Washington Journal 04/21/2026 covers Kevin Warsh replacing Jerome Powell as Fed Chair and Representative Sheila Scherfalis-McCormick facing expulsion over stolen FEMA funds. The episode details Vice President JD Vance's Pakistan trip amid Iran ceasefire threats, Virginia's $90 million redistricting referendum, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeReamer's resignation. Journalist Holly McKay analyzes the first AI-native conflict, citing a 99% fake USS Abraham Lincoln video, while Teddy Schleifer explains how "gray money" doubled since 2020 via opaque nonprofits. Ultimately, the broadcast highlights deepening political polarization fueled by disinformation and opaque campaign financing. [Automatically generated summary]
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Iran War Plans and Economics00:15:26
Federal Reserve.
If confirmed, Mr. Warsh would be scheduled to replace Jerome Powell when his term ends on May 15th.
And at 2 p.m., the House Ethics Committee meets to make its disciplinary recommendations for Florida Democratic Representative Sheila Scherfalis-McCormick.
She's accused of stealing millions of dollars in FEMA funds and using the money to support her 2021 congressional campaign.
She continues to deny wrongdoing and is running for re-election in the 20th district.
You can also watch these events on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
Coming up this morning on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments live, Stephen Farnsworth of the University of Mary Washington previews the redistricting referendum election taking place in Virginia.
And then Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist on President Trump's economic policy approaches and how the economy will factor into the midterm elections.
Later, independent journalist Holly McKay will talk about her recent piece for Deadline, looking at how AI-generated images and videos shape public perception of the conflict in Iran.
And New York Times reporter Theodore Schleifer will discuss his recent investigative piece looking at the increase of gray money donations from nonprofits.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
This is the Washington Journal for April 21st.
When it comes to U.S. talks with Iran, several factors remain unknown as of today.
The UP Vance is scheduled to go to Pakistan for talks.
At this hour, no solid assurance that Iran will attend.
The initial ceasefire deal set to end tomorrow.
President Trump reportedly has said no extensions would occur previously, but now possibly a slight extension tomorrow.
And all this, as the world watches the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran continue.
To start the show, tell us about your thoughts on the current state of play when it comes to Iran and efforts by the Trump administration to end the conflict.
Here's how you can share your thoughts this morning.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
You want to share your talks on the current state of play with Iran by Texas 202-748-8003.
As always, you can post on our social media sites.
That's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X, that's C-SPANWJ.
To give you the latest from the president on what he said about the current state of negotiations, The Hill capturing this story yesterday saying that he was telling PBS News Monday that, quote, lots of bombs will go off in Iran if the ceasefire expires without a deal.
Quote, then lots of bombs start going off.
He told the reporter Liz Landers over the phone when she asked about what would happen if the ceasefire lapses without a peace agreement.
The president telling the Bloomberg News on Monday also that the truce, which began on April 8th, expires Wednesday evening Washington time, adding that he is highly unlikely to extend it if the administration, if his administration, and Irani officials cannot reach a deal.
He has reportedly threatened Iran with further bombings after 1,700-plus civilians, including 254 children in the Middle East country, were killed in the first 39 days of the effort.
When it comes to the vice president's role, Axios has this headline as of this morning: that the vice president, JD Vance, set to travel to Pakistan for those talks if they occur.
He traveling along with Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner.
When it comes to those negotiations, the story adding that with the full-scale deal on such a tight timeline, that would be difficult.
The president could agree to extend the deadline if there are signs of progress.
And this also adding that the president is already effectively adding a day.
While the two weeks agreed in the ceasefire runs out today, technically, he said Monday that the deadline was Wednesday evening when it comes to that.
When it comes to the latest from the president himself on state of play in Iran, he writes this on Truth Social as of yesterday.
I'm winning a war by a lot.
Things are going well.
Our military has been amazing.
And if you read the fake news like the failing New York Times and absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think that we are losing the war.
The enemy remains, is confused because they get these same media, quote, reports, and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out.
Their Air Force has gone over darker runways.
They have no anti-missile or anti-airplane equipment.
Their former leaders are mostly gone.
He goes on from there.
And when it comes to Iran's chief negotiator, he himself posting on social media sites when it comes to his own perspective on what is going on in Iran, writing this, that the president, by imposing a siege and violating the ceasefire, seeks to turn this negotiating table in his own imagination into a table of surrender or justify renewed warmongering.
We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats.
And in the past two weeks, we have prepared to reveal new cards on the battlefield.
So that's just some in the last 24 hours when it comes to the state of play.
Again, over these negotiations on a pending deadline, you can make those comments about the state of play, the pending deadline, the United States' role, all that up for discussion on this latest.
And when it comes to Iran, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, and 202748-8002 for independents.
Social media sites available to you as well.
And if you want to post on our or send us texts on this, 202-748-8003.
Here on Capitol Hill, the latest when it comes to Iran also being the topic of conversation on the Senate floor.
Here is the Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, on the floor talking about President Trump's handling of Iran.
Donald Trump continues to demonstrate that he has no plan to end his disastrous war of choice with Iran and no idea just how badly the American people are hurting because of it.
Companies and airlines are charging Americans in Iran war surcharge.
Mortgage rates are climbing.
Gas is still over $4 a gallon.
Over the weekend, Trump's energy secretary said that gas prices won't be normal until 2027.
If you don't believe Chris Wright, believe Donald Trump.
Trump said gas prices will, quote, be around the same or maybe even a little higher, his quote, by November.
His words, not mine.
Just the other day, Trump said that $4 for a gallon of gas is not very high.
That's what he said.
And that everything's doing really well, really, Mr. President.
Spoken like a man who doesn't have to fill up his own tank.
Try telling the American people, who will spend an average of $740 more this year on gas because of this war, that, quote, everything's doing really well.
And unfortunately and sadly, there's no end in sight.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Iran fired on commercial ships over the weekend.
The U.S. seized an Iranian vessel.
According to Trump, JD Vance will be on his way to Pakistan soon, but it's unclear whether the Iranians will even agree to meet with him, let alone agree to open up the strait.
51 days into this war.
And Donald Trump still does not have an objective, a strategy, an exit plan.
The Senate Minority Leader's Perspective on Iran.
Let's get yours.
Theodore in Michigan, Republican line, you are up first.
Good morning.
Good morning, Pedro.
President Trump has a plan.
He has a plan with this war in Iran.
I'm so tired of these Democrats and the way they're crying about this war and gas prices.
Even with all the trouble we're having with this war, gas prices are still just about lower than they were under Obama and Biden here, even with this war.
And why do people of color have to call in and say white people always have to try to take over a country?
These people in Iran squaw on the buildings in their country, death to America.
They want death to America, Pedro.
So, Theodore, when you say that the president has a plan, what do you believe that is?
Has he articulated that very well?
Has he pretty much laid out his case of what the plan is in your mind?
Well, war, Pedro, you cannot predict the outcome of war.
You have to do, you have to follow up what your original goals were just to knock out their nuclear capability, number one.
And number two, if that doesn't work, just bring them to their knees.
This country wants death to America.
Okay.
And then I got to live over here in Michigan next to this terror center, Dearborn.
We should start dropping bombs on them, too.
Okay, okay.
Theodore in Michigan there giving his thoughts on the current state of play in Iran, especially as negotiations could take place, deadlines pending.
This is Pat in Florida, Independent Line.
Pat, go ahead.
You're next.
Yeah, good morning.
You know, for the last few weeks, I have heard that 47 years ago, Iran did something to America.
Well, I looked it up.
I was in my baby making days back then with my husband.
So I knew about messages.
So when I looked up, what I was, there was, we all knew about the most of that part.
I knew about that.
But we didn't know when the Eisenhower administration, they had Jah there.
He helped Iran actually help with their uranium development.
He helped with giving them munitions.
And then when they had evolution, those people put the Americans out.
The Americans had no business there in the first place.
And in terms of the plans for Trump, Trump has never had a plan, even in business.
I read the book Raising Trump, and that had a lot to do with that wife, that first wife he had.
She ran that business.
Well, back to the topic at hand.
The previous caller had just said one of the presidents' goals about Iran's nuclear program specifically.
Do you think that falls within a plan for this administration, or have they articulated that enough?
I think he's just parroting what everybody has parroted all the time.
And by the way, that Khomeini did not believe in nuclear weapons, period.
That was part of the plan that Obama came up with.
I don't understand why our media has never talked about the fact that they did not believe in nuclear weapons.
And now, to be quite honest, I hope everybody get nuclear weapons just to hold the United States and Israel at bay.
And let me just say this last thing.
People need to wonder why 92% of all African-American women voted for someone else, did not vote for Trump.
Okay.
We'll move on.
Let's go to John.
John in Virginia, Independent Lying, the latest on Iran, especially in light of the current state of play.
John, hello.
You're next up.
Yeah.
I think the thing is, Vance and the negotiating team are going to have a hard time trying to convince the Iranians to accept Israel's plan, pinpoint plan, because this whole war is driven by Israel.
And so Israel wants to become the dominant power in the region.
And after Iran, they're going to set their sights on Turkey.
So I think that before the worst is going to happen, before the best could possibly happen in that region.
Why do you think that Israel's calling the shots on this plan?
Because in the media, and, you know, a lot of people have said that Israel has had a, has established a precedent of blackmailing American presidents decided Bill Clinton.
And so I just think that with APAC and a lot of the other lobbying groups, that their money is really driving this war.
And, you know, I just think that America would be better off if perhaps maybe they started dictating America's terms to Israel instead of the perception of Israel dictating the terms to America.
But we'll see what happens.
Okay.
John in Arlington, Virginia, giving us his thoughts.
Tony is up next.
He's in Pennsylvania on thoughts on the current events in Iran.
Independent lying.
Tony, hello.
Good morning, sweetheart.
To the caller prior to this last caller.
Hold on one second, Mr. Pazo.
Let me buckle this up.
Okay, I'm on the road, so I'm listening to these callers, but I didn't get a chance to listen to the last caller.
But that caller prior to this last caller who stated that Iran constantly saying death to America, I would like for you to play that because I've never heard that, and I don't believe that's the case.
And this is something that's constantly being said by the same people that want to kill these people in Iran.
Iran was not an imminent threat to this country, and everyone knows that with any kind of common sense.
When you say that, when you apply that to yourself, how do you know that for sure?
Mr. Pedro, let me say this: the callers are more important than your guests and you.
Let me finish my point.
No, I want you to finish your point.
I just wanted to say, when you said what you just said, how do you define that?
How do you know that for sure?
How do I know what, Pedro?
That Iran was not an imminent threat.
Pedro, because this is something that just came out the blue.
If Iran was an imminent threat, this would have been talked about for a long time before this country, before Donald Trump's ignorant, but wanted to send our military into a war.
Voter Fear Over Iran Threats00:04:12
And I'm going to tell you something, it's not the only war we're in.
Anytime you bomb another country, like we did with Yemen, like we do with Syria and Libya or whatever country's over there, that is an act of war.
So we're at war with several countries, basically, but this one in Iran is going to come back to bite us because this is very, very serious and it's going to last forever.
These people are not just going to forget because we say the war is over.
It's never going to be over for them.
We had no business doing this.
Okay, that's Tony there in Pennsylvania giving us his thoughts.
Several of you bringing up the economics of this.
This is a story from The Hill taking a look at lawmakers' perspectives, saying that some Republican lawmakers sounding the alarm over how voters view the president's handling of the economy after Iran announced over the weekend it would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, raising the prospect of high fuel price to election prices through Election Day.
Growing Republican concern about a likely voter backlash in November has spurred some Republican senators to call their leaders to broaden the scope of the pending budget resolution to address cost of living issues, including housing gas and other medical costs, facing pressure from GOP colleagues.
Senate Majority Leader Thune on Monday acknowledged that Republicans could do more in a new budget reconciliation bill to address the economy.
I think elections are generally about the economy.
I think most people are pocketbook voters.
Yes, we need to be speaking to the needs of the American people.
I think we've done that.
If there's more that we can do, I'm certainly open to it.
That's Leader Thune.
This is Ronald Lackey from Facebook posting and saying if this still costs a billion dollars per day, these negotiations better have an end result that's worth it.
Also, I would like an update on the investigation on how the girls' school was bombed and which country was responsible.
Eddie Barton, also off of Facebook, saying if they don't sign a deal, no more delays, erase them from the Middle East.
And then Jesus Macias saying that Congress needs to do its job and pass a war powers resolution.
The latest on that effort by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democratic senator from Wisconsin.
Look out for that on the Senate side to play out.
You've seen other efforts to pass these war powers resolutions even as of last week.
And you can always go to our website and our app if you want to see the latest on that front.
When it comes to Iran, we're getting your thoughts on the current state of play given pending deadlines and possibilities of negotiations.
2027488001 for Republicans.
Democrats 2027488000.
And Independents 2027488002.
Let's hear from Lee, Republican line.
He's in Michigan.
Hello.
Hey, good morning, Pedro.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thank you.
Go ahead.
Good.
My whole thing about this is I think the whole war should be blamed on the Democrat Party.
And the reason I say that is not just because I'm a Republican, it's because look at the candidates they gave for presidency.
Kamala Harris.
I mean, come on.
How exactly does this relate to Iran?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
How is that?
They make the case.
They gave us, the Democrats gave us the win for Donald Trump by giving us, by giving the people no choice on who could run for their president.
Sure, that's politics, but how does it relate to Iran?
That led to Iran because here's Trump's in office.
Now, I voted for him.
And to tell you the truth, I feel like I got duped.
Yes.
I mean, but I feel like I got duped because of the known wars.
I feel like I got duped because of the Epstein files.
Because not one head has rolled.
Now, I voted for him in disgust.
I'm just totally disgusted with what's going on.
And like I said, I feel like I got duped, but you've got to give the Democrats some play into that because look at who they gave the candidates to.
Okay, Clarence is up next.
Feeling Duped by Political Choices00:12:12
He's in Baltimore.
Democrats line.
Hello.
Hello.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Clarence from Baltimore.
I'm sorry.
Hey, how are you doing?
I got like two things to say.
One is that people, you guys are starting to have a lot of irrational fear over what's going on and understanding that we are in a war.
And this is just what a little bit that comes with war of just back and forth of going who has what resources, who doesn't, and how we're going back and forth about it.
But hearing about people complaining about nukes and being shot over here and all what they say about death to America, that's kind of like wild to hear because most of the, there's only like three countries that have like ICBMs, and that's the one that's most, that's the one that y'all should be really scared about instead of these little small nukes that's going on.
And most of those nukes only go to like the surrounding areas or other military bases.
But you guys should really be more scared about like what's going on outside of this Hamas straight thing because granted it's going to make our gas go up and that's just it is what it is.
But like China just like was talking about accepting like the vaccine for cancer or something like that from Russia.
And if they do that, then that's really going to start doing stuff to America's economy more so than this gas prices.
China is trying to make deals with Taiwan.
Like they just shook hands with the female president of Taiwan.
So it's really going to put us in a pickle outside of just gas.
It's going to really put us in a bigger bind that's all we're worried about is just gas.
There's other economic things that's going on that can really put us in a little standstill that can take our American superiority away.
And I think that we should focus more on that, a little bit more on that, more so than just this gas stuff.
Okay.
Clarence there in Baltimore, he talks about gas prices and economics.
Those were some of the thoughts from New York Republican Nicole Maliatakis talking to Bloomberg yesterday, not only talking about the economic side of what's going on in Iran, but what it means overall for President Trump and his administration's efforts.
Here she is from yesterday.
We all understand why he's doing this in terms of wanting to take a number one terrorist sponsor off the table.
And I think that's critically important for the future to make not just the Middle East, but the entire world, our military that's overseas, our embassies here at home, making sure that we stop future terrorist attacks.
I understand that that's critically important.
But it's, I think when you look at the ground, right?
Like when we're here in the, you know, we're in the district and you see gas prices increasing, that's at the end of the day, I think what a lot of constituents are paying attention to.
How much is this costing me?
And so, yes, it is an investment long term.
It is important to get Iran's nuclear capability off the table.
It is critically important that we help cripple them economically so they can't finance Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and these terrorist bad actors.
But at the end of the day, what are constituents looking at?
They're looking at gas prices, and that's what they see directly affecting them.
And so, you know, you always say, like, if you prevent a terrorist attack from happening, you know, it didn't happen.
So maybe you don't get so much credit for preventing it.
It's only if it does occur, then you're to blame.
And I think what the president's trying to do here is important, but we also have to be realistic about what people are feeling on the ground.
Talk about the state of negotiations.
Talk about the current activity when it comes to the U.S. and Israel and Iran.
You can talk about the economics, which you just heard our New York representative talk about and some of the previous callers as well.
202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats and Independents.
202748-8002.
If you want to share your thoughts when it comes to latest in Iran war negotiations.
Sam in Boston, Independent Line.
Hello, you're next.
Hey, good morning.
Just a few things in under 30 seconds.
No one's told you lately how crisp you dress and what a role model you are for everyone, young and old, including your moderation.
So thanks, Pedro.
Second thing is, I recall the Pentagon stating that there was no imminent threat with regard to this all.
And that can be subjective, you know, that language, and we can see people using it differently.
But I go by the institutions and the professionals who know best and who we trust.
And to me, that would be the Pentagon.
And third thing, last thing is to that guy who thinks he got duped.
You did.
You did get duped.
And it's a good thing to realize it.
And going forward, I think, you know, a lot of people need to discern their information and news better.
And that goes back to the trust and institutional professionals.
With that in mind, let me ask you a couple of questions.
You talked about trust.
Do you trust the DOD on this effort in Iran?
The Department of Defense.
You know, if I'm sitting here, I have a hard time figuring out the difference between DOD and the Pentagon, to be honest.
So I would have to figure that out first.
But, you know, there's political roles in the government, and those people get replaced.
And I think that has to be taken into consideration.
If you have trustworthy officials that are clearly, you know, well-meaning and professional, then maybe you should trust those people.
Well, then let me ask you this.
Do you think there is a way to end this conflict somewhat reasonably or in some manner?
Do you think an end will eventually come?
Well, an end has to come in some way, right?
And then as far as how's that happened, I'm not a military professional, so I, you know, just be my layman's input on that.
But to me, now it seems like damage control and you kind of opened up the Pandora's box here with a lot of interplaying factors.
And that's kind of what I look at is, you know, you got to look at all the interplaying factors and everything's a system, whether it's people or the military or geopolitics or the ecosystem or what have you.
There's a lot of factors and they need to be weighed and taken into consideration, I guess.
That's what I would say.
That is Sam in Boston giving us his perspective.
And add yours to the mix as well on our line for Democrats joining us from Ohio.
This is Sandy.
You are next.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, what I'm calling about is that the commentator there, he brought up a good question, is how do we know that it was a threat?
So when you actually are not communicating your administration with the Congress, nobody can come out and say they had more enriched uranium, they had the same amount or whatever.
And then you go into this type of conflict.
The American people don't know.
So I'm saying that I kind of feel like it was a thing that when you get a, where you want to tear up everything that every other administration did and you want to be the top of what you're doing, of what's going on, and you can fix the whole world, you do enter into problems.
Now, my other last quote thing on this is, I don't understand why Jared Kushner and JD Vance is trying to make a deal with the Iranians.
I mean, the last one, they had biochemists and scientists and a group of people to see, because I think the thing is to keep them from having an atomic bomb.
And how can they know that with people that are not even they're not well that's it and that's all I wanted to say today.
Thank you.
Sandy in Ohio, a viewer from Facebook saying this, let's finish the job.
He continues on in all caps, worry about the cost later.
We have a chance to wipe off a terrorist evil regime civilization now than later, I say.
Again, that's off Facebook, facebook.com slash C-SPAN.
If you want to post there on X, We found it at C-SPAN WJ.
If you want to make your thoughts there, too.
It was the ranking member of the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee talking on MS Now yesterday, Representative Adam Smith, Washington State, giving his perspective from his point of view on the committee on the current events in Iran.
Here he is.
He's also promised a better deal than the one John Kerry negotiated for President Obama.
Does that seem possible?
It seems highly unlikely at this moment.
Now, part of the problem here is we don't know exactly what's going on.
I mean, two big reasons for that.
One, you outlined brilliantly with Rachel, and I can't do better than the analogies you used, that President Trump, you can't believe a thing he says.
So it's hard to track what's going on because he goes in radically different directions.
And you know that he's just making it up at least 75% of the time.
And then in Iran, and this is a crucial part, who are we negotiating with?
Who's running Iran?
It's hard to tell.
The reporting seems to suggest that the hardline IRGC has consolidated their power, but you do still have a president and members of parliament who are perhaps a little bit more willing to cut a deal.
But every time you have any hope of getting close to that, President Trump undercuts it by basically doing a juvenile victory dance that undermines the credibility of anybody, if there is anyone, in Iran, trying to get to a reasonable place and just boosts the hardliners.
When you threaten the war crimes that you described, when you threaten the erasure of a civilization, that's going to boost the hardliners who say we have to stand up to this guy.
So not only is what Trump is saying impossible to believe just because he makes so much of it, so much of it up, it's undermining our ability to get any kind of deal at this point.
And let's hear from Steve.
Steve's in South Carolina, Independent Line.
Hi.
Good morning.
I just want to say that when we enter a war of choice, that war needs to be explained to the American people ahead of time.
That way, they would probably be more willing to suffer consequences of higher gas prices, higher food prices, housing, and things of that nature.
If it's a war of necessity, those things change.
And people would more than likely be on board with the higher prices.
And also, I've noticed over the last several days that politicians and talking heads talk about 1979 as being the pivotal point in their relationship with Iran.
that hardly ever does anybody mention 1953 and the CIA's takeover and ousting a duly elected president and installing a puppet regime, Shah Riza Pahlavi.
And also, why do people keep calling it the straights of blues?
Isn't there only one?
And shouldn't that be singular?
That's all I've got to say.
Stephen, South Carolina, finishing off this round of phones when it comes to Iran.
Gerrymandering and Virginia Votes00:14:56
Thanks for your participation.
You can carry on and talk about activities in Iran.
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If you can hold off from doing so today, and also pick the best line that represents you.
Perhaps you're a resident of the Commonwealth, Virginia, and one of the things you want to talk about in Open Forum is today's vote there when it comes to redistricting, a redistricting referendum taking place in the Commonwealth.
And joining us to tell us more about what to watch for today.
Stephen Farnsworth of the University of Mary Washington.
He's a professor, also the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the university.
Professor Farnsworth, thanks for your time.
Glad to be here.
Tell us in broad strokes what today's vote in Virginia is all about.
Well, what happens in Virginia may very well shape the outcome for the midterm elections for Congress and the country as a whole.
If the Democrats and the yes vote side prevails in this referendum, you're looking at a change from six to five Democratic advantage in congressional seats to 10 to 1.
Those are the estimates.
So that would be a very significant gain, countering the impact of earlier gerrymandering in Missouri and Ohio and Texas and other places.
If it fails, of course, this would be a significant hit for the argument that Democrats can compete effectively in the re-gerrymandering that's been going on around the country since Donald Trump convinced Texas to get this process started.
It would be a significant disappointment for Democrats in terms of being able to take over the House if their no vote is the one that wins today.
If you look at the current political makeup of the Commonwealth, what do you sense might happen at the end of the day once the votes are counted?
Well, the polls do show that there's a slight advantage to the yes side.
Of course, polls are approximations, and so we'll see, of course, when we can count the ballots where things stand.
But certainly the yes side has been able to come up with a great deal more fundraising and a great deal more of an effort to try to sell this process.
Remember, when you're talking about a referendum like this, you have to get people motivated to vote.
Once you get beyond that core of activists on the left or the right, there are an awful lot of people who really only vote when there are candidates on the ballot.
And the only thing on the ballot today is this question of whether to redraw those congressional lines in ways that are very favorable to Democrats.
You talked about the argument that those who say vote yes make.
What is the counter argument from those who say vote no?
Well, Virginia, just a few years ago, passed a constitutional amendment to ban gerrymandering in the state, to basically take the authority for drawing the district lines away from the legislature.
And so that was to be handled by a bipartisan commission or failing that by the courts.
And so what you're seeing on the no side is we just voted about this.
And that referendum before, which took place for the district lines we have now, is being undone.
And so one of the things that the no side has been very effective at doing is going back into the archives and finding the things that Governor Spamberger said against redistricting a half a dozen years ago, things that President Obama said about redistricting as he was referring to other places in the past.
And so when you put those things together, you have an ability to draw the attention to people about how this is yet another effort to try to redow draw the lines in a way that is a partisan advantage.
It's not a popular thing to do in the abstract, but the argument that the yes side is using is very much a focus on President Trump, who of course lost Virginia three separate times when he ran for president.
President Trump expected to make comments about today's vote later on.
We've seen former President Obama in commercials talking about it.
What's the level of heavy hitters involved, not only in this redistricting effort, but also the money that's being put into it?
Oh, this is amazing.
We're talking about over $90 million on one ballot question.
This is extraordinary amounts of money.
And under Virginia law and the way that this process has been working, there isn't the kind of transparency that a lot of voters might want to see when it comes to who's actually bankrolling these kinds of things.
What you see, though, with respect to President Trump and with respect to Republicans in Virginia has been a relatively small campaign, really very targeted through social media, not so much on television airwaves, mailers to people they think are pretty loyal to the Republican side.
That's where the focus is right now.
And so it's a much quieter campaign, but polls do show that it's very, very competitive.
If the yes side prevails, they may not prevail by much.
And if that happens, there may be a lot of recriminations on the Republican side that this was winnable, that some of the money that has been banked for the midterm elections in November might have been more effective in terms of retaining the House by weighing in in Virginia in April.
Stephen Farnsworth, every time we look at elections in the Commonwealth, people always focus on Northern Virginia or perhaps around Richmond or perhaps towards the coast there.
Are those the centers to watch for, particularly today?
Absolutely.
Elections in Virginia are won and lost in what you can think of as kind of the outer ring suburbs of the big cities.
So as you look, for example, at the Washington area, Arlington, Alexandria, those are very Democratic.
Fairfax, very Democratic.
But when you get further afield, Prince William or Stafford or Loudoun, you know, those are the kinds of outer ring suburban communities that sometimes go red, sometimes go blue.
Similarly, go ahead.
Well, similarly, you'll see in Chesterfield County and outside Richmond and in the outer ring suburbs of the Hampton Roads area, same kind of dynamics.
Those are where elections are won and lost in Virginia.
So as you watch this thing plays out today, what are you watching for?
And also, if, say, the yes side prevails, how soon does it go into effect?
Well, if the yes side does prevail, there's still court hearings that will be taking place later this week.
So there are Republican challenges to the constitutional question that is before the voters that haven't been resolved yet.
So even if the voters do say yes, the courts may very well say no.
But if that does, if the courts do allow this to proceed, we're talking about primaries in August, and the lines are going to take effect immediately.
In terms of what to watch for, I think the question is how high the turnout is on Election Day.
Democrats tend to really concentrate on the early voting side of politics, whereas Republicans tend to be more sympathetic to voting on Election Day itself.
And so the big question to look at as you're looking at those, particularly those outer ring suburban counties, is how big is the turnout?
Because that is going to be the part of this process that's going to lean Republican.
Is there any sense of how early turnout or early voting has been in this process?
Well, there's a great deal of uncertainty about this because in Virginia, people do not register by party.
So you end up looking at counties that are more red or more blue and say how high is the turnout there.
In the early start of the early voting, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in red counties, in more rural parts of Virginia.
But in the last week or so, the last week or so of early voting, you saw much greater participation in some of the blue areas, particularly in suburban Washington.
The narrative about President Trump, I think, really generates enthusiasm on both sides.
When President Trump is part of the agenda, it really motivates people to vote either for or against the president or for or against this constitutional amendment.
Professor, tell us about the Center for Leadership and Media Studies.
Well, one of the things that we try to do is look at the changing nature of Virginia politics.
We do an annual survey that brings to voters in Virginia, to citizens in Virginia, and to the national audience concerned about things in Virginia, what's going on here and how our Commonwealth is changing.
Because in the 30 years since Virginia has over the last 30 years, Virginia has had extraordinary changes.
It went from a very, very red state to a purple state and now more blue than red.
And so those kind of dynamics are changing.
We also have lots of people moving into Virginia for the economic opportunity here.
You're looking at the federal employment, you're looking at federal contractors, you're looking at the many military bases and high-tech operations.
You look at the Dulles Technology Corridor.
Virginia is very, very vibrant, changing a lot compared to a lot of other states in this country.
And so we're trying at the center to try to figure out what's going on in Virginia and how Virginia is changing over these years.
The center located at the University of Mary Washington, which is located in Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour south from Washington, D.C., Stephen Farnsworth, affiliated with the university and the center.
Professor Farnsworth, thanks for your time.
Thank you.
Again, it's open forum.
You can participate by calling.
202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
Sam in Washington, D.C., Independent line, first up on this open forum.
Sam, thanks for calling.
Go ahead.
Sam in Washington.
Oh, Sam's gone.
Well, you can continue to call on.
We'll take those calls as they come in.
One of the things that came out, aside from activities in Iran yesterday being reported by the Washington Examiner and others, is the resignation of the Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeReamer.
He marked the third member, according to the Washington Examiner, to leave President Trump's cabinet in less than two months.
Her departure comes after the president fired Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam and the Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Chavez de Rima was embattled by allegations that she pursued an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.
Her attorney has denied these claims.
The inquiry also included questions about possible misuse of taxpayer funds.
So that's the Washington Examiner's take on that.
You can read more reporting of that again on this open forum if you want to participate.
There are the numbers.
I'll start with 202 area code and pick the line that best represents you.
We talked a little bit about that Commonwealth race when it comes to redistricting.
One of the things that's been a feature of the race are ads that Virginians have been seeing over the last several weeks leading up to it.
We'll give you a sample of some of the ads they've been seeing.
We are counting on you.
Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years.
But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st.
Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide, not politicians.
This is the responsible thing to do.
Help us chart a better path forward, Virginia.
Vote yes by April 21st.
In 2020, 66% of Virginians voted to end partisan gerrymandering.
We voted for fair maps, and both parties supported it.
We want a fair, nonpartisan commission to draw the lines.
Now, the Democrats want to shred the nonpartisan commission and rig our maps.
Why?
It's a power grab to create districts only one party can win.
It's a power grab that takes choices away from voters.
Say no to partisan gerrymandering.
And as always, you can stay close to C-SPAN to see the results of that referendum vote in the Commonwealth.
Cynthia in Texas, Republican line.
Hi there, you're next.
Go ahead.
Good morning.
I think some of the callers, especially the Democrat callers, are overlooking something because right now, what the Democrats in Washington are running on is high gas prices, prices of energy, and everything else that goes along with when they closed the coal plants.
Their plan, if they ever get back in power, they're going to go right back to their green plan and they're going to be closing the coal plants again.
You know, Trump's plan was drill, baby, drill.
We have new refineries that are being built.
All of that's going to bring cost of everything down.
And now the Democrats are acting like that's the problem when they're going to go right back into their green plan.
Don't make a mistake on that because that's what they'll do.
Cynthia there in Texas.
Richard joins us.
Richard joins us from Williamsburg, Virginia, Independent Line.
Hi.
Hi, good morning, Pedro.
How you doing?
Fine, thank you.
Go ahead.
Hey, I just wanted to chime in and talk about what the guess you just had on about the redistricting in Virginia.
And since I've been a citizen here for the last 17 years, I've seen a lot of changes too.
And I'll tell you, I am definitely for the yes vote simply because it is not something that we do all the time, but you just cannot have the Republicans continue to do what they do.
And then we think we just sit on the sideline and not do nothing.
Because we know since Trump has been in office, he has really hurt this country.
And we have got to do something about it.
Richard, there in Virginia, one of the other things to watch out for on Capitol Hill, particularly on the House side today, this being reported by Axio saying that many House Democrats are ready to vote to expel Representative Sheila Schriffilis-McCormick from Congress as soon as the House Ethics Committee meets to decide her fate today.
This is according to Axios in interviews saying Republicans are expected to force an expulsion vote, but they will need roughly 80 Democratic votes to remove the representatives.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has carefully avoided saying how he might advise his members to vote, even though if the committee reaches a bipartisan decision that should be expelled.
And House Democrats will meet as a caucus following the ethics hearing.
He told reporters Monday to, quote, follow the facts and apply the relevant law without fear or favor.
Representative McCormick is accused of laundering $5 million in COVID relief funds and funneling it to her campaign, has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in her criminal trial.
That hearing today by the House Ethics Committee will be at 2 o'clock, and you can see the back and forth that will take place concerning the fate of the representative as she faces that committee hearing.
C-SPAN 3 is where you see the deliberations.
You can also follow along on C-SPAN now and our website at c-span.org.
Mixed Messages on Taxes00:05:11
Let's hear from Mel.
Mel is in New York, Independent Line.
Hi.
Well, Pedro, you know, as I listen to this gerrymandering legislation before the people of Virginia, I hear mixed messages from Obama as well as Spangberger.
And it reminds me of the mixed messages that the left is sending when this reporter from Turning Point USA in Minneapolis was blindsided by a bully as she was thrown to the curb.
And as this took place, this was done by the Minnesota angry man who on MSNBC four months earlier said that we need some peace, love, and harmony, and we can hug it out.
You think he has a love as love sign on his yard?
It'd be very hard to do that if you're self-described as a Minnesota angry man.
Messages need to be consistent, and the left is showing their inconsistency by these types of actions that they take when they want tolerance only to be intolerant, when they demand to stop hate only to dish out hate to those they perceive as hateful, and demand safe spaces with a loophole to brutalize individuals they dislike in their space.
Okay, that's Mel in New York.
Let's hear from Susan in Maryland.
Susan Independent Line.
Hello.
Hey, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I just want to say this is sort of an overall thing, but I do hope that what is happening now in Congress, what is happening with this current president, will become a true cautionary tale for voters for this country.
It's important to vote, but it's also important to do your research.
Don't go and vote for the guy who you've seen the most ads on, so their name means something.
Do a little research, find out what's going on.
Trump made it perfectly clear with his, before he was elected, exactly what he was going to do.
And he did it all.
And we're paying for it now.
And the only other thing I will say, he really disappointed me when for weeks and weeks, nobody heard anything about what this war was about.
And he chose the night that we were going to the moon.
And that became the thing, the fact that somebody was doing something bigger and better than he was.
So he had to do his program the same night that we were launching the most amazing thing that this country has done in 50 years.
Okay, Susan there in Maryland.
Susan there in Maryland.
Jerry's in Michigan.
Independent Line.
Good morning.
Yeah, okay, where are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
Go ahead.
This isn't just to do a little chat here.
I can talk about that the Iranians going to a table and sitting down and talking to the United States.
They've done the same thing back when Jimmy Carter and the hostages they had back then.
They talk right up to the last minute of the four days and then get up and walk off.
They're not honorable people.
I'd like to tell his Spiffer, I can't remember the days.
The Secretary of War, Defense Secretary Hagseh.
Yeah, we'll pass on to him that instead of, you know, just taking those A-10s and recogn Arizona, they are to donate them to Israel.
They make a great ground troop support.
Okay, Jerry in Michigan there, the Kash Patel, the FBI director in the news as of yesterday, saying that he filed, the Reuters reporting actually, that he filed a defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and its reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick following the publication of an article on Friday alleging the director had a drinking problem that could pose a threat to national security.
The magazine's story, initially titled Kash Patel's Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Job, cited more than two dozen anonymous sources expressing concerns about Patel's conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.
That's in quotes, also in quotes that he alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice.
This Reuters story going on to say the article, which The Atlantic subsequently titled, The FBI Director is MIA, in its online version, reported that during Patel's tenure, the FBI had to reschedule early meetings, quote, as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, and that Patel, quote, is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations.
There's more from Reuters, this taking place yesterday.
Kash Patel Scandal Details00:03:33
You can make that part of the open forum too, if you wish.
David is in Indianapolis.
Democrats Lying.
You're next.
Hello.
You're out.
How are you doing today?
Fine, thank you.
Good.
Prior to this economic downturn that we've seen in cases in Minnesota and Minneapolis tonight, it's horrific.
Give an opportunity to someone to run for governor to do this in the United States democracy is pitiful.
Number one.
Number two, the suffrage for the taxpayer, which for what we serve, for what we understand, we used to, there's been economic problems, not only including the medical fields, the tech fields.
It's almost getting point to the manual time management apparatus data collective system, which means walking and having a wristwatch seems to be more qualified than what we've seen, what we're paying for now.
So with that said, demography, when it comes to things that we enjoy on an entertainment basis, we enjoy the tax dollar.
But as far as the services, how far the service is going when there's been a break in the technological function.
And that leads to the downturn of their business.
So if you have, for example, if you have CBRE competing with another company that is going through every state, David, go ahead and finish.
Yeah, go ahead.
If you have CBRE or other companies competing for these contracts to sell something or buy something at a higher or lower rate, it's really.
David, we'll leave you there.
We got your point.
One of the things to watch out for today when especially the back and forth over the White House and the Federal Reserve about its chairman and who might be the future chairman.
Kevin Warsh is the nominee from the president.
He's a former Federal Reserve governor.
He will appear before the Senate Banking Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on his confirmation as Federal Reserve Chair nominee.
You can see that 10 o'clock today.
C-SPAN 3, C-SPANNOWERAP, and C-SPAN.org.
This is from California, Republican line, Harold up next.
Hello.
Yeah.
Harold, you're on.
Go ahead.
I didn't, I didn't call to get on to try to do no conversation or anything.
I mean, I'm not, you know, it's kind of strange hours.
I'm half asleep.
I'm not quite ready to go with your conversation.
I mean, I just want to, you know.
I just wanted to find out what was going on.
Okay.
Bernard in California, Independent Line.
Last call.
Go ahead.
Thanks, Pedro.
25th Amendment for Crisis Exit00:03:23
The administration needs to evoke the 25th Amendment to get us out of all this badness.
You got Donald Trump saying that we can't afford daycare, can't afford Medicare, Medicaid.
But that hasn't stopped him from the griff as far as all his lawsuits.
He wants taxpayer dollars.
He wants $10 billion because he says somebody leaked his taxes that he said he was going to show us.
He says America is going to pledge $10 billion to his peace board, which he's the chairman of for life.
The griff just goes on and on.
In order for us to, and this war stuff is a mess that he created, nobody really knows his angle.
Only him, Netanyahu, maybe his new friend, MBS, whatever they got going on.
Okay, but the 25th Amendment is what the administration needs to do to step up and try to get us out of this mess.
Okay, Bernard in California, Independent Line.
Last call on this open forum.
Thanks to all who participated up next to talk about aspects of the president's economic policy.
We'll hear from Americans for Tax Reforms President Rover Norquist on the impact of tax cuts this year and economic policy by the Trump administration.
That conversation coming up on Washington Journal.
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Corporate Tax Rate Changes00:12:46
Stay informed.
Stay engaged.
Washington Journal continues.
This is Grover Norquist back on our program.
He's president of Americans for Tax Reform talking about economic policy.
Mr. Norquist, good morning.
Hey, good to be with you.
I suppose that the week of April 15th, tax time, this is a big time for your organization.
The president says that more people, people are getting more money back this year.
Do you believe that's the case?
And what's the overall economic impact from what was passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill?
Sure.
The One Big Beautiful Bill took the tax cut, the Republican tax cut from the first Trump term and made it permanent and then added some things.
Very important.
It cut tax rates for every single American.
If you pay taxes, your tax rate went down.
It reduced tax rates for businesses.
We used to have a 35% corporate rate.
China was at 15, is at 15 for anything that matters.
We were higher than France, dumber than France, is not where you want to be on tax policy at 35.
That was brought down to 21, which makes us okay competitive.
The president, and I certainly agree, said we should go to 15 to be very competitive with the rest of the world, China to start with.
You add to that that business investment is now expensed.
It's not depreciated over many, many years.
So it's easier and less costly for business to create new jobs and make people more productive with better equipment, which is very important for economic growth.
Growth comes from productivity plus the number of people working.
That's the growth.
And we need to encourage, or rather not discourage, investment in productivity.
So all of those things in the Big Beautiful bill added to it this time around was no tax on the first $25,000 worth of tips.
Very important for a lot of independent contractors.
More and more Americans don't want to work for a boss.
They want to be their own boss, whether it's Airbnb or Uber or any of the many companies that you can work with or independent as independent contractors.
You decide your hours.
And a lot of that is tipped work.
And so that's a very big step forward.
It reduces the taxes on Social Security.
A lot of very important pro-growth policies in that.
Plus the Trump accounts, the Trumpaccounts.gov.
People have focused on that for four years, if you have a child in last year, this year, the next two years, the government will put $1,000 in an account like a 401k in IRA for a child.
That's interesting.
But more important is that parents can put up to $5,000 each year up until age 18.
If you think, oh, my kids are all born, this isn't me.
Oh, yes, it is.
This is an IRA for kids that you can help your child start saving.
And you see that charities are deciding to do this too with the Dell Foundation, where they're giving $6 plus trillion dollars to 25 million different accounts to help people start their first account for their children.
Again, it doesn't have to be born this year or last year.
I know everyone focuses on that.
The important part is anybody under 18 every year.
Companies are now giving it as a benefit as well.
Let me ask you about the initial things you said.
And the Democratic refrain consistently has been, because of the One Big Beautiful bill, that it benefits those who are the high earners.
It doesn't necessarily benefit the middle class, and it benefits corporations.
What's your argument to that, or at least your response to that?
Well, that's what the Democrats say about all tax reductions.
When you tax a business, and the Democrats are now talking about raising the tax on small businesses, medium-sized businesses, 12%.
Take it up to 50%.
In California, it'll be 60%.
Small businesses are incorporated as individuals.
They're not corporations.
They're subchapter S corporations, pastors.
Good on Main Street.
That's who they want to raise taxes on.
So, but even let's say the corporate income tax.
When you go to the grocery store and you pay the sales tax and the company pays the corporate income tax for the, where do they get the money from?
When you buy potatoes, when you buy milk, consumers pay the corporate income tax.
The only reason the Democrats like the corporate income tax is it hides who pays it.
Average citizens pay it.
They like to pretend it's somebody else, but corporations, there's no Mr. General Motors.
There isn't.
There are people who buy cars.
They think there's a Mr. General Motors smoking cigars and going on cruises on New York somewhere.
No, that's not the case.
But the consistency is it still benefits some more than others.
Not sums are in the higher income brackets.
No, if you're, well, first of all, it damages consumers.
And about 70% of it, different economists look at it different ways, but everybody recognizes consumers pay most of it and workers pay a great deal of it.
Because if you're in a very competitive industry and they add this tax to you and you're competing with the rest of the world, wages have to go down.
There's no extra money to be had there.
That's where they pay the taxes out of it.
It hits consumers, it hurts workers.
When people understand that, the Democrats will have to come up with a new gig.
The other one is that you're right.
They say, oh, it's the rich people.
Remember, the Kamala Harris's promise when she ran against the Republicans was she was going to repeal the entire Republican tax cut.
The $1,000 per child tax credit, gone.
The doubling of the standard deduction, not the first $12,000, but the first $24,000, gone.
The taxes they want hit middle-income people devastatingly.
And that was what they ran on.
They all voted against increasing the per-child tax credit, against doubling the standard deduction, against making workers more productive with more assets flowing into veteran computers and everything else that people work with, bigger trucks, bigger machines.
So yes, that's what the Democrats always say, but it's not true.
They promised us that when they put the income tax in in 1913 to go back a little bit.
Well, let me show you.
I want the callers to get in there.
2027 488001 for Republicans.
202-748-8,000 for Democrats and Independents.
202-748-8002.
If you want to make your questions or comments to Grover Norquist.
Go ahead.
In 250 years ago, when they did this Declaration of Independence, colonies, when we were a colony, we were paying 2% of our income.
In London, the Brits were paying 20%.
We were paying 2%.
And they thought they should raise taxes on the Americans.
So we started shooting at them, and they left.
And until about 1913, we averaged 2%, sometimes 3% of our income went to government.
It's now closer to 30%.
But for most of our life as a country, both as a colony and as a country, we worked on 2% to 3%.
When they put the personal income tax in 1913, they promised it was just for the rich.
The top rate was 7%.
And to get that top rate, you had to be earning $11 million in a year in today's dollars.
Today, the 7% is half of the bottom rate.
So they say they're going to tax the rich, but then they take the tax and squish it onto everybody.
And they do that on tax after tax after tax.
The Spanish-American War was paid for with a tax on rich people.
Really?
Yes.
On phones.
Those only rich people had phones in 1980, 1898.
$4,000 to buy a phone, rich people.
Pretty quickly, everyone in the country had the phone, and that tax lasted 100 years and was a very regressive tax.
So with inflation and with their policies, the Democrats start with rich people.
They haven't finished the sentence.
We're going to tax the rich first.
You had our friend Clinton promised he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone who earned less than $150,000.
First target, gasoline, people who drive cars.
Obama never raised taxes on anyone who makes less than $250,000.
First target, cigarette smokers, average income, $30,000 a year.
People who are addicted, big CV taxes, who have low incomes.
Thank you, Mr. Obama, for being so concerned that you're only going to tax rich people.
No, they're going to take the money anywhere they can get it.
One of the other things that, because of the reduced revenue, is what ultimately does when it comes to funding things of the federal budget.
It was Washington Democrat Patty Murray who asked CBO Director Full Swagel about the impact of the One Big Beautiful bill on revenues.
She posted a quick video on it.
I want you to watch it, get your response.
Sure.
What single piece of legislation has contributed the most to increasing the debt in like the last decade?
The single piece of legislation is the 2025 Reconciliation Act.
And that increased the deficit by $4.7 trillion over 10 years, including the interest costs and the dynamic feedback.
Right.
So it was the biggest debt driver in a decade.
Just for the record, every Democrat opposed it, every Republican voted for it.
And Mr. Norquist, you probably have heard that before.
What's your response?
Of course, you're talking about a Congress Senate woman who votes for every spending increase.
She doesn't understand the deficit comes from spending too much money, not from taking too much from the American people.
And again, that is the perfect, your point that they want to claim that other people other than non-existent people pay taxes.
And cutting taxes is a problem, but raising spending isn't.
The two parties are very divided, and we're going into an election, and we're having a discussion about that.
The Democratic Party, and Senator's perfect example, is a collection of structures that benefit from big government.
Government employees, government contractors, big city political machines, the trial lawyers.
And then you go through all the people who get government grants to run their lives, various government unions.
It's a takings coalition who view the proper role of government is taking things from some people and giving it to usually them, but to others.
That's the point of government.
On the other side is a leave-us-alone coalition, the Republicans, the conservatives.
And around that table is people who, on their vote-moving issue, want to be left alone.
Freedom of religion, which is why evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, although just don't agree how to get to heaven, but they do want the freedom to raise their own lives and their own children.
You go around to people who care about the Second Amendment, people who want to educate their own children, homeschoolers, private school, school choice, businessmen and women who want to, independent contractors who want to run their own lives, be their own boss, not have a boss, not have a union, take any of their money when they're working.
All around the table, everybody there wants to be left alone, and none of them are asking for money from the government.
So there's a difference between the two parties.
There is a chart that...
Before we show the go ahead, if you can take a couple of calls.
Yeah, let's hear from the Colette in Oregon.
Democrats line, you're on with Grover Norquist.
Go ahead, please.
Yeah, I'm curious.
We've had all these unfunded wars that have gone on to the debt, mostly by Republicans.
How much is this last cut and this last conflict added to the debt?
The national debt.
Colette there in Oregon talking about current operations that are on and what.
I don't know the numbers, but certainly all the weapons that have been used, missiles and so on, you have to buy new ones.
That costs that people are already being paid.
But there's a cost.
War is the health of the state.
Wars cost money.
Yeah.
But when Bob Dahl talked about Democrat wars, everyone got mad at him because you're a very young person.
World War I, World War II, reviewed at the time as Democrat wars.
I'm not sure that we should think of wars with countries that threaten us as a partisan issue.
And Dependent Live, Brooklyn, New York.
This is Andy.
Hi.
Good morning.
Thank you for ceaseban.
Grover, congratulations on bringing in record profits of billionaire oil clerks from the South and Alec and all the rest of the plantation owners from Reconstruction.
Take baby take oil from Venezuela, oil from Iran, money from all over, from the hardworking families that you call consumers.
Migration Driven by High Taxes00:08:59
The people trying to survive in this world.
And congratulations on the mayhem that you all are creating right now with our economics.
I mean, y'all are making plenty of money.
You, Alec, all the rest of you guys.
I've been watching you for 45 years.
I mean, I've been following you since Reagan.
You know, even when you and the Republicans forced Bill Clinton to sign NAFTA, which sent all our jobs out of air, and now you're using AI to eliminate all the rest of the working class people.
What is wrong with sharing with the populations?
You try to destroy renewable energy sources.
You're just oil and greed, and now we're suffering.
Can you do something to help the regular people instead of just avoiding taxes that helps the whole Thai community?
Thank you.
Yeah, obviously, sir, you're aware that all Americans pay taxes.
And it's not just at the federal level with the income tax.
Actually, if we could show this one, this is a map of the 50 states.
And just as the Republicans and Democrats divide on the tax issue and more than any other issue around, almost all the Republicans have signed the pledge never to raise taxes.
No Democrat has.
There have been some Democrats in the past.
They switched parties.
Two senators, five congressmen, couldn't live in the Democratic Party as non-tax increasers, so they became Republicans.
But if you look at the states, you'll see that blue states, Democrat states, and red states, Republican states, are moving in very, very different directions.
And as you point out, you can judge whether the people like lower taxes or higher taxes, more government or less, based on where they move and what they're doing.
The map here is the green states, the eight green states, have no income tax.
And there you see people moving into those states, and they've been growing.
The yellow states have a single rate tax, a flat rate tax, not a graduated tax.
Karl Marx had 10 things on his list for the Communist Manifesto.
Number two was the graduated income tax, because you can divide people into different groups, play them against each other, mug them one at a time, play class warfare, but everybody's taxes go up as you're playing that game.
So we have now 16 states that have a single rate tax.
It used to be eight about five years ago.
The number of states are growing.
There are now 12 states that have said, they're all red states, Republican states, we're going to phase the income tax to zero.
Five of them have actually passed the law that will trigger them down.
As revenue comes up, instead of spending it, they reduce the income tax down to zero.
South Carolina, on April 15th of this year, became the fifth state to pass the law that will automatically click them down.
Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kentucky, five states now on the way to zero.
Another seven on this map, the one with the black dots, have leadership, House, Senate, governor that said, we're going to go to zero.
And they've taken real steps.
They're halfway there in North Carolina.
They're almost halfway there in Iowa.
Arizona is more than halfway.
They're down to two and a half.
They haven't passed a law that will take them automatically, but they're taking serious steps.
Missouri is now committed to going to zero, should be on the ballot this fall.
Arkansas, also the governor was elected, committing to go to zero, and she's been taking serious steps there.
So the two, and on the other side, the blue states that you apparently prefer, California's taking its income tax rate.
If you make more than $70,000 a year, you hit 9.9% tax.
That's their vision of who's rich.
And so California also wants a wealth tax, which they're putting in or talking, they're just talking about it.
But already a third of the targets they were going after have left the state.
Certainly New York and California are seeing more and more people leave.
I think if you look at where people move to and where they decide to settle and where their kids move to, you'll see people prefer lower tax, limited government states.
Here's a viewer from New York.
This is Steve in Schenectady, Republican Line.
Good morning, Steve Spanish.
I just want to say, Grover Norquist has been around 35 to 40 years, and he's been preaching the same conservative policies.
And everyone who's watching this program, if you go to every state that follows his path and then see where that state ranks in education and in health and other things, you will see that they're all failures.
Grover Norquist.
Well, Caller, as a Republican, why don't you agree with Mr. Norquist's philosophy?
I don't think the caller's a Republican.
I am a Republican, but the Donald Trump MAGA Grover Norquist of the party chased me away.
I don't agree with him because, once again, look up the states that follow his tax policy and then look up their education and their poverty level.
I am a Republican, but I'm not a Grover Norquist MAGA BD Netanyahu Republican.
Thank you.
Okay, Stephen, New York.
Okay, Stephen, Republican from New York.
In point of fact, people, if they believed as you think they should, that higher taxes and more government makes life better, people would move to states.
California offers lots and lots of government.
You're in New York, great deal of government.
The difference, New York now has fewer people than Florida.
Okay?
You and I are both old enough to remember when Florida was full of cows.
Florida has more people than New York.
Why?
People are leaving New York and moving to Florida.
Why could that be?
Florida doesn't have an income tax.
New York has an income tax.
It hits over 10%, plus the city.
Well, but all those benefits you get in New York.
In New York, you spend twice as much per capita.
You spend about $230 billion at the state level.
You have less people, fewer people than Florida.
They spend about $115 billion, half as much, even though they're fewer people where you are.
So you spend $2 for every dollar in Florida.
Your schools aren't better.
Your roads aren't better.
Your services aren't better.
You do have much higher paid bureaucrats, many more of them, pensions, very impressive pensions, and very impensive benefits.
But you don't have a higher quality of life, which is why people leave the states with higher taxes.
It's not just the higher taxes.
It's the higher taxes and the less competent governments.
The reason Florida has no income tax is that they run the government competently and they don't waste a lot of money, so they don't need an income tax.
Governor Norquist, let's talk about the other side when it comes to economic policy.
The president making a $2 trillion-plus budget request.
A, what do you think of the number, and where do you think of where the money's going when it comes to that request?
This is the largely specific, the defense part?
There's the defense part, but there's others, total $2.2 billion, which 10% reduction in spending, I think, was part of that.
Is that enough in your mind?
Well, there are a couple of things that we really need to do on spending.
One of them is to take the welfare programs and block-grant them to the states.
Because the reason the states are important, the reason federal is important, is you can find out what works and what doesn't.
When Bill Clinton signed the bill for welfare reform and he took aid to families with dependent children, now called TANF, and block-granted it to the states, the states were able to get the aid to people, but they dropped the cost 30% because they were able to experiment with what works and what doesn't work.
It was also their money that they were spending.
So right now, a lot of welfare goes to the states, but under strict rules, it just gets sent.
Nobody at the state checks for fraud.
In Wisconsin, the people get mad that the governor didn't check for fraud.
Why should he?
It's not his money.
He's not spending his money.
He doesn't care who gets it.
But if you said, here's the money, you spend it, then everyone in Wisconsin would say, we want to see if you spend it wisely.
So block-granting the welfare structures to the states and allowing them to figure out how to do it would save you a great deal of money.
It would find the kind of problems you have that we did find in Wisconsin and some other states.
We need to look, the government regularly predicts under Democrats and Republicans about 15 to 20 percent is misspent.
You'll never find that if nobody is responsible down the chain.
So I think that that's a big, important step in the right direction.
But the president has dropped the number of federal employees by 350,000 in one year, okay?
State Level Flat Tax Shifts00:12:53
Lowest number since 1966.
Everything's getting done.
The one problem you have is that they wouldn't fund TSA.
That was the Democrats' decision to do that.
But that wasn't from a shortage of TSA agents.
So there is a lot of money to be saved with reducing the number of bureaucrats in the government.
Former head of the controller for the Pentagon, Dove Zachheim, told me that they had 700,000 civilians at the height of the Cold War, civilian employees, not military, but civilian employees in the Pentagon.
Said you could do with 200,000 less now that the Cold War was over.
I mean, still have conflicts, but nothing to compare with the Cold War.
These are significant savings that can and should be made.
Since a sort of Republican called in, could we look at this part of the COVID-19- Yeah, I want to roll another call, but yeah, go ahead, Coco.
Because this explains everything.
The far left is 1932 when FDR got elected.
See all that blue until the yellow line.
The yellow line is when 96 percent of Republicans signed the pledge never to raise taxes and have kept it since.
Before the Republicans were the party that wouldn't raise taxes, they won Congress twice, once under Eisenhower, once under Truman.
But that is a sea of blue.
The Senate is the top part.
The House is the bottom part.
The little unimportant part in the middle is who's president, because presidents can't raise taxes, can't cut spending.
They can veto bills.
So Republicans could slow things down with Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan.
But at the end of the day, the Democrats controlled spending and taxing during those periods.
Since the yellow line, the Republicans, no Republicans voted for a tax increase, no tax increases passed if there were Republicans in charge.
The only tax increases when the Democrats had the House and the Senate, and then they would lose it in the next election cycle under Obama and Biden.
If you look at the red, you can see the Republicans won control of Congress 18 years, Democrats six.
So as the party that won't raise taxes, the Republicans, not dominant, very small majority, but has had a majority in the House and the Senate for 18 years versus six before they twice held Congress in 62 years.
We had a one-party state here in terms of who decided how much money to spend and what taxes look like.
From Virginia, this is Matt and Falls Church Democrats line.
Good morning.
I am another person who has lived my whole life with this person, spouting these lovely ideas of smaller taxes and smaller government and everything's going to be green on the other side.
And yet, what kind of situation do we have now?
Massive debt to pay for wars, tax cuts for rich people.
We have an oligarch class running our government, literally billionaires running our government in the presidency.
Most of the Senate is made up of rich people.
This guy has been around for so long, and he preaches this idea of Anne-Randian selfishness, that as a country, you're all about getting yours.
We as a country have been stuck with these horrible ideas for the last 40 years in the Republican Party.
And you can see it in that our country doesn't seem to care about its actual citizens.
Look at Kansas, the Sam Brown back experiment, where they tried to do Grover-Norquist ideas and cut taxes to the bone.
The state was cutting so much needed services.
And they had to kick out in an extremely conservative place their governor because the state was so horribly managed under Grover-Norquisting tax cut ideas.
Okay.
There, Matt and Falls Church, thanks.
Sure.
It's an odd set of talking points, and it's a little old.
In Kansas, they were looking to reduce the income tax with Sam Brown back as governor.
You had a very liberal Republican Senate and a more conservative Republican House.
The Senate did everything, the Republican Senate did everything they could to undermine it.
But the Supreme Court came in and demanded that they spend half a billion dollars on more spending.
And instead of saying to the Supreme Court, you know, if you really would like to help us do the budget, run for legislature, but you don't get to do that, instead, they tried to give, to spend more money the way they wanted to, and they couldn't reduce the spending and rein in spending.
What did happen is that they've told the Supreme Court, thank you, but you don't run the country or the state.
And the Republicans, conservative Republicans, Reagan Republicans, Trump Republicans, who want lower spending and lower taxes, have won two-thirds of both houses.
So, sir, in Kansas, they rejected your policies.
In Kansas, two-thirds, very serious Reagan Republicans, said, we're never voting for a tax increase.
We are reducing spending.
They have passed a law to bring the tax rate down to 4%, just as they were looking to do before, but this time with the United Republican Party.
And because people like yourself were saying we should raise taxes and raise spending, people said, we're not doing that in Kansas.
And they, again, took two-thirds to override the governor's veto, plus.
And so Kansas is an example of a state that started to try and reduce taxes but couldn't get spending restraint.
You don't have to cut taxes.
North Carolina has been phasing its income tax down for 12 years now, and its goal is to get to zero, but they're legally going down to 2.49, and then they'll have to pass another law to get there.
They're phasing down.
They're competing with South Carolina, which is phasing down to 1.99.
2.49 in North Carolina.
Why?
Arizona is 2.5.
And I think the people who run gas stations who run the legislature.
And then in South Carolina, they said, We're going to two.
Nope, not two.
1.99.
So they're going to 1.99.
So in the next five years, they're going from 6% to 1.99.
They're going to be ahead of North Carolina, which is going fine, but slowly.
And they've had more revenue come in every year.
They just don't spend it all.
And when they do have additional revenue above what they need, they reduce taxes.
And that's what they've done for 12 years.
It's a very serious, step-by-step.
There's not tomorrow.
Step-by-step, bring the rates down and get control of spending.
What's the threat to the president's economic policy goals if the House comes into Democratic hands after the midterm elections?
Well, there are a number of really bad ideas out there that the Republicans would never pass through the House and Senate, but you might get Democrats to do.
The one, the most favored nation thing that they call its price controls on pharmaceuticals, on new drugs.
When you put price controls on things like apartments in New York, you get fewer of them.
Or Cambridge, Massachusetts, you get fewer them.
We know that price controls make people go, I'm not going to make more of that because you put a price control on it.
The price controls that they're looking to put on pharmaceuticals are already starting to change people's willingness to invest in very important cancer research because they're going to say, well, we won't be able to sell it to recoup your costs.
So that's a challenge.
There's also one, there's a highway, a Railroad Safety Act, which is really just a list of labor union desires.
They want more staff.
They want more inspections.
On the day there was that crash in Ohio, there were three people, not one, three, with the driver, and they want to pass a law that requires you to have two.
And they'd had an inspection that morning and they said, we need more inspections.
So what we know is the crash had nothing to do with how many people were in the drivers with the driver, and nor were there inspections.
And yet the labor unions, which want more union dues, not safer railroads, are pushing a piece of legislation that will cost billions of dollars and make everything less affordable.
I think the key thing to remember is that affordability has two sides.
It's what's the price of the goods and services in the store.
But when you walk into the store and you've just had a Republican tax cut, there's been a tax cut.
You walk into that store, everything is more affordable because your income taxes are lower than they were before.
When you have a tax increase, when the Democrats come in, we're going to help you out, we're going to raise your taxes, you walk into that store, everything's less affordable.
Tax increases are pay cuts.
The people who talk about, I like workers and we're going to raise taxes, are talking about pay cuts.
A tax cut is a pay increase.
And the difference between the two parties going in two very different directions here, we see in the states what people say they want.
Let's go to Mark.
Mark in Michigan, Independent Line.
Hi.
Yes, sir.
Technical problem I have.
Have we ever heard of a prorated tax?
The concept is you finance something for five years and you pay for it in four years, allowing that one year that you won't have to pay for it, that you actually could subsidize something else, some other payment plan.
The concept is the House doesn't have a budget.
The Senate just passes whatever the unions work with.
Trump did a line-item veto backwards of things he don't want to pay for.
If the president could claim 70% of that first income in taxes and put that down on the debt, that's his responsibility.
It's not cutting what's already been fake spent because you've gone into debt for it anyways.
But that's the solution, and a prorated tax would actually allow the system to pay for itself as it potentially collects the taxes as well.
Okay.
That's an idea from Mark and Michigan.
Okay.
I'm a little confused.
My recommendation when you look at taxes, sometimes people go, why don't we go to a sales tax, which would turn into a value-added tax.
The difference between the United States and Europe is the VAT.
You take a look at American spending, add the European VAT, and that's how much Sweden's spending or France is spending or Britain is spending.
The Europeans have figured out you can't get any more money by raising the income tax even on very rich people because they don't have to go to work if they don't want to, and they don't have to invest their money.
They could spend it.
So raising taxes, and we've had taxes as high as 90%, it doesn't get the government more money.
What the Europeans have figured out is a sales tax.
Nobody can pay a 20% sales tax because you'd buy everything down the street from Costco, not in Costco.
They'd open up the trucks in the back and sell them there.
It's 20% off because you're not paying in the ridiculous sales tax.
But if you have a VAT, at a value-added tax, sales tax at every level of production, then you can force people to pay it.
And the Europeans have realized they have to have wage taxes, not just income taxes, that are higher, and the value-added tax, which is the ultimate goal, if you read the literature, of the left in America.
They know they can't get any more money from higher income taxes.
They say that in order to make people think, oh, you're going to tax other people while they talk about putting in the VAT the sales tax and now property taxes.
Our website for our guest is atr.org.
Grover Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has been at this for a long time.
What do you owe your longevity to?
Well, focusing on one single idea, which is the taxpayer protection pledge.
And two-thirds of all the Republican governors have signed the pledge never to raise taxes and kept it.
The vast majority in the House and Senate, Republicans as well.
And it really has defined the Republican Party as the party that won't raise taxes.
And Democrats self-select for their own reasons to be the party of tax increases.
But that's been one major project line.
The other is moving at the state level, moving states to flat rate taxes.
I think we'll have, we have 25 states now that are either at a flat rate tax or one or two years away from it.
Grover Norquist Tax Pledge00:03:00
Half the country has decided to take envy off the table when it comes to state income taxes.
Everybody pays 2%.
Everybody pays 3%.
Or eight states pay zero.
My favorite flat rate tax is zero.
But two is better than a graduated or progressive tax.
Again, because people can mug you one at a time.
Oh, we're not going to tax you this time.
We're going to tax them.
And then come back for you.
And they don't care to protect you.
You've already not been there for it.
Grover Norquist, thank you.
Good to be with you.
Coming up a little later on the program, we're going to hear from the New York Times reporter Teddy Schuffleifer of the recent investigative piece looking at the topic of gray money.
Donations from nonprofits that don't have to disclose to their donors.
That's coming up.
Next, we're going to look at how AI is being used to shape public opinion on the Iran war with independent journalist Holly McKay.
That conversation coming up on Washington Journal.
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Washington Journal continues.
Joining us now, Holly McKay.
She is an independent journalist, writes a substack called Dispatches with Holly McKay.
And in a recent article for Deadline magazine online, she takes a look at AI and its influence it's had when it comes to shaping public opinion in Iran.
Holly McKay, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
AI Manipulation of Video Content00:14:51
How did you get turned on to this?
How did you get interested in this topic?
Yeah, well, this is a topic I've been covering for a really long time.
I've been a war reporter for the last 15 years and spent a lot of time in different conflicts.
And when I really started to see how the pervasiveness of fake content and AI-generated content was during the fall of Afghanistan, I actually stayed through that and for another six months under the Taliban rule.
And I was just perplexed by being sort of on the ground, seeing what was happening and then going onto social media or watching the news and seeing something that felt in many ways like a very different reality.
So I started to really deep dive and look at where these videos and where these photographs were coming from, how they were being shared.
And this was back in 2021.
And so here we are in 2026 and gone through several wars.
I saw the same thing happening with Russia disinformation in Ukraine.
Also spent a lot of time in Taiwan and saw how sophisticated the Chinese had become and very intentional in the way that they were targeting the Taiwanese people with their disinformation.
And here we are really in the Iran war and what I would really consider to be the first AI-native war.
And especially in those first couple of weeks, just that onslaught and having to wade through what was real and what was not and how things go viral so quickly, even when they're not real.
And it's something that I find deeply concerning.
One of the examples that you cite in your story was an image online of what was perceived as the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Looks like it's been attacked, it looks like it's been damaged.
Set this into context of what was portrayed and what the reality was.
So, there was a video of the USS Abraham Lincoln being struck by missiles and sinking.
And this was portrayed as this great victory by the Iranians.
And as quick as that on social media, on TikTok, on Twitter, the video is just going viral.
And people are saying, Oh my God, look what happened.
You know, this is what's happening in this war.
But the reality was that the ship was never hit.
There was an AI detection tool, Hive, which basically showed that the content was 99% AI-generated.
St. Com confirmed that the missiles didn't even come close.
But yet, you had the spokesperson for the IIGC who was saying that this had happened.
And this content was being shared by Iranian officials, which then really just blurred the lines of what was actually happening in the war theater.
Then, so the idea of sharing them once it hits social media, though, hard to pull back from it once it makes the rounds there.
What can we do to combat that?
It's very, very challenging.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook and other groups, you know, they try to take down fake content where possible.
But once it's sort of spread like wildfire, it becomes extremely difficult.
So that's where the onus really is on us as individuals, what we can do before we share, what we can do to look at a picture, a photograph, a story, a video, and say, does this look real?
How can we determine it?
And I think that really does make the place of journalists even more important because that is sort of our job is to take a breath, look at the information and try to determine whether it's real or fake.
But again, in this age of AI, it is becoming increasingly difficult.
This content is increasingly sophisticated.
And what they're doing is not necessarily generating content from scratch.
They're taking snippets of real content and just tweaking, manipulating, changing.
So that just makes it harder to detect what is real and what is false because there is a part of that content that is actually real.
Holly McKay is our guest.
And if you want to ask her questions about the use of AI, particularly when it comes to shaping what's going on in Iran, public opinion of Iran, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats and Independents.
202-748-8002.
You can text questions or comments at 202-748-8003.
Holly McKay.
You asked the question in your story: who is steering the story on Iran?
How would you answer your own question?
I would say that both sides or all sides are steering the story.
And of course, propaganda is nothing new in war.
This has been happening every single war since the beginning of time and it's in its own way.
But we are in this sort of technological age that makes it very difficult and the lines are very blurred.
But each side has its agenda.
And I think what we run into is a real problem when people feel that, you know, even in White House accounts, especially in the early days, there were sort of Hollywood clips that were being shared.
And this, you know, has a tendency to, I think, permeate a bit of distrust when people feel that they can't trust their own leadership, you know, what is real, what is fake.
And then we really do have a problem because then it just becomes sort of a free-for-all of not knowing where we stand.
Holly McKay, do people generally in this day and age that we know about AI right now have the ability to discern what's real or not?
And if that's not the case, what can be done to improve that skill?
I think we can look at Hive is a great tool that we can go to on the internet to kind of look at what is fake, what is real.
They're pretty good at determining that.
If it's an image, you could do something simple, like put it into a Google reverse search to see if that image has been used partially somewhere else, you know, five years ago.
And then you can pretty much determine, okay, well, that's not from the Iran war.
You can also go to, I guess, official journalists' pages, journalists that you trust, and see, you know, what are they saying about it?
And then you can do, ironically, it's a little bit harder with video, but you can also take an image and put it into an AI tool itself.
And the AI tool can tell you, you know, with some degree of certainty whether it looks like it's been artificially generated.
When it comes to the images, the video, is it individuals mainly sharing this, or are there official organizations either within the United States or Iran that are sharing this?
Yeah, absolutely, official organizations.
And that's what makes it even more challenging.
And remember that the internet in Iran is down for 99% of Iranians.
So what the officials in Tehran are doing, they're targeting the American audience.
They're not necessarily targeting the Iranian audience with disinformation.
So when they share fake stories, fake images, fake videos, they're doing it to sow a sense of distrust in the United States.
They're doing that so that the U.S. sort of turns against, you know, maybe its own government and says, this is, you know, this is not what we want.
This is not where it's going.
And that is the Iranian playbook, very similar to the way that China says operates in Taiwan, where it sort of floods the space with disinformation, not for the Chinese people in the mainland, but for the Taiwanese.
And Russia, a similar playbook.
So we're just seeing this kind of proliferate more and more.
Again, our guest, Holly McKay, here to talk about the use of artificial intelligence when it comes to what's being said about Iran.
Let's hear from Rhonda.
Rhonda in New Jersey, Democrats lying, you're up first.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Good morning, young lady.
My question for you about the AI is the AI farms that they're building in these communities.
Everyone's electric bill has tripled.
How were they able to pass down the cost of running these farms onto the American taxpayer?
I mean, taxpayer.
I mean, taxpayer.
It's horrible.
Everyone's electric bill has doubled besides the environmental damage and the noise.
They can't even sell their homes.
No one wants to buy them.
Okay.
Rhonda in New Jersey.
Thanks.
I don't know if it fits in the context of what we're talking about, Holly McKay, but let me expand that a little bit.
For those who are producing the content, is it random individuals?
Is it organized entities behind it when it comes to the production of this type of content?
I think it generally is started by individuals and shared by officials.
But I do think that there are certainly in this particular war, there is a little bit more incentive for officials to sort of take part in the production of these things.
I think five years ago, AI was very much sort of an ad hoc.
Someone at home, someone, you know, with their own kind of agenda to sew was creating it.
But I think it's a lot more organized and a lot more kind of funneled for focus right now.
And that is just going to increase, I think, as time goes on.
One of the groups, a pro-Iranian group with the creation of this type of contest, a group known as explosive media, and producing such AI content that was being used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, this video was passed around.
This video also features the style of Lego characters.
Let's show it for our viewers now.
See that,
but the style of video being used even and using things like Lego characters, I suppose that could shape a certain opinion even in the way that it's being portrayed.
Yeah, absolutely.
These are taking sort of cultural, iconic things and then putting them in the context of war in a way that people can relate to.
And again, it's all about drumming up that propaganda for your team.
And it's just fascinating times we're in that this is where it's at.
A viewer asked on X saying this follows a cycle of AI that goes out to social media, it goes viral and spreads, it gets verified untrue.
It's called out as fake on social media and finally is generally disregarded as fake.
And this is the question, in your experience, how much time does it take to go through that type of cycle before it's found out as fake?
Yeah, I mean, it can take anywhere from five minutes to 50 minutes to five hours.
But even if it happens very quickly, these videos are often compelling enough that they're already shared hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times before they are called out as fake.
And how many people are necessarily following up to see if they're called out as fake?
And so you've already sort of generated a huge amount of sort of interest and intrigue and belief in many cases.
And it can take 30 seconds and it's off.
So Holly McKay, when it comes to the actual social media platforms, what's the responsibility that they have at this time when it comes to this type of content being distributed about Iran?
Yeah, I think it's a very kind of tough line that these big companies have to play in the sense that they want to be sort of these beacons of free speech and people being allowed to share content.
But then you're also portraying something that's fake as real.
And so oftentimes there usually is enough pressure for them to take down the content themselves.
But at the same time, they have to go through their own process of verifying and seeing before that they can do that.
So it's sort of a process and they're constantly walking that fine line of what is artistic expression and what is just spreading fake news.
There was a story after the video we showed.
Apparently France, or actually YouTube recently placed a ban on the distribution of that type of video.
What's the possibility that other social media providers, content providers will go the same routes?
I don't, for me personally, I don't necessarily see that happening.
I mean, we send to see less of these fake videos on YouTube.
For that reason, YouTube seems to have a much stronger vetting system than a lot of the other social media platforms.
But again, these platforms are all about content, views, you know, quick, sharp, shortened videos.
And, you know, they constantly, again, portraying themselves as being, you know, this is the place where you can come and share information and different views and diversity.
And so I think that their pushback is going to be a lot different to, say, Google and YouTube.
From Ohio, we will hear from Bill, Democrats line for Holly McKay.
Go ahead.
Hi.
This wasn't the topic I was expecting, but I mean, we all know when President Trump posted that image of him in the jet wrapping on America, that was disgusting.
And I mean, when you get that vile and disgusting, it pretty much opens the door for everything else, doesn't it?
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest problem, you know, whether depending on the content, but especially when it's being sort of shared in a war context, like early days, they had clips of, say, Tropic Thunder, you know, which ignited the upset of Ben Stiller a lot.
It just creates, I guess, an environment of distrust.
And that's the hardest thing is when we can't tell who's telling the truth.
Is the Iranian government telling the truth or is our government here telling the truth?
And they both have a different theory.
Grok Compounding Disinformation Issues00:06:56
And that's what makes it really challenging.
Holly McKay, in the story that you wrote, you also there's a video included that was put out by the United States.
It puts movie clips together with actual events of what's going on in Iran.
We're going to show that to our viewers.
Wake up, Daddy Shom.
Welcome, Dumza.
Strength and honor, strength and honor.
What will you do without freedom?
Maverick Simba.
You can't conceive of what I'm capable of.
Finishing this fight.
Yeah, I'm thinking on back.
I'm here to fight for truth and justice in the American way.
I am the danger.
Time to find out maximum effort.
Here it comes.
Now in this floor's victory.
And Holly McKay just said, and it said it itself, this was put out by the White House.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think the, you know, the intention of that was to, again, its own propaganda, drum up a kind of patriotism, the strength of the U.S.
But I think the biggest danger with clips like that is you turn war into a video game video game.
And it's sort of one thing when you're 5,000 miles away, you know, watching it kind of happen on a TV screen.
And it's a very different reality when you're obviously in that and experiencing it and people are losing their lives.
And I think you do run a big danger of trivializing war in some way and turning it into a video game.
You know, this isn't Call of Duty.
This is a very real, real thing with real weapons and real lives that are being lost.
So I think that it's just a very dangerous path to walk.
A viewer asked the question, I think you hinted on this, but she asked the question: can AI identify AI-generated materials?
In often cases, yes, it can.
And I've certainly used that tool before when I've seen pictures and I'm like, ah, I can't, I can't quite tell if it's real or it's fake, or it's just been maybe a little bit photoshopped or enhanced.
And I will upload a photo into Claude and say, can you tell me?
And Claude will come back and say, this is AI generated, likely because of XYZ.
And sometimes I've actually been really surprised where I've seen pictures that I was sure must be, you know, AI generated being shared.
And it's come back and it said, no, it actually seems authentic.
So I don't necessarily think it's perfect, but I certainly think it's a good starting point.
And I personally do use that.
I'll follow up on that.
A lot of people, when they use X, they go to Grok in order to confirm things.
You write in your story that Grok perhaps a little bit compounded the problem of what we're seeing today.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, remember these AI tools, they're not necessarily perfect.
Again, Grok is sort of part of the Twitter empire.
And I think that, you know, in many cases, these tools, they can hallucinate.
They can often spread information that's very incorrect and it takes a long time to correct.
I mean, I think a lot of us have experienced going to chat GPT or something, and it's still telling us that President Biden is the president.
So AI is something that certainly needs to be verified.
And yes, it can cause a problem, especially in the beginning, before it's caught up to what is actually happening.
Two things that you highlight, two terms that you use.
One, you use the term something called shallow fake and how that complicates the issue of trying to determine what's real.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, that's what I sort of talked about a little bit earlier, where you have something that's got a real element, or it's a video that was taken from a real event and it's been sort of just manipulated or changed, or maybe the flag in the background has been changed or the soldier's patch or something to make it relevant in this case to the Iran war.
But, you know, that might have been footage from the protests in Egypt from 2011.
So it's just, it's not, again, not creating something completely from scratch.
It's taking something real and then just tweaking it to manipulate it to this particular situation.
And I think that's what is creating a huge amount of the confusion because you're looking at it thinking, well, this seems real.
And you may even put it through an AI detection and it says it's real, but we're missing those kind of nuances.
Yeah, it's the subtlety.
That's what you write about.
That's what's complicating the issue for people to make their determinations.
Yeah, absolutely.
And AI has just come so far.
You know, obviously there was three, even five years ago, it was just, it was clunky.
You could tell something was often very poorly edited.
You know, the attempt to make it look real was just kind of bad.
And we could all look at it and say, that's stupid.
But that's just changed a lot in the last couple of years where we look at it and think, oh, my goodness, you know, I don't know what I'm seeing here.
And it's a little bit scary to think if we've come this far in the last couple of years, where are we going to be at in the next couple of years?
To that end, for those people that you interviewed for this article on Deadline, they see the problem.
To what degree are they so concerned that they want to do something about it, in your opinion?
I think everybody's just trying to figure out what exactly is the best thing to do right now.
And so I think, you know, again, the sort of advice that I was given by a lot of these tech professionals is go back to the individual.
Go back to, you know, being able to take a breath, being able to try to kind of do your own research before you automatically share something.
And, you know, a lot of that work does come down to journalists, you know, doing a lot of that grunt work too, because we're all living in busy, chaotic societies.
How much time do we have to necessarily vet everything that we see and do?
But I think it is important, especially in the context of war, to just stop and take a minute before we share something.
Another viewer on X saying, could there be filters applied to get rid of this type of contact or a warning label to show it's fake news or a lie?
Adding there must be a legislative way on how AI is handled in this context.
Yeah, I think a lot of companies are trying that, trying to, you know, flag something that appears to be AI.
But again, AI is, it's got this ability to outsmart everybody.
And I don't think that our sort of surveillance technology has caught up to the reality of it and may always be that one step behind.
And I think from a legislative point of view, you're kind of dealing with the same problem.
You can legislate something, but how do you actually enforce it?
How do you actually, you know, do make these changes.
And remember, a lot of the content itself, you could legislate something in the U.S., but a lot of this content isn't necessarily coming from the U.S., it's coming from all over the globe, and that's just sort of impossible to try to police.
Global Content Policing Challenges00:04:14
Our guest is a founder of a substack called Dispatches with Holly McKay.
A lot of it, or a good deal of it, dealing with war-type content and what's going on in the modern day.
Tell us about the sub-stack and what are you looking at currently when it comes to Iran.
Yeah, so obviously, my sort of approach as a journalist has always come from a humanitarian perspective.
So I try to really speak to Iranians, speak to what is happening on the ground in these different conflict zones.
And also, in addition to Iran, you know, there are so many other things happening in the world.
And it's really important for me to sort of shine a light on those too, because they often don't get the attention that they deserve.
Places like Darfur and the Congo and many different parts of Asia and Africa.
So it's our media, you know, we're very fixated on Iran, but I think it's also important to remember that these hardships and these horrors are happening in far too many places.
HollyMcKay.substack.com is you want to find the substack dispatch or sorry, deadline.
The online publication is where you can find her story taking a look at AI and how it's shaping information in the U.S.-Iran war.
Holly McKay, thanks for your time.
Thank you.
Coming up in about a half hour from now, you'll learn how so-called gray money is being used when it comes to nonprofits giving to political campaigns.
And we'll have that conversation with New York Times reporter Teddy Schalifer.
But first, open forum and here's how you can let us know what you're thinking when it comes to politics.
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202-748-8000 for Democrats and Independents.
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As we told you, Kevin Warsh, the president's nominee to be the next head of the Federal Reserve, will appear in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
C-SPAN 3 is where you can see it at 10 o'clock.
Also view it on our app, and our.org.
And then we were talking earlier about the House Ethics Committee meeting to make its disciplinary recommendations for Florida Democratic Representative Sheila Scherfalis-McCormick, accused of stealing millions of dollars in FEMA funds to support her congressional campaign.
And then you'll see that play out in front of the committee on C-SPAN 3, also on the app and the .org.
House Ethics Committee Meeting00:02:56
And you can participate in an open forum and comment on those things as you wish.
Let's hear from Roy.
Roy in North Carolina, Democrats line on this open forum.
Hello.
All right.
Thank you, Pedro.
Okay, here's one way we can tell that Iran, Iran, wasn't an imminent threat is because the entire rest of the world didn't think it.
I mean, it's like we're saying the whole rest of the world is wrong and we're right.
Not one NATO person wanted to take part in this.
I mean, it's beyond belief.
And when you had Grover Norquist on recently, this is why we're having this incredible, we have this incredible national debt that's approaching $40 trillion.
I don't know why the commercial media doesn't point out that, well, like with Carter, Jimmy Carter, when he handed it off to Reagan, they were saying, oh my God, this is terrible.
$900 billion national debt.
And then Reagan proceeded to triple it.
And then Bush proceeded to add another trillion to it.
And then, you know, the Republicans, I can't believe Grover Norquist can get away with it.
The Republicans always add to the debt astronomically.
Bill Clinton had a $250 billion surplus in his last year.
Almost all of it was payroll taxes, Medicare, like Social Security.
And Bush has said, oh, we should give it back to the people.
But then he gave it back to the rich people.
It wasn't the people who paid Social Security and Medicare.
I think Clinton had three straight years of surpluses.
All right, Roy in North Carolina, let's hear from Jackie in Florida, Independent Line.
Hello.
Yes, good morning.
This is my first time calling.
However, I want to talk about the picture that Trump put out in terms of the antichrist focus.
Now, what I think about that is, first of all, I knew there was something going on when he had the Bible upside down.
And then the next thing is, if I'm wrong, please correct me, in regards to him not putting his hand on the Bible during inauguration.
I mean, he was the only president, in my view, that has never put his hand on, I mean, did not put his hand on the Bible.
So I say that is that that was an indication to me there was something up.
I think that he's also a blessing in disguise.
Trump Bible Incident Mystery00:02:44
You know, God works in mysterious ways.
And in one aspect, he's showing us something.
And another aspect, it's not good.
That's all I have to say.
Okay.
That's Jackie there in Florida, part of this open forum, and you can participate as well.
We told you and talked a little bit earlier when it came to the referendum vote in Virginia today on redistricting.
You can see that play out and watch C-SPAN as when the results come in.
One of the people talking about it yesterday on Capitol Hill was the House minority leader, Kakeem Jeffries, giving his impressions on what he expects to play out after the vote today.
Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the people of Virginia that Barack Obama, President Obama, and that Governor Abigail Spamberger are urging a no vote.
That's a stone-cold lie.
The no vote position is Donald Trump's position, as is being evidenced tonight.
I hope that this rally is broadcast all across the Commonwealth of Virginia because Donald Trump, up until this point, has been trying to hide his position.
He's been in the presidential witness protection program as it relates to the referendum in Virginia, but he can't hide anymore.
And we're urging everyone to vote yes to stop the MAGA power grab.
And the voters of Virginia have an opportunity to ensure that there's a fair national congressional map because we believe that it's the voters of Virginia and the people of this country who should decide which party is in the majority in the aftermath of the midterm elections,
not Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA sycophants and state legislative bodies across the country who were ordered by Donald Trump to gerrymander the national congressional map as part of their effort to rig the midterm elections.
The president participating in a teller rally with Speaker Johnson when it comes to the lead up to today's vote.
The president also posting on his Truth Social site just this today, Virginia vote no to save your country.
You can see that on Truth Social.
This is Blake Blake in North Carolina.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, what I'm trying to figure out about what Trump is doing is making no sense.
Confusion Over Middle East Stance00:07:53
And I don't see why in the world why he's coming out giving them a ceasefire, apart ceasefire.
He don't just give it all up right now and bring our family back home.
This is too much.
He don't even need to be in that chair.
He needs to go and impeach him, get it over with.
And that's all I got to say.
Thank you, and y'all the best.
Ceasepan, y'all, y'all the best.
Thank you.
Let's hear from George in Cleveland, Ohio, Independent Line.
Good morning.
Good morning, Pedro.
I have a question about the Strait of Hermouth.
I noticed doing a little research that the Strait is about, it's with 22 miles, which is about one half of like, let's say, Lake Erie, which is about 50 miles.
My question is: the Strait of Hermouth, as I understand, is basically the last, you might say, ace in the hole for Iran to bully the world.
Why don't we do something to oversee the strait?
Is it that difficult?
I'm thinking back in the Vietnam era, we brought out a battleship that bombarded the coastlines, I believe, of Vietnam.
Why can't we bring out another battleship which is, I think, a little bit cheaper to send armament across to destroy the hillsites, mountain sites, from wherever these Iran missiles and drones are coming from.
And then, as far as like to deploy naval ships that have heat tracking or the ability to track sending armed missiles to defense, similar to like Israeli with the Golden Dome, have a golden dome over the strait.
So any incoming.
I have not heard anybody ask this question.
Is this a possibility to your knowledge or to anybody with military knowledge within the C-SPAN community?
I'll refer you to our website only to the idea that in the lead up and since the Iran war began, many segments taking a look at the Strait of Hamus by experts much more knowledgeable than me.
So we invite you to check out what's been said on our website.
There's a search feature there if you want to look at there for yourself.
Let's go to Pete, Pete in Massachusetts Democrats line.
Hello.
Hello, Pedro.
Yes.
I haven't heard very much about the reprehensible behavior with the campaigning for Orebon and Hungary.
And obviously, this administration loves Putin also.
So I guess I'm really confused.
This is really directed to the MAGA and whatever you call this party now, but I'm just confused.
There's no outcry.
This is not, you know, this is not their orthodoxy.
So I'd love to hear from some people on that side of the aisle because that's traitorous activity to be campaigning in another country's election.
And, you know, by the grace of God, it turned out to be a huge landslide because sometimes actually people do the right thing.
I'd also like to mention to the MAGA folks that these people, Witkoff and Kushner, are not your friends.
They're not your allies.
These are really bad people.
And they are not one of you.
So I'd love to hear from some of these people because it just is not a world that is right.
If I may ask, in your mind, what makes them really bad?
Well, first of all, I would say Witkoff and Kushner probably have Democrats their whole life.
So they don't represent anything about working class, rural people, America First.
I think that's good enough right now, other than they are New York developers that are really criminals that deal with the Saudi Arabians and other bad countries.
Let's go to Ron.
Ron in Florida, Independent Line on this open forum.
Hello.
Yes, I like to just comment on I notice how you get a lot of the, I'm just going to say Republicans that don't see a problem with America is over in the Middle East blocking the shipping.
But we're doing the same thing here over in America.
I mean, Cuba, Venezuela.
I mean, we can't be right all the time.
And it just seemed like we're just turning into such a bully country the last few years.
And just to me, I love America.
I'm on American all the way.
But I can disagree and just say this don't make any sense.
That we, just because we have all the, we're strong as far as power, you know, military, that we're right all the time.
And that's all I have.
So, Ron, Ron, as far as being right all the time, specifically, like take Iran, for instance.
Do you think the United States is right in its actions or wrong?
I don't know, but if you look at the history of Iran, like you can go all the way back to the Shah.
I mean, that was America, if I'm not mistaken.
That was an American guy, and he just didn't work out.
The same thing with Iraq, with Saddam Hussein.
That was an American guy.
So we're not right all the time.
And I think we keep up a lot of confusion because we're so busy looking at our interests that we don't pay attention to what everybody else wants or need in order to survive in this world.
We're not right all the time.
Okay, that's Ron in Florida giving us his thoughts.
You can continue on with yours as well.
202748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
And Texas, too, at 202-748-8003.
Pam Bondi's departure from the Justice Department has produced this story from the Washington Post this morning.
Here's the headline: Uncertainty Reigns at DOJ in the aftermath of the exit, saying that following the president's decision to fire Todd Blanche's predecessor, Pam Bondi, various factions of the president's MAGA coalition have rallied around figures like Harmeet Dylan, currently the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and Janine Pirro, the sharp-tongued former Fox News host and current U.S. attorney in D.C., as alternatives at DOJ.
Neither Dylan nor Pirot has been so forward as to openly suggest an interest in the job, but both have taken steps in recent days that are viewed by insiders as efforts to raise their profile and jockey for the president's attention.
Todd Blanch, meanwhile, himself has quickly moved to make his own mark on the Justice Department's downtown Washington headquarters in his new role, pushing out Bondi's top spokesperson, installing a key ally in a top deputy position, and others within the president's orbit have seized upon the department shake-up to push their own favored candidates for influential jobs.
That's in the Washington Post.
Tucker Carlson Relationship Shifts00:05:53
Bill joins us next from Pennsylvania Republican line.
Hello.
Bill in Pennsylvania.
Hello.
I just, I'm just kind of disgusted with some of the callers.
I mean, the war over Iran is going fabulous from a U.S. perspective.
We are destroying a terrorist nation and organization and military.
I can't believe that anybody, independent, Democrat, Republican, whatever, would disagree with that.
We are, and for these people to say, well, you know, these idiots like Waltz and Murphy going overseas and criticizing the country and Trump, the president, is just ludicrous.
And they should be up on charges of terrorist, you know, treason because they are aiding and comforting the enemy.
It's Bill there in Pennsylvania.
We will hear next from Elaine, who joins us from Texas Independent Line.
Hello.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Just a moment.
Hello, can you hear me?
Elaine, you're on.
Go ahead, please.
Okay.
Okay.
The reason I'm calling is I voted for Trump one time, and then I voted for Biden.
I consider myself always an independent.
The problem I have is nobody's talking about following the money.
Follow the money.
We never got an explanation of how Jerry Kushner got $2 billion after he left, after Trump left office.
We don't know what happened, how he made that money with Saudi Arabia.
Now, in the past year and a half, the Trump family has amassed over $4 billion.
Follow the money.
This is a pay-for-play presidency.
I am almost 77 years old.
I've never seen this in my whole life.
You go to the Trump in Mar-a-Largo, you pay a million bucks for a dinner, you get all kinds of connections now to that family.
I'm tired of seeing his name on every single thing he wants because he thinks he's a king.
That's just my contribution to this conversation.
We need to focus on what's going on with the money and how this administration allows everybody in the administration to also gain money off of this administration, whether it's through stocks, whether it's through betting on the war, whether it's through, okay, you know, Hedspeth, whatever his name is, he placed a bid, his broker placed a bid on something related to this war, and the very next day we go into war.
I mean, this is absolutely insane.
We've never had an administration like this where it's so unethical.
And he's gotten rid of every single person who used to maintain some level of efficacy.
They're all gone.
He's gotten rid of everybody and replaced them with yes people.
So that's it.
Okay.
Richard up next.
Richard Upnex in North Carolina.
Hello.
Yes.
Hello.
It's been my observation that people who are opposed to the war in Iran basically have two reasons.
There may be other reasons, but the two big reasons are they oppose Donald Trump generally, or two, they don't see the threat.
They don't view the threat from Iran having a nuclear weapon as being that great, or at least great enough to justify the action.
I am vehemently opposed to Donald Trump.
I never voted for him and I never will.
But I do support what we're doing in Iran because I do see it as a great threat, that the longer it goes on, the more we hand this to our children and our grandchildren.
And I'd like to just read a very, very brief quote from General Douglas MacArthur, which I believe sums up at least my view.
And he said, of course, MacArthur was a great hero, five-star general from World War II.
He said, quote, the history of failure in war can almost always be summed up in two words.
Too late.
Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy.
Too late in realizing the mortal danger.
Too late in preparedness.
Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance, unquote.
So I just ask people to consider that when they say, well, it wasn't imminent.
Just think about North Korea.
They built a shell around them in the case of North Korea so that we couldn't do anything.
And that's the case exactly in Iran as well.
Okay.
So I'm no Donald Trump fan, but I do support the war, and I hope we finish it and get it over with, including getting that nuclear material out of there.
Okay.
Thank you.
Richard in North Carolina, Newsweek publishing a story, taking a look at the latest when it comes to Tucker Carlson and his relationship, or at least his perspective on Donald Trump, saying he's, quote, tormented by backing him, adding, I'm sorry.
He said that, according to Newsweek, Tucker Carlson said he'll be tormented by his support for the president for a long time.
That's in quotes, telling Americans, I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people.
Support for Ending Iran War00:14:57
It was not intentional.
Carlson, who was once a loyal Trump supporter, made the comments during his most recent podcast episode, which featured his brother, Buckley Carlson, who wrote speeches for the president in 2015.
It's the latest development in Carlson's public riff with Trump that has featured mutual insults, namely over disagreements on Middle East policy and broader infighting within the MAGA movement.
There's more there if you want to see that at the Newsweek website.
If you go to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning, Alan Dershowitz, a common figure on media, a common figure a lot when it comes to topics of politics, posting this morning in the Wall Street Journal why I'm becoming a Republican.
And this is some of the argument he makes saying, I'm a lifelong Democrat.
I started campaigning for the party's local candidates as a teenager in Brooklyn, New York, and I've been a registered Democrat for 67 years, made speeches for John F. Kennedy as a college student, and can count on one hand the number of Republicans I've ever supported for any office.
I still disagree strongly with the GOP on abortion, the separation of church and state, immigration, health care, and taxes, among other things.
Yet I've decided to bite the bullet and register as a Republican.
He adds this: the Democratic Party has become the most anti-Israel party in U.S. history.
Going on to say, I believe that the Democratic Party's hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world.
So I intend to work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and the Senate.
He goes on from there, but there's more of his opinion if you want to read it online about his change in political party.
Let's hear from Paul.
Paul joins us from Virginia, Republican line.
Hello.
Hello, Yaron.
Yeah, how are you?
Fine, thank you.
Look, I'm a Republican, and I've been, I did vote Democrat twice in my life.
My father was a Democrat, but what I see going on in this country now, a lot of things.
I'm 68 years old.
I'm a white male.
I just cannot believe some of the things that have gone on in this country in the last 10 years.
And I just can't understand why the Democratic Party does the things that they do.
It just boggles my mind.
And I live in Virginia, and I'm pretty much ashamed of my two senators.
They are a disgrace.
Paul, do you plan to participate today in the redistricting referendum that's taking place in Virginia, or have you done that already?
Haven't done it already.
I'm just getting up.
But yes, I'm going and I will vote no.
What leads you to do that?
Because, like I said, I'm a Republican, and I think it's all right the way it is.
I mean, the Democrats own the Senate and the House, and they got the Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor.
And what else do they want?
This new governor we got came in, and I knew what she was.
She was just like Nancy Pelosi.
She wants to make Virginia the California of the East.
And that cannot happen.
Okay.
Paul there in Virginia.
He brought up Senator Mark Warner, one of the senators from Virginia, Democratic senators.
He posted this announcement yesterday saying that it announced the death of his 36-year-old daughter, who had suffered from juvenile diabetes.
Quote, we are heartbroken beyond words by the passing of our beloved daughter, Madison, after a decades-long battle with juvenile diabetes and other health issues.
She filled our lives with love and laughter, and her absence leaves an immeasurable void.
He and his wife, Lisa Collis, posted on X, going on to say, we are grateful for the loving support of friends and family during this difficult time and ask for privacy as we navigate this profound loss.
Madison is survived by two younger sisters, and three were introduced to the political spotlight in 2001 when Warner was elected governor of Virginia.
Let's hear from Curtis.
Curtis in Missouri, Democrats line.
Yes, good morning.
Morning.
I was calling just to speak on Trump.
He is thump boats that supposedly had drugs on them.
Nobody's seen drugs.
Started this war with Iran where Congress at.
And then he gets a ballroom going.
And every time the name Putin or Epstein comes up, he comes up with another distraction.
There is something definitely going on with him and Putin.
Thank you very much.
This is from Paul.
Paul is in Ohio, Independent Line.
Hi, good morning.
I was calling with regard to Grover Norquist and how it relates to the wars and other things that we're paying for.
It seems as if on both sides of the fence, you either hear taxes are great because they help us or taxes are awful.
Let's get rid of them.
I'd love to hear from an economist that doesn't have any kind of foot in one court or the other.
Bill Lafayette here in Ohio is a good example, who can actually sit down and say, what does the debt really mean to us?
What do taxes do for us?
What can we eliminate tax-wise?
What can we keep tax-wise to keep all the things of social services that people demand?
You know, it's interesting to hear a Norquist talk about get rid of taxes, but the reality is it probably doesn't work.
So, I mean, my suggestion is if you ever get a chance, find someone who's not being paid one side or the other to talk about what it really means.
The business channels say that that's not that bad, and yet we keep talking about it in ways that are negative or positive, depending on who's paying you.
I enjoy C-SPAN and I enjoy every day the Washington Journal, but I just love to hear some middle-of-the-road economists talk about what it really means to us, not an opinion based on what they get paid for.
Paul there in Ohio, thank you for the suggestion, calling in on our independent line.
Let's hear from a viewer in Florida, Republican line.
This is Alberto.
You're next up.
Yes.
Alberto, go ahead, please, but you're going to have to turn down your television first, please.
I am until I have it on.
I know, but you need to turn it down, please.
Oh, there's no problem.
I enjoy and I enjoy everything.
Give me a second.
All right.
Alberto, go ahead, please.
Okay, I have it down.
I have it down.
Go ahead, please.
Okay, I just want to say is Donald Trump is doing a great job with this country, and I'm proud of it.
But I'm sick of, again, sick and tired of the Democrats lying about Donald Trump.
And let me tell you about Biden.
Biden is the one who screwed up this country, and Donald Trump is fixing it all the mess Biden did.
And Kamala Harris, you know, Biden was the worst president in United States of America history.
And the Democrats, they talk nonsense.
They're all acting like jerks.
They don't know what they're talking about.
And I'm a Republican, so I'm always Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump is doing a great job with the terrorists.
He's doing a great job with his country.
And he knows what he's doing.
And he's sending all the bad people out of this country.
And that's all I have to say.
Okay.
That's Alberto there in Florida, the president himself talking on the various shows this morning.
This is from CNBC saying that the president is saying today he thinks the U.S. is, quote, going to end up with a great deal with Iran to end the weeks-long war, even as he said he didn't expect to extend the ceasefire due past ceasefire due to expire on Wednesday.
Quote, I think they have no choice, he said in an interview on CNBC when asked when expected to come out of a second round of peace negotiations with Iran.
Quote, we've taken out their Navy, we've taken out their Air Force, we've taken out their leaders, the president said.
There's more there on the CNBC site if you want to read it there.
Also, the caller had brought up the tariffs.
The front page of the New York Times highlights the facts that the fact that the United States now, because of that Supreme Court decision on certain tariffs collected by President Trump, that refund process is beginning.
Just to show you the headline, that U.S. begins first steps to refund $166 billion taking for illegal tariffs.
And then the subhead payments for importers, not consumers.
As you read that there, let's go to one more call.
This will be from Dennis in Michigan, Democrats line.
Hello, C-SPEN.
Love your show.
All I have to say is of our two-party system, there's only one political party, only one, that if you are a racist, neo-Nazi, proud boy, oathkeeper, the Republican Party welcomes you with open arms.
Come on in.
You're our kind of guy.
I'm not saying all Republicans are like that, but if you are of that type, the Republican Party welcomes you.
So you people who are Republicans who say, I'm not a racist, why do you support a party that supports racism?
That's all I have.
Okay, Dennis in Michigan, finishing off this round of open forum.
Thanks for participating.
We'll take a look at money that's made to political campaigns done by nonprofits, so-called grave money, and how it's being used in the process of donations.
Teddy Schleifer of the New York Times, who covers this and other things related to how the wealthy spend their money.
He'll join us next when Washington Journal continues.
Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
But we have to listen so we can govern better.
Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility.
You can fight and still be friendly.
Bridging the divide in American politics.
You know, you may not agree with LeoCrown on everything, but you can find areas where you do agree.
He's a pretty likable guy as well.
Chris Coons and I are actually friends.
He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends.
A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other.
We all don't hate each other.
You two actually kind of like each other.
These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose.
It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
You guys did agree to the civility, all right?
He owes my son $10 from a bet.
He provides for it.
Don't fork it over.
That's fighting words right there.
I'm glad I'm not in charge.
I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
There are not shows like this, right?
Incentivizing that relationship.
Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
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The White House Gorrespondents Dinner, live this Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
Washington Journal continues.
This is Teddy Schleifer joining us.
He's with the New York Times reporter for that publication.
And a recent look of his takes a look at the topic of nonprofit donations and their potential impact in midterm elections and political contributions.
Teddy Schleifer, good morning.
Good morning.
How did you get interested in this topic?
Well, as I've been writing more and more about campaign finance over the last decade, I've found that these reports that are published every couple of months or every couple weeks at times are increasingly useless.
I think we depend in American elections on the transparency that comes with campaign finance filings.
And what I was finding is that that transparency was not there anymore.
When you would look at a Federal Election Commission disclosure deadline, which happened, there was one last night, and there was one last week, and there's going to be one next month.
The biggest donors to super PACs or to the outside committees that spend hundreds of millions of dollars in elections are not real people.
They are Americans for Apple Pie and Apple Pie for All Americans, Inc.
And these are nonprofits that are set up sometimes a couple of weeks before, and somehow or another they end up with tens of millions of dollars to donate to a politician's super PAC.
And there's no way for voters to know who is funding those nonprofits because of the way the game is structured.
So we set out to sort of chart how big a problem really is this.
So if I understand it correctly, if I'm a wealthy donor and I give to a super PAC, I have to disclose how much I give.
And yet I can circumvent that if I get to a third party, so to speak.
Can you explain how that web works?
Yeah, that's more or less correct.
In the system, I think as designed, or at least as the Supreme Court thought of it when they made the Citizens United decision, there was this belief that in exchange for allowing people to make donations of unlimited size, we will require the donor's name disclosed.
So if Teddy Schleifer gives $200 million to support a Trump super PAC, it would say my name and the amount that you gave and the date you gave it.
Super PAC Donation Concerns00:15:53
And that sort of is the bargain that we've all struck.
The problem or kind of the path or maybe the genius of kind of the campaign finance lawyers and their point of view is if you give it to a nonprofit first, nonprofits in the U.S. are almost always not required to disclose their donors.
That's true if you give to the Red Cross or to any nonprofit that I'm sure some listeners have given to.
Nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors.
So if I give it to a nonprofit and then that nonprofit gives it to the super PAC, the super PAC then discloses the donation from the nonprofit, but the underlying donors are not disclosed.
And that sort of is sort of intentional, but what's unintentional, I think, is this way of using that maybe for nefarious means or for means that are not necessarily set up or intended by nonprofit law, where if instead of giving to a super PAC, you were giving it intentionally to the nonprofit as a way to obscure kind of the disclosure requirements.
You write that about 17% of money that was donated to super PACs in 2024 election cycle, about 1.5 billion, came from organizations that did not disclose their donors, the review showed.
And that was more than double the proportion that came from these dark money groups in 2020, which in turn was a major spike from 2016.
It's getting worse.
That escalation.
Explain how that works.
Yeah, I mean, basically, look, I mean, all money is getting, the amount of money that's flowing into super PACs in general is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, right?
I mean, you can see this just in the number of ads you're seeing on your TV or, you know, the denominator, so to speak, is getting bigger.
But the numerator is getting bigger at a faster rate, the numerator being the amount of money that is coming from these nonprofits.
So, right, 17% or about one in five dollars that was donated to super PACs in the 2024 cycle came from these nonprofits or came from entities that do not disclose.
It's gotten so confusing.
I mean, we now have this world where nonprofits will donate to other nonprofits, and then those nonprofits will donate to super PACs.
And there's kind of a lot of various accounting reasons why people do that.
The why now, our review showed a lot of this is due to Democrats.
Republicans were sort of doing this much more in the 2012, 2016, to some extent 2020 elections, which were the first three presidential cycles after Citizens United.
But in the 2024 cycle, we saw a tremendous spike in the amount of dark money coming from Democrats.
So everyone is doing it more, but I think just Democrats, the rate of their acceleration is higher.
And I think I read in your piece, one Democratic spokesperson said, look, we don't like it.
We can change the rules if it goes our way, but this is what we can do right now.
Yeah, and I think this story looked at the 2024 cycle, but looking ahead, I mean, a lot of Democrats, Democratic donors feel potentially targeted by the Trump administration.
So there's no sign this trend is going to get, there's going to be any breaks on it.
It's going to be probably just the gas pedal.
I mean, people are going to be doing this more and more because in 2026 midterms, we're already seeing signs of this.
And I think in the 2028 election, frankly, donors think to themselves, why disclose?
What's the point?
Like, I mean, you can do it effectively through undisclosed means.
It requires paying some lawyers and accountants a coin to make it work.
But if you can do it through undisclosed means, you might as well.
And you won't be targeted by Trump.
And that's what I think that quote was getting at, this sense that if, well, Republicans are doing it, we should do it too.
Teddy Schleifer here with us.
And if you want to ask him questions about this process, so-called gray money, as it's known, here's how you can ask him questions.
202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8002 for Independents.
And if you want to send us a text question for our guest, you can do that at 20274.
Sorry, 20748-8002.
Here's another thing you wrote.
Explain this for us.
You wrote, in fact, some major super PACs have created their own sibling nonprofit groups precisely to make their offices a one-stop shop for major donors and to make these transfers easy.
It goes on to talk about the 2024 cycle, but take it from there.
Sure.
I mean, so the path I was laying out before is almost quaint.
Basically, it's like, well, you give it to a nonprofit and the nonprofit happens to give to the super PAC.
Isn't that nice?
In reality, the super PACs run the nonprofits.
Like, these are entities that are, you know, interlinked.
So the same person, the same office, the same fundraiser, you know, will run both groups.
And then it says, hey, Teddy, would you like to donate $100 million to help Senate Republicans?
Here's the nonprofit option.
Here's the super PAC option.
And like, to be clear, some of this stuff can get close to the line of being illegal.
So I'm kind of glossing over some of the details here, but essentially, you cannot intentionally give the money to the nonprofit and tell them, give it to the super PAC tomorrow.
So I couldn't give it to you.
You couldn't give it to the nonprofit and say, give it to X.
Yeah, you can't do that.
But frankly, everyone knows how the game works here.
Like donors that are sophisticated operatives and fundraisers and lawyers, you don't really need to do that.
Like you basically can say that, hey, I'm going to give you $100 million.
I'm going to give you $100 million.
I really hope you use it to help Senate Republicans or Senate Democrats or whatever.
And they can work out the math on their end.
But it's gotten easy or particularly daring, you might say.
And there's very few prosecutions on this stuff.
We'll talk more about that.
Teddy Schleifer, New York Times reporter, also a contributor for MS Now.
Again, if you want to ask him questions about this so-called gray money, Call the Lines, let's hear from Kentucky.
This is Andy, Republican Line.
Andy, hello, you're on with our guest.
Good morning.
I was going to say hallelujah.
Somebody finally brought this thing up to the national audience.
My goodness, these people, these 501c3s, the churches and the political parties and all these other nonprofits that force me to pay.
They write this off to the government and off the top of their taxes.
So every time somebody gets a tax break and can write it off their taxes, I have to pay for it.
So I'm paying for the opposite of what I believe in or want.
Everybody should have to pay for their own stuff, man.
501, the churches.
By the way, I just wanted to ask you, can the churches, which are 501 corporations, all of them, can they write give it to another nonprofit and like a bunch of money to another nonprofit?
And then they don't have to report that because 501c3 churches are not allowed to give or at least a very low amount to a political party champagne or candidate.
Okay, Andy and Kentucky.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, basically, what he's getting at, there is a way that 501c3s, which are kind of traditional nonprofits like churches or hospitals, the Red Cross or universities, they are not allowed.
Those nonprofits are not allowed to engage in politics technically.
Though I think one thing we get into our story is the ways in which 501c3s can end up supporting 501c4s, which are these dark money groups that can give to politics.
So without going too much into the details here, there is a way in which money from C3s could at least potentially flow to help partisan political objectives.
And the caller is correct that those C3 contributions are tax deductible too.
So donations to C4 organizations are not tax deductible.
So if I give to the Super PACs nonprofit group, I can't deduct that on my taxes.
But if you gave to a 501c3 group, which is deductible, there's at least concerns, and there's, I think, some evidence, or maybe the beginnings of evidence, that some of that money can flow downstream into politics.
Does the Federal Election Commission have any interest in regulating this?
Concerns about how it operates?
What have they said or not said?
Yeah, I mean, the other agency here with the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, which governs nonprofits.
The reality is the way these things are disclosed, a lot of things are aggregated.
A lot of big nonprofits, 501c3 organizations, you know, that donate to the 501c4 organizations, those things are the filings that are released public with the IRS, with public and I believe with regulators, are not really giving much insight into individual nonprofits' activities.
So it's hard.
And there's a lot of ways in which entities can kind of pass off costs to the other.
There's a lot of good accountants and lawyers out there.
So also these agencies are under-resourced.
You talked about Democrats using this in your story.
Is there a standout group that uses it and what's their approach?
Sure.
I think the entity that I think raised the most eyebrows last cycle was an organization called Future Forward.
Future Forward was the main super PAC behind Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's campaign.
You know, it raised about a billion dollars from donors for their activities.
And this super PAC, which ran ads and I'm sure people here saw, about 40 or maybe 45% of their money came from their own nonprofit.
And their own nonprofit is called Future Forward USA Action.
Side by side.
Not Future Forward.
And that was probably the most example that I think got me most interested in the storyline.
If they have a nonprofit attached, how separate can they be under one roof, so to speak?
Yeah, I mean, oftentimes, as I just pointed out, oftentimes the names are almost identical.
They can be under one roof.
People work for the same in the same offices.
Some people get paychecks from both.
It's very integrated at times.
Ron joins us from Tennessee.
Ron, Republican line, you're on with our guests.
Good morning.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
You know, you're talking about gray money.
What about this Act Blue where people are donating?
They don't even know who it is.
And they're using people who have donated maybe $10 or something.
They're using these people's name to donate $10,000, $20,000.
And it's super corrupt.
And, you know, if I had it my way, I wouldn't allow any contributions.
You put the politicians on TV like C-SPAN, give them a certain amount of time to put their ideas out there so we vote for ideas instead of buying elections.
This Act Blue, they're getting, the DOJ is looking at them right now, but that's a big, big problem.
Money in politics breeds corruption.
Ron, there in Tennessee.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, my colleagues at the Times have written a number of stories over the last couple weeks about sort of the chaos at Act Blue.
Kind of an adjacent issue here, but clearly, you know, there's a lot of concern within the organization about kind of the way that things have gone there.
I suppose this type of system depends on lawyers, specialists, experts.
How do they fit into the picture?
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole cottage industry, and the billable hours are pretty good for anybody out here who wants to get involved.
You know, the expertise, I think, like with lots of parts of kind of white-collar law, the expertise really is outside of the government.
It is coming from the campaign finance lawyers seem 20 steps ahead of the regulators here.
And you asked about the IRS and the FEC earlier.
The FEC is a lot of trouble doing anything, frankly.
I mean, there's been some signs of progress recently, but it's constantly being riven by a 50-50 split that has made taking action on anything really impossible.
And at the same time, if you're interested in innovation in campaign finance, there's plenty of donors willing to pay you as much as you want to make their dollar go further.
So it feels like they really have the upper hand on the outside.
It seems an obvious question.
Why would someone go through the means of working through a nonprofit to make a donation rather than just donate and make the information known as far as who gave and what they gave?
It's the disclosure element primarily.
It's the desire to avoid that.
You know, I don't want to overstate, like, there are legitimate political nonprofits that do political nonprofit advocacy, and those donors give to those entities, at least in part, because they want to achieve the objectives of the nonprofit, which, you know, like I know people who, you know, really want to focus on improving like black political power in North Carolina, right?
In that situation, if that's your genuine objective, there might be a 501c4 organization that is focused on that, which is unrelated to a super PAC that is running ads in North Carolina to help elect Roy Cooper, who's running for the U.S. Senate this year.
Those are like adjacent goals.
But there are also people who would give to the C4 because they know the C4 will then give to the Super PAC.
So I think both are true.
You mentioned it, but elaborate a little bit.
There was a thing called Citizens United.
It seems like the starting point for everything we talk about these days when it comes to campaign finance.
Remind people about that case, what it did.
Sure.
Essentially, this decision in 2010, so about 16 years ago, which cleared the way for unlimited contributions from corporations, from unions, from individuals.
And basically, what then the court ruled was in exchange for that decision, in exchange, sorry, for that, those loosening of requirements, there was going to be an explosion in transparency.
Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision in that case, basically said explicitly that, yes, we know that we're taking off the gates here and letting unlimited contributions come in, but don't worry, America.
We will make sure that voters have up-to-date information on everyone who is making those donations.
And as I can tell you, as someone who reads these reports, that's not come true.
If you put it on a chart, is there a takeoff point once that decision is made as far as where we are today?
Is it a steep tip?
Basically, as we look at our data, every cycle, this issue of nonprofit money has gotten worse and worse and worse.
Yeah, I mean, in 2024, it's spiked in part because of those kind of Democratic organizations.
Again, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats and Independents, 202748-8002.
I know you briefly mentioned it.
It's not exactly in the context of what we're talking about.
Somebody was, this is Tony from Texas, acting about the investigation in Act Blue, if you can elaborate on that.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, you know, this is not, my colleagues Reed Gepstein and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times have written a lot about this.
You know, basically, there's a Trump has ordered up an investigation into Act Blue, which has always sort of been a target for the right.
But now that obviously the Republicans control the White House, they have a lot more power.
And they've sort of alleged that it's been a way for foreign money to influence American elections.
Act Blue denies this.
At the same time, this is going on.
Foreign Money Election Influence00:04:50
There's also kind of been a tremendous amount of internal tension within Act Blue.
So there's a lot of good reporting in the New York Times if people want to read more about it.
In reporting your story, you put out a lot of information.
What was the most interesting thing?
What was the one that you didn't expect, or maybe you found in the process of digging into it?
Yeah, I think the new organizations that are sprouting up every five minutes on this, I think humored me to some extent.
Like, you know, all these organizations have extraordinarily similar names.
Like, there's an organization called American Opportunity Action, which started this year and has been a big donor to lots of ballot initiatives, including in Virginia, the redistricting site today.
So that's American Opportunity Action.
I don't want you to confuse that with Our American Future Foundation or Our American Future Action, which are separate organizations and also Future Forward USA Action, which we just talked about.
There's also something called the Bright Future Fund, which is another organization.
And I'm sort of trying to confuse you right now because these are all Action America Future, blah, blah, blah.
And it's only May or April.
So, you know, we've got six more months for people to come up with different iterations of those words.
And these things keep rolling.
And there's always a new organization.
There's always some new nonprofit that is getting started to basically continue this trend.
And I think I'm humored whenever I find one of these new things.
And, you know, you go to their website, and their website is just like completely anodyne information about how they're just here to improve the American electorate.
They only have info at email addresses and they just present this blank slate because that's the whole point.
Their whole point is to be anonymous.
Which suggests to me that as far as setting one up, how simple is it?
Is it just files?
You got a computer?
We can do it right now.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple.
You have to file for nonprofit status with the IRS.
That takes a little bit of time.
But there's a will, there's a way.
I mean, there's a lot of interest in doing this stuff.
So, you know, if you have to pay some lawyers or accountants to do it, people do it.
Let's go to Michael.
Michael is in Virginia.
Democrats line, you're on with our guests.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I was calling in reference to if there's any way to reverse engineer it, and that is if a senator or congressman brings up some type of legislation that would benefit a foreign government or, say, a drug cartel or something like that, and be able to hold him accountable for where he got the money to be able to want to pass that type of legislation.
Thank you.
It's hard.
It's just hard.
I mean, like, the, like, I'm supposedly an expert in this stuff, and it's hard for me.
I mean, like, you know, it's really tough to be able to demonstrate that someone is doing this definitively in part because of the disclosure requirements.
Like, there's been like there is one example, this was not in the story, from a couple years ago in Puerto Rico, actually, where there was a nonprofit where someone was convicted, or I think they pled guilty, where they were basically, there was evidence, written evidence of someone saying quite explicitly, like, give to the nonprofit, and the nonprofit will give you anonymity, and you can give it to the super PAC.
That was charged.
But it's just really hard to prove these things.
Ernest, Ernest is in West Virginia, Republican line.
Ernest, you're up.
Go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, C's fans.
Good morning to your guests.
I guess my question would be very similar to the gentleman in Virginia.
How is this different from, let's say, money laundering?
Is there a difference?
Because there seems to be some similarities.
Thank you.
Yeah, the word laundering is an interesting way to put it.
I mean, if you're a critic of this system, like the nonprofit is sort of doing the laundering, right?
In terms of like there is a name that was attached to a donation and then it was laundered and now there is not a name attached to the donation.
It's like getting rid of a stain in a piece of clothing.
I mean, that is, you could argue a type of laundering.
There's a story a couple of days ago when it comes to the new Prime Minister of Hungary saying that the government was funding CPAC, which is and now they won't anymore.
Does this fall into the context of the way that money works or at least money is shuffled around?
Yeah, it's just the following the money here.
I mean, this is a full-time job for me, and it's just gotten really, really tough to do this in part because like a lot of these institutions, I mean, CPAC is like pretty press-friendly, but a lot of these institutions have zero interest in serious scrutiny on their books.
Campaign Finance Laundering Tactics00:04:08
Like zero.
Like they'll pretend they do, and I think liberal organizations more so pretend that they do.
But the culture of political giving, and I would say the culture of philanthropy that I write about is surprisingly hostile to scrutiny.
And that's just kind of makes it hard to really track these things.
And that's in the U.S., at least, which is what I know the best.
It's gotten tough, despite our best efforts.
So to the degree that you talk to people for this story, how welcoming or at least open were they when you wanted to ask them questions about the money and how it's flowing?
Can I give you a negative amount, please?
I mean, the amount of interest in me doing my job from some of these people is negative.
And that's just kind of how it goes.
The House is about to come in in a few minutes, but let's hear from Susan.
Susan's in New Jersey.
Democrats line.
Hi, Susan.
Go ahead.
Hello.
It's my first time calling.
I'm sorry.
What is this gentleman?
Where is he from?
I didn't catch that.
Where?
He's with the New York Times.
Are you a Democrat or a Republic?
Oh, the New York Times.
Okay.
Hello.
Call it because what about the bars today or whatever his name is and Leonard Leo and all those other Republican organizations that were put into play to take over our government and our Supreme Court and the money that comes in.
They put these morons in, like Trump and all that, so they can get their agenda.
And now he's a puppet.
They're getting ready to get rid of him because they want to run this country the way they want to run it.
And they want to change everything.
They want to take everything away from people that pay their taxes.
They want to take anything charitable.
They have no empathy.
They've run amok.
And that's all I have to say.
Actually, I have a lot to say.
And I know I'm not a good speaker, but this country has fallen in the toilet.
And we're monsters.
We're monsters.
We attack and kill people.
You know, we're killing people.
Okay.
Okay.
Gotcha.
Call it.
Gotcha.
She mentioned Barry Seed and Leonard Leo, who are two, for people who don't know, are two kind of prominent conservative donors and campaign finance impresarios, I suppose.
I don't want to overstate the extent to which this is like a Democratic problem.
Like those are two Republicans who, you know, as the caller points out, have been involved with the Trump administration.
Republicans are doing this too.
I'll just leave it to that.
Like this is not purely an issue on the left.
We got about 30 seconds.
What's the next step you're following in this process, especially as we head towards midterms?
Yeah, I think I'll end on a very pessimistic note.
I do not believe this problem will be solved.
I think that every cycle going forward, this will be an increasing proportion of political spending.
I think the regulators and the media do not quite have their hands around how much this is happening.
And hopefully the story helps.
You can find our guest work at newyorktimes.com, Teddy Schleifer, who reports on these issues, joining us for the first time.
Thanks for coming on.
Hope you come back.
You bet.
That's it for our program today.
The House is just about to come in.
And speaking of the House, as we told you throughout the morning, stay tuned later on this afternoon, about 2 o'clock.
It's the House Ethics Committee as they take up issues concerning Representative Sheila Schriffelis-McCormick, her future when it comes to investigations, and her future in Congress as well.
Stay close to the House on that.
And also Kevin Warsha, the president's nominee to head the Federal Reserve, his hearing starting now on C-SPAN 3.
The House of Representatives is coming in.
We take you to them.
The House will be in order.
The chair lays before the House a communication from the Speaker.
The Speaker's Rooms, Washington, D.C., April 21st.