| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Safety First
00:15:06
|
|
| We've done both. | |
| We've made a decision to, with lots of restrictions, keep the traffic going. | |
| We've also had other times we've had to declare that it's just not safe. | |
| We have to shut it down. | |
| Frank, is there anything you want to add to that? | |
| Thank you, Governor. | |
| Just that safety is our paramount concern. | |
| And we're in constant communication with our partners in state and local government to ensure that the road will stay open, but in a safe and drivable manner. | |
| Anything else? | |
| All right, guys. | |
| Thank you. | |
| All right. | |
| Thanks, everyone. | |
| All right. | |
| All right. | |
| You've been watching live coverage. | |
| We return now to our scheduled program. | |
| We joined it in progress. | |
| Good morning, James. | |
| I voted Republican, and now I'm starting to question myself, seeing bloodshed of American citizens. | |
| And it might be something small for others that they haven't, you know, looked at and realized. | |
| But I see Trump doing this ballroom. | |
| And I say, all the millions, hundreds of millions that's going into that. | |
| Is he planning on leaving office? | |
| Because if he was, I don't think he'll be billing a ballroom for the next president. | |
| So I think what we're seeing today is setting up for him to try to stay in office. | |
| That's why all these ICE agents that they are hiring and putting them around the country, because when the election comes, those agents is going to be in blue states trying to keep people from the voting box. | |
| I think he flim flam America. | |
| I knew he flimflam me. | |
| So I'm very worried about the future of America. | |
| And thinking back now, listening to the Democrats talking about our democracy was at stake with Trump. | |
| It's all coming to fruition, if you ask me. | |
| Tanya is in Tampa, Florida, on our line for independence. | |
| Good morning, Tanya. | |
| Good morning. | |
| Thank you for making my call. | |
| My question, and I wanted to just ask: who pays the insurance coverage for all the politicians? | |
| And I wonder if they would be, so if it is the taxpayers, I wonder if they would be so disregarding or not concerned about how we've lost the coverage for numerous Americans. | |
| Would they feel the same way if they were being affected? | |
| Because I'm not sure who fits the bill for the politicians, which I already think it's going to be the taxpayers. | |
| But that just really concerns me of how they are not being due diligent on reinstating or getting some type of coverage for these Americans that have lost their insurance health coverage. | |
| And thank you for taking my call. | |
| Nicole is in Jersey City, New Jersey on our line for Democrats. | |
| Good morning, Nicole. | |
| Ms. Adams, can you hear me okay? | |
| Yes, we can hear you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I feel very grateful that I get to speak to you this morning because yesterday was a nightmare for this country. | |
| I also appreciate your guest, Mr. Goodman, because as a Democrat, hearing a Republican with his posture and being able to speak without insulting people, that's what our country is built on. | |
| It's people who are different talking to each other and trying to come to an agreement. | |
| My question for him was if he had seen the video of Alex Pretty, who was a VA nurse and had a concealing carry permit and was unarmed at the time with his shirt over his head and he was shot by ICE agents. | |
| So my question, because he said we shouldn't defund ICE, how can we not defund ICE? | |
| How can the people not call for ICE to be defunded and shut down the government? | |
| Because this is a constitutional emergency right now. | |
| They're executing Americans. | |
| And I think that every politician that stands with the people needs to go to Minnesota, go to Minneapolis, stand there, stand in the streets with those people in the cold, and watch what is happening because we elected them in office. | |
| This is completely unacceptable. | |
| And thank you so much. | |
| Mike is in Covington, Indiana on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Mike. | |
| Yes. | |
| I was kind of wondering about the X team thing. | |
| You know, most girls are promiscuous by the time they're 16. | |
| Robert is in Rex, Georgia, on our line for independence. | |
| Good morning, Robert. | |
| Good morning. | |
| So many issues. | |
| First of all, I'm a longtime listener, and this is my first time on the air, but I want to talk about the leadership vacuum in this country. | |
| I mean, it goes from the local level here in Rex, Georgia. | |
| You look on the ballots, only people running is the incumbents. | |
| You look at the federal government. | |
| It's either one far end of the liberal end to one far right end on the right. | |
| And nothing's getting done for the people in the meantime. | |
| I mean, it's going on year after year, term after term, politician after politician. | |
| And the citizens here are just left holding the bag. | |
| You know, we got so many problems in this country, and there's no hope for resolving any of them. | |
| So I just want to tell all Americans to go to the polls and vote your conscience. | |
| Vote for the best person you think that can get the job done. | |
| Thank you, America, and have a great day. | |
| Osinsemi is in Pensacola, Florida, on our line for Democrats. | |
| Good morning, Osinsemi. | |
| Yes, I have been listening to Republican explanations, and it's almost like the president can do no wrong. | |
| No one working for him can do any wrong because no one can do any wrong. | |
| Congress goes along with everything that he does, but he does lie. | |
| And it's almost like, no, it's not almost like it is, if you repeat the lie enough out loud, people are going to believe it because you're saying it out loud. | |
| The lie is that things are better or getting better and then not. | |
| Maybe under Biden, we paid more for gas, but now we're paying $15 a pound for ground beef. | |
| This is absolutely insane. | |
| You get a Republican on there, and they don't see anything wrong with ICE shooting somebody in the head. | |
| They don't seem to see anything wrong with American citizens being dragged out into the cold weather in their underwear with a blanket thrown around their shoulder with the excuse that ICE is looking for a pervert and the pervert is already in jail. | |
| I don't understand how we can suspend our conscience along political lines. | |
| People are being hurt. | |
| Children are being victimized. | |
| And we are being duped. | |
| And if you don't know your history, you are bound to repeat it. | |
| And when people say that Jews are not to be intimidated, then you need to understand what happened in Germany with Kristal Nacht, which was the night that the Gestapo went through and broke out the windows of the Jewish merchants. | |
| We are radicalizing our own people in this country for an excuse for martial law. | |
| And when that martial law is upon us, a lot of those people who are in support of the big lie, the big, beautiful lie, are going to finally say, I didn't sign up for this. | |
| Scott is in Effingham, Illinois, on our line for Republicans. | |
| Good morning, Scott. | |
| Good morning, America and fellow patriots, and may God bless you, Kimberly, and everybody that works at C-SPAN. | |
| As a decorated Vietnam veteran, I have traveled the world three times around this world, and nowhere in the world can you protest even peacefully as witnessed by what's going on in Iran, killing thousands of their people, China, Tiananmen Square, North Korea. | |
| You just can't do that. | |
| I know we have government things, you know, it's in our Constitution, but this peace, it's not really peacefully. | |
| Okay, I have a bumper sticker for 40 years on my truck. | |
| It says, America, love it or leave it. | |
| I've been approached by a dozen people recently and saying, what does that mean? | |
| And I have an intelligent conversation with these people. | |
| And it's not that I change their minds, but they listen to what I say and say, we've got the greatest country in the world, and we should defend this country and love this country, not have this chaos that we're having. | |
| But secondly, and this is very important for all the people in this country, even immigrants, listen to me. | |
| I had an earache a few weeks ago, and I bought this prescription, whether it's a drug, it's not prescription, from a big box store. | |
| And it was $15, not the cheap stuff. | |
| My wife, God bless her, she's 79 years old. | |
| She put two drops in my ear. | |
| Within five seconds, my ear exploded like a shotgun. | |
| I had to go. | |
| I screamed in bloody pain. | |
| I've been close to death five times in my life, and this was the worst. | |
| If I could have got to my pistol, I probably would have ended my life. | |
| Let's move on. | |
| Miss Italy is in Los Angeles, California on our line for independence. | |
| Good morning, Miss Italy. | |
| Hi, thank you so much for taking my call. | |
| This is my first time seeing C-SPAN and what you guys are doing, the Washington Journal. | |
| And, you know, I'm a transgender person displaced in a hotel right now in Los Angeles and am experiencing hate firsthand. | |
| Just yesterday, a guy across the street at Target pulled a gun on me all because I was living and breathing and existing. | |
| And by hair, my nickname, my Chime Chin Chin, I was able to, you know, escape that. | |
| You guys are offering people to the table, and that is absolutely, I say thank you for inviting people to the table to honestly have an honest discussion whether they agree or they disagree. | |
| I guess my question, I guess my comment first is that: can we really say that we live in the land of the free? | |
| If the very fundamental characteristic traits of America is the fact that we are such a beautiful gumble pot, and then our government is trying to take that away and like point the finger at certain demographic of society and basically point an invisible gun at people and using our military and our citizens, | |
| our militarizing our citizens and deputizing them and making them federal agents in a way that they then have the legal right to kill people. | |
| Can we really say we live in the free land when the transgender community is now hiding because we're so afraid? | |
| We're so afraid of just being us. | |
| And our government is, you know, now they're saying things on the line and over the television that they would have never said three or four or five years ago. | |
| And can we really say we live in the home of the free when we are not even allowed? | |
| What if I'm atheist? | |
| What if I don't agree with the Christian state? | |
| Am I rights being respected as an atheist? | |
| Do I have the right not to agree and then be who I am? | |
| And then my final point is that do you really think that the LGBTQI community right now in today's society, where we are targets, would then still choose with everyone dying, with them assassinating, assassinating our Americans, do you think that we would choose to just be transgender because it's a fad, because it's a trend? | |
| No, we are living whatever truth we have left. | |
| And I say, we don't shouldn't have to die. | |
| What are we doing? | |
| We are killing Americans. | |
| Keith Porter was killed in his apartment complex. | |
| The man went next door and put his suit on and came out and murdered him. | |
| Yes, he shot off a fire in celebratory for the New Year's. | |
| But that man premeditated. | |
| It was premeditated. | |
| He went back in his unit, got fully dressed, came back out and murdered someone. | |
| We've got to do better. | |
| Susan is in Richmond, Virginia, on our line for Democrats. | |
| Good morning, Susan. | |
| Good morning. | |
| I just want to express a lot of agreement with many of the other Democratic and independent callers about ICE. | |
| And I truly believe that ICE has been assembled by Trump and Christy Noam to be an extrajudicial brown shirt army that's not just about border control and immigration enforcement. | |
| I think it's absolutely and positively being used to intimidate and now murder Americans. | |
| Anybody who's aware of the facts of yesterday and the killing of that disarmed man in Minneapolis will know he was murdered. | |
| That is just cold-blooded murder. | |
| And so this is, we are in a new age now. | |
|
Authoritative Regime Struggle
00:04:38
|
|
| This is an authoritarian regime. | |
| We are being purposefully intimidated prior to the elections because Donald Trump is afraid of losing. | |
| He's afraid of being impeached again. | |
| He's afraid of being kicked out of power. | |
| So, and the Republicans, just not a peep. | |
| The only Republicans brave enough to stand up against Donald Trump are the ones who are on their way out. | |
| Nobody in office in the Republican Party is doing anything to curb this violence, and the hypocrisy is just unbelievable because now they're saying, like Jim Jordan, proclaiming that January 6th, those individuals who perpetrated that riot and tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, | |
| they were peaceful. | |
| They were peaceful protesters calling for the hanging of Mike Pence, the murder of Nancy Pelosi, breaking in windows, assaulting police officers. | |
| I don't care if the Minneapolis protesters are spitting at these officers who, brown shirt officers, who are hiding their faces, brutally attacking people. | |
| They may spit at him. | |
| That's not good, but it does not rise to the level of a riot. | |
| All right. | |
| That's about all the time that we have for Open Forum today. | |
| Thanks to everybody who called in. | |
| Up next, we're going to be joined by journalist and author Kenneth Rosen. | |
| He's going to talk about his new book, Polar War, Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series. | |
| Today, with our guest, Christopher Buckley, best-selling satirical author and son of conservative writer William F. Buckley. | |
| He has written more than a dozen books, including The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Florence of Arabia, and The Deeply Personal, Losing Mum and Pup. | |
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | |
| You have written 20 books, many of them satires. | |
| Satire is a lost art a bit. | |
| I don't see that many satirists that are best-selling authors. | |
| There are. | |
| Carl Hyason, Dave Barry, although they might be more classified as humorists. | |
| The difference between a satire and a humorist, you would say, is hundreds of thousands of sales. | |
| Watch America's Book Club with Christopher Buckley today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | |
|
Greenland's Arctic Ambition
00:14:02
|
|
| Welcome back. | |
| We're joined now by Kenneth Rosen, who is an author of the new book, Polar War, Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic. | |
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | |
| Hey, thanks for having me. | |
| Let's talk about the title of the book, Polar War. | |
| War is a very strong word. | |
| Why did you choose that? | |
| Well, it seemed to me after three years traveling across the circumpolar north that there were great powers competing for resources and access to the far north, and this constituted a different kind of war, a struggle over how to define a region that has largely been one of cooperation and scientific research. | |
| And so it's a battle. | |
| It's a war for power and dominance in a place that had long been sort of icebound and neglected. | |
| You know, in the book, you lay out that it has become what you argue to be a new front line in global politics. | |
| I want to read a bit of an excerpt. | |
| Nations near and far from the region have seen the warming, and this is talking about climate change, as an opportunity for expansion and military dominance. | |
| And what they have cooked up is a conflict teetering towards full-blown war, even in a place that has largely been historically regarded as inaccessible due to geopolitical ambitions. | |
| Can you talk particularly about the impact of climate change on the development of what you're calling a polar war? | |
| Sure. | |
| So when I went about writing the book, I wanted to focus on a narrative that hadn't been largely tackled in other books about the Arctic and the media writ large. | |
| What climate change meant for the rest of us, right? | |
| We all don't live in the Arctic. | |
| We don't live above, many of us don't live above the Arctic Circle. | |
| And so the changes there, how is that going to affect the rest of us? | |
| And the melting of the polar cap, the four to five times warming that is dominating the North, is making it more accessible to a lot of nations who otherwise wouldn't have been privy to that area. | |
| So when we think about the Arctic, we think about the Arctic electoral states or the Arctic Council, which is comprised of eight nations, right? | |
| You have the Scandinavian and Nordic countries, and then Canada, the U.S., Iceland, and Russia, who are primary Arctic stakeholders. | |
| Then there are places like India and Turkey and China who are calling themselves near-Arctic states and seeking to have a role in the decisions being made in the Arctic, primarily because the climate change at the top of the world is also impacting their lands. | |
| So you start to see a lot of different nations who otherwise wouldn't be in that area moving in and showing interest and navigating those waters more freely. | |
| Let's talk about geography for a moment. | |
| You know, we're talking about the Arctic sort of writ large, but what areas in particular are really the focus of your research here? | |
| Sure, I make a distinction in the book that there is no really one way to define the Arctic or the sub-Arctic. | |
| The definitions vary depending on who you ask. | |
| There is, of course, the Arctic Circle, but it changes if you're looking at whether it's where permafrost begins or where the last tree line ends. | |
| So when I talk about the Arctic, I mean anything that is struggling now to define itself because of climate change. | |
| We see communities that are slipping into the ocean or that are being battered by 100 years, weather events that would have otherwise been contained in part due to the ice that was there. | |
| So it's just this area that is largely seen in the summer through light and then in the winter through dark, which is another way of defining the Arctic. | |
| I purposely made a loose distinction during my travels. | |
| If you believe that you lived in the Arctic, that was good enough for me. | |
| You know, this is a timely book, obviously, with all of the discussion around Greenland and President Trump's push to acquire the territory. | |
| You write, one could be forgiven for thinking tensions in the Arctic, perhaps most prominently embodied by President Donald J. Trump's egregious campaign to get and secure Greenland as another American territory, came out of nowhere, but it did not. | |
| Historically, the American desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself. | |
| It was not Trump's rhetoric of a takeover that struck me during my years spent traveling and reporting on the circumpolar north. | |
| It was the ineptitude surrounding the idea. | |
| To publicly make threats of invading Greenland while America continually fails by all metrics in the Arctic at home and abroad seemed an anathema to our own desires and lacking abilities across the region. | |
| Why do you think that? | |
| What did you see in your travels that made you think that the United States is so ill-equipped in the Arctic? | |
| Well, I just want to note that I had written that in January of 2025. | |
| So it is interesting for me to see how it remained prescient, even though we've gone through a whole year of President Trump's second administration, and the rhetoric was still there, despite it also being present in the first Trump administration. | |
| But specifically to your question, when I was traveling with the U.S. Coast Guard in the Bering Sea and also in the Arctic Ocean just north of Norway, it was very clear to me that the Americans weren't prepared for operating long-term in the high north. | |
| I had spent time with the Swedish Armed Forces, I had spent time with the Norwegian border guards, I had spent time with the Finnish border guards, all of whom exhibited great competency in Arctic conditions and cold weather warfare, as opposed to the Americans who seemed beaten and weathered and not equipped, literally and figuratively equipped to be able to sustain operations in the north. | |
| And even our NATO partners who primarily live and operate above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland and in Norway had told me stories about the times that they had worked with American forces and felt that they were incapable of operating there. | |
| Their guns would jam, their equipment would freeze, they would often get trench foot or many other maladies that would otherwise not stricken forces who are accustomed to the region. | |
| What is trench foot? | |
| Trenchfoot is when your feet get too cold and wet and then you end up getting gangrene or other you run the risk of losing the foot. | |
| And I saw that in Alaska when I was embedded with the 11th Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. | |
| But even just last week, the Americans were conducting a NATO exercise in Finland and had to surrender to the Finnish, their Finnish counterparts because of inexperience in the high north. | |
| So it's still ongoing, a thing that we've lost since the Cold War. | |
| I want to talk a little bit more about the impact of climate change there. | |
| You also write: the relationship between a warming planet and the region's militarization was barely a footnote in many nations' global ambitions until about 2010 or so. | |
| Russia leading the charge with more military bases in the Arctic, greater competency in cold weather operations, and a fleet of icebreakers that dwarfs the maritime Arctic fleets of every other nation. | |
| America and its allies have meanwhile played catch-up. | |
| This gets to the idea of sort of more accessible areas, not just for military use, but also commercial use in the area. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| The Northern Sea Route is a proposed sea route that is sometimes used that runs north along the Russian coastline with the Arctic Ocean. | |
| It would cut travel through the Suez Canal, the current shipping route from East Asia to Europe by 10 to 14 days. | |
| So, this is one of the major pushes that Russia and China are seeking. | |
| China calls its Polar Silk Road to open up trade routes that were otherwise ice-bound for a very long time. | |
| 16 years ago, China was able to navigate it by itself, but now it relies on Russia, its infrastructure along the coastline, in order to make those trips possible. | |
| Now, whether or not Western nations want to use that or can use it is another discussion, in part because there are so many sanctions that prevent Western nations from using that. | |
| So, that's one of the things that are opening up, and there's certainly more shipping occurring through the Bering Strait as well. | |
| Last year, no, the year before 2024, there were about 100 ships that transited the Bering Strait, and now last year was about 800. | |
| So, we're seeing a lot of commercial traffic moving into a region that was otherwise impossible to navigate. | |
| If folks have questions for Kenneth Rosen about the Arctic and our American ambitions there, our phone lines for Democrats, 202748-8000, for Republicans, 202-748-8001, and for Independents, 202-748-8002. | |
| Kenneth, I want to return to the topic of Greenland in particular. | |
| You know, you contend that the United States has historically neglected the Arctic, especially Alaska. | |
| But the Trump administration has really renewed its focus there as evidenced by its attention to Greenland. | |
| What do you think is behind this? | |
| I think the current administration sees an opportunity to pressure NATO allies into offering something that is already on the table, which is primarily access. | |
| The U.S. maintains through the Kingdom of Denmark access agreements to minerals and subsurface rights across Greenland, as well as a lease to operate a base in northern Greenland. | |
| You know, what I've said about what I've said in the book about neglecting the Arctic still persists today, and the idea that we're going to take Greenland for ourselves, but also face an incompatibility with operating in the far north is wickedly divorced from the realities. | |
| For instance, the Pacific Space Base, the one I referenced in the north of Greenland, is oftentimes stricken with runways that are cracked and failing because they're built on top of permafrost. | |
| The buildings are sinking into the ground. | |
| They don't even have reliable Wi-Fi for the service members who work up there. | |
| So I think that Trump's big idea is to position America in a more hemispheric approach to national security. | |
| But we have to remember that we already maintain a lot of the agreements and the facilities necessary to already accomplish that. | |
| You talk about the impact of all of this on indigenous communities throughout the Arctic and how they're affected by both militarization and this race to the Arctic. | |
| You know, can you talk about sort of the impact on those communities in particular? | |
| Sure. | |
| I was just in September. | |
| I was out in an indigenous town, indigenous community in Alaska on the Seward Peninsula called Elim. | |
| And Elim is now seeing more and more outside interest in its proposed uranium mine area. | |
| There's about 30 miles north of the town, there's supposed to be a uranium deposit, which would be beneficial to, of course, nuclear power and then military defense equipment. | |
| And they have no interest in having outsiders come in and tear up their land that has been long used for sustenance fishing and hunting. | |
| So with the Trump administration's push for more expansion in the Arctic, it's mostly for commercial expansion, for drilling and mineral extraction. | |
| And these communities don't want to see that expand. | |
| Under the previous administration, a lot of those lands were marked as preserves and safeguarded against these companies. | |
| The Ambler Road Project has opened up or is opening up in Alaska off the Dalton Highway, which would cut through parts of the Brooks Range. | |
| So there's a lot of displacement happening, not only from the weather impacts that we discussed earlier, but also from companies moving in to benefit from this thawing north. | |
| You're right. | |
| We have refused to learn from the follies of the past when the heydays of Alaska led to rushes for gold and gas and the segregation of Native tribes from pristine stretches of wilderness. | |
| And this approach will prove fatal for industry, national security, and for the people who reside across the American Arctic. | |
| You advocate in your book for an Arctic ambassador at large. | |
| Why? | |
| The Arctic Ambassador at Large was a historic position that had existed in previous administrations. | |
| In the previous Biden administration, there was an Arctic ambassador at large who was nominated and approved by the Senate, but was summarily denied or not reinstated after Trump took office in January, last January, excuse me. | |
| This person, Mark Sfraga, was a champion of the Arctic and had ties to also the security interests of the High North. | |
| To be able to have someone who was moving about the Arctic, who was in those circles, having those discussions about what we needed to do to improve our own infrastructure and footing in the High North was invaluable to the United States and is now something that doesn't exist. | |
| Mr. Srega was a part of every discussion about the Arctic that I could think of and knew the players both in the region and outside the region who had stakes within the Arctic. | |
| For one instance, he was able to- We take you live now to a briefing with New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani, who's giving an update on winter storm response efforts. | |
| Including the DSNY workers that I had the privilege of thanking earlier today for all that they have done. | |