elections should be publicly financed.
Then that would erase the gun problem and the health care problem.
That's Tad in Rhode Island, the headline from USA Today on the shooting in Australia of the gathering of members of the Jewish community there.
Australian gun laws didn't halt that shooting.
The story noting that in speaking with reporters, the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Alpne, said that his government would urgently examine the need for tougher gun laws.
And if there's any action required in terms of legislative response, we will certainly have it.
He told reporters in the wake of that shooting.
This is Cindy, Norwalk, Connecticut, Republican.
unidentified
Good morning.
Hi, good morning, John.
I don't know if we're more desensitized.
I think it's more of everything that's going on is so horrible.
And of course, with media now and social media, we hear about it 24-7.
I think it's more like a protection mechanism because people can't face the horror of what's happening.
You know, the Bible said this is going to happen.
And you can blame political figures till the cows come home.
You're never going to change the sin nature of man or, you know, you're just not going to change it.
You mentioned social media, members of Congress marking the spate of violence on social media.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia saying, a heavy world reels from so many tragedies this past weekend.
In the face of despair, we pray, we grieve, and we reflect.
And we must also promise to move forward with action and work to curb gun violence and hate-fueled extremism.
A better world is still possible.
Also on social media, Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, a horrific Bondi Beach attack, another devastating reminder of the global rise of anti-Semitic violence.
No one should ever have to fear gathering with their community to practice their face, their faith anywhere and ever.
Shelley Moore Capodo, the Republican from West Virginia, the anti-Semitic attack in Australia is horrifying and unacceptable.
Hate and violence against Jewish communities have no place anywhere in the world.
We must remain united in condemning anti-Semitism in all its forms.
The comments also continuing on the floor of the United States Senate.
Yesterday, it was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who spoke specifically about the violence at Brown University and Australia and how the United States should respond.
I have warned repeatedly that anti-Semitism is a scourge around the world that must be condemned loudly and fought vigorously at every turn.
The Jewish people have been collectively demonized, increasingly so in the last few years.
And this tragedy in Sydney shows the danger, the abject danger, of letting anti-Semitic rhetoric and action go unchecked.
So those of us in elected office have a responsibility to speak out against anti-Semitic rhetoric and conduct wherever it arises, whenever it arises.
And separately, Congress must also take action against another poison of our age, that of rampant gun violence.
Australia is no stranger to gun safety legislation.
They famously took strong action in the 1990s and saw gun violence plummet.
Yesterday, Australia's prime minister said the country will take another look at their gun safety laws and see where they can make improvements.
If Australia can find courage to act after a tragedy like the one in Bondi Beach, Congress should certainly find the will to act after a tragedy like the one at Brown University.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday from the Senate floor, back to your phone calls asking you about this spate of violent attacks around the world.
Do you believe America is becoming desensitized to violence?
Donovan Dover, Arkansas, Republican, what do you think?
unidentified
Yeah, I just want to say kind of a little bit in concert to what your first caller was talking about, violence.
And I didn't call actually to talk about Donald Trump specifically, but since she did, I'd like to remind people that Trump himself was twice a victim of violence and was almost assassinated because of, in some part, because of the kind of patriotic language that's coming, that was coming from the left.
Now, it does come from both sides.
And if it were me, I wouldn't have said what he had to say about Rob Lydon.
I thought that was a horrible tragedy.
And, you know, he, you know, it wasn't a time of Doug, I would say that.
And I'm saying that as a guy that voted for him three times.
But, you know, we're talking about violence and we're trying to talk, you know, we're trying to, you know, fix the problem.
You know, talking about one politician versus another or blaming Donald Trump for every little thing doesn't get us there.
So I think we should try to focus on ways to stop these things from happening, try to get to the root causes.
And, you know, blaming on Trump's the easiest thing to do, but obviously does not fix any problems.
Before you go, this, we talk about the wall-to-wall coverage on television of these violent acts.
The videos that you can watch on social media, you can see the entire Bondi Beach attack, almost the entire attack, play out over the course of a 10 or 11-minute video of the attack.
What do you think that does for Americans and trying to comprehend the bloodshed?
Have we gotten to the point where it's too much and all-consuming?
unidentified
I think so in a lot of ways, but it's come to the point where it's becoming somewhat normalized and things like that.
I know, for example, there's a lot of people with the Charlie Kerg assassination.
And so, you know, there's, you know, obviously we have our freedoms, but then there's also, you know, there's things like what Australia is doing as far as with Facebook.
If you're under a certain age, or I believe you're 16, that you have limited access or no access to things.
Maybe some of those kinds of things we should look at, you know, to try, especially from young people from seeing some of these horrible things.
Donovan, thanks for the call from Arkansas this morning.
Back to that column by Steve Pierce, political consultant strategist.
He was writing for the Desiree Morning News.
And again, this was last month.
This was before the spade of violence from over the weekend.
But this is what he writes about the idea of reclaiming our humanity amid all the violence that you can see on television and social media.
He says it's not too late to alter this trajectory to collectively pull ourselves back to the side of our better, gentler angels.
But the path ahead demands more than numbed rage or fleeting gestures.
We must rehumanize.
We must rebuild our moral muscle.
In journalism and social media, we must resist sensationalism and avoid turning violence into spectacle.
In classrooms, we must teach empathy and understanding to inoculate children against the impulse to see others as objects instead of human beings.
In public policy spaces, we must push for common sense laws that will make it harder to access weapons designed for mass death and easier to access treatment for a myriad mental health issues plaguing the American populace.
He goes on to say, and in our communities, in our school hallways and church basements and neighborhoods racked by loss, we must show up for each other.
We must mourn with those who mourn, advocate for those whose voices can no longer be heard, and refuse to treat more blood as the inevitable wallpaper of modernity.
None of these moves is a silver bullet, but each is a statement that violence is never normative and never neutral.
Steve Pierce writing in the Desiree Morning News last month, if you want to read that, it's available on their website.
Back to your phone calls.
This is Doug in Fairfax, South Dakota.
Good morning.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning, John.
It's been a long time since I talked to you in a couple of months as I called.
But anyway, yeah, we are getting desensitized about violence.
And people say about the Bible, you know, the Ten Commandments say thou should not kill, but our government sends people over there to kill people all the time.
You mentioned the government, government officials, law enforcement officials involved in averting a future attack, four charged in a New Year's Eve bombing plot.
We mentioned the story at the top of the segment.
First U.S. Attorney of the Central District of California, Bill Esale, was at a news conference yesterday talking about the bomb plot and the work by federal officials.
The defendants are all radical anti-government members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, which according to their own social media is an anti-capitalist, anti-government movement that calls for their associates to rise up and fight back against capitalism.
One of the leaders of the organization, defendant Audrey Carroll, helped organize an even more radical faction of the group called the Order of the Black Lotus.
Each of the defendants charged today was also a member of the Order of the Black Lotus.
Carol described this group to her co-conspirators as everything radical.
As detailed in the federal complaint, which we will now make public, in November 2025, Defendant Carroll created a detailed bombing plot to use explosive devices to attack five or more locations across Southern California on this upcoming New Year's Eve.
Carol and her co-defendant, Zachary Page, led the effort to obtain and build the bombs and to recruit others to join in their plot.
Carol's bomb plot was explicit.
It included a step-by-step instructions to build IEDs or improvised explosive devices and listed multiple targets across Orange County and Los Angeles.
Carol also made clear her desires.
She said, quote, what we are doing will be considered a terrorist act.
Carol and Paige also discussed plans for follow-up attacks after their bombings, which included plans to target ICE agents and vehicles with pipe bombs.
Carol stated that those plans would, quote, take some of them out and scare the rest.
Hey, listen, the same stuff's going on in the world that's been going on in the world since the beginning of time, right?
It's just more in your face, and you're more assumed to it.
You know, where I come from, I believe that education would fix a lot of things.
Like, we would educate our people, especially our children, and stop lying to them.
You know, we start off lying to them about Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and then we expect them to believe some kind of crazy notion about somebody in the sky, right?
Like, I believe that education would fix a lot of this.
He's like, Dad, like, you know, this is what you sold me and told me.
And I just don't hold that doesn't hold water.
And so the more that I watch and the more that I become involved in political ideas and stuff, the more that I see the funding of education, like the lack of funding.
Like here in Arkansas, we're not going to have PBS anymore because of what Trump's done.
This is John here in Washington, D.C. Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, John.
Thank you so much for taking my call and certainly good morning, America.
I would certainly argue that America is becoming desensitized.
I've been in this ongoing conversation probably for the past five years, and you'll see somebody being sentenced for something, and the last thing they'll say before they go serve their time is, I don't know what I was thinking.
Well, they probably were not thinking.
I think psychology talks about the amygdala.
That's the part of your brain that just reacts.
You know, that's the part that drives road rage.
And the cortex is the part that we call the educated part, right?
Where you're thinking through and processing stuff.
And, you know, the conversation I was having was these video games that kids are playing.
And before their brain is developed, they're shooting, they're doing all sorts of stuff and can't really differentiate between what's real and what's fantasy.
So I think the brain has a lot to do with that.
Also, I have to agree with the lady who called earlier, gentlelady.
She talked about social media, television.
I think every time we see that, it desensitizes us.
There's this dopamine release when we see somebody's clicked our post or we put something on there and someone likes it.
And then finally, Mozlov's Pyramid.
You know, at the very bottom, it's, you know, basic needs like food, water, shelter, security.
And when that is not happening for an individual, a person can become hopeless.
I'm looking at this Michigan coach.
You know, he's talking about killing himself once he's realized what all he's lost.
And January 1st, you've got people who are going to be losing health care.
I mean, there are a lot of people right now who are hopeless.
And if people are hopeless, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of what we're seeing, it's going to be a little bit more commonplace.
This is the op-ed pages of today's New York Times.
Sharon Bruce, founding and senior rabbi of a Jewish community based in Los Angeles, the headline of Sharon Bruce's piece, The Humanity Amid the Horror at Bondi Beach.
Sharon Bruce writing, I'm tired of looking for the silver lining after such tragedies.
I no longer want to hear after a mass shooting of the remarkable ways a community came together.
I don't want platitudes and pieties.
I want justice.
I want accountability for the rhetoric and the policies and in our own country, the obscenely easy access to weapons of war that endanger us all.
I don't want to celebrate with resiliency.
I want to see reform.
But as a spiritual matter, Sharon Bruce writes, I urgently need the silver lining.
I need the hints of humanity that remind us that what is not what is is not what must be.
The quiet insistence that there is more light than darkness in this world, that tenderness and love can prevail over even the most virulent hatred.
Give me the counterfactual that makes it impossible to fall in despair.
That will keep me from slipping into self-defeating certainty of our impending doom.
Sharon Bruce saying, and here it is: the hint of humanity, that spark of vitality.
I see it in Ahmed El Ahmed, the fruit vendor, who risked his life to tackle one of the gunmen, no doubt saving lives.
Sharon Bruce ends by saying, I will think of Ahmed El Ahmed and thank God for planting such a courageous and decent soul in this world.
And I will remember that light is born from the midst of the deepest, most impenetrable darkness.
That has always been true, and it is today, too.
If you want to read that column, it's in today's New York Times.
Back to your phone calls.
This is Joey in Columbus, Ohio.
Republican, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, John.
Thanks for taking my call.
I think we've been desensitized to things.
I think it started, you know, all along, but in the 60s, movies used to allude to violence, and then all of a sudden it started becoming more and more graphic, right in your face.
And it continued on until now.
There's movies that are out there that are nothing but different ways to kill a human being.
And people crave to watch them.
And the very first caller today, the lady, you know, she blamed Trump for a cycle of violence and that kind of thing.
And I think she needed to maybe think in terms, and every Democrat needs to think in terms and look in the mirror and say, which of the two parties has a platform whose very main tenet is based on the killing of an unborn child till the moment of birth?
If that's not the cheapening of life, I don't know what is.
And I think it's a tragedy, and I'm not foolish enough to ever think that abortion would be illegal in this country.
But that's, you know, it goes back to that kind of thing.
If that's not the most innocent of life right there, and it's so easily taken, then how what's the difference if you take it after they're born, if it's a child or an adult?
And I think that's what we need to look at: our entire society and what we're capable of.
Just over the last 24, 36 hours, I've been inundated with text messages and calls, specifically talking about what an incredible young woman Ella Cook was.
And I cannot imagine the pain and grief that her parents are feeling right now, and her little brother and her little sister and her extended family.
It is clear that she made an impact, that her time on earth was such a positive force for good that the ripple of her life will be felt for generations to come.
I would only ask that all of us, including anyone listening, just hold off and give these families a little bit of grace and peace as they deal with this loss.
unidentified
They were expecting to see these kids for the Christmas holidays.
I think what's going on here is we've reached fruition through a catalyst of social media and general decay.
And, you know, where did that come from?
I look around and there's a fact of people, there's a group of people here that seem to be enabling all this.
And as far as I can tell, it's conservatives.
They're hell-bent on violence.
They're hell-bent on othering people.
They're tribal.
You know, we used to function on somewhat bipartisan policy decisions.
But now we have this group of people that, you know, you asked when it started.
I don't know if it started during the years of conservative talk radio with Rush Limbaugh and all these people, you know, Alex Jones.
These are really crazy people.
You know, if you listen to what they're saying, and this was permeated through conservative talk radio for decades.
Then we reached Tea Party stage with the Republicans, you know, and they didn't push it through.
They didn't get it.
But how do they get it?
They got it through social media spreading disinformation, which, you know, by most accounts is at least five times harder to eradicate than the truth.
So they've hijacked this social media system in the last 10 to 15 years, and it really tipped over and gave them the control socioeconomically to really dig in their heels.
What would you say to the caller earlier, who I assume would disagree with you?
He was pointing to attempted assassinations against Donald Trump and the shooting of Charlie Kirk.
I would imagine he and you would be on different sides of this.
unidentified
Yeah, I look at that, and I'll go back to part of the fruition here.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
And, you know, these people are crying about this stuff.
Who brought it on?
It's them.
You know, from the individual to the very top, whether I talk to these Republicans on the street, they don't care about other people unless they're their kind.
All right.
And then you go to the top.
Who's the president?
A bully who goes on TV gleefully talking about grabbing women by the genitals, making fun of handicapped people physically.
You know, like it's endless.
I'm sitting here and I can't even think of the list of just disgusting things that these people do.
And it's exhibited down to the individual level where I talk to them.
And, you know, it's to the point we're caring about other people and doing the right thing and being united as a country like we used to be, you know, against the common, for a common good, against a common enemy.
Is the point then that people should pay more attention to the stories of violence in their own communities and that these big national stories that get wall-to-wall coverage and are everywhere on social media that we miss what's happening in our own communities because all we get to watch on TV and social media are these big international stories?
unidentified
Yes, yes, very much so.
It starts at home.
It starts at home with the mother and the father, with the children.
And one is we are a godless nation now.
We have turned our backs against God.
We don't have a unity with God anymore.
There's one of the biggest problems.
That probably is the biggest problem.
I think, you know, whether you believe in religion or not, there's something when you speak about Christianity, there's something there.
It's not going out and killing people.
The Ten Commandments, like one guy said earlier, thou shalt not kill.
Well, thou shalt not kill is murder.
Don't murder people.
In a time of war, you have to do things that you would never ever want to do, want to do.
But you have to do them in a time of war.
You have to commit murder.
Well, then it's killing.
It's not necessarily murder because murder is premeditated as far as going and doing a hideous crime.
This is the front page of the Washington Times today.
Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at the Washington Times.
This is what Kelly Sadler writes.
The Global War on Terrorism, a military campaign initiated by the U.S. in response to September 11, 2001, drew a gradual conclusion during President Obama's tenure.
However, Radical Islam's war on the West has never ceased.
Over the weekend, three Americans were killed and three wounded in an ambush by the Islamic State Group terrorist organization and Syria's security forces.
On the first night of Hanukkah in Australia, two radicalized militants gunned down and killed at least 15 people, including a 12-year-old girl at an event in Sydney's Bondi Beach.
Back in the U.S., a gunman opened fire Saturday during the final exam review for the economic class of a Brown University professor who also teaches Jewish studies courses in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two, wounding nine.
On Friday, German police arrested five men, three Moroccans, a Syrian, and an Egyptian, foiling a planned attack on a Christmas market.
Kelly Sadler writes that liberal politicians lack the moral clarity to denounce the clear anti-Western attacks on the Jewish and Christian communities carried out by radical Islamists around the world.
Western civilization is under attack by radical Islamists, hell-bent on killing Jews and Christians.
Kelly Sadler writes, if you want to read that column, it's in the Washington Times today.
About 10 or 15 minutes left here asking you about the Spada killings that has happened, these very high-profile killings, and wondering your thoughts on how much we're seeing it.
Do you think America has become desensitized to violence?
Republicans, it's 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
Independents 202-748-8002.
We'll also look for your text messages as well.
202-748-8003 is that number.
Carolyn in Alliance, Ohio.
Good morning.
You're next.
unidentified
Hello.
I blame ourselves.
It seems as if Americans love guns more than they love their children.
And we could put restrictions on guns.
It would be so easy to have a two-week waiting period, not let weapons of war be sold to ordinary people, and put a heavy tax on bullets.
We could do a lot of things, but we don't want to.
I think a lot of people do want to.
They want background checks.
They want maybe a two-week period or at least a week period put on buying a weapon so you couldn't do a background check and give that person who's an impulse buyer some time to think about what they are doing.
So I guess one other thing I was going to say, what we could do about it is to put people in office for state government, for national government, who will do something about the guns on the street, who will put restrictions on buying weapons and carrying weapons.
That's Carolyn in the Buckingham State to Staten Island.
Andrew, Independent, good morning.
You're next.
unidentified
Good morning.
Good morning to everyone.
This desensitized question is one that was, to me, that started a long time ago here in America, the United States of America, which began with slavery.
You forget, slavery was a form of mass killing of people.
It desensitized individuals to the point where you can see pictures today where they're hanging African Americans and individuals are standing around.
Crowds of individuals are standing around smiling and laughing.
That's Mary in Florida, our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal.
Stick around, though.
Plenty more to talk about this morning, including a little later.
We'll be joined by the Hudson Institute's Brigham McCowan to discuss Republican efforts to streamline the process of getting permits for energy projects.
But first, it's Texas Republican Keith Self.
We'll discuss this week's expected votes on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies and other news of the day.
You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country.
I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watch C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
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Friday, on C-SPAN's Ceasefire.
At a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman and Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the top issues facing the country.
They join host Dasha Burns.
Bridging the Divide in American Politics.
Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
A conversation now with Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Freedom Caucus.
But Congressman Self, I want to start with those expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits and what it means for the cost of health care for millions of Americans.
What do you think should happen when it comes to those health care subsidies?
And is there a piece of legislation out there right now that you can support?
Well, frankly, we need to let these COVID era temporary subsidies expire.
First of all, most of the increases in premiums that people are seeing across the country are because of the normal subsidies, not these temporary subsidies that we're discussing today.
First of all, they only affect 7% of the people.
These expended, extended COVID area subsidies.
They only cover about 7% of the people.
The vast majority of the premium increases are because of the Obamacare subsidies written into the original law.
So we're piling subsidies on top of subsidies.
We need to let these expire at the end of the year, end of this month, and then we need to start fixing health care.
Obamacare has been a monumental failure for 15 years.
And I think now is the time.
Now that people are understanding just how broken Obamacare is, now is the time to start fixing it.
And I think that's what you're alluding to.
So we've got several proposals by moderates to extend the subsidies.
I don't think we're going to get a vote on any of those because I think they've actually whipped the votes and they realize it's not going to happen.
So what we are going to see is the Rules Committee is going to put together a package for the floor of the House tonight that we will vote on either tomorrow or the next day, depending on when they bring it to the floor, that will have some modest improvements, some modest reforms.
But going forward into the new year, we're going to have a heavy lift to then probably go to Reconciliation 2.0 and fix health care in a major lift.
Moving from healthcare to foreign affairs, I just want to get your thoughts on where we are as somebody who's steeped in this when it comes to a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Look, Iran and China basically are funding the Russian war effort by buying Russian oil, Russian energy.
So, we need to actually take steps to enforce it.
So, take the Russian ghost ships that are transporting Russian oil around the world, China and India, primarily, and actually enforce those sanctions, because that's what's actually funding the Russian war effort.
Well, we need to keep focused on the central bank digital currency.
I don't know that we're going to see anything by the end of the year, but we were promised that the anti-central bank digital currency would be in the National Defense Authorization Act.
It didn't get in there, so we need to focus on what is the next tool.
And frankly, I think that, again, that will be Reconciliation 2.0.
But the central bank digital currency is the federal government has absolute transparency of your money, of what you buy, what you spend your money on, and it's a dangerous concept.
And we need to make sure that we continue to follow up on that.
I want to ask the congressman, and I want to make a statement to the congressman about Donald Trump them blowing the boats up with drugs in the water.
Now, I'm a security officer for a security building here in Albany, Georgia.
And I have a friend that worked with the Coast Guard for the United States.
And what I see is it is committing murder because if you blow those boats up and we have got the Coast Guard to do that work, and we have the greatest Coast Guards in the world, and when the Coast Guard sees those boats, they get those people, they bring them to court, and they find out where those drugs are coming from.
That is the proper procedure.
The president nor HETSET should be intervening and blowing up and killing people.
I read the definition for treason, and it talked about other means that might be used to overthrow government.
And I'm wondering if he would look into the socialist attack on America right now, and the fact that the Democrat Party facilitated 12 to 20 million people, mostly from socialist countries, into our country.
Could this be looked at as possibly a means by the Socialist Democrat Party to overthrow our government?
I would ask you to reach out to your own member of Congress.
You're from Nashville, I believe.
You've got some good members there.
I don't know exactly who represents you, but I recommend that you reach out to your own member of Congress entirely and suggest that, because that's a great idea.
Your reaction to this four people being charged in this New Year's Eve bomb plot and some of the details about their anti-government views and networks that they had developed?
Well, I think you're trying to draw me into distinctions here.
The rule of law is the foundation of America.
So if they've broken the law, regardless of what their intent is, charge them and prosecute them.
So that's the bottom line.
And if they are trying to set off a bomb in Nashville, absolutely charge them, prosecute them, regardless of their intentions, because the rule of law governs the United States.
And certainly trying to set off a bomb is a chargeable offense.
Congress, I don't understand why it's an issue with getting a vote on taking the ability for the Congress men and women to invest in stocks.
It's a known fact that Nancy Pelosi has used this to make millions of dollars, you know, and it, you know, Martha Stewart was arrested for the same thing.
You know, and I just don't understand how she continues to make millions and millions and millions of dollars, and there's nothing that has been done.
On the second note, regarding the ships that are being bombed, it's a known fact that no one has had an issue with all the drugs coming into the United States, killing Americans.
And everyone has pretty much known or have lost someone personally from these drugs.
And I don't hear anybody complaining, you know, about all the people that have died.
Yet, everyone is complaining about us taking these drugs out.
Charlotte, North Carolina, this is Andrea, Democrat.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hello, thanks so much for taking my call.
Something that is really concerning me, and I want to hear from the congressman, what they are working on to start regulating AI in a way that can protect people's jobs.
I was watching this speech on ABC like two days ago, and we're talking about driverless ride-sharing cars.
And it's so funny because on the media, they only talk about how wonderful, how fun, how cool it is taking one of these rides.
Okay, but how about people that rely on this kind of job to pay their bills?
I'm talking about only one sector of society.
Think about the amount of jobs that we might end up losing in our economy.
So it would be very nice if CISPEN could start talking about more about this.
And I'm not seeing Congress doing obstacles anything about it.
But to your point, AI is going to replace many jobs.
It's not that we're not going to have jobs.
The jobs are going to be different.
Frankly, if I were advising people, stop going to college to get liberal arts degrees and start getting plumbing and HVAC and the trades, mechanics, because those are the people we will not be able to do without.
And they're highly paid today because we need them.
So back to AI.
AI is making strides that are unimaginable.
We're not talking about tenfold.
We're not talking about a hundred-fold improvement.
We're talking about 10,000-fold.
And now it's in the honeymoon period, I realize, in the investment.
And we're going to see, we may see some consolidation.
But at the end of the day, let's take AI has already started to produce drugs that we wouldn't even think about.
We couldn't think about because AI is making those strides.
So that's one example of actually producing drugs that we couldn't even think about without AI.
So AI is going to change the economy, but we are going to continue to need those people who are hands-on.
I did want to get your thoughts on the question we asked viewers at the beginning of our program today amid a lot of very high-profile stories about violence in the U.S. from Hollywood to Brown University to Syria to Bondi Beach in Australia.
We're seeing it all over the news and social media phase.
Do you think we've become desensitized to violence today?
Yeah, I think we have definitely become desensitized to violence.
There's a couple of issues here.
First of all, in the Rob Reiner case, the son was well known to have mental issues.
So the mental challenges, the mental illness is one issue.
A lot of the other violence that we're seeing is simply when you defund the police, what's going to happen?
You're going to have more violence.
So, and frankly, when you take out, and I think this statistic is still correct, when you take out the five highest cities with murder rates, the rest of the United States, these are the big cities with the highest murder rates, you take them out of the equation, the United States falls to like 120 or something in the safest countries.
So we would be very safe if you simply strip out the five big cities.
You might have to check my math and current status, but that at one point was the case.
So yes, we need to also not defund the police.
And we need to, and frankly, El Salvador is a great example.
You start putting people in jail to commit crimes and the crime goes down.
So there are examples around, I think it's El Salvador, there are examples around that we can use that simply enforcing the law back to the rule of law.
We're also desensitized to the fact that the law applies to everybody else but someone who is committed to committing a crime.
So that's my answer.
We need to enforce the rule of law.
Yes, I think we're desensitized to a certain degree.
There's a headline in today's Wall Street Journal.
The president offers vitriol instead of condolences after the death of Rob Reiner and his wife.
Talking about the president's truth social posts in the wake of that killing, Republicans being quoted in that story responding to the president, did you have any response to his truth social post?
Coming up a little later this morning, we're going to be joined by John DeLavolpe of the Harvard Institute of Politics.
We'll discuss their latest poll on young Americans and their attitudes on the current state of the country.
But first, it's the Hudson Institute's Brigham McCown on efforts by the House this week to streamline the process for getting permits for energy projects.
Stick around for that discussion.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
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How close is the United States to being energy secure, or another phrase we hear, energy independent?
unidentified
Right.
We're pretty close.
And honestly, we've been close to becoming energy independent for a number of years.
And there's a little bit of fallacy with that because North America, in particular, Canada and the U.S., share some of the same energy infrastructure and connectivity.
So if we said North America, we are pretty much energy independent now.
For energy projects, and obviously there's various energy sources out there, but how long does the permitting process take for a new energy project generally?
unidentified
Yeah, so under NEPA, National Environmental Policy Act, the idea is that we get all the stakeholders together and then decide whether to go forward with a project.
Or maybe you have an idea on how to make it better.
Well, that's the idea.
What actually happens now is it can take a decade or longer to permit a project.
And when you're talking about the transmission line of 10 years from now, look outside because it's what we've got today is what we're going to have in 10 years.
If you want to talk about permitting and energy projects in the United States, a real good person to do that with.
He is with the Hudson Institute.
It's the initiative on American Energy Security, the director there.
Here's how you can call in with your questions, your comments.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8002, as folks are calling in.
What is the SPEED Act that's being offered by Congressman Westerman, Republican of Arkansas, and Congressman Golden, the Democrat from Maine?
unidentified
Yeah, so that's an interesting one.
It does have some bipartisan support.
The SPEED Act is just that, to try to move these projects more quickly.
And this isn't just for energy, but rebuilding America's air traffic control system, rebuilding Dulles Airport.
No matter what it is, road bridge, it's all caught up in NEPA.
And the idea is that this NEPA process reform targets a timeline.
Make a decision.
Analyze it, sure.
But we need finality of decision.
And whether it is our tax dollars going into this project or whether it's private money coming in, the only thing that's worse than speed, or more important than speed, is uncertainty.
So you're talking about federal agencies sponsor individual private sector projects?
Is that what you're saying?
unidentified
Well, in the case of roads and bridges, it's often the State Highway Department.
But where there is federal dollars coming in, then there's a federal role.
And that's another thing.
If the states are sending their tax dollars through the federal gas tax to Washington, D.C., only to get that money back in, say, Tennessee, is it even a federal action?
Why should NEPA come in at all?
Isn't this really a state decision?
Those are the type of questions that we've kicked the can down the road for a generation.
Talking at the end of the year here on energy prices, what are your expectations for what Americans can expect at the gas pump when they plug into their wall at home?
What should they expect on energy prices come 2026?
What are you seeing as you study this at the Hudson Institute?
unidentified
Yeah, that's a tough one.
I think we see marginally lower prices.
However, as we're talking about AI data center build out that requires more transmission lines, it's an open-ended question of who's going to pay for that new infrastructure.
Consumers think that the AI data center should pay for it all.
Some people think consumers should pay a little bit.
And I think that's going to be a very hot-button question.
But really, when it comes down to prices, it's a global commodity.
And we're talking global supply chains.
And adding investment into infrastructure, whether that's federal tax money or private money, can lower the cost of energy because it makes it more efficient.
But if not done correctly, it can tax all of our bills.
In fact, there are several bills pending in Congress right now on hydrothermal power.
And it offers an unlimited source of steam and heat, as you've described, that can be used to power turbines.
And, you know, for those that may not know, when you produce electricity from turbines, whether it's natural gas, hydrothermal, or some other fuel source, you're running a giant jet aircraft engine basically to spin that into electricity.
So great idea.
And on the ocean current side, it's something that's been studied.
The reliability and the maintenance is still a little bit of an issue anytime you have moving parts.
And so I think the jury's still out on tidal electricity.
I wanted to mention that I worked in the National Environmental Policy Act probably for 40 years, and I'm still working in that field.
And I wanted to note that what you are describing about NEPA is true.
I agree with almost everything you said.
I have a couple of comments.
One is it really comes down to leadership.
And what I have noticed is that leadership is really rare, probably everywhere, but in the federal government particularly.
And so people who are actually the decision makers, they're reluctant to take risks.
They're reluctant to actually make decisions.
And I believe that's at the core of the problems that you've described.
And I guess my question for you is, what I've also seen is managers or politicians or whoever coming in with projects that they've already made pre-decisional ideas about it.
They already know they want it.
And so the cost of saying no becomes really, really high for a manager.
But when you're talking about something like XL Keystone or other projects that have really serious deficiencies, I mean, what do you think about the NEPA decision of no action?
How often are federal judges making the decision when it comes to NEPA?
And are these the right people to be making decisions about environmental and energy policy, asking, putting the decision in the hand of a federal judge?
unidentified
Yeah, that's a great question, John.
And most of the time, the judge is ruling on a process failure, a technicality, if you will.
The federal government failed to study this.
The federal government failed to document that.
Most of the time that these projects fail, it's not for substantive reasons, but it's on procedural grounds.
A question from Sally on X saying, how does this Bill the Speed Act balance faster federal approvals with state and local authority, especially when communities oppose a project?
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really yet to be determined how it goes.
You know, one of the things about communities opposing projects, it goes back to the not-in-my backyard, which all of us have to some extent.
We need prisons, but don't want one in my backyard.
We need an airport, but I don't want it in a backyard.
When it comes to interstate resources, infrastructure, power lines, transportation corridors, we have to look at the whole country as a concept.
And I think you can move things around.
And there are plenty of history where a roadway has been moved or something has been taken into account after local concerns.
But it's a tough one.
Interstate commerce ultimately trumps local concerns.
To harden the infrastructure means to make it such that whether it is through natural events or man-made events, it's much more difficult to disrupt it, to damage it, to bring the grid offline.
And we've learned a lot of lessons from how Ukraine has done these type of things.
I think America has also realized that in case of an internal or external direct threat, say state-sponsored activity, our grid's pretty vulnerable, John.
And we've had cases of that in the past with a guy shooting up a transformer plant in Metcalf, California to foreign governments cyber hacking into our grid.
And that's without missiles flying, right?
So it's about resilience, it's about backup power, and it's about hardening that grid.
If we had a Windows XP machine and we plugged it into the internet today, that machine would be compromised in probably under two minutes by a hostile threat actor.
That is the wild west that we're living in that knows no borders.
And so making sure that those legacy assets are patched, making sure that they're unplugged from the internet, that they have direct fiber links, that nobody else comes in or out, that we test the equipment we purchase.
When I was running a company up in Alaska, every device before we put it on our system, we tested it to make sure it wasn't communicating with somebody we didn't know it was communicating with.
Is it on the transmission lines to move that power?
Is it on the user interface at the end?
Where would you say is kind of the weakest link that should be patched first?
unidentified
Yeah.
If we're talking physical security, it's often contractors or subcontractors or just your average employee that leaves the gate unlocked or makes it look like it's locked, right?
We've all done that probably to our back door at some point and it's not locked.
So penetration testing, both physical as well as cyber, is very important.
You know, hats off to CISA and some of the other DOE labs that do cyber penetration testing of systems, but it really depends.
Yeah, I have a couple of concerns and a couple of questions, but it's based on the infrastructure and moving forward at a fast pace.
Everything in this country, and you've got to understand I've been in the construction industry my whole life, runs on budgets.
And some of these budgets are 10, 15 years out planning, staging things, staging changes in the infrastructure.
And my question is, you know, you want to bypass everything to rush something through as a commercial project.
How are you going to stage that and make it work with everybody's budgets?
Are you going to just blow the budget out of the water by quickly bypassing all of those timelines and planning stages that are needed to get a project done just so you can say we're getting it done?
Am I going to be paying the cost of all of this?
I heard words of not wanting to pay for it through just the companies themselves, say your AI companies, but through public.
This issue has been bugging me for years, says Kristen.
Again, Portland, Maine.
Why does everything seem to have been modernized in this century?
Cars and planes and computers and phones.
But telephone poles are stuck back in the 1800s, and they've been a deadly failure in spawning fires in Hawaii and California.
If we hold the owners of these energy executives personally accountable for not upgrading their systems, something might finally get done.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Kristen, that's good insight as well.
You know, if you go into a newer subdivision, you won't see all of these.
I grew up in the Midwest where we had alleyways out back and we all had telephone poles in the alleys with a lot of string connecting them all.
And they, you know, during cold weather, a hot weather, they snap, they break.
They're not as resilient, right, as storing them underground.
If you go down to Florida because of earthquakes, you'll see instead of telephone poles, concrete or steel structures that are reinforced, you'll see electrical lines buried.
That's certainly a direction we could go.
And we could certainly do that with high-speed transmission lines, leaving the surface area available for surface use.
That costs a lot of money.
Whenever you build an underground facility, it's three to ten times the cost of just throwing up a telephone pole and a line.
Coming up a little later this morning, young Americans, questions about how they're feeling about this country.
John DeLaVolpe is with the Harvard Institute of Politics, and he discussed the finding of a new poll of young people in America.
But first, some time here for our open forum.
Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about?
Now is the time to call in.
The numbers are on your screen.
Go ahead and start dialing, and we'll get to those calls right after the break.
unidentified
Friday on C-SPAN's Ceasefire, at a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman and Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the top issues facing the country.
They join host Dasha Burns.
Bridging the divide in American politics.
Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
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Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now is the time to call in.
As you're calling in, here's what's happening on the Hill today.
The House is in at 10 a.m. Eastern.
The Senate is in at noon Eastern.
A few events that we are covering on C-SPAN networks today.
On C-SPAN 3 at 10 a.m., the head of the Federal Aviation Administration will testify before Congress for the first time since his confirmation in July.
Brian Bedford is his name.
At 2 p.m. Eastern, with the Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the month, the House Rules Committee will meet to consider health care legislation aimed at lowering costs.
The Rules Committee meeting will, again, air live at 2 p.m. on C-SPAN 3 today, and those are all Eastern time for you.
Also out today, and this was less than a half an hour ago, the belated November jobs report.
And this is the Axio story on that report.
The U.S. economy added 64,000 jobs in November, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, according to the Labor Department.
Hiring slowed last month alongside a jump in the jobless rate.
The Axio story saying the report comes after the government canceled the October jobs report, citing the government shutdown.
Tuesday's report indicated the economy lost 105,000 jobs in October, according to the delayed data collected from businesses, a decline almost entirely due to the effects of the federal shutdown.
Some of the numbers from that report, we can dig in more to it if you'd like in our open forum because you're leading the discussion.
Any public policy, any political issue?
Numbers are on your screen, and we will start in Tampa, Florida.
This is Ernest Democrat.
Ernest, what's on your mind?
unidentified
Good morning.
Thanks for having me.
Listen, the problem I see here in America is you got Congress, over 500 people in Washington, D.C., sitting back letting President Trump do whatever the heck he wants to do.
Congress is supposed to run the country, not the president.
And on the other hand, I think a better way to do the country is: number one, eliminate the Electoria College.
Number two, put term limits on every office.
That's the representative, the Senate, the Supreme Court justices, the federal judges.
Nobody in this country should have a job to life.
That's just ridiculous.
Then Congress gets up there and they do all this trade.
In Dallas, Texas, just coming back to Tina Peters for a second, the headline from the Hill newspaper, Trump rips pathetic Colorado governor over the Tina Peters case, the story noting that the president yesterday lashed out at Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, a Democrat, over Tina Peters, his latest remarks focusing on the case of the state election official who is convicted of multiple felonies after breaching voting equipment in the 2020 election.
He held an event in the Oval Office focused on slowing the flow of migrants and drugs across the southern border when he made those comments.
But the president having that case on his mind yesterday.
This is Delia, New York City, Democrat.
Good morning.
You are next.
unidentified
Yes, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I echo what the gentleman just said, and earlier someone had said something about crime.
I live in New York, as you stated, and the crime in New York is like nothing I've ever seen.
I'm a New Yorker born and bred, raised in Harlem, born and bred in Harlem, and I can tell you that the crime that is going on there is staggering.
I can't tell you how many times I've been a victim of crime.
I can't tell.
In fact, there was my story actually aired, I think it was November 8th, 2023 on Channel 11, the 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast where myself and several other black women were attacked by a guy.
I don't know whether he at one point was an illegal alien or not.
However, we had to go to the grand jury and get this guy finally put away.
But you really couldn't imagine how bad it is.
And as far as representation in New York State, I'm a Democrat.
I am a Democrat.
There really isn't any representation that I see in New York that I can really go to.
How do you think Mayor Zorhan Mamdani will deal with the issue of crime?
unidentified
Perfect.
Perfect timing.
I was just about to say.
The mayor coming in, Mamdani, oh my God, well, I don't see him helping the problem.
In fact, I see it getting worse because he's just going to piggyback, I think, probably off of the brag, you know, doctrine of catch and release or Mayor Adams, you know, allowing all of the illegal aliens to come in or Letitia James, who just focused on anything except her job.
I don't see, well, not to mention, let me just say during the debates, what really frightened me about Mayor Mamdani, now Mayor-elect Mamdani, oh God, he turned around and he made, I think it was Cuomo, who I voted for, by the way.
Cuomo made a comment, and I'm thanking God that he did, because none of us would have known that he said that Mayor Mamdani has a bill that he's sponsoring in the New York State Congressional House or Senate or whatever, that he wants to legalize, excuse me, decriminalize prostitution.
No, let me just say, as a Christian, as a Christian African-American woman, I found that to be offensive because one, you mean to tell me the only way that he can think to help desperate women is by telling them to do something or legalizing or decrim,
whatever you want to say, by having them, I just have to say, to use themselves in a way that is just unconscionable.
If he had said, and someone mentioned this earlier, about going, getting through the red tape, the gentleman who was on before, he was saying about getting through the red tape as far as energy or something.
And I was thinking the same thing as far as Mamdani is concerned.
If he had told women, look, I'm going to help you get through the red tape, maybe opening your own business, or I'm going to have a program, some kind of program where if you need help, you know, we're going to help you because contrary to popular belief, it is still harder for women to get into business.
There's a woman in my church who found a way.
We call her, our pastor calls her pound cake lady because she lost her job.
She had no source of income.
She was able to use the skills she had legitimately, you know, she started selling pound cakes out of her house.
Finally, she opened her own business.
Now, these are ideas.
YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU CAN BE PROUD TO BE ABLE TO HAVE SOMETHING THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO DO AND BE ABLE TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF IT, AND THOSE ARE THE KIND OF SOLUTIONS THAT . GOT YOUR POINT, DEALIA.
I just wanted to say a while ago, I forget the gentleman's name, but a couple weeks ago, you had a gentleman on there, and he was talking about how it's really only like 25% of the nation's population that are Republican, another 25% that are Democrats.
But there's another 40% that are basically that are really neither.
You know what I mean?
They vote, but they're not staunch Republicans or Democrats.
So, really, the majority of the population really doesn't feel properly represented, right?
They just make the best choice of with whatever they have.
So, and that guy that you just had on there not too long ago was speaking on getting the money out of elections, right?
So, that you know, you know, and that is really what I feel like we need to get to is getting the money out of elections.
That's why we have a difficult problem solving the issue of affordable education, affordable health care, housing costs, and interest rates, and also military spending.
So, it's like they've done a heck of a job, you know, basically disenfranchising the average folks, you know, and you know, because it's ridiculous.
You have a lot of households where people are bringing in $300,000 a year as an entire family, but yet still struggling, you know.
Just like today's housing costs, right?
In my particular area, a single-family home, the average single-family home, probably costs you about $700,000.
Now, a 7% interest rate on that is going to be something like $5,200 a month, right?
Which a lot of people can't afford, you know.
Whereas that same house at that same cost, but with the 3.75% interest rate, it's something like $3,200 a month, you know.
So, it's like $1,800 a month difference just because of greed, or more like $2,000 a month difference.
And at 3.75, mortgage lenders are still making a tremendous amount of money.
Everybody got a moment about Marjorie Taylor Green.
She agreed with everything that Noon was saying about everybody getting arrested, children being arrested.
Marjorie Taylor agreed with Noones on everything to security.
So don't trust her, Democrat.
Okay, now, John, I want to talk about when Donald Trump said make America great again.
This is what he was talking about.
He was talking about bringing us back to the 1930s.
In New York City, it was called the American German Wound.
In 1939, they had a Nazi rally meeting at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and there were 20,000 Nazi synthesizers in Madison Square Garden that day.
They were wearing Nazi uniforms.
They had a picture of George Washington in Madison Square Garden, standing 20 feet tall.
That was President Trump yesterday at the White House.
One other story about President Trump from yesterday.
President Trump on Monday filed a $5 billion defamation lawsuits against the BBC over the way the news organization deceptively edited remarks he made in the run-up to the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
A British Broadcasting Corporation documentary released last year included a misleading edit the Washington Times writes of comments that Mr. Trump made during his January 6th rally.
Instead, they spliced together two separate comments he made nearly an hour apart to create an impression that he was calling for violence.
The edit has led, they note, to the resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turnis and BBC Director General Tim Davey.
The BBC didn't issue an apology, did issue an apology saying it had no plans to air the documentary again, but stopped short of fulfilling some of Mr. Trump's demands about the documentary.
The story again today from the Washington Times.
This is Tony in Redding, Pennsylvania, Republican.
Good morning.
It's open forum.
We've got about six or seven minutes left.
unidentified
Yeah, I just want to say that people just do not realize what a great president Donald Trump is.
We never had a president that was a truly working president along with his administration.
They are very competent, strong people.
They are truly working, working 24-7 to try to bring our country back, to save our country.
If you really want to be fair and look at the situation under the Biden administration, with Majorkis and all of his administrative people on his cabinet, look at what they did to our country.
The illegal immigration was coming over our border like ants out of an anthill.
Anyone that is true and a true belief and sees with their own eyes what Biden administration did.
This country has been a lot, a lot of damage has been done to our country.
And what I'm saying to you is Trump is trying to clean it up.
Earlier you had a congressman on, and he was like for term limits, but I'm not for term limits.
If you want to make it more fair, the thing to do is to end the gerrymandering so that the citizens can pick their congressmen and senators.
You know, Benjamin Franklin said a republic, if you can keep it, Thomas Payne retorted back, if you don't have a Democratic Republic, then you have nothing.
Again, a reminder that the House is in a 10 a.m. Eastern live gavel-to-gavel coverage on C-SPAN, and that's where you'll go when this program ends today at 10 on C-SPAN 2.
The Senate comes in at noon Eastern is when they're scheduled, and you can watch there.
And we hope you'll stay with us for the next 45 minutes on the Washington Journal.
This is Valerie in Michigan.
Democrat, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
I am surprised that everyone is so surprised about all of the violence.
We've always had an overwhelming country of violence from the beginning until now.
It's just that now, since the internet, it's more seeable, and it's coming from the top.
What has that done to our psyche, our mental health?
Is that a problem?
unidentified
Well, of course it is, but you've got to understand that this didn't just start.
It's always done things to mental health coming from the portrayals of violence and the people on the side that receiving it.
No matter what community, white communities, black communities, Hispanic communities, most communities create violence in their own community, and then when you drop a little bit of racism in there, it floods over to others.
But most black-on-black crime is true.
But there's a lot of white-on-white crime.
We don't cover what's going on equally, and we don't be honest about all the violence that we have created every place we've ever been.
We're just a violent country.
Think of all the wars, all the secret.
The only time I remember us not bombing a country is when President Carter was in office, and everybody labeled him as a weak president.
It takes strength to know when to stand still and you saw power.
It's easy to be, it's more easy to be violent.
It's more easy to take pictures of your violence and celebrate it.
There's been various different reports on what the number would be of what the impact would have been over the past year if USAID was still in operation.
unidentified
Yeah, and I do donate myself to USAID or to actually Save the Children.
And I want to say that, you know, we have one of the biggest criminals in the history of the world in the office of the President of the United States.
We have, he has come into office and just ignored the emoluments clause.
He has shown himself to be just open to graft and to be willing to give himself and his friends a lot of leeway that the average American does not have an opportunity to experience.
And we welcome back now Harvard Institute of Politics polling director John DeLa Volpe.
He's out with the latest edition of the Harvard Youth Poll.
The survey dates back to the year 2000.
Mr. De La Volpe, what did you find out about the hopes, the fears of American 18 to 29-year-olds in the year 2025?
unidentified
Thanks again, John, for having me back.
This is a survey where perhaps last time we had a conversation about this.
I talked about that this generation, mostly Gen Zs, what we're talking about, 18 to 29-year-olds, were worried about their near-term and longer-term future, mostly connected to the economy.
But I think today, the story from this poll is that worry has now turned into concerns about their own economic situation,
deep concerns about the instability of the job market based upon technology and AI, and deep concerns about the institutions designed and developed to protect and to guide them.
So this is a generation that's feeling just deep levels of instability at this moment.
This is from the latest edition again of the Harvard Youth Poll that you can find online at the Harvard Institute of Politics.
Only 30% of those 18 to 29-year-olds believe that they'll be better off financially than their parents, with college students at 34%, graduates at 35%, slightly more optimistic than those not in college and without a college degree.
Just 28% of those folks believe that they'll be better off financially than their parents.
And John DeLa Volpe, some history of this poll for folks who don't know much about it.
It goes back to the year 2000.
It happens about twice a year at this point.
What was the original point of doing this poll?
And did you expect it to be going on for 25 years?
unidentified
No, this is one of my favorite stories about what makes the Institute of Politics here so special.
This was never my idea.
It was the idea of two sophomores, Aaron and Trevor, who looked at our campus back in the spring, winter spring of 2000, who looked at our campus and noticed that there wasn't a lot of robust political conversations.
Same thing happening, they felt on other campuses across the country, but it seemed like their peers were deeply committed to community service and volunteering.
And the question that they brought to the leadership of the Institute of Politics at Harvard at that time was: can we try to understand this disconnect?
Can we try to understand why so many young people seem committed to community service, but not as engaged and as voting and kind of political debate and conversations as we might expect?
This, of course, was following the 1996 presidential election where only roughly a third of people under the ages of 30 participated.
So this was designed to be kind of a one-semester project.
And as you noted, it's about 50 semesters ago, 25 years.
And what also makes this unique is this is the longest running, largest survey of young voters, but it's also true collaboration between, at this point, several dozen undergraduates here at the college with me and my colleagues.
And together we kind of develop the questions, we conduct the interviews with outside partners and report, of course, on the findings.
It's a really unique combination of undergraduate enthusiasm and curiosity with, of course, the rigor that is necessary to conduct survey research today.
And as we've had just a few hits to the technology side here, I want to make sure that we can continue to hear you and have this conversation with you.
So I'm going to work on that connection with you as I promote the phone lines.
We especially want 18 to 29 year olds to call in this morning.
That number, if you're 18 to 29 years old, 202-748-8000 is the number to call.
If you are 30 to 50 years older, 202-748-8001.
If you're over 50, here's the number to call, 202-748-8002.
It's the Harvard youth poll.
And you can find it at IOP, Institute of Polling, at Harvard, Institute of Politics, at Harvard.edu.
And you can find that poll online, iOP.harvard.edu.
John DeLaVolpe, let's run through a few more numbers on the poll on the technology side.
AI, an issue that very much is on the front of mind of kids today and young people today.
What did you find?
unidentified
Well, we found by a margin of roughly three to one that younger people across political affiliation, across demographic, socioeconomic status are concerned that AI will take away, not create opportunities for them in the future.
And more importantly, I think, and creating a lot of this anxiety, is that over half, 59% say that AI will have a negative impact on their career prospects.
And again, that's something that I think most young Americans agree with, again, regardless of their education or their economic status at this point.
How long have you been polling about the coming of AI?
And is it getting more trepidation among young people or are they becoming more comfortable with it?
What does the sort of trend line here say?
unidentified
We don't have, John, we don't have a lot of trend line on this particular series of questions.
But what I will note is that we did see that, you know, that a significant number of people are using AI on a regular basis for school assignments, for work assignments, et cetera.
But as it's concerned about kind of their future, they just have more questions than answers.
And that is one, I think, of the reasons that there's so much concern and this feeling of being unstable today, because you already have issues related to inflation.
You have issues related to the job market.
We see unemployment rising as of this morning.
That is only, those concerns are only exacerbated now with questions around AI.
And the concern that I have is they're looking to governments to provide some pathways, some guardrails.
And again, they just don't hear that government is actually kind of on their side on this issue, which creates more economic stress and more mental health stress, to be honest.
On trend lines and young people, one of the questions that you've been asking for a long time is whether young people think the country's on the right track or headed off in the wrong direction.
In this latest poll, just 13% of young people said that the country is generally headed on the right track.
Where does that stand historically in this poll?
unidentified
That stands at close to the lowest number, but when you look at the ratio between the right track versus wrong direction, that ratio, we also, in this particular survey, I'll throw up a kind of a third option in terms of really not sure.
But when you look at the right track versus the wrong track, this is as negative a perception that younger Americans have had in the last 20-something years.
In fact, it is darker and more negative than it was actually during the depths of the Great Recession when, as you noted, we were asking that question as well.
So, just again, deep concern, instability economically, instability related to kind of the status of kind of Democratic institutions, and sadly, instability even around important personal relationships.
Those are the big three findings, I think, in the survey.
What are young people saying about 2026, a midterm election year?
What can the folks who work up here on Capitol Hill, what should they be paying attention to from this survey?
unidentified
Well, I think one of the good things, despite kind of, as I said, the instability, people aren't giving up.
I wouldn't say that they're apathetic.
We see roughly the same number, never enough as far as I'm concerned, roughly the same number of young people saying they're likely to participate and vote in 2026.
Again, always want that to be higher.
But whereas both political parties are viewed far more negatively than positively, approval ratings of Democrats in Congress, Republicans in Congress are under 30%.
Despite that, we see Democrats with a significant advantage at this point relative to Republicans a year out from 11 months now from the midterms.
We see that among young registered voters, 46% say they prefer Democrats' control of Congress.
29% indicate the same for Republicans.
And Democrats have a double-digit lead when you look, when we dig into the crosstops across most subgroups, single-digits, when you look at younger white voters and you look at younger voters who are not on a college campus and don't have a college degree.
But overall, relative to Republicans, Democrats are in good shape, although there are clearly concerns that younger people have with the Democratic Party kind of brand and image right now, as we also delved into in the survey.
Donald Trump is not on the ballot in 2026, but what did your poll tell you about young people and their views on Donald Trump?
unidentified
So Donald Trump, you know, in 2024 did what many people would say surprisingly well with younger voters.
He did far better in 2024 than he did in 2020.
In 2020, Joe Biden received 60% of the youth vote, and Kamala Harris in 2024 received roughly 55%.
And that was because of a double-digit shift over the course of four years among younger men in particular.
Some young women moved, but it was mostly younger men.
Even though many young Americans didn't necessarily kind of agree with Donald Trump on a lot of issues, but there was a significant number of people, even in January, on the eve of his inauguration, who indicated that he might help improve their personal economic situation.
That's the lens in which younger people were viewing, I think, kind of Donald Trump.
You fast forward 10, 11 months into the administration, and you can see that only 29% approve of his job overall.
And whether that is overall and whether that is on the economy, on inflation, on immigration, on healthcare, his approval rating doesn't increase much more than 32, 34% on any one issue.
The phone numbers, again, for you to call in if you are between 18 to 29, and that's who was targeted in this Harvard youth poll.
It's 202-748-8000.
If you're 30 to 50 years old, 202-748-8001.
If you're over 50, 202-748-8002.
John DeLaVolpe, our guest via Zoom for about the next 20 minutes to take your calls.
First question from Text Message, or this actually is from X. America Inc. is the handle asking you, in light of what you found when it came to youth views on AI, what fields do you believe that youth should be focusing on in light of what we find out about AI?
unidentified
Well, I spend a lot of time with younger people, not just through surveys, not just on this campus, but also conducting focus groups and traveling to other places around the country.
And what I think is the ability to be essentially kind of well-read.
And I think that kind of a return to that traditional liberal arts education is something that I think will help more young people understand how to get the most out of AI.
I spend a lot of time myself using these tools.
And I think it is kind of the experience of asking and directing AI in terms of what the task is.
And that is something that comes with kind of experience and understanding kind of our broad set of knowledge across multiple fields to really kind of understand and get the most of this technology.
So I hear a lot about that in my focus groups.
I see a lot of younger people spending time online, on YouTube, and other places to try to understand kind of more context about the issues that they care about so they can get the most out of AI and AI prompts.
Can you actually just briefly do the methodology for the Harvard youth poll?
unidentified
Of course.
So the Harvard Youth Poll is a quantitative survey.
Every semester, twice a year, as you said, we conduct well more than 2,000 interviews.
We conduct them mostly in English.
If folks are interested and more comfortable in Spanish, we offer a Spanish, a translated version as well.
We recruit people.
This is what we would call a probability-based sample, which means that every young individual under the age between the ages of 18 and 29 has an equal chance of being selected for this survey.
The way in which we recruit them isn't based upon a telephone number or an internet address like we might have in the past.
This is based upon an address-based sample.
So we recruit people actually based upon kind of where they live rather than when I started this in this field decades ago now based upon telephone exchanges.
So that is the way in which we do this.
The students and I kind of develop the questions and we use an organization called Ipsos and their knowledge panel to actually collect the information.
And then over the course of the last several weeks of the semester, students and I break up into research teams and we analyze and of course kind of report the results.
Bill is on the phone from Jacksonville, Florida, on that line for folks who are over the age of 50.
Bill, you don't have to give your exact age, but go ahead with your question for John DeLa Bolpe.
unidentified
Don't mind telling, I'm 82, so I've been through a few of the generational changes here.
And to Mr. Volvy Vivi Tas, my question is that one thing when I was growing up, we had the draft, and that certainly had minds focused on what to look for, and that gave us an extra couple years to maybe find things to be perhaps more successful.
Along with that, I was wondering in your survey, you said things aren't getting better.
What about things possibly being worse type thing?
And I'll pose on a third point.
One difficulty we have is that we've ensured with government regulations and welfare stuff, not going into poverty as much as opposed to the old days.
Like my dad grew up, he was born in 1912.
There was that safety net, so you really had to scramble to be successful.
Just your thoughts on that, please.
Yeah.
I think a couple of things.
I think when you spoke first about the draft bill, this is something that community service, national service, looking for an opportunity to kind of connect with each other.
This is a big idea, not necessarily only the military, but I think a call to national service is an important step in moving this generation and this country forward, which is something that Bill talked about.
You know, essentially, kind of every three decades, we see a focus from the White House, FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton kind of engaging in national service and public service.
And I'm hopeful that we see leadership in the next couple of years to encourage more young people to participate.
I do think as we started this conversation, John mentioned that only 30% of young Americans think they'll be better off than their parents.
Close to 50%, over 40%, indicate that they are barely getting by or struggling financially.
And one of the things that I'm so incredibly concerned with is, John, when I talk about the focus groups I conduct, there's virtually not a focus group that I can assemble.
We recently did something in New York before the New York City Marriage Race with our students, but I travel across the country on a regular basis.
And there's virtually no group that I can assemble where I'm not meeting, engaging with young people who are currently had recently been or on the verge of being without a home.
It's a different kind, I think, of homelessness than many of us might expect.
That doesn't mean that they're necessarily kind of panhandling, although some are, but it does mean that they don't have a home, that they're couch surfing, that they're back, you know, in some unstable environment.
And that is just, again, a concern that is just right below, I think, right below where folks are thinking about it every single day.
I'm not surprised at what you're telling me from your friend group.
I've heard that dozens of times in focus groups.
Listen, I think that focus groups and other kinds of what I would call kind of deep listening is an essential part of my job as a researcher, as a pollster.
I don't think it's something that's incorporated enough into the survey and the polls that we collectively look at that are available online.
Without spending time with younger people, we're not able to actually kind of create questions that we can survey that are relevant to them.
So it's just incredibly important that we kind of invest in as much listening as possible.
Now, the difference between a focus group where I think we get kind of authentic answers and conversations, it's certainly more art than science.
A few, though, of the most significant, I think, kind of principles would be we just need to establish as much trust between kind of the facilitator, the moderator, and the group of young people that we're talking with as quickly as possible.
That goes into just this commitment to listening, but also who else may be in that group.
So, for example, if we truly want to kind of understand the rationale of younger voters who might have voted, never voted before or voted for a Democrat, now switch to Trump, well then I think my instinct is that they feel more comfortable with a group of like-minded people and certainly someplace where there's just no judgment.
One of the most concerning pieces of data in this survey, when I talk about instability, it's economic instability, instability regarding the direction of the country and our institutions, but also instability in personal relationships.
And there are too many young Americans who feel shame, who feel uncomfortable kind of sharing their political views because for fear of being judged.
And specifically, it gets to close to 50% of people feeling shame.
And among those people, it gets over 50% among those people who are conservative or Republican.
And I think we collectively need to do a far better job to open up areas of Spaces where people can ask questions, have a conversation, and kind of share views without fear of being kind of judged in any way.
What percentage of the voting bloc are 18 to 29-year-olds compared with the overall electorate?
unidentified
Yeah, it's a good question.
It's roughly, it flows somewhere between 14, 15 percent up to 17, 18, 19 percent based upon the election.
So, you know, one in six, one in seven voters are going to be kind of under the age of 30.
And what makes this such an important demographic group is, as I said, is this is younger voters are hard to predict because they haven't had as much experience.
It's not, you know, kind of a series of trend lines in terms of their level of participation and their partisanship compared to older voters.
So, every single year, you're dealing with essentially kind of a new cohort of Americans whose political identity and whose values are shaped during just the, you know, essentially usually the previous four or five years.
And it's just critically important that I think we're investing and listening to this cohort of Americans whose identities are being shaped in real time.
And I think, you know, to me, kind of sadly, they are kind of losing faith in institutions.
And I think it, you know, requires us to commit to understanding kind of where they are, what they care about, and how we can kind of include them kind of in the process of turning that 13% right direction back in the other direction on the right track number.
More people want to be involved than are currently being involved, but we need to listen more and invite them into the process.
Where do young people stand on socialism in this country?
unidentified
You know, that's a series of questions.
It's a great question.
We've been asking now for nearly a decade not only views about the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, but also the degree to which young people kind of associate or identify as capitalist, as socialists, Democratic socialists, et cetera.
And despite the national attention that, for example, a Democratic socialist incoming mayor Zora Mamdami has had, we haven't found increasing support for Democrat socialism or socialism at all.
It is far less supported than many of the other kind of labels that we've asked people about.
With the young kids and that, and the young people, their attitudes today, I think, are shaped largely by what they see and what they hear and the way it's presented to them.
I listened to the very first call this morning at 6 o'clock.
I was going to try and get through.
And I knew what it was going to be.
I knew before the program came on that it was going to be about this Rob Reiner getting stabbed to death out in California and Trump having something to say about it.
And I thought, man, if I was a kid, would that be the most important thing?
Here we got a guy who struck a bull on the head for this country.
He's closed the border.
He's cut gas prices in half.
The most important thing he's done is he defanged Iran, the largest nuclear terrorist country in the world.
He pulled their teeth.
They're quiet.
The whole Middle East is quiet.
It's just, I don't know all the thing.
He's killing the narco-terrorists.
This fentanyl and cocaine is destroying the youth in the country.
And what do we talk about?
Because Trump said something about Rob Reiner.
If I was a kid, I'd want to go to somewhere other than where the most important thing in the world was: how can we say something bad about President Trump?
If we can do that today, the country will be wonderful.
The guy's taking the boys out of girls' sports.
He's taking this DEA out where you might get the best pilot in your airplane instead of somebody that fits a mold for that particular group of people.
Well, I want to pick up on what younger people are telling me in the focus groups and the survey that they care about.
They have already factored in Donald Trump's posts on Truth Social.
They've already factored in so much of his personality.
Listen, younger people are pragmatic.
They're not, I don't think, judging Donald Trump's performance based upon a post about Rob Reiner.
What they are judging Donald Trump on is: is their economic situation better today because he promised it would be than it was a year ago?
And when, through other data sets, we can look at the month-to-month-to-month approval ratings of Donald Trump, we can see that his honeymoon ended in the springtime.
It ended in April when conversations related to the tariffs started.
So, yes, there were a lot of potential distractions out there, but younger people's views of Donald Trump are neatly correlated with views regarding the economy and also the impact that the economy is having in their own day-to-day life.
In terms of how much young people are paying attention to foreign policy issues, what did your survey find?
And how much did the protests on college campuses that were so much in the news a year ago, how much do you see that still in the polls that you're taking today?
unidentified
Overwhelmingly, again, it's really about just the day-to-day economic survival.
We regularly ask questions about views of foreign policy, of individual conflicts and other things.
And it's been for years now, during from COVID through this period, younger people are essentially kind of asking our leaders to kind of invest more in our country than in other countries, I think is largely what we're hearing, especially young men.
I see in this and in other research who are incredibly concerned about additional conflicts that the U.S. could engage in and their interest and focusing more kind of domestically.
That's really, I just cannot overstate just how anxious folks are about their futures.
Again, 42, close to 50% among some groups say they're barely getting by economically.
They're deeply concerned not just about today, but the role that technology and AI and other things will have on their future job prospects.
And again, this, John, is a generation where only 30% say they'll do as well as their parents.
And it's something that, you know, that was, I think, a lot of the reasons that Donald Trump did so much better among younger men a year ago, because he was promising and they were hopeful that he could kind of address this economic insecurity that they felt and help them become better kind of providers and protectors.
And at this stage, that is the prism of which they're viewing him.
And we can see that those numbers at this stage are quite negative, as is their views about the direction of the nation.
It made me think of that book that got a whole lot of attention last year, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
Did you read that book?
How do you think that is factored in as to what you've found in terms of young people's views and anxieties today?
The thesis of that book is the impact that always on screens, social media lifestyle, how it's impacting kids today.
And the book mostly focuses on teenagers, but those teenagers turn into the 18 and 29 year olds.
unidentified
Yeah, and I think the additional aspect that I add to that conversation is, listen, 50, roughly 50, 51, 52% of folks in this survey indicate that several days, several days in the last two weeks, they've had bouts of anxiety or depression.
25%, half of that number, which of course are millions of young Americans, John, indicate that they've had concerns and thoughts of self-harm several days in the last two weeks.
And then there's a not insignificant number, less than 5%, but still not insignificant number, who say they have thoughts of self-harm on a daily basis.
So every high school, every college, essentially across America, you're dealing with this significant number of younger people who are anxious, depressed, and have very dangerous and dark thoughts.
One aspect of this conversation related to the phone, I think, is the instability in the news.
And the concerns that we've been talking about here in terms of current events, public affairs, instability, disquiet in our politics is specifically adding to the anxiety and the stress.
It's just simply not screen time, fear of missing out, and other kind of important conversations, but it's also the disquiet in our politics, which is driving part of this mental health crisis.
And again, what younger people are looking for from any leader, Democrat, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, whoever, is some stability in an otherwise unstable country right now.