CSPAN - Washington Journal 05/07/2026
Aired: 2026-05-07
Duration: 03:00:58


=== Cutting Federal Spending (15:40) ===

[00:00:00]  Psychologist and former Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy on mental health policy in the U.S. and a new national survey calling for federal action.
[00:00:09]  And then Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression President and CEO Greg Lukianoff on the state of free speech in America.
[00:00:16]  And former National Security Advisor John Bolton on the Trump administration's handling of the Iran conflict and other foreign policy challenges facing the administration.
[00:00:25]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next.
[00:00:28]  Join the conversation.
[00:00:37]  Good morning.
[00:00:38]  It's Thursday, May 7th.
[00:00:39]  The national debt hit 100% of GDP, the gross domestic product, at the end of March.
[00:00:45]  It's the first time since just after World War II, an interest on the federal debt now tops $1 trillion a year.
[00:00:53]  That's more than the U.S. spends on defense or Medicare.
[00:00:56]  The Congressional Budget Office projects debt will reach 108% of GDP by 2030 and balloon to 120% by 2036.
[00:01:06]  The Nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calls it a bipartisan failure to make hard choices.
[00:01:12]  So for our first half hour, we'll ask you to make some hard choices.
[00:01:17]  How would you cut federal spending?
[00:01:19]  And what specifically would you cut from the federal budget?
[00:01:23]  We want to hear from you.
[00:01:24]  Democrats are on 202-748-8000.
[00:01:27]  Republicans 202-748-8001.
[00:01:30]  And Independents 202-748-8002.
[00:01:35]  You can text us at 202-748-8003.
[00:01:38]  Include your first name in your city-state.
[00:01:40]  You can post to social media, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ.
[00:01:49]  Welcome to today's Washington Journal.
[00:01:51]  Start with that Wall Street Journal article from April 30th.
[00:01:56]  U.S. debt tops 100% of GDP.
[00:01:59]  It says federal debt exceeding the size of the economy is a potent symbol of the gathering fiscal stresses on the U.S.
[00:02:08]  It says that this would have been a once unthinkable threshold.
[00:02:14]  And it says, as of March 31st, the country's publicly held debt was, according to data, 100.2%, and it will likely climb.
[00:02:29]  It's saying the government is spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects in revenue.
[00:02:36]  And the budget deficit this year is projected at $1.9 trillion.
[00:02:40]  That's the deficit.
[00:02:42]  Well, yesterday on Washington Journal, we had Carolyn Bordeaux.
[00:02:45]  She's executive director of the Concord Coalition.
[00:02:48]  And she talked about what this means: that the debt is at 100% of GDP.
[00:02:54]  You do mention the debt and the deficit.
[00:02:56]  Sometimes people use those two interchangeably.
[00:02:59]  Explain the difference.
[00:03:01]  Okay, so the deficit is our annual shortfall.
[00:03:04]  We spend $7 trillion a year.
[00:03:07]  We bring in $5 trillion a year in revenues.
[00:03:11]  And that difference, that $2 trillion difference, is our deficit.
[00:03:15]  And every year, that then adds to our debt.
[00:03:18]  And our debt is approaching $39 trillion.
[00:03:22]  By the end of this year, it will be $40 trillion.
[00:03:25]  And one of the things you noted is that the publicly held debt, so this is not the debt in the Social Security Trust Fund, but publicly held debt, is now the same as the U.S. economy.
[00:03:36]  And that's a real benchmark for people that it is getting out of control.
[00:03:40]  It is going to be a potentially serious economic problem going forward.
[00:03:44]  And that 100% number.
[00:03:47]  So the amount that the U.S. economy is producing is the same amount as we owe.
[00:03:53]  In essence, yes, right?
[00:03:55]  So if you were to liquidate our entire economy, right, that was what it would take to pay off our national debt.
[00:04:01]  And why is that a bad thing?
[00:04:03]  I know that sounds like a simple question.
[00:04:05]  Most people would understand that, that it's a challenge.
[00:04:08]  So I often try to put this in terms of like a family budget of some sort.
[00:04:13]  So, you know, it's roughly a family making $70,000 a year, but having a credit card balance of $500,000, right?
[00:04:22]  So in essence, it is amount of debt.
[00:04:24]  If you were a family, you would probably be bankrupt, right?
[00:04:28]  But we're the U.S. economy.
[00:04:30]  We are very strong.
[00:04:31]  We're powerful.
[00:04:31]  So it doesn't bankrupt us in that kind of way.
[00:04:34]  But what it starts to do is really put pressure on interest rates.
[00:04:37]  It starts to put pressure on inflation.
[00:04:40]  And it creates a really serious long-term drag on our economic health and growth.
[00:04:45]  And this is the committee for a responsible federal budget saying that Treasury and markets anticipate at least $2 trillion in deficit for fiscal year 2026.
[00:04:56]  That's our current fiscal year.
[00:04:58]  The deficit, the budget deficit being at $2 trillion.
[00:05:03]  Wonder what you think we should cut from federal spending.
[00:05:05]  Eddie, Atlanta, Georgia, Democrat, what do you think?
[00:05:09]  Well, I think, you know, if they stop paying into all these bonds in the president that we have, and we could use our own money in the United States, put it towards it.
[00:05:26]  And then you got all these restaurants, restaurants saying, we got all these businesses open.
[00:05:32]  You know, they, you know, they pay into it.
[00:05:36]  And Trump, when Trump came in office, you're supposed to find the waste of spending and stuff, but ain't nobody putting it to the national debt.
[00:05:47]  You know, so, you know, we have to put the right people back in office that can handle, put more facilities in Congress to look at the debt.
[00:06:04]  And, you know, when the restaurants and all of Walmart and everybody pay in it right and get these Trumps out of office, like Trump, then we can, you know, they can put some money towards the national debt, you know.
[00:06:21]  Should have complainted about it every time, every time you come up, whoever coming off.
[00:06:27]  That's what I think.
[00:06:28]  All right, Eddie, let's talk to Scott, San Antonio, Texas, Independent.
[00:06:31]  Good morning, Scott.
[00:06:33]  Morning.
[00:06:33]  How are you doing?
[00:06:34]  Good.
[00:06:36]  Good, yeah.
[00:06:37]  So I was thinking that, I mean, obviously cutting is important, but the process itself is what needs to change.
[00:06:43]  Otherwise, it's just going to keep happening.
[00:06:45]  So you need to instill zero-based budgeting so we don't roll over budgets year over year.
[00:06:51]  And then we need to eliminate Christmas tree bills and eliminate the ability for people to pile in these pork barrel spending bills.
[00:07:01]  Scott, when you say zero-based, do you mean insist on a balanced budget every year?
[00:07:08]  No, so well, yes, technically, but zero-based budgeting is you don't roll over last year's budget.
[00:07:15]  You have to kind of lobby for your budget in the current year.
[00:07:20]  So you don't have these situations where people are trying to spend money so they have the same budget next year to lobby for what budget they need as opposed to what budget they had last year.
[00:07:30]  So we don't have these pandemic era budgets rolling over and spending just kind of rolls down a hill.
[00:07:38]  Okay.
[00:07:38]  So give me an example of something you would cut.
[00:07:42]  So we're at like $2 trillion deficit just for this current budget.
[00:07:48]  So give me something that could add up to $2 trillion.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, I mean, military's top of the chopping block.
[00:07:54]  Could probably because they're looking for 1.5 trillion, I believe, and you could cut a trillion off that a lot of generals say we could.
[00:08:02]  We could sustain ourselves with just 500 billion, and then the rest you're gonna probably take from entitlements.
[00:08:11]  Okay so, like Social Security, Medicare yeah, social security you have to means test people.
[00:08:21]  A lot of people don't even need social security that are taking it.
[00:08:25]  So anybody who's like above a certain means, take them out of it.
[00:08:29]  And then you have to look at more seriously fraud and Medicaid and Medicare.
[00:08:35]  Got it.
[00:08:36]  And we might be able to pick up something there.
[00:08:38]  Okay.
[00:08:39]  And this is Anthony, who sent us this on X.
[00:08:43]  He says, very easy savings.
[00:08:45]  Close every military installment outside of U.S. territory.
[00:08:49]  Cut the Pentagon budget by at least two-thirds.
[00:08:52]  Eliminate the Department of Homeland Security altogether.
[00:08:56]  Well, so Anthony and our last caller talked about the defense budget.
[00:09:00]  So let's take a look at Mark Kelly.
[00:09:03]  He's a senator from Arizona and a veteran Democrat.
[00:09:07]  He was testifying before the Senate last month, and this is what he talked, he asked Secretary Hegseth about President Trump's $1.5 trillion defense spending request.
[00:09:20]  I'm trying to understand, Mr. Secretary, what kind of detail did you guys did?
[00:09:25]  You work out like a detailed plan, and at the end of the day, it came out, oh, it just happens to come out to be $1.5 trillion.
[00:09:34]  Senator, the exact amount is actually $1.535 trillion, and it was a product of a highly rigorous process throughout our department, from COCOM commanders to the services with our comptroller, with our deputy secretary, with the chairman and myself, to ensure the budget reflects the realities of the world we live in and the capabilities we're going to need.
[00:09:52]  And that's why there's $65 billion for shipbuilding, $120 billion for the defense industrial base, $331 billion for munitions, $44 billion for quality of life, $71 billion on our nuclear dib.
[00:10:05]  You name it, we're investing in it.
[00:10:07]  And the biggest reason for it is the underinvestment of the Biden administration.
[00:10:11]  I mean, what they spent on defense, the continuing resolutions and others, undercut the buildup that President Trump had created.
[00:10:17]  So yes, we're doing a lot of deferred maintenance here around the world and in our department.
[00:10:22]  And this budget reflects it.
[00:10:24]  And it's a commitment, a generational commitment to the security of the American people.
[00:10:28]  And if the rest of the world won't spend on their defense, that's their fault.
[00:10:31]  The American Department of War will invest properly to defend the American people.
[00:10:36]  I've always been supportive of defense spending in my entire time here.
[00:10:41]  And after 25 years in the Navy, I want to make sure our folks have what they need.
[00:10:47]  I think you should go back and take a look and see if there are places where we are making investments that we actually don't need.
[00:10:54]  There are some systems out there.
[00:10:56]  I mean, we're constantly looking and trying to balance, do we want, you know, F-47, which I've been supportive of, B-21, also supportive.
[00:11:07]  And then we want to make all these other investments in really inexpensive, low-cost munitions, because we suddenly realize that the expensive stuff, even through B-21, we can't really close enough.
[00:11:22]  But the whole idea behind B-21 and F-47 is we can penetrate further into the A2AD bubble.
[00:11:28]  So there's some conflict there.
[00:11:30]  So I'm just encouraging you to go back and see if there are some systems where we can bring that number, the overall number, down.
[00:11:41]  Because as I look at what the department is trying to field, you know, some of this stuff, in my judgment, and I know others might have another opinion.
[00:11:50]  Some of this stuff we either don't need or it's not going to work.
[00:11:57]  That was Senator Kelly speaking to Defense Secretary Hegseph.
[00:12:01]  And this is what Jersey Girl sent us on X. Number one, repeal both Trump tax cuts.
[00:12:06]  Number two, increase taxes on the ultra-wealthy.
[00:12:09]  Three, slash the military budget in half.
[00:12:12]  And four, slash all corporate subsidies.
[00:12:16]  Larry Tignall, Georgia, Democrat, what do you think?
[00:12:19]  How would you cut the federal budget?
[00:12:23]  Hello?
[00:12:23]  Hi, Larry.
[00:12:24]  Go ahead.
[00:12:26]  Okay, good.
[00:12:27]  Well, here we go again.
[00:12:29]  You know, I thought that that was taking care of.
[00:12:32]  Donald Trump came in slashing jobs, cutting, you know, people pay, cutting a Medicaid and Medicare, and we're still in debt.
[00:12:44]  So how much do they support and save so much money?
[00:12:47]  Why is the debt so high?
[00:12:50]  He didn't give it to the United States, the people in the United States.
[00:12:54]  I mean, they just are still in debt for us.
[00:12:57]  I'm sorry.
[00:12:58]  Paying taxes, if he cut that ballroom out, that taxpayer is going to pay for it.
[00:13:04]  We probably save some money.
[00:13:06]  You know, he just wants to enrich himself.
[00:13:10]  Leave the country in debt.
[00:13:12]  So that's the only thing I have to say.
[00:13:15]  All right.
[00:13:16]  And this is Gregory in Kaiser, West Virginia, Republican.
[00:13:22]  Hi, Nikki.
[00:13:23]  Hi, Gregory.
[00:13:25]  How are you doing?
[00:13:26]  Good.
[00:13:27]  All right.
[00:13:28]  Main thing I wanted to say is cut out the fraud, and that's enough money to care the war, whatever, $1.5 trillion.
[00:13:43]  I mean, you think there's $1.5 trillion in fraud?
[00:13:50]  Oh, yeah.
[00:13:52]  I totally believe that.
[00:13:54]  Just look at Minnesota alone is what, $200 billion.
[00:13:59]  And then you go to California, it's probably double that.
[00:14:03]  And then New York is even more than that.
[00:14:05]  So, yeah, I think that if you cut out the fraud, it's enough to balance the budget, to be honest with you.
[00:14:15]  Okay.
[00:14:16]  This is Kira, Upper Marlboro, Maryland, Independent Line.
[00:14:20]  Go ahead, Kira.
[00:14:24]  Kira?
[00:14:24]  Good morning.
[00:14:25]  Hi, good morning.
[00:14:26]  Are you there?
[00:14:26]  Yep, go ahead.
[00:14:27]  Good morning.
[00:14:29]  So the concern that I have is that, you know, and I agree with one of your previous callers, that we really do need to go back to a zero-based budget, but we also need to go back to what we need to modernize the system.
[00:14:45]  The last time that we updated our budget process was in the 60s, and we've outgrown our budget process.
[00:14:53]  And we can't effectively and strategically plan for a budget for departments the size that we have with a process from the 60s.
[00:15:07]  We've outgrown that.
[00:15:08]  If you look at the rate at which technology advances at the way that our processes and systems need to advance, we can't do that.
[00:15:16]  We haven't passed an on-time budget since the 90s.
[00:15:20]  And we're going to continue to have this dilemma until we hold our elected officials accountable to recognize that we have outgrown our system and they pass into law a process that works for the 2020s.

=== Outgrown Budget Process (03:23) ===

[00:15:40]  Okay, so I understand what you're saying about the process.
[00:15:43]  Are there certain items that you would like to see taken out of the budget that would save money and close the gap?
[00:15:51]  Well, I would say that in looking at that, anything that's aged out, which I would say there are several things, and to include that in the process, we're submitting everything to Congress on paper for the budget.
[00:16:04]  And so, how much money would that save if we did it electronically?
[00:16:10]  All right.
[00:16:11]  So, just the justification books alone go to Congress in truckloads of paper.
[00:16:16]  So, that's all the rings of paper, that's all the toner, all the ink, and the truckers to truck it to the Capitol.
[00:16:25]  And so, aged-out processes would reduce our spending, but then also all of the aged-out processes throughout the government that no longer need to be there, but nobody's taken the time to remove them.
[00:16:37]  And then, we need to, as going to the zero-based spend, when you're going to put something in the budget, where is that coming from?
[00:16:44]  You have to have a give and take.
[00:16:46]  What are we getting rid of to pay for what you're wanting to put in?
[00:16:49]  And so, it needs to be strategic choices being made instead of just upping due to a demand.
[00:16:57]  We have to make those, you know, our leaders are elected to make tough decisions.
[00:17:01]  So, we either need to hold them to those tough decisions or we need to replace them.
[00:17:04]  And that's all of them, whether they're Democrat, Republican, whomever.
[00:17:08]  And we, the people, are not doing that.
[00:17:10]  All right, Kira.
[00:17:11]  And previous caller asked about the ballroom.
[00:17:14]  Thehill.com says this: GOP includes $1 billion for Trump White House ballroom security in the budget bill.
[00:17:22]  So, that would be for next year's budget, an additional $1 billion.
[00:17:26]  That's the request from Republicans.
[00:17:30]  Here is Cynthia North Jackson, Ohio.
[00:17:32]  Democrat, good morning, Cynthia.
[00:17:35]  Oh, boy, a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.
[00:17:41]  I think that what you need to do is, first of all, policymakers and elected officials should not be allowed to make investments and profit off of funding bills that they're determining funding for.
[00:17:58]  That's number one.
[00:18:00]  That's a lot of corruption right there.
[00:18:03]  And secondly, stop giving money, tax cuts to billionaires and billionaire corporations, and not make these new data centers are the latest way that the taxpayers are being robbed and the property owners are being abused.
[00:18:22]  They're giving them these huge multi-million dollar tax breaks, and then they're putting all the tax burden on the middle class.
[00:18:33]  This is an old song and dance, and that's where it needs to end.
[00:18:36]  You start at the top, and you know, Doge came in, took away all our programs, and stole that money and gave it straight to the billionaires.
[00:18:46]  America, wake up, please.
[00:18:49]  And Democrats, please make this an issue when you're running.
[00:18:53]  Make these the main issues.
[00:18:56]  All right, Cynthia.
[00:18:57]  And John on Facebook says, simply cut ICE and CBP.

=== Rich Get Richer (10:41) ===

[00:19:03]  Elvin on X says reform Medicare by cutting big pharma, cut the spending on the military defense contractors, and raise taxes on the rich.
[00:19:14]  And Sir E.S. Mann on X says cut the defense budget in half and the rest of discretionary federal spending 90%, send nearly all programs back to the states, cap a flat tax at 10%.
[00:19:30]  Well, so there's this website from the Treasury Department.
[00:19:35]  So it's called fiscaldata.treasury.gov.
[00:19:38]  So this comes out of the Treasury Department, and it keeps track of how much has the U.S. government spent this year.
[00:19:45]  It says that the U.S. government has spent $3.65 trillion in fiscal year 2026.
[00:19:54]  And if you scroll down on this website, you can see spending year to date, so this is 2026, by category.
[00:20:04]  Top of the list, 22%.
[00:20:06]  on Social Security, interest 14%, health 14%, Medicare 14%, national defense 13%.
[00:20:16]  You can also click to make it by dollars.
[00:20:21]  So Social Security at $818 billion, interest $519 billion.
[00:20:27]  That's so far in the fiscal year to date.
[00:20:32]  And you can also see it by agency.
[00:20:34]  So top of the list is Department of Health and Human Services, followed by Social Security Administration, then the Department of the Treasury, and then on to Department of Defense.
[00:20:46]  So again, that's fiscaldata.treasury.gov if you want to take a look at that.
[00:20:50]  Speaking of Social Security, yesterday the Cato Institute hosted a discussion on the future of Social Security.
[00:20:56]  Take a look at a portion of that event.
[00:21:00]  So most of Medicare, as you mentioned, Gene, is already funded based on general revenues.
[00:21:06]  And in large part, it is through borrowing because the federal government is running massive deficits.
[00:21:14]  We're already borrowing to repay the Social Security Trust Fund.
[00:21:19]  Why not keep borrowing to continue to pay Social Security benefits in full?
[00:21:25]  Well, the combined Social Security and Medicare cash shortfall is $157 trillion over the next 30 years when including the resulting interest on the debt.
[00:21:37]  Yes, let me back up.
[00:21:39]  That is $157 trillion with a T. About a third of that is Social Security and two-thirds is Medicare.
[00:21:48]  It would push the debt held by the public, which was 40% of GDP during most of the post-war period, 100% of the economy today, up to 240% of the economy in 30 years.
[00:22:01]  Yes, we can do that.
[00:22:02]  We can try to just keep borrowing and running up deficits.
[00:22:06]  But if the political solution is to borrow an extra $157 trillion, it makes a debt crisis so much more likely because it is difficult to imagine the bond market absorbing that much demand for treasuries without notably raising interest rates.
[00:22:24]  And then higher interest rates would turn around and raise the debt in a vicious circle.
[00:22:29]  So in the short term, it's easy to say just keep running deficits, but the trends are so bad long term that something's got to give.
[00:22:39]  Give you one simple statistic that to me says a lot about how our system's working.
[00:22:45]  If you take the revenue increases that come with economic growth, project out 10 years, you might have 15, 20% more revenues, or 10 years, maybe more if you had good economic growth.
[00:22:55]  All of those revenues, at least as projected by the Congressional Budget Office, are not enough to cover the increase in Social Security cost plus the increase in Medicare cost plus the increase in interest on the debt.
[00:23:09]  And so you mentioned my book earlier.
[00:23:11]  So what happens is that everything else is getting squeezed.
[00:23:15]  Even with the deficits we're running, we're really squeezing our opportunity to do everything else.
[00:23:21]  And why is the squeeze so hard?
[00:23:23]  Well, you've got the policymakers in a huge fiscal dilemma, which is at this point, the promises for this growth are so great that if you measure whether you're cutting benefits by not by relevant to current levels, by whether that growth path you get in this fight, oh, you're cutting benefits.
[00:23:41]  A long-term solution to Social Security, Medicare, or anything is to basically get the growth rate in line with what the revenues can support.
[00:23:50]  And another five, ten minutes or so on this topic, and then we'll open it up to anything else you'd like to talk about public policy-wise.
[00:23:59]  We got a few here from Johnny B. actually on X says cut all foreign aid.
[00:24:07]  I just look that up, Johnny B, on how much we are spending on foreign aid.
[00:24:12]  This is USAFACS.org.
[00:24:14]  This is for fiscal year 2025, so last fiscal year, not this current one, it was at $19.4 billion reported and obligated.
[00:24:26]  That is not complete, but that is what we're looking at.
[00:24:30]  You can see the trend here from 2023 to 2024, and then now in the administration, the Trump administration with USAID having been shut down.
[00:24:42]  So that is where that is at.
[00:24:44]  And we got this from Dave in Washington, Pennsylvania on text.
[00:24:48]  Fix our debt problem by eliminating everything not mentioned in Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution.
[00:24:54]  Entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, should be operated at the state level.
[00:25:00]  And Peter on Facebook says welfare number one and anything remotely linked to migrant services.
[00:25:07]  Oh, that's insignificant compared to defense spending in quotations.
[00:25:11]  Okay, then it should be painless.
[00:25:13]  No foreign aid, period.
[00:25:15]  Exact same as cutting welfare, only far more egregious, as it's just sent away to countries that don't like us, only our money.
[00:25:24]  Let's go to Mark in Bremond, Texas.
[00:25:27]  Republican, good morning, Mark.
[00:25:31]  Yes, ma'am.
[00:25:34]  I think a lot of things that you could really kind of help out of helping the budget is getting rid of all the fraud that the Democrats do, especially in Minnesota, the fraud that was going on there, and the fraud that was going on in California with the hospice.
[00:25:55]  The fraud in Minnesota, multiple, multiple billions of dollars stole by a Democratic governor and Attorney General Ellison, nothing but fraud, stealing from children that need autistic children, fundling the money.
[00:26:14]  Ilhan Omar is another Democrat that is nothing but a traitor.
[00:26:19]  She shouldn't even be here.
[00:26:21]  She married her brother to get here, and she's lived off taxpayer money.
[00:26:27]  So, Mark, getting back to the fraud that you mentioned, this is KMON News citing a GAO report.
[00:26:37]  That's the Government Accountability Office.
[00:26:39]  And it says the federal government loses billions annually to fraud.
[00:26:42]  Let's take a look at how much that is.
[00:26:45]  This is from January of this year.
[00:26:47]  It says, highlighted the staggering financial losses the federal government incurs annually due to fraud and improper payments.
[00:26:55]  According to the GAO, the government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion each year to fraud based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.
[00:27:11]  Additionally, improper payments, funds that should not have been paid or were paid in incorrect amounts, were amounted to approximately $2.8 trillion.
[00:27:21]  That is an aggregate number since 2003.
[00:27:27]  Here's Pete, West Palm Beach, Florida.
[00:27:29]  Democrat, good morning, Pete.
[00:27:31]  Good morning.
[00:27:31]  I can't believe what's happening to this country.
[00:27:36]  Clinton was the last president that actually had a surplus in the deficit.
[00:27:42]  It's what happens when you let these tax people run this country.
[00:27:46]  The rich are getting less tax than the poor.
[00:27:49]  They don't realize this.
[00:27:50]  You can make a million dollars in profit without paying taxes because you don't sell the stock you have that picked up a million dollars.
[00:27:59]  That's why the rich are getting so much richer every year.
[00:28:03]  The tax system is so bad.
[00:28:05]  Our revenue is terrible.
[00:28:07]  We're spending a lot more.
[00:28:09]  I think we could save a lot on spending.
[00:28:11]  But we should look at the tax, the way it's set up.
[00:28:14]  I made about $35,000 in profit this year.
[00:28:19]  I'm not selling anything.
[00:28:20]  I'm just $35,000 richer.
[00:28:23]  Could you imagine what a multi-millionaire is making when the stock market just hit $50,000?
[00:28:29]  They're so much richer, but they don't have to pay taxes until they sell it.
[00:28:34]  And what they do, they borrow money to buy something, and this way they don't have to sell their profits, and they could show that they're paying off the loans.
[00:28:44]  This has been happening since Regan became president.
[00:28:47]  When he says deficit does not mean a thing, we could live with deficits.
[00:28:51]  Well, I don't know how long we're going to live with deficits.
[00:28:54]  I'm 95 years old.
[00:28:56]  I hope I'll never see the end of this.
[00:28:58]  But there's going to be a downfall to our country sooner or later.
[00:29:02]  We cannot keep doing this, having the rich get richer, and we keep spending too much money, especially military.
[00:29:10]  China has no soldiers outside of China.
[00:29:13]  We have soldiers all over the world, and China is just as strong as we are.
[00:29:18]  Nobody's attacking China.
[00:29:20]  God forbid they ever tried.
[00:29:22]  So we keep sending all our troops around the world.
[00:29:25]  It does cost lots of money to keep troops in different countries.
[00:29:30]  And we've got to do something about this, too.
[00:29:33]  Thank you, Foya.
[00:29:34]  All right, Pete.
[00:29:35]  Dan in New York, Independent Line.
[00:29:37]  Good morning, Dan.
[00:29:39]  Yeah, I did a little Google searching in my Google search.

=== Global Troop Costs (09:44) ===

[00:29:44]  NGOs cost the country anywhere from $300 to $500 billion a year.
[00:29:51]  NGOs, non-governmental organizations?
[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:56]  So you're talking about nonprofits.
[00:29:58]  That's correct.
[00:29:59]  Okay.
[00:30:01]  And also, the largest sum of money that's given out is in welfare benefits, $2.5 trillion a year.
[00:30:11]  Wait, wait.
[00:30:11]  So, Dan, going back to your point about nonprofits, when you say that costs the federal government, you mean in lost tax revenue to people that donate to them.
[00:30:21]  Is that what you mean?
[00:30:23]  Well, no, that's just what the amount of money that is given to various organizations by the government, and these are all NGOs, and 501c3 is probably, I don't know, for services, you mean?
[00:30:38]  Yeah.
[00:30:38]  Okay.
[00:30:40]  So you would cut those services.
[00:30:42]  Well, I would say that we've got a problem with NGOs to begin with, since most of those NGOs, a lot of them, had to do with immigration and brought people into this country that are living off of benefits that were here for the American public.
[00:31:00]  And I would assume that out of that $2.5 trillion in welfare benefits, a big, vast majority over the last 30 years that we've been bringing people into this country have been going to people that are not American citizens.
[00:31:19]  I mean, we've had so many immigrants come into the country, and I know we need some of them.
[00:31:24]  There's no doubt about it.
[00:31:25]  But at the same time, it needs to stop.
[00:31:29]  And for a federal tax dollar not to be used by the states to pick up illegal citizens and people that should be prosecuted for violent crimes and deported out of the country is a waste of my tax dollars.
[00:31:47]  And the states that do it are New York, California, and various other Democratic states that don't adhere to it.
[00:31:53]  So here's the question.
[00:31:55]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:56]  Why are we spending my federal tax dollars in a state, period, that doesn't want, doesn't want to take care of the criminal activities that go on in that state?
[00:32:09]  Okay.
[00:32:09]  And I'm in New York.
[00:32:11]  And Dan, I would ask you to look at fiscaldata.treasury.gov.
[00:32:17]  That's the website that I mentioned.
[00:32:19]  That is from the U.S. Treasury Department.
[00:32:22]  Talking about spending and where that is going, you can do it either by category or by agency, but you see by far it's at $818 billion.
[00:32:32]  That's year to date, so that's not done for the fiscal year for Social Security.
[00:32:37]  And this is Mark in Bremen, Texas.
[00:32:42]  Did we?
[00:32:43]  Yes, Ryan.
[00:32:44]  Oh, yes.
[00:32:44]  No, I had you, Mark.
[00:32:45]  Sorry.
[00:32:47]  Randy in Michigan, Line for Democrats.
[00:32:49]  Good morning.
[00:32:51]  Good morning, Mimi.
[00:32:52]  I was just at Northern Michigan University on Wednesday with this exact thing that we were talking about, how to get rid of the national debt.
[00:32:58]  I sat down with the professors, and this is how you do it.
[00:33:01]  In 24 years, we can get rid of this national debt.
[00:33:04]  We've got to do one thing first.
[00:33:06]  We've got to start for anything, anybody under $10 million a year in income, their tax will stake the same.
[00:33:13]  They won't tax not one cent higher.
[00:33:15]  What you do is you start at $10 million, you tax them at 50%.
[00:33:19]  At $100 million, you tax them at 70%.
[00:33:22]  At $150 million, you tax them at 90%.
[00:33:26]  At anything over $1 billion, you tax them at 99%.
[00:33:30]  We can have the tax, we can have the national deficit gone in 24 years and have a trillion dollars extra at the end of that 24 years.
[00:33:39]  And right now, if we would start lifting the cap off of Social Security so everybody pays on all their income, we can let the killed children have Social Security until 2090.
[00:33:51]  Look it up.
[00:33:52]  Just fact-checking on AI.
[00:33:54]  Everybody, you hear what I just said?
[00:33:56]  We have a plan.
[00:33:57]  We know how to do it.
[00:33:58]  It's been fact-checked on AI, and I've been working on this, and this is how you do it.
[00:34:03]  So, Randy, when you say an income of a certain amount, what kind of income are we talking about?
[00:34:08]  Because there's different income.
[00:34:11]  Anybody under $10 million leave the tax break, leave the tax cuts right where they are, just how it is.
[00:34:18]  You would also consider capital gains.
[00:34:20]  $10 million.
[00:34:21]  No, we're not talking, we're only talking about income, taxing their income.
[00:34:25]  We're not talking about...
[00:34:26]  Okay, but most of the wealthy are not getting a paycheck.
[00:34:30]  Yeah, but see what we're going to do.
[00:34:31]  They're getting capital gains from their investments.
[00:34:34]  How you have to do that is you have to tax any income that they've made.
[00:34:38]  That's income that they've actually made.
[00:34:40]  Like the guy that was just talking about the $35,000 that he gets, and he don't have to do nothing.
[00:34:45]  Well, that's income gain.
[00:34:46]  That's gained.
[00:34:47]  Even though he hasn't sold it.
[00:34:50]  Right.
[00:34:50]  It's still considered income free.
[00:34:53]  It was no matter what, if you're a $10 million, how much is enough money?
[00:34:56]  If you got $10 million, and that's who we're starting with, the people that are under $10 million, those are the people that are struggling.
[00:35:02]  The people that got $10 million in the bank, they got enough money to pay all their bills.
[00:35:06]  They were ain't about putting food on the table or sending their kids to college.
[00:35:11]  That's how you take care of it.
[00:35:12]  If we lift that cap off Social Security right now on all income, we can let those kids have Social Security until 2090.
[00:35:21]  Secure their rest of their life.
[00:35:23]  They'll know that they have Social Security when it's there.
[00:35:25]  It will be funded.
[00:35:26]  And we want to worry about cutting any taxes to anybody that's under $10 million.
[00:35:32]  That's how you do it.
[00:35:33]  And we have the numbers.
[00:35:34]  Fact check it on EI.
[00:35:36]  See, I was just in NMU talking to two professors about this on Wednesday.
[00:35:43]  Randy, got it.
[00:35:44]  And we are going to go ahead and go to open forum now.
[00:35:48]  If there's other things you'd like to bring into the conversation, we'd like to hear what you've been thinking about.
[00:35:52]  The numbers are: Democrats 202, 748, 8,000.
[00:35:55]  Republicans 202, 748, 8,001.
[00:35:58]  And Independents 202, 748, 8,002.
[00:36:02]  This is President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday talking to, responding to questions about the war in Iran.
[00:36:12]  Oops.
[00:36:14]  Not that one.
[00:36:16]  Wanted to do.
[00:36:16]  Okay, well, we'll get to that later.
[00:36:18]  Here is Paul in Lake Mary, Florida, Independent Line.
[00:36:24]  Good morning.
[00:36:25]  Nice to talk to you.
[00:36:26]  That was an interesting approach that Randy just brought up.
[00:36:32]  Here's another way to look at it.
[00:36:35]  If you shut down the federal government and we went from the $5 trillion roughly that we spend every year in recent years, per year, to zero, no federal spending at all on anything, it would take 37.6 years to get rid of our current $40 trillion plus the under $157 trillion with Medicare and Social Security.
[00:37:01]  So in my mind, it's a combination of cutting spending and increasing revenues.
[00:37:07]  It can't be all or one.
[00:37:10]  But anyone that thinks that we can't raise revenue with a progressive tax rate on the wealthy and solve this problem just by cutting spending is not thinking straight on this matter.
[00:37:24]  It's too late.
[00:37:25]  We cannot cut our way out of this national debt.
[00:37:30]  We can't do it.
[00:37:31]  We could have done it 25 years ago, 20 years ago.
[00:37:34]  Today, not possible.
[00:37:36]  Thank you very much, and have a great day.
[00:37:38]  Okay, Paul.
[00:37:39]  And here is that portion of President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday talking about the war in Iran.
[00:37:46]  We're facing the planner right now in Iran that has refused to submit.
[00:37:51]  You seem optimistic now that you may be closer to a deal.
[00:37:53]  What's different about this moment now than in other moments where a deal has seemed close?
[00:37:58]  Well, why do you say they refuse to submit?
[00:38:00]  You don't know that.
[00:38:01]  You don't know what's going on.
[00:38:04]  Yeah, no, a few days ago is a long time ago.
[00:38:07]  In the world of war, a few days ago.
[00:38:09]  No, they want to make a deal badly.
[00:38:11]  And we'll see if we get there.
[00:38:12]  If we get there, they can't have nuclear weapons.
[00:38:14]  You know, it's very simple, but what's not to submit?
[00:38:18]  So they had a Navy with 159 ships, and now every ship is blown to pieces and lying at the bottom of the water.
[00:38:25]  They had an Air Force, lots of planes, and they don't have any planes.
[00:38:27]  They don't have any anti-aircraft.
[00:38:30]  They don't have any radar left.
[00:38:32]  Their missiles are mostly decimated.
[00:38:34]  They have some.
[00:38:34]  They have probably 18, 19%, but not a lot by comparison to what they had.
[00:38:40]  And their leaders are all dead.
[00:38:43]  So I think we won.
[00:38:46]  Now it's only a question of, look, if we left right now, Iran, it would take them 20 years to rebuild.
[00:38:52]  You would call that.
[00:38:54]  We're in good shape, right?
[00:38:55]  Fantastic.
[00:38:56]  We're in good shape.
[00:38:58]  And now we're doing well.
[00:39:00]  Now we have to get what we have to get.
[00:39:02]  If we don't do that, we'll have to go a big step further.
[00:39:05]  But with that being said, they want to make a deal.
[00:39:09]  We've had very good talks over the last 24 hours, and it's very possible that we'll make a deal.
[00:39:17]  I was a president in the Oval Office yesterday.
[00:39:19]  We're in open forum, and we'll talk to Tom in St. Augustine, Florida, Democrat.
[00:39:23]  Go ahead, Tom.
[00:39:24]  Hi.
[00:39:26]  I would like to thank everybody who's called in.

=== Voodoo Economics Study (02:30) ===

[00:39:29]  Very interesting comment on the economics of cut and spending.
[00:39:36]  I would like to thank C-SPAN too.
[00:39:38]  Y'all do a great job.
[00:39:40]  Could you do a show on three economic studies done on all of our economy and budgeting issues?
[00:39:51]  And these, one was done by the RAND Corporation on trickle-down economics.
[00:39:57]  One gentleman talked about how we switched to voodoo economics in the 80s under Reagan.
[00:40:04]  And these studies talk about that and show how we got in this problem.
[00:40:09]  Again, one was done by the Rand Corporation, and I think it was a 40-year study.
[00:40:15]  One was recently released by Harvard.
[00:40:18]  I think it was a 20-year study.
[00:40:21]  And one was done, I believe, a 20-year study by the London School of Economics.
[00:40:27]  Could you show the people what those three studies said?
[00:40:32]  And they might.
[00:40:35]  Yeah, no, I appreciate the suggestion.
[00:40:37]  Tell us, explain what voodoo economics is.
[00:40:39]  I haven't heard that term in a long time.
[00:40:42]  Well, that is your economic program being based on something that has a low probability of working.
[00:40:53]  And therefore, it doesn't.
[00:40:56]  And you go in debt.
[00:40:58]  So it's like betting the farm on a long shot.
[00:41:01]  In fact, when the term came around, that was a term used by George Bush when he was running against Ronald Reagan in 1979 for the presidency.
[00:41:15]  That was an idea that Dick Cheney and an economist, Arthur Laffler, created over lunch one day.
[00:41:24]  And they thought that giving money tax breaks to the rich, they would invest it, create jobs, and therefore there was a trickle-down effect.
[00:41:34]  Now, before that, what the government did with the same money was they invested it too.
[00:41:42]  They just invested it in programs that promoted the general welfare of the people, like the preamble.
[00:41:49]  An example would be here in Jacksonville, there is a gas company that's been around.
[00:41:56]  The guy started as a one-man show.

=== Trickle-Down Myth (07:02) ===

[00:41:59]  I read about him.
[00:42:00]  I praise him.
[00:42:02]  He's worked very hard and he runs a good business.
[00:42:05]  Well, let's say that man makes $100 million and we let him keep, you know, most of it because he's going to build more gas stations and sell more gas, create more jobs.
[00:42:17]  Those are all really good things.
[00:42:19]  And that money will trickle down.
[00:42:21]  Now, what would the government do, let's say, if we taxed his $100 million profit with the same $20 million?
[00:42:29]  Well, we could hire a police officer, put it in every school in the city, and now we have a good man with a gun in there.
[00:42:38]  Now, guess what?
[00:42:39]  It's trickled down, too, because that police officer buys a house.
[00:42:43]  He shops at the local.
[00:42:45]  I got it, Tom, but I got to move on and talk to Bill in Newark, Ohio, Republican.
[00:42:50]  Go ahead, Bill.
[00:42:51]  Oh, thanks for taking my call.
[00:42:55]  Listen, what I think what's wrong with this country, and until Trump and his cabinet wake up and both challenge and eliminate sanctuary states and cities for violations and distortions of our federal laws as written, failure to prosecute these states and cities will destroy all of our national securities in an attempt for perpetual control of power by the left.
[00:43:23]  That's all they want is power and control.
[00:43:27]  Don't complain.
[00:43:29]  Prosecute Trump.
[00:43:30]  Get an attorney general in there.
[00:43:32]  Obey our Constitution.
[00:43:34]  Thank you.
[00:43:37]  Rick in Indiana, Independent Line.
[00:43:40]  Hi, Rick.
[00:43:41]  How are you doing today?
[00:43:42]  Good.
[00:43:44]  I'm good.
[00:43:45]  Hey, you know, we got to look at this way.
[00:43:48]  People, everybody complains.
[00:43:50]  Oh, I've done it too, many, many times.
[00:43:53]  But you've got to understand one thing.
[00:43:55]  We're on end times.
[00:43:57]  If you read children killing parents, parents killing children and this, and you know, there's nothing you can do with Trump.
[00:44:05]  He's going to do what he's going to do.
[00:44:07]  You know, you know, these Republicans, all the Democrats, when you complain to them, they just raise the finger up at you and said, hey, because he ain't, I don't care.
[00:44:17]  You know, just like that.
[00:44:19]  You know, man, it's sad.
[00:44:22]  You know, we're going to have storms.
[00:44:24]  I've said it many times before in this comment here in the C-Stan.
[00:44:28]  And people just overlook it.
[00:44:29]  They just think it's really cute.
[00:44:31]  You know, this guy don't know what he's talking about.
[00:44:35]  Well, anyway.
[00:44:36]  All right, Rick.
[00:44:37]  Let's talk to Ronald next in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Democrat.
[00:44:40]  Go ahead, Ronald.
[00:44:42]  Yes, good morning.
[00:44:44]  I like everybody to pay attention to who's calling in.
[00:44:50]  There's certain classes of people.
[00:44:52]  You don't hear billionaires calling in complaining, not one time.
[00:44:57]  Why?
[00:44:58]  Because they're up there.
[00:45:00]  Now, on the tax situation, I believe that all stocks, and this goes for commodities and everything else, for every $100 spent to buy and sell, there's a $6 fee put on it.
[00:45:17]  It goes to the national debt.
[00:45:19]  Instead of just making money, buying trading stocks all the time, they're going to pay their fair share.
[00:45:24]  They don't pay.
[00:45:26]  They show it into trust systems and stuff like that.
[00:45:30]  But if they buy stock, they have to pay a fee, a federal fee, and it goes to the national debt.
[00:45:38]  But people, listen to us.
[00:45:40]  There's no billionaires calling in complaining about what's going on.
[00:45:44]  They're happy as ticks.
[00:45:46]  We've got to stop it.
[00:45:48]  They need to call in and complain, too.
[00:45:51]  Thank you.
[00:45:53]  On the Republican line in Telford, Pennsylvania, John, you're on Open Forum.
[00:45:58]  Yes.
[00:45:58]  So, Mimi, I was wondering, can you put on, like I just heard on, I guess it was CNN, Shell Oil, since the war started, has made a profit of $1.3 billion.
[00:46:15]  I wish that CNN would put these corporate people's earnings up, their quarterly earnings, and let the American people see how we're being gouged and ripped off.
[00:46:24]  I mean, the other callers said, well, why should we tax them?
[00:46:27]  Because they're not investing back into the country.
[00:46:30]  They open up shop overseas.
[00:46:33]  They're not worried about us working.
[00:46:37]  All they're worried about is points keeping.
[00:46:39]  And just like the gentleman said, you ain't going to hear no billionaire calling up complaining.
[00:46:43]  And I'm a Republican, and I voted for Republican.
[00:46:46]  But the Republican Party seems to be the party of the ultra-rich again.
[00:46:49]  We don't care about the working class.
[00:46:52]  All we care about is ballrooms and making money and this war with Iran.
[00:46:57]  We're in control, but the straits closed.
[00:47:00]  I mean, you're going to have to shoot straight with the American people.
[00:47:04]  So, John, no, I'm curious why you think that the Republican Party is now the party of the rich.
[00:47:14]  When did you decide that and what made you decide that?
[00:47:17]  Okay, let me, I'm 63, 63 years old.
[00:47:21]  I was always a Democrat.
[00:47:22]  I left the Democrat Party because I couldn't stand how far progressive they got.
[00:47:29]  And I always knew, and it was always known, that the Republican Party was the party of the rich, okay?
[00:47:36]  And then Trump was supposed to come and change that, and you know what I mean, and start caring about small business.
[00:47:44]  Look, me, I made less, I work seasonal, I made less than $20,000 and still paid a projective federal tax of over 6%.
[00:47:55]  So I don't want to hear that crap to people that, oh, don't you make this, they don't put, yes, I pay taxes.
[00:48:01]  Even though I made less than $20,000, I still had to pay taxes on the money that I made.
[00:48:06]  Okay?
[00:48:07]  So I'm telling you, the Republican Party is going to get rocked in November.
[00:48:13]  All right.
[00:48:14]  And are you voting Republican or are you voting Democrat?
[00:48:17]  I probably ain't going to vote at all, to be honest with you, because I'm disgusted.
[00:48:21]  The two-party system doesn't work.
[00:48:23]  It doesn't.
[00:48:23]  Look, we've gone bankrupt since what?
[00:48:26]  The World War II?
[00:48:27]  And we're 250 years, right?
[00:48:31]  And in the last, what, 50, 60 years or whatever, we've destroyed our country with debt?
[00:48:37]  $39 trillion in debt?
[00:48:40]  Are you kidding me?
[00:48:41]  How are you going to pull out of that?
[00:48:42]  So, John, you...
[00:48:43]  Usually when the rich don't care, all they care about is points keeping.
[00:48:48]  Mansions, islands, all this other stuff.
[00:48:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:48:52]  Okay, and John.
[00:48:55]  To get back to your first point about Shell Oil, so I do want to show that.
[00:48:58]  That's CNBC.
[00:49:00]  And that says this.

=== National Debt Crisis (09:55) ===

[00:49:01]  Shell tops profit estimates as Iran war boosts oil price, cut share buybacks.
[00:49:07]  It says oil giant Shell posted bumper profit $6.92 billion through the first quarter as the Iran war sent fossil fuel prices soaring.
[00:49:17]  The London listed energy major cut the pace of its quarterly buyback to $3 billion, down from $3.5 billion.
[00:49:25]  The earnings came shortly after Shell announced an agreement to buy Canadian energy company ARC Resources in a deal valued at $16.4 billion.
[00:49:33]  CNBC has that if you'd like more information.
[00:49:37]  Also, you might have heard the news that Ted Turner has died.
[00:49:41]  He was the founder of CNN, and he was on C-SPAN a lot.
[00:49:46]  He's got 46 videos in our library.
[00:49:48]  This is a portion of his conversation and Q ⁇ A with students at the University of Southern California back in 2008.
[00:49:57]  Take a look.
[00:49:58]  When you were 20 or younger, did you envision yourself or see yourself as being as successful as you are today?
[00:50:05]  No.
[00:50:06]  I didn't, but I thought I was going to go as far as I could, as fast as I could.
[00:50:11]  But I didn't know where I was going to end up.
[00:50:13]  I was like Columbus, just like we started CNN.
[00:50:16]  When Columbus started out, he didn't know where he was going.
[00:50:22]  When he got there, he didn't know where he was.
[00:50:24]  And when he got home, he didn't know where he'd been.
[00:50:30]  You ever heard that one?
[00:50:32]  You did hear it.
[00:50:33]  Well, anyway, it's still good.
[00:50:35]  I didn't attribute that to me.
[00:50:37]  But this is a line I did come up with.
[00:50:39]  Life's like a Grade B movie.
[00:50:41]  You don't want to walk out in the middle of it, but you wouldn't want to sit through it again.
[00:50:47]  Good Ted Turner has died at the age of 87.
[00:50:50]  He was a founder of CNN.
[00:50:53]  Back to the calls to Nestor Sigler, Oklahoma Independent.
[00:50:56]  Good morning.
[00:50:58]  Buenos Diaz, Mimi.
[00:51:00]  Good morning, America.
[00:51:01]  This is Nestor.
[00:51:04]  $40 trillion in national debt.
[00:51:07]  For decades, they say that the cliff was $30 trillion.
[00:51:12]  Well, now we're over the cliff.
[00:51:15]  We've hit the wall.
[00:51:16]  They cannot fix the debt.
[00:51:18]  They're going to keep spending this money until we cannot service the debt any longer.
[00:51:23]  Then they will say that the dollar has collapsed and they will issue in a digital currency at a discounted rate of like 20 or 30 percent, just like they did in 33 when they took back the gold and silver and issued greenbacks at about 30 percent of what they had in the banks.
[00:51:42]  That is where we are going.
[00:51:44]  They will collapse the dollar and issue a digital currency at a deep discount to save America.
[00:51:51]  Thank you, Mimi.
[00:51:52]  All right, Nestor.
[00:51:54]  Sonia, on the line for Democrats in Staten Island, New York.
[00:51:57]  Good morning.
[00:51:57]  You're on Open Forum.
[00:52:00]  Good morning, Mimi.
[00:52:01]  Yes, I wanted to point out the ballroom that we don't need.
[00:52:12]  That's a want.
[00:52:15]  There was something about the fountains around the White House and the Yes?
[00:52:27]  Sorry.
[00:52:28]  How the price for that when Biden was there, the price to fix it was like 3 point something million.
[00:52:36]  But all of a sudden, now when Trump is there, it's like $17 million.
[00:52:41]  This is exactly what he was found guilty of doing in New York.
[00:52:46]  This is the fraud that he knows he is well.
[00:52:49]  This is the art of his deal.
[00:52:51]  He does know how to do that really well.
[00:52:53]  But this is why he was found guilty, and he's doing it now to the whole country.
[00:52:58]  This is how he is stealing all of the taxpayers' money and getting away with it.
[00:53:04]  And also, I want to point out to our Republican friends who call in and say that Democrats only complain about Trump.
[00:53:14]  And if he found the cure for cancer, Democrats would complain about that.
[00:53:19]  I want to say, I know people that have gone through cancer, that have survived, or that passed away.
[00:53:25]  If he found a cure for cancer, everyone would be happy.
[00:53:29]  We don't care whose name is on it.
[00:53:31]  Everybody would be grateful.
[00:53:33]  And I want to say thank you for anybody who comes up with a cure for cancer.
[00:53:37]  Thank you, Mimi.
[00:53:38]  All right, Sonia.
[00:53:40]  On the Republican line in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
[00:53:42]  Louise, you're on the air.
[00:53:44]  Good morning.
[00:53:46]  I would like to speak to the man that insisted that somehow Republicans were always for the big corporations and the big conglomerates.
[00:53:57]  And I would point out to them that they should take a look at Warren Buffett and how he got his money to be a conglomerate.
[00:54:06]  He came in, he bought businesses up, he hauled them out, he shipped their production to China.
[00:54:13]  He put $10 billion into BYD.
[00:54:17]  This is a big Democrat donor.
[00:54:20]  And he's been around for decades.
[00:54:22]  And I also wanted to point out that we had something under Janet Yellen called the modern monetary theory.
[00:54:34]  And that theory was that you could spend all you want and the debt didn't matter.
[00:54:40]  And that's what happened under the Obama Treasury.
[00:54:45]  And so that's the way things go.
[00:54:48]  And so we went from a grand total of what $15 trillion debt to $39 trillion, all in a very short period of time, just 20 years, less than 20 years.
[00:55:03]  So this is what happens when you get people like Janet Yellen as Secretary of Treasury, as head of the Federal Reserve, who goes over to China.
[00:55:17]  and drinks some mushroom tea and bows to China.
[00:55:22]  This is what happens.
[00:55:24]  Democrats created this, not Republicans.
[00:55:27]  And for all you people out there hoping that Republicans just wake up, I would turn it around and suggest that you wake up.
[00:55:36]  All right.
[00:55:37]  Dean in Florida, Independent.
[00:55:38]  Good morning.
[00:55:40]  Good morning.
[00:55:40]  Thank you for taking my call.
[00:55:43]  I'm just calling because, you know, I see that this is deterred.
[00:55:47]  This is becoming, I want to say a red and blue war.
[00:55:52]  You know, we as a people need to just worry about us individuals as people, what we need as people, instead of battling each other on who we want to be in the president over office, because for many years, you know, we vote and we put people in office and we vote on policies that realistically, none of them have been really met.
[00:56:21]  And, you know, just like the Republicans, they voted on policies that they wanted Trump to pass.
[00:56:28]  But in reality, Trump has not passed any of the policies.
[00:56:32]  They voted on no more wars.
[00:56:34]  But now the same MAGA supporters, now they're for the war and they're all for the gas prices because they keep saying that, hey, yes, we do need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.
[00:56:49]  Well, it's going on 47 years.
[00:56:52]  No nuclear weapons have been shot at or nothing like that.
[00:56:56]  And all of a sudden, Trump is the 47th president.
[00:56:59]  So he wants to try to stop or try to create a war and then stop a war because he's the 47th president and they've been building bombs for 47 years.
[00:57:10]  How would that look?
[00:57:10]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:57:11]  So he does a lot of things that really shouldn't have been done.
[00:57:15]  We should not be over there fighting.
[00:57:17]  We had no business over there.
[00:57:18]  Because if we did, why didn't Trump do the right thing and call up his allies and coalition and get everything approved and make sure everything was legit?
[00:57:27]  Why did he have to strike midnight when everybody was sleeping?
[00:57:30]  We woke up in the next morning and now we're at war.
[00:57:33]  Sorry.
[00:57:34]  Wendell in Laurel, Delaware, Democrat, last call for open forum.
[00:57:38]  Go ahead.
[00:57:39]  Oh, good morning.
[00:57:39]  How you doing?
[00:57:40]  Good.
[00:57:41]  I'm trying.
[00:57:42]  Thomas, okay, how come y'all never talk about all this corruption Trump is doing in the office?
[00:57:48]  I ain't never seen nobody make that much money while he's working in the office, his sons and everybody in the whole cabinet.
[00:57:56]  And y'all never talk about that.
[00:57:58]  And plus, he's talking about the balling room.
[00:58:01]  He probably had all these donations and going to pay for it.
[00:58:04]  Now end up the Republicans putting a bill up to pay for it for him.
[00:58:10]  I guess they're going to take all that money that he's getting donated to and put that in his pocket too, I guess.
[00:58:16]  And first, he'd be talking about, I ain't never seen a president that be happy somebody died like Robert Mueller.
[00:58:25]  And he said he was glad the man did.
[00:58:27]  Now, what kind of president is that?
[00:58:30]  And he needs to be in there.
[00:58:31]  I tell you, and the man is in dimension and shit.
[00:58:34]  He doesn't know what he's talking about.
[00:58:35]  He's setting up guys asleep all the time.
[00:58:41]  All right.
[00:58:42]  And later on this morning on the Washington Journal, it's a conversation about the state of free speech in America with advocate Greg Lukianov.
[00:58:51]  After that, we'll have John Bolton.
[00:58:53]  He was the National Security Advisor during the first Trump administration.

=== Mental Health Care (03:09) ===

[00:58:57]  But first, May is Mental Health Awareness Month.
[00:59:00]  After the break, we're joined by psychologist and former Republican member of Congress Tim Murphy to talk about the mental health system in the U.S. We'll be right back.
[00:59:23]  In a divided media world, one place brings Americans together.
[00:59:28]  According to a new MAGA research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced: 28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate.
[00:59:41]  Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides.
[00:59:47]  Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source.
[00:59:51]  No commentary, no agenda, just democracy.
[00:59:54]  Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks.
[01:00:01]  On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
[01:00:05]  During his almost 40-year career in publishing, Bruce Nichols served as publisher of both Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Little Brown and Company.
[01:00:14]  His book is titled The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World.
[01:00:20]  The focus of the book is on famous names, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau.
[01:00:30]  Author Nichols says the Emerson Circle is the story of this small group and the movements it inspired.
[01:00:36]  He says it's not a comprehensive group biography.
[01:00:39]  He suggests there are wonderful books about each member that go into far more detail.
[01:00:44]  Bruce Nichols suggests their collective work represents a crucial cultural moment in American history.
[01:00:51]  A new interview with author Bruce Nichols about his book, The Emerson Circle: The Conquered Radicals Who Reinvented the World.
[01:00:58]  Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
[01:01:10]  American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
[01:01:17]  As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, join American History TV for our series America 250 and discover the ideas and defining moments of the American story.
[01:01:28]  This weekend at 11 p.m. Eastern, we explore the role of the Cherokees in the American Revolution and talk about how combatants in conflict view the issue of slavery.
[01:01:37]  And at 8 p.m. Eastern, we'll show you a college lecture on the portrayal of immigrants in the video game Grand Theft Auto.
[01:01:43]  And then at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, the grandson of Bess Truman discusses the legacy of America's 33rd First Lady, exploring the American story.
[01:01:52]  Watch American History TV.
[01:01:54]  Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/slash history.

=== Healthcare Access Struggles (13:59) ===

[01:02:06]  Washington Journal continues.
[01:02:09]  Joining us now to talk about mental health care in America is Tim Murphy.
[01:02:14]  He is a former U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania.
[01:02:18]  He's also a psychologist and an author.
[01:02:20]  Tim, welcome to the program.
[01:02:21]  Good to be with you.
[01:02:22]  Thank you.
[01:02:22]  Okay, you were in Congress for 15 years.
[01:02:25]  You're also a psychologist.
[01:02:26]  Can you tell us about your background and how you aresue of mental health?
[01:02:33]  For 40, 50 years I've worked in the area of dealing with mental illness, but really more dealing with serious mental illness because I saw this is a massive problem in the United States.
[01:02:42]  It is not being addressed adequately at all.
[01:02:45]  While in Congress, I wrote and we were able to pass some significant legislation called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act.
[01:02:52]  However, like anything else, it got stripped of a lot of key provisions.
[01:02:56]  And at the end, we didn't get everything we needed, but we needed everything we got.
[01:02:59]  But some things we still need in this country are more hospital beds, more providers, more research and other things for the people who are the most seriously mentally ill in this nation.
[01:03:10]  So I'll continue to fight for them.
[01:03:12]  Let's talk about the poll that you did.
[01:03:14]  So you're now you serve on the board of the schizophrenia policy action network.
[01:03:19]  It's called SPAN.
[01:03:20]  That national poll was voters across the political spectrum.
[01:03:25]  What were their major concerns?
[01:03:27]  Well, the major concerns, I should say, I'm no longer on that board.
[01:03:30]  I need to retire off, but that's okay.
[01:03:31]  I know it's recent things.
[01:03:33]  But it's a great organization.
[01:03:34]  And what happens is that we did a poll trying to get a sense of America's opinions on this.
[01:03:39]  And the reason that's important is when I was working on my legislation, we had lots of data about the costs, about the number of people, about the problems with people in prison and homeless, et cetera.
[01:03:49]  But the polling information was so important because that's what members of Congress pay attention to.
[01:03:54]  Now, you know that New York Times had a poll recently.
[01:03:58]  They said less than 10% of Americans trust Congress to do anything.
[01:04:02]  That's pretty bad.
[01:04:03]  And a member of Congress, if they see a poll that says 51% of the population likes an issue, well, they like that too.
[01:04:11]  But we wanted to find out, and the results that we found in this poll were absolutely staggering.
[01:04:17]  The percentage of people who are concerned about mental illness.
[01:04:20]  Can I go into a couple of those points?
[01:04:21]  Yes, please.
[01:04:22]  So, for example, 86% of a national random sample, half Democrats, half Republicans, said mental illness is very important in terms of treating it.
[01:04:30]  But we also did a sample of families and people associated with maybe have some illnesses, and 95% of that sample said that they were concerned about it.
[01:04:40]  But only 18% of our national sample and only 6% of families felt positively towards the mental health system in America.
[01:04:48]  It is disastrous.
[01:04:50]  Okay, and that's what I want to talk to you about.
[01:04:52]  And I know that there's more that you want to go through, but let's talk about why it's disastrous.
[01:04:57]  What's wrong with it?
[01:04:58]  Well, particularly for those with serious mental illness, we're talking in particular here, let me focus on schizophrenia.
[01:05:03]  It may only be 1.2% of the population, but that's 3.7 million.
[01:05:08]  And our study also showed that 51% in the national poll have a family member or friend with serious mental illness.
[01:05:16]  So this is no small number.
[01:05:17]  But what happens is they can't get care.
[01:05:20]  We found a third of the people couldn't get the care they needed.
[01:05:24]  People may wait months or years.
[01:05:27]  Generally, once a person starts showing symptoms, it's one to two years before they get appropriate care.
[01:05:32]  That's absurd.
[01:05:33]  And many times a person's first contact may be with police, they go to an emergency room, the hospitals don't have beds for them because of federal regulations passed in the 1960s limited the number of psychiatric beds to 16 per hospital.
[01:05:48]  16.
[01:05:49]  Why?
[01:05:49]  Why would you want it?
[01:05:50]  They did that back then because they thought it'd be two things.
[01:05:52]  One, cost savings.
[01:05:54]  And two, it was a matter of saying, well, we have these big institutions.
[01:05:57]  We had 500,000 beds in the United States in the 1950s when there was 120 million population.
[01:06:02]  They said, these places are too big.
[01:06:04]  We're warehousing people.
[01:06:05]  They shouldn't be in there.
[01:06:06]  I get that.
[01:06:07]  A lot of that's true.
[01:06:09]  But their method of getting rid of it was to limit beds.
[01:06:12]  Now, think if we did that for cancer.
[01:06:14]  Here's how we're going to cure cancer.
[01:06:15]  We're not going to treat it.
[01:06:16]  We're going to close on the hospitals.
[01:06:18]  That was the absurdity of the approach, and it has remained there.
[01:06:21]  And now when we try to change it, Congressional Budget Officer someone says, oh, it's going to cost us a billion to $200 billion a year to change that.
[01:06:28]  That's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost.
[01:06:30]  The annual cost of schizophrenia in this country, $366.8 billion.
[01:06:36]  And the federal government is concerned about a couple billion of this.
[01:06:38]  We need more beds.
[01:06:39]  We need more providers.
[01:06:40]  We don't have enough, those lines too.
[01:06:43]  But why is it so expensive to treat?
[01:06:45]  Or is it just like any other illness?
[01:06:47]  Well, that $366.8 billion is actually the cost of not caring.
[01:06:51]  Much of that burden is families have to take care of someone because they can't get care.
[01:06:56]  There can be things with housing and other care with with HHS or Medicare, Medicaid may pay, but that is such a shoots and ladders game of you can't get care and then someone goes into crisis, they can't get medication.
[01:07:08]  So what happens is families bear the burden.
[01:07:10]  A large chunk of that money is also the criminal justice system because police are involved.
[01:07:15]  A large percentage of policeman time is involved with this.
[01:07:17]  You look at some of the major murders and assaults that grab the headlines.
[01:07:21]  A lot of those are someone with untreated schizophrenia.
[01:07:24]  You have also folks with schizophrenia, psychosis disorders, a large percent of a chronic illness.
[01:07:30]  About 75% have a leech one.
[01:07:33]  So when we don't treat the mental illness, we end up with more chronic illness expenses too.
[01:07:37]  The list goes on and on.
[01:07:38]  But notice I didn't say anything about treating schizophrenia.
[01:07:41]  That's a very small number, but we don't treat it, and that's not the answer to make things going away.
[01:07:46]  If you'd like to join our conversation, if you've got a question about mental health care in the United States or mental health policy, do give us a call.
[01:07:53]  Here are our lines.
[01:07:55]  So if you're in the eastern or central time zones, you want to call us on 202-748-8000.
[01:08:00]  If you're in Mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001.
[01:08:04]  We also have a line for mental health professionals.
[01:08:06]  So if you're working in the field, you can call us at 202-748-8002.
[01:08:14]  Following up on what you said about the criminal justice system, a lot of times there are caregivers or family members who want their, let's say their son, an adult son, is showing signs of violence or erratic behavior and they want him in treatment.
[01:08:32]  But because he is an adult, they can't force him to be in treatment.
[01:08:37]  So talk about that issue.
[01:08:38]  A lot of times, they'll show up at the emergency room.
[01:08:41]  The guy says, no, I'm not sick.
[01:08:43]  I'm fine.
[01:08:44]  And nobody can do anything and they're released out into the public.
[01:08:47]  That is a brilliant question.
[01:08:48]  That is the key.
[01:08:50]  48 states, one of them that doesn't do this is Massachusetts, says you can't have something called assisted outpatient treatment where a judge can court order someone to go in treatment.
[01:08:58]  Now, here's the thing about it.
[01:09:00]  If someone is gravely disabled to the point they can't take care of themselves, you know, a large percentage of the homeless are people with schizophrenia and mental illness.
[01:09:07]  A large percentage of those in prison are that way.
[01:09:10]  But what happens is, if someone, the standard is someone has to be in imminent danger, I mean right now ready to kill themselves or someone else, harm someone or someone else.
[01:09:19]  And then a judge can say, well, all right, we're going to hold you in the hospital for a few days and do an evaluation of you.
[01:09:24]  Even a person with serious mental illness can keep it together long enough.
[01:09:28]  I know a guy absolutely convinced he was Jesus Christ.
[01:09:31]  And he felt that he had to bring doom and gloom to the nation, the world, and obviously these are hallucinations and delusions.
[01:09:38]  But when asked, are you really going to do this?
[01:09:39]  He says, oh no, I wouldn't do that.
[01:09:41]  But he maintained his violent delusions and hallucinations.
[01:09:44]  These are people not in treatment.
[01:09:46]  When they get in treatment, they can get better.
[01:09:48]  But this whole idea that we shouldn't be asking someone to do something they don't want to do, what will we do with someone with Alzheimer's?
[01:09:55]  What if grandma, 80-year-old, was walking down the street in the snow and bare feet in a robe at 2 in the morning and the policeman came by and says, what's going on?
[01:10:02]  He said, I have to get to school.
[01:10:03]  My homework is due.
[01:10:04]  Well, they would take her to the hospital and they would keep her there to get her care.
[01:10:07]  They would call the family members.
[01:10:09]  But if someone is delusional and talking about the CIA is planting things in their brain or they're worried about that, they'd say, well, do you want to go in the hospital?
[01:10:17]  No.
[01:10:18]  And so you walk down any street in Washington, D.C.
[01:10:20]  I talked with someone yesterday, conversation on that.
[01:10:23]  He's hallucinating delusion the whole time.
[01:10:25]  Is he violent?
[01:10:26]  No.
[01:10:26]  Should he be getting help?
[01:10:27]  Well, yes.
[01:10:28]  But what we do is we give them a tent, a blanket, take them to a soup kitchen.
[01:10:33]  That's cruel.
[01:10:34]  We shouldn't be doing that sort of thing with people.
[01:10:36]  Would you force medication?
[01:10:38]  Well, sometimes that is a thing.
[01:10:39]  Now, when the wording is forced, and sometimes, would you hold someone down and inject that?
[01:10:45]  Well, there are medications in pill form and in long-acting injectables that can help someone for days or weeks or a month or so at a time.
[01:10:56]  I talked to a gentleman who he was quite wealthy, and he had people all over the country to try and find his mother.
[01:11:02]  When he finally found her, she said, why didn't you find me sooner?
[01:11:07]  He says, well, I wasn't allowed to.
[01:11:08]  I wasn't allowed to do anything.
[01:11:10]  A woman by the name of Bethany Eiser, which I quoted in one of the articles I wrote about this, was an American spectator.
[01:11:15]  She said when she was in college, a brilliant woman, she was in college, she began to have her schizophrenic break.
[01:11:21]  For three years, she slept behind bushes in a churchyard.
[01:11:25]  And when she finally started getting help, she said, why didn't someone help me sooner than that?
[01:11:29]  But the idea is, when someone is that gravely disabled, rather than say, we're going to let you make a decision here and go ahead and live your life in rot and filth as homeless or go to jail where you risk being beat up or be one of these people that get involved in a police encounter, why aren't we providing them with care to the point when they're well and stable, then talk to them about the long-term care.
[01:11:52]  But those who are out there saying, no, you should never ever under any circumstance have someone without their full consent.
[01:11:58]  I say they can't have informed consent if their mind is filled with delusions and hallucinations.
[01:12:04]  Let's talk to callers.
[01:12:05]  We'll start with Raul in Raleigh, North Carolina, who is a mental health professional.
[01:12:09]  Raul?
[01:12:10]  Hi, good morning.
[01:12:11]  Thank you.
[01:12:13]  I wasn't really prepared for the subject, but it's surprising that it's on.
[01:12:18]  So thank you, Representative Murphy.
[01:12:23]  Yeah, so comment is the distinguish between true schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, and that people with schizophrenia are typically not violent.
[01:12:43]  And thank you for that question about forced drug administration, Mimi.
[01:12:52]  Sorry I didn't have it clearly, but thank you.
[01:12:54]  Okay.
[01:12:54]  Well, let's talk about that.
[01:12:56]  With regard to drugs, one of the biggest scourges growing in this country is cannabis.
[01:13:00]  This isn't the old Woodstock stuff, 1% or 2% THC.
[01:13:03]  This is 90, 95, 99% of THC, which is the active ingredient.
[01:13:07]  We see large increases in psychotic behavior, psychotic and schizophrenic admissions.
[01:13:12]  You increase the risk among teenagers.
[01:13:14]  So teens, young adults who use marijuana regularly, increase, sometimes doubling the risk for psychosis.
[01:13:20]  The more psychotic breaks, the greater the risk of schizophrenia.
[01:13:23]  There's big costs associated with that.
[01:13:25]  Now, the idea is someone has to obviously do a diagnostic differential diagnostic when someone comes to an emergency room in a crisis like that.
[01:13:32]  There's also a lot of people using and don't understand the high risk for this.
[01:13:35]  And we say, oh, it's recreational marijuana and it's going to be fine and states can make some money.
[01:13:40]  States are going to lose money because the cost associated with marijuana use for emergency room visits, critical care stays and ICUs, hospital stays, auto accidents, a whole host of other things far, far, far exceeds by hundreds of millions the costs of what people think they're going to be taking in tax revenue.
[01:13:56]  So that's another area that people need to be paying attention to.
[01:13:59]  Would you outlaw cannabis complaints?
[01:14:01]  Oh, no, it's not a matter of outlawing.
[01:14:02]  It's out there.
[01:14:04]  And first of all, there's no real medical uses for medical marijuana.
[01:14:07]  People talk about, oh, it helps depression.
[01:14:08]  No, it exacerbates depression.
[01:14:10]  Does it help with insomnia?
[01:14:12]  My patients, they get worse.
[01:14:13]  They take it, but over time, they become dependent on it.
[01:14:16]  But my point is, if you're going to legalize it, if you're going to do things with that, instead of saying, let's have the tax money and give it to elected officials, they can build playgrounds and do other things.
[01:14:25]  California did this, and the money did not go to treat people.
[01:14:28]  They dedicate that money towards treating mental illness.
[01:14:31]  That's a place where you can get the funds to help with this.
[01:14:34]  John in Virginia, go ahead, John.
[01:14:37]  You're on the air with Tim Murphy.
[01:14:41]  This is not a gotcha question.
[01:14:43]  Sir, who pays your health insurance?
[01:14:47]  We pay your health insurance, don't we?
[01:14:49]  As a representative?
[01:14:51]  So, John, he is a former congressman.
[01:14:53]  He is no longer in Congress.
[01:14:54]  Okay, but he's still getting paid for it.
[01:14:57]  I pay my health insurance, but thank you.
[01:14:59]  Okay, let me ask you something, sir.
[01:15:01]  You see what's happening today that people are getting cut for health care.
[01:15:05]  The problem is people cannot afford the medication that they need to help their own families.
[01:15:12]  And the problem with Obamacare, who was helping a lot of mental people who want to have medication so they can act it the way they want to take care of their family, it's all gone.
[01:15:22]  How are we going to help our people when every day the people are cutting what they're supposed to get for our country so we can help our people, a lot of military people on the street?
[01:15:34]  Got that.
[01:15:34]  Thank you.
[01:15:35]  There's a few things with that.
[01:15:37]  When I moved my legislation, President Obama was in office, and we didn't get a lot of help from the executive branch in terms of moving these things.
[01:15:44]  But one of the important things we had in this bill was created the office of the Assistant Secretary of Mental Health and Substance Abuse.
[01:15:49]  I created that office in my legislation.
[01:15:51]  Does that still exist?
[01:15:52]  No, there's nobody in that office.
[01:15:53]  It still is there, but it has not been filled.
[01:15:55]  We have nobody at the helm.
[01:15:57]  When we look, who in the federal government is there taking the lead in this?
[01:16:00]  Now, yes, Secretary Kennedy is the head of HHS, but this is a big, important part of this.

=== Medicaid Cuts Impact (16:09) ===

[01:16:06]  20% of Americans at any given time have symptoms which are part of mental illness from the mild to the severe.
[01:16:14]  But the access to medication, the access to providers is not there.
[01:16:17]  We just haven't been doing this, nation, and the costs are enormous.
[01:16:20]  So why aren't we doing this?
[01:16:21]  Just what I said about the cost of schizophrenia, $366 billion, that exceeds the cost of the entire Veterans Administration.
[01:16:29]  That's massive.
[01:16:30]  We're not dealing with it.
[01:16:31]  So I would certainly call in a couple of things here.
[01:16:34]  One, I would really love it if Secretary Kennedy could appoint a secretary, Assistant Secretary of Mental Health.
[01:16:40]  Two, we need congressional committees to hold hearings in this.
[01:16:43]  There's a couple of key places.
[01:16:44]  In Ways and Means, Vern Buchanan of Florida is the chair of health.
[01:16:48]  Please hold a hearing on this because Medicare Medicaid problems are part of the reasons people are not getting care.
[01:16:53]  And within the House side of energy and commerce, I'd love it if Dr. John Joyce of Pennsylvania, head of oversight investigation, would do a hearing on this too.
[01:17:03]  Because it is very difficult for someone to get care.
[01:17:06]  Medicaid, for example, if a person is in jail, they lose their insurance.
[01:17:10]  It's up to the state.
[01:17:11]  Well, 80% of people with mental illness in prison are not getting care.
[01:17:14]  They leave their jail time, they're back on the street, here's one pill, and they start having their problems again.
[01:17:20]  They cycle through the criminal justice system again.
[01:17:23]  I mean, look at the case of DeCarlos Brown, that sad, sad case in North Carolina where he stabbed the woman on the train.
[01:17:30]  He had 14 mugshots in his history and his background, but he kept being released.
[01:17:35]  And when we talk about should he have been in a program to say you are going to be on medication, you are going to get treatment.
[01:17:41]  Yes.
[01:17:42]  Do we know that he was medically, that he was out of mental health?
[01:17:46]  Yeah, diagnosed with schizophrenia.
[01:17:47]  Yes, and there was diagnosis.
[01:17:49]  He's a retired judge, but Judge Steve Lifman of Florida, brilliant man, who has really worked on this in Miami-Dade County.
[01:17:56]  Now he's trying to build a center down there to say those who are the frequent flyers, the revolving door of mental illness, putting them in jail is not treatment.
[01:18:05]  Getting them care, making sure they stay in care is the answer, and these people can live more productive lives.
[01:18:09]  Why are we doing that?
[01:18:10]  Why do we say, we're going to let you die with your rights on?
[01:18:13]  You're going to have the rights, by golly, but you'll be in jail or on the street.
[01:18:16]  That's not compassion.
[01:18:16]  Or hurting other people.
[01:18:17]  Or hurting other people.
[01:18:18]  That's a big problem, too, yes.
[01:18:20]  Rosemarie in Valley Village, California.
[01:18:23]  Go ahead, Rosemarie.
[01:18:25]  Hi, Representative Murphy.
[01:18:27]  Thank you so much for taking my call.
[01:18:29]  I live here in Los Angeles.
[01:18:30]  I've been here all my life.
[01:18:32]  I'm 62 years old.
[01:18:33]  And I do remember that the mental facilities were being closed in the 80s.
[01:18:39]  And, you know, it's gotten progressively worse here.
[01:18:42]  There are people with schizophrenia that are running the streets.
[01:18:46]  They're homeless.
[01:18:48]  I do agree what you're saying about the marijuana psychosis.
[01:18:52]  I've seen that happen.
[01:18:53]  You know, people that already have mental illness, they're using this marijuana, but the THC level that is so strong now.
[01:19:00]  And I see these young people in psychosis.
[01:19:03]  I see people get stabbed.
[01:19:05]  You know, there's violence.
[01:19:06]  The cops are out here.
[01:19:08]  They're like psychiatrists out here.
[01:19:11]  You know, and I actually have a family member, a young relative, and he was autistic.
[01:19:18]  And he had a schizophrenic episode that didn't realize that he was dealing with schizophrenia.
[01:19:25]  And he was using marijuana.
[01:19:28]  And I kept saying, you know, be careful because I had a feeling something was going to happen.
[01:19:33]  And there was attempted murder.
[01:19:35]  I don't know if he's still in prison.
[01:19:37]  I don't know the whole story.
[01:19:38]  I don't want to get into it because, you know, it's a family matter.
[01:19:42]  But I'm just overwhelmed by all this.
[01:19:45]  I really want to try to help people out here.
[01:19:48]  What do you think?
[01:19:49]  What can you suggest?
[01:19:50]  What is overwhelming?
[01:19:51]  California, the governor spent something like $24 billion between 2018 and 2023 to deal with the homeless program.
[01:20:00]  The Auditor General of the State said it was a disaster.
[01:20:03]  It didn't work.
[01:20:04]  In fact, homelessness got worse.
[01:20:06]  If one is just saying, well, we're going to be kind to folks and we're going to make sure they have some housing.
[01:20:10]  We're not going to demand they get treatment, but maybe just have housing.
[01:20:13]  It's called housing first, or some food or things like that, they're going to get better.
[01:20:17]  But someone who is that gravely disabled doesn't necessarily get better.
[01:20:20]  There are some success stories.
[01:20:22]  A friend of mine, I'm sure it's okay it says his name because it's been in the news, Anthony Hernandez of California.
[01:20:28]  His son tried to kill him by stabbing him.
[01:20:31]  Luckily, everybody's alive.
[01:20:32]  His son did some time.
[01:20:34]  His son is very productive now, stays on his medication, stays in treatment.
[01:20:38]  It's a blessing for Anthony and his son to have change, but you've got to get folks treatment in this.
[01:20:45]  And that's the thing we have to stop saying, well, we're going to not force medication.
[01:20:50]  By the way, it's important she mentioned a stabbing incident.
[01:20:52]  I just mentioned Anthony Hernandez.
[01:20:54]  And these other cases that have been around, there was recently a woman who tried to abduct a child, a three-year-old in Omaha, Nebraska, ended up stabbing, slashing the child with a knife.
[01:21:02]  Police shot her.
[01:21:03]  The case I mentioned before in Charlotte, North Carolina, other cases around, stabbing cases.
[01:21:07]  I don't hear anybody saying, well, why are we banning knives?
[01:21:10]  Well, that's because that's not the issue.
[01:21:12]  And it's not about guns here.
[01:21:14]  Instead of talking about what's in their hands, let's talk about what's in their minds.
[01:21:17]  And this is we're getting people timely treatment, making sure it's accessible for their keeping them on treatment.
[01:21:23]  That's going to be the difference.
[01:21:25]  Otherwise, we're just going to be seeing more tragedies on television.
[01:21:28]  And you talked about needing more beds and more providers.
[01:21:32]  How do you get more providers?
[01:21:34]  Well, one of the things that didn't get through the legislation, I hope they can do this someday, is actually a couple of things.
[01:21:39]  One, I'm a believer that those who are going to go into the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but work with serious mental illness.
[01:21:45]  God bless the families in the suburbs struggling with some other issues, but we're talking about some serious mental illness.
[01:21:50]  I'd say you're going to go into these areas of high need and high cost.
[01:21:54]  We'll reimburse you for your studies, so your student loans, et cetera.
[01:21:58]  The other thing is Medicare and Medicaid oftentimes pay very little, so providers don't want to do that.
[01:22:02]  And in some places, they won't even take Medicaid because the cost doesn't even cover their expenses for having a practice.
[01:22:09]  Okay, but Medicaid is being cut now.
[01:22:11]  It is not being expanded.
[01:22:13]  This is a huge problem.
[01:22:14]  Why are we cutting this for the people who need it the most?
[01:22:18]  And I'll say this again.
[01:22:20]  We make this system the most difficult for the people who have the most difficulty.
[01:22:23]  And now we're seeing her get less.
[01:22:24]  Here's another absurd thing, too.
[01:22:25]  Let's say someone starts to get better.
[01:22:27]  They're there in treatment.
[01:22:28]  Medicaid's paying their costs.
[01:22:30]  They're getting some supplemental social security, disability income.
[01:22:33]  They start to make some money.
[01:22:35]  They're no longer in the poverty range to start to do more.
[01:22:37]  What does SSI do?
[01:22:38]  It says, We're cutting your funding.
[01:22:40]  Well, first, I can't make it there.
[01:22:41]  Well, it's too bad.
[01:22:41]  You got healthy and now we're going to punish you.
[01:22:43]  It should be a step down.
[01:22:45]  As you start to make more money, we'll maybe reduce this and reward you for getting better, sticking with treatment.
[01:22:50]  But instead, we say, We're going to cut your safety net.
[01:22:52]  Good luck to you.
[01:22:53]  Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, Thomas, a mental health professional.
[01:22:57]  Go ahead, Thomas.
[01:22:59]  Good morning.
[01:23:00]  Thanks for taking my call.
[01:23:02]  Good morning, Mr. Murphy.
[01:23:04]  I worked for a state institution in Brooklyn.
[01:23:07]  It's still working.
[01:23:10]  And I started in 1973, and they were just implementing a program where they, you know, the first 14 days, if they were able to stabilize you, put you on Medicaid and social services, try to get you an apartment if they can.
[01:23:26]  And one of the basic things that even we had to go out into the community to see if they're doing okay.
[01:23:32]  I also have a loved one who's on Medicaid social services, able to get some kind of housing where the social services help pay for it.
[01:23:42]  But then I'm kind of concerned about what you were just saying as far as when the Medicaid comes in.
[01:23:46]  So every time I look around and check on her to see how she's doing, you know, so far, so good.
[01:23:52]  But I don't know what's going to happen in the future.
[01:23:55]  You know, there's a transition that takes place, too.
[01:23:58]  If someone's on Medicaid, after a while, they can switch to Medicare.
[01:24:01]  But here's another absurdity: you can only have 190 days lifetime of Medicare with mental illness.
[01:24:06]  Now, not that same way with cancer or diabetes, but with mental illness, that's all.
[01:24:10]  You can have lifetime hospital days.
[01:24:12]  Why is there that difference?
[01:24:14]  Because someone says we're going to save money.
[01:24:16]  It's absurd.
[01:24:17]  This is a phenomenal bigotry and prejudice against mental illness.
[01:24:21]  Congress needs to change this.
[01:24:22]  I mentioned two people: Chairman Vern Buchanan and Chairman Joyce should hold hearings on this and hear this.
[01:24:29]  The horror stories families have when they say, I can't get my child, my brother, sister, parent into treatment.
[01:24:36]  And hospitals, here's another thing: if they're on Medicare, a hospital gets punished if someone cycles back in the system within 30 days.
[01:24:43]  So what do you do to the hospital?
[01:24:44]  We're not going to admit you.
[01:24:46]  Instead, we'll give you some medication.
[01:24:48]  You're calm now.
[01:24:49]  You're not going to kill yourself.
[01:24:50]  Good.
[01:24:50]  Back in the streets.
[01:24:51]  Good luck to you.
[01:24:52]  No social service follow-up in many cases.
[01:24:55]  And so the person cycles back in, but the hospital, because they didn't admit them, they don't get punished for that stuff, too.
[01:25:01]  Julie, Lake Katrine, New York.
[01:25:03]  Good morning.
[01:25:05]  Good morning.
[01:25:05]  I want to share that.
[01:25:08]  Sorry.
[01:25:09]  The story of my son.
[01:25:13]  At 16, he attempted suicide in front of me.
[01:25:16]  He was released three hours later.
[01:25:20]  He's fine.
[01:25:22]  19, he attempted it again.
[01:25:25]  He was in the hospital three days, given meds, declined that declined therapy.
[01:25:30]  Said he declined 21 to 26 into a deep state of psychosis.
[01:25:34]  At 25, hospitalized for a week and a half.
[01:25:38]  I asked specifically if he was schizophrenic, I was told, oh, it's a fine line between that and bipolar.
[01:25:43]  He's great.
[01:25:44]  You're never going to have a problem with him.
[01:25:46]  A year later, he gets the life of my husband.
[01:25:53]  He's now in the system.
[01:25:55]  He's in the system.
[01:25:57]  He's gotten treatment.
[01:25:59]  It's the only way I could get him treatment.
[01:26:00]  Not that I got him treatment, but it's the only way he got treatment.
[01:26:04]  He's made almost a full recovery.
[01:26:06]  He's doing amazingly well.
[01:26:08]  The point of all this is: had he received treatment, had my husband not been able to step in front of him and get him treatment, none of this would have happened.
[01:26:19]  We need staffed, affordable, safe, clean, supportive housing.
[01:26:25]  I agree.
[01:26:26]  We need more providers that are trained in how to treat serious mental illness.
[01:26:30]  And we need a way for the caregivers to step in front of them when they are in a deep state of psychosis and temporarily control their medicinal decision making until they're stabilized and then put it back in their hands.
[01:26:44]  And I'm sorry, I got emotional.
[01:26:46]  Thank you for sharing that, Julie.
[01:26:48]  It's a powerful story, and it's exactly what we're talking about here in the situation.
[01:26:52]  How many suicide attempts did it take to Julie's son before they finally said he's going to get treatment?
[01:26:56]  And notice you said, you know, the temporarily medication, this isn't forcing someone lifetime.
[01:27:01]  But in other circumstances, would we give if a person has a heart attack with a paramedic, say, well, we can either give him CPR, but he can't give us permission right now, so we're going to wait until he wakes up.
[01:27:10]  This is how bad it is in this nation.
[01:27:12]  There are millions of stories like hers out there.
[01:27:15]  But I tell people, if you think about writing a letter to your congressman or somebody's chairman, I said, the letter you don't write is a letter they don't read.
[01:27:22]  And nowadays, you can't just call someone else's congressional office because they'll send you somewhere else.
[01:27:26]  So you have to write a letter to them.
[01:27:27]  But we need a nation of people doing this.
[01:27:29]  There are some amazing organizations.
[01:27:31]  National Shattering Silence Coalition, led by Ann Corcoran out of Massachusetts.
[01:27:36]  They're fighting these things in Massachusetts.
[01:27:38]  Treatment Advocacy Center, Lisa Daly, a profoundly good program to speak up there.
[01:27:43]  The Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance is another great organization, schizophrenia policy action network.
[01:27:51]  And if people need this information, my website, which is drtimmurphy.com, drtimmurphy.com, read the articles on this that I presented in terms of the cost of schizophrenia and psychosis, how we can make America mentally healthy again, this polling information.
[01:28:06]  People read that, but we need people to be organized and speak up and tell your stories to members of Congress and your state level too of how painful all this is.
[01:28:15]  In Iowa City, Iowa, Leslie, you're on with Tim Murphy.
[01:28:19]  Go ahead.
[01:28:21]  Good morning, Dr. Tim Murphy.
[01:28:22]  Thank you so much for appearing on C-SPAN to speak to this issue.
[01:28:26]  Thank you also for the shout out to the Treatment Advocacy Center for whom I work.
[01:28:31]  For families out there who are interested or anyone interested in learning more about how to advocate for solutions, I'm going to highlight that we teach something called the advocacy boot camp for families who have been struggling trying to help their loved ones and they want to get involved in advocacy and they want to know how to advocate, where to start, who to talk to.
[01:28:54]  Reach us at www.tac.org and we are happy to provide you with some education and guidance for sharing some of the solutions like assisted outpatient treatment, first episode programs, and a full continuum of care.
[01:29:09]  Thanks to the caller earlier who mentioned that we need to be funding housing for the small percentage of people that really need it on a 24-7 basis in order to stay healthy and adherent to medication.
[01:29:22]  My question is, would you talk about more of the solutions?
[01:29:27]  Sure.
[01:29:27]  Let's look at the housing issue, for example.
[01:29:30]  There was a move for a while to say, well, we're just going to do housing and just provide apartments for someone.
[01:29:36]  I visited a program in Monterey, California that had small apartment buildings.
[01:29:40]  They were just a few stories and had maybe 20 folks in them.
[01:29:43]  And there's a difference between those that say, we're just going to have housing for you, versus those who have someone at the front desk, maybe a social worker or nurse, who say, Joe, did you take your medication today?
[01:29:51]  Come on, you got to do that.
[01:29:53]  And get them little jobs here.
[01:29:54]  Your job is to do them janitorial work here or work at the local coffee shop.
[01:29:58]  Giving people meaningful work, treating them decently like human beings makes a big difference here too.
[01:30:03]  Another change that needs to work on is quite frankly the HIPAA laws.
[01:30:06]  When someone comes in, for example, a suicide event or their event in an emergency room, they say, literally, don't call my mom and dad because they work for the FBI and they're the ones that did these things to me.
[01:30:16]  Don't let them know.
[01:30:18]  Well, what if that provider in the emergency room says, I know your mom and dad, I go to church with them.
[01:30:23]  Yes, I am going to call them.
[01:30:24]  Well, under HIPAA laws, I can't do that.
[01:30:26]  And so a person says, I'm not going to kill myself.
[01:30:29]  They're out of the hospital at two in the morning on their own.
[01:30:31]  Why do we do that?
[01:30:32]  Why do we not have situations where a hospital can say, I got your son here, can't really say much any ill.
[01:30:37]  Is there any medication we need to know that they're on?
[01:30:40]  Because you can't be switching medications because it can cause toxic effects or as they're switching medications.
[01:30:46]  I mean, look at the sad situation with Nick Reiner, who is accused of stabbing his parents, switching medications.
[01:30:52]  Famously, he was at a party and they said he was violent and aggressive with his parents, with Conan O'Brien's party.
[01:30:58]  Well, should he have been hospitalized?
[01:31:01]  Yeah.
[01:31:02]  What happened?
[01:31:03]  The deaths of his parents.
[01:31:04]  So we protected his rights to be sick, and two people are dead.
[01:31:09]  Well, speaking of medications, this is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy was speaking on Monday about the overuse of specifically antidepressants and psychiatric drugs.
[01:31:23]  Here he is.
[01:31:25]  The United States does not just face a mental health crisis.
[01:31:28]  We face a dependency crisis driven by over-medicalization.
[01:31:34]  The data is clear.
[01:31:35]  One in six American adults takes an antidepressant.
[01:31:39]  One in ten children are on prescription medication for their mental health.
[01:31:45]  30% of college students report using psychiatric medications in the past year.
[01:31:51]  And in nursing homes, more than half of the residents are on prescribed antidepressants.
[01:31:58]  That's not a marginal issue.
[01:32:00]  This is a system-level pattern.
[01:32:03]  Too many patients begin treatment without a clear understanding of the risks and how long they will stay on these drugs or how to come off of them.
[01:32:13]  And that's not informed consent.

=== Over-Medicated Society (13:00) ===

[01:32:16]  We are going to fix it.
[01:32:17]  Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default.
[01:32:25]  We will treat them as one option, used when appropriate, with full transparency, and with a clear path off when they are no longer effective.
[01:32:36]  Tim Murphy, do you agree with that?
[01:32:38]  Yes, but here's some things about that.
[01:32:40]  Most psychiatric medications are prescribed by non-psychiatrists.
[01:32:44]  Think about what I just said.
[01:32:45]  If I said...
[01:32:46]  Are they allowed to do that?
[01:32:47]  Well, yeah, any physician.
[01:32:48]  Anybody can write that.
[01:32:49]  But if I said most brain surgeries done by people aren't brain surgeons, what's wrong with that?
[01:32:54]  So what happens is, are we over-medicating children?
[01:32:56]  Absolutely.
[01:32:57]  If a child has problems in school, give them a medication for attention deficit disorder.
[01:33:01]  Someone's down in the dumps, let's give an antidepressant.
[01:33:05]  You know what really works with antidepressants?
[01:33:07]  Exercise, healthy eating, good sleep.
[01:33:10]  And those who regularly practice religion and faith do far, far better.
[01:33:15]  By the way, that also extends to PTSD, depression, anxiety, et cetera.
[01:33:19]  But what happens is people, what's that old saying, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
[01:33:24]  But that's what happens.
[01:33:25]  We are an over-medicated society.
[01:33:27]  A lot of people in nursing homes are also put on antipsychotics just so they don't bother the staff too.
[01:33:32]  This is wrong.
[01:33:33]  Again, a place we need providers, places we need more training.
[01:33:36]  And even in my own field as a psychologist, most psychologists have very little, if any, training in dealing with schizophrenia and psychosis.
[01:33:42]  They'd rather deal with a family who's got some marriage problems with a child with some homework difficulties.
[01:33:48]  Yes, those are important.
[01:33:49]  But these are significant problems in America and we need that.
[01:33:52]  So I hope he continues that.
[01:33:54]  And by the way, Secretary Kennedy, I sure help you appoint an Assistant Secretary of Mental Health.
[01:33:57]  You have a lead person to deal with this.
[01:33:59]  Okay, you might be watching.
[01:34:00]  So I'll throw my resume in there.
[01:34:03]  Lorraine, Ithaca New York, you're on the air.
[01:34:07]  Yes, hello this morning.
[01:34:09]  Thank you, Dr. Murphy, for saying so many amazing right things about the needs of people with schizophrenia.
[01:34:18]  My questions is whether or not one of my questions is whether or not the public really understands the difference between serious and persistent mental illness and all the other mental illnesses that we talk about where people perhaps are somewhat over-medicated for short times.
[01:34:39]  You know, schizophrenia means you're on PET scans, they can see a deteriorating brain.
[01:34:45]  That is a very key thing.
[01:34:47]  I don't think people realize if you have a county of, let's say, 100,000 people, you'll have a percentage of people who have this serious type of stuff that needs these extra hot bodies of providers in these supportive living places that needs it occasionally to be kept in psychiatric institutions.
[01:35:10]  One of my biggest concerns is that privatization of even mental health clinics in some, so for instance, in a nearby county, they privatize their mental health.
[01:35:22]  Guess what?
[01:35:23]  That clinic went down.
[01:35:25]  Because guess what they found out?
[01:35:26]  It doesn't make a lot of money.
[01:35:28]  This is something that public has to, it has to be a public thing that we do.
[01:35:36]  We do it because we're going to save that, like you said, we're going to save the $360 billion on all the chronic things that flow from it.
[01:35:45]  And when you privatize the prisons for profit, I had no idea that Bob Barker Industry supplies all the prisons and made billions of dollars off of supplying the prison industry.
[01:35:58]  So we've got to make this a public event.
[01:36:01]  So anyway, I just want to say thank you for your advocacy on this, and I hope we do have hearings.
[01:36:06]  And I hope the public understands the difference between serious and persistent mental illness.
[01:36:11]  Got it.
[01:36:12]  So the serious mental illness is important, particularly schizophrenia, bipolar, other psychosis spectrum disorders.
[01:36:18]  When I was initially, when I was the chairman of Oversight Investigation, at that time the head of SAMHSA, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, their annual report didn't even mention schizophrenia.
[01:36:29]  And they saw mental illness as something that came when you were stressed too much.
[01:36:31]  So they had recommendations how to make a good fruit smoothie, how to do sing songs, and things like that.
[01:36:36]  It was absurd.
[01:36:38]  So we fought against that.
[01:36:39]  That's why we needed an assistant secretary who has some credentials here.
[01:36:42]  Schizophrenia is a brain disease.
[01:36:44]  Very important to understand that.
[01:36:45]  This is not something that comes because you had a bad day.
[01:36:48]  It could certainly be exacerbated by stresses, major stresses there, but we have to treat it as a brain disease and because of that, work more on funding within NIMH, et cetera.
[01:36:59]  An important point, cue the poll.
[01:37:02]  We asked our groups, would you be more likely to vote for someone if they made treatment of mental illness a top part of their priorities?
[01:37:12]  Of our national sample, 78% said yes.
[01:37:15]  Of those with a family member with mental illness, 97%.
[01:37:19]  Remember early on, I said if you get 51% in a poll, you like that?
[01:37:22]  I look at these numbers and I'd say to members of Congress, why aren't you fighting for this?
[01:37:26]  I should say, when I worked very hard on this, my last two terms in a Democrat district, I didn't even have an opponent because people saw that we need someone to do.
[01:37:34]  I must say, I want to see a champion there in Congress to work.
[01:37:37]  Okay, but this isn't happening.
[01:37:38]  You know, every time we have a violent national level event, there's people that the lawmakers will come out and say we have a mental health problem in the United States.
[01:37:47]  Nothing happens.
[01:37:48]  Nothing happens.
[01:37:48]  Because they don't know what to do.
[01:37:51]  So because it's so difficult to have continuity with Medicare and Medicaid, because it pays so little for mental illness, because we don't have enough providers, and this bed rule, they need to change that.
[01:38:01]  And if the Congressional Budget Office says, well, that's going to cost you $3 billion a year, it says, or we can pay $370 billion a year for poor care.
[01:38:08]  Make a decision.
[01:38:11]  There's a lot of things we need and this is it.
[01:38:13]  But what's going to happen is people need to speak up.
[01:38:16]  There's a lot of silence out there.
[01:38:18]  That's why that group National Shattering Silence Coalition is out there.
[01:38:20]  But there's also some cool programs where people, there's a woman by the name of Janet Hayes, New Orleans.
[01:38:26]  She has a program down there to help people.
[01:38:28]  So these are more of grassroots organizations doing this.
[01:38:31]  But the federal government and state governments need to be doing more to save lives and work on this.
[01:38:36]  Maxine and Maryland, mental health professional, go ahead.
[01:38:41]  Yes, hi.
[01:38:45]  Mr. Murphy?
[01:38:46]  Yes.
[01:38:47]  Let me ask you a question about, I was listening to you.
[01:38:51]  How do you find the right therapist if you need a little help?
[01:38:57]  So how do you get the right therapy?
[01:38:58]  I find that.
[01:39:00]  Go ahead.
[01:39:01]  How do you know which is the right therapies?
[01:39:03]  Is that what you're asking?
[01:39:04]  Because I have, well, myself, I'm having a problem now.
[01:39:08]  I don't, I feel that I'm not getting it, what I'm saying, that I don't really feel her.
[01:39:15]  And she's a nice person, but, you know, I just need your help.
[01:39:20]  So are you talking about counseling therapy or medication?
[01:39:24]  Well, I'm talking about that also.
[01:39:26]  That play a part with mental health.
[01:39:30]  And first of all, I don't think medication really helps that much.
[01:39:34]  What do you think?
[01:39:35]  Well, let's look at this.
[01:39:36]  It depends on the medication and what it's for.
[01:39:39]  There's one medication called Clausapine, which the FDA put all kinds of hoops that you had to jump through.
[01:39:44]  You had to have monthly blood tests and other things so you couldn't get a prescription.
[01:39:47]  We fought to change the rules on that so it made it easier.
[01:39:51]  But this is where we need more research with pharmaceutical companies, coming up with some other medications or some other promising drugs in the pipeline now.
[01:39:58]  But in your case, if you feel you're not getting better, two things, it's okay to bring that up to the counselor.
[01:40:04]  Many times we're intimidated when talking to a counselor and saying, do I really want to bring this up?
[01:40:08]  It says, yeah, it's okay.
[01:40:09]  Be honest with them and say, I feel like I'm not getting better.
[01:40:12]  Can we switch what we're doing or maybe refer to me to someone else?
[01:40:15]  And if it's medication, you ask for another opinion on that.
[01:40:19]  Now, if a doctor seems to dismiss and says, well, let's try this or let's increase the dosage or do something else.
[01:40:24]  It's okay to speak up.
[01:40:25]  When I was in the Navy and I worked at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Bethesda in a traumatic brain injury PTSD unit.
[01:40:31]  I joined while I was in Congress, but it was down there.
[01:40:35]  A wonderful, wonderful program there.
[01:40:37]  But many times we see a veteran come in with six or eight or ten different drugs.
[01:40:41]  And the first thing we have to do is get them off the drugs.
[01:40:43]  And some of the complaints we see with the veterans administrations, people go in there and when they present with problems, the first thing they'll get is medication and they get put in a waiting list for counseling.
[01:40:52]  It can be weeks or months before they get care with it.
[01:40:55]  I run a program now for veterans to provide care for them.
[01:40:58]  We do this pro bono for them.
[01:41:00]  But it is very much a matter of reviewing the medications and looking at that.
[01:41:04]  Just because something's prescribed doesn't mean that's the right thing, so ask questions.
[01:41:08]  And if the doctor says, well, then we'll give you this other drug too, and this other drug too, and this other drug.
[01:41:12]  I remember seeing a veteran Marine went to his house.
[01:41:16]  His mother called upon me and he ran out of the house when he got there.
[01:41:20]  He had probably 60, 80, 100 bottles of medication stacked on tables and other places.
[01:41:25]  And so we began to lay them out in order.
[01:41:26]  We found they started from the most mild to the most intensive antipsychotics, anti-seizure drugs, everything else like that.
[01:41:32]  What was really remarkable about that, the bottles weren't opened.
[01:41:36]  So many times he talked to the VA, they say, is it working?
[01:41:38]  No, it's not working.
[01:41:39]  I don't feel any better.
[01:41:39]  They just write him another prescription.
[01:41:41]  So maybe we ought to do some tests and find out you're really taking these drugs.
[01:41:44]  They can be helpful.
[01:41:46]  We need to do that.
[01:41:47]  But again, someone's got to work on them.
[01:41:48]  But please speak up and talk to your counselor about those issues.
[01:41:51]  I want to ask you about psychedelics, specifically ibogaine.
[01:41:55]  You know that President Trump recently signed an executive order to speed the review of psychedelics.
[01:42:01]  What do you think of that?
[01:42:02]  Do you think that they're useful?
[01:42:04]  Well, and also add to that list, psilocybin and LSD.
[01:42:07]  So, psilocybin is in the pipeline and is found with those with intractable depression.
[01:42:11]  Not everyone, those with appeared unresponsive to treatment depression, it can help someone with that.
[01:42:18]  The other ones, that's in the pipeline to be further researched, probably three years away.
[01:42:24]  And I don't want people thinking, well, if I just find, go down to Mexico and take some LSD, I'm going to be better.
[01:42:29]  No, it doesn't cure PTSD or some of these other treatments.
[01:42:33]  What it does do sometimes is relaxes the person to the point where they're more responsive to counseling.
[01:42:39]  In some of my patients, for example, who have taken some medications to do some ketamine, for example, sometimes they say, I feel great now.
[01:42:47]  I'm wonderful.
[01:42:48]  I don't need any more counseling.
[01:42:49]  He says, no, no, no.
[01:42:50]  We have to work on how you view the world, not just how you feel right now, because then they get dependent on this drug.
[01:42:55]  So it isn't just how they feel, it's how they think that has to change.
[01:42:58]  Carrie in Warsaw, Indiana, you're on the air.
[01:43:03]  Yes.
[01:43:05]  I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, been recovering for 39 years in October.
[01:43:12]  I've dealt with mental illness all my life.
[01:43:16]  And the thing that I found is that alcohol and drug addiction run hand in hand until there's more emphasis put on them being hooked together.
[01:43:32]  And because a lot of people that can't stay clean and sober are have a mental illness like bipolar or severe depression.
[01:43:42]  There's not enough studies being done to understand addiction and mental illness.
[01:43:50]  And a lot of people, I feel, that can't stay clean and sober.
[01:43:54]  It's because they're not comfortable and they're only skin and they're self-diagnosed or they're self-medicating themselves.
[01:44:06]  That's what happens to a lot with people with serious mental illness.
[01:44:10]  They'll self-medicate with alcohol, cannabis, other drugs, and of course it makes the situation worse.
[01:44:15]  And when people are using other drugs too, that greatly increases, if they're not in regular treatment, but using some of the substance, that greatly increases the risk for violence in their behavior too.
[01:44:25]  So watch out for that.
[01:44:26]  But hang in there with your substance abuse treatment and remain clean and sober, Carrie.
[01:44:33]  And Tim, you wrote a book called The Christ Cure, 10 Biblical Ways to Heal from Trauma, Tragedy, and PTSD.
[01:44:40]  Can you tell us about the role of faith in mental health?
[01:44:42]  The role of faith in mental health is extremely important.
[01:44:44]  We know that people who are religious, who are believers, who regularly practice, not just someone who believes in a cosmic consciousness, but regularly practice religion, the prognosis for their mental health improves greatly.
[01:44:56]  Unfortunately, most psychologists and psychiatrists have zero training in this.
[01:45:00]  My own Pennsylvania Psychological Association, the number of workshops and presentations they've had in the last five or ten years at conventions, the number of things that have come up in our monthly publication dealing with faith-based treating is zero.
[01:45:12]  Zero.
[01:45:13]  And most psychologists, psychiatrists, are agnostic or atheists.

=== Unfiltered Free Exchange (05:57) ===

[01:45:16]  Now, the problem with that is most people are not.
[01:45:18]  And when they go see a counselor, it says, you know, I feel bad about this.
[01:45:21]  I have these moral injuries of things I've done, or maybe it's a soldier who feels bad about things.
[01:45:26]  And the counselor is completely clueless to understand the role of faith.
[01:45:30]  So I wrote this book, to the book, called The Christ Cure, 10 Biblical Ways to Heal from Trauma, Tragedy, and PTSD.
[01:45:36]  It's stories of people with success in their lives.
[01:45:38]  I immersed in there the link between psychological practice, good science, and how faith and stories of faith and biblical stories can help people.
[01:45:47]  I want people to understand there's a lot of hope for them, even when you can't see it.
[01:45:50]  Hope is there.
[01:45:52]  Faith is a big part of that.
[01:45:54]  But when we don't engage in that, I think we're doing patients a short change.
[01:45:59]  So it's a matter of prayer, it's a matter of faith.
[01:46:02]  It's finding people who can know how to work with this.
[01:46:04]  So the book I wrote to help people both, I guess, for those who are broken and those who love them.
[01:46:11]  That's Tim Murphy, author, psychologist, and former U.S. Representative.
[01:46:15]  You can find him at drtimmurphy.com.
[01:46:18]  Thanks so much for coming in.
[01:46:20]  Thank you.
[01:46:20]  It's a pleasure being with you.
[01:46:22]  In about 30 minutes, a conversation with John Bolton, National Security Advisor during the first Trump administration.
[01:46:30]  We'll talk about the latest with Iran and other foreign policy topics.
[01:46:34]  But first, after the break, a discussion of the state of free speech in America with Greg Lukianov of the group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[01:46:43]  Stay with us.
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[01:50:29]  Washington Journal continues.
[01:50:32]  Welcome back to Washington Journal.
[01:50:34]  Just to let you know, in about 10 minutes, the House is going to have a very quick pro forma session.
[01:50:40]  So if you're interested in seeing that, you can watch it on C-SPAN 3.
[01:50:45]  That's at 9 a.m. Eastern in about 10 minutes.
[01:50:48]  Now, joining us to talk about free speech is the president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[01:50:55]  It's called FIRE.
[01:50:56]  He's also the co-author of The War on Words.
[01:50:59]  Greg Lukianov, welcome to the program.
[01:51:02]  Great to be back on.
[01:51:03]  So remind us about your organization, what the mission is and how it's funded.
[01:51:09]  So FHIR, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has been around since 1999.

=== Protected Speech Rights (15:48) ===

[01:51:14]  And initially, we only focused on free speech and academic freedom threats on college campuses.
[01:51:20]  But then in 2022, we decided we needed to expand well beyond campus.
[01:51:24]  We're now a national free speech organization dealing with issues all across the board, all across the country.
[01:51:32]  And unfortunately, business has been booming in the past several years.
[01:51:37]  We have more cases than we know what to do with.
[01:51:40]  And we are donor funded.
[01:51:43]  And what was happening in 1999 on college campuses that you felt that this organization was necessary?
[01:51:49]  Well, I didn't found the organization.
[01:51:50]  It was founded by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, but I joined as the first legal director in 2001.
[01:51:56]  But a lot of people do remember that there was the, I'd say the great age of political correctness on campuses from like 85 to 95, and that essentially this is when campuses that used to sort of venerate free speech started passing speech codes.
[01:52:13]  And there was this big fight for about 10 years, and everybody thought it won free speech won, that it was all over.
[01:52:20]  But unfortunately, when I started in 2001, a lot of the same speech codes that were passed in the heyday of political correctness in the 1980s were still on the books in campuses across the country.
[01:52:31]  So we spent years trying to tell people that actually it's worse on campus than you think it is.
[01:52:37]  And people only really started to notice after things got more intense again after, say, like 2014.
[01:52:42]  So explain what kind of speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
[01:52:47]  True threats are not protected, for example.
[01:52:50]  That's been much in the news.
[01:52:51]  But true threats are things that would make a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death.
[01:52:58]  It's basically like, I'm going to kill you, and saying you know where someone lives.
[01:53:02]  It's not just a vague idea that maybe someone's wishing you harm.
[01:53:09]  Incitement to imminent lawless action is not protected.
[01:53:13]  And that's kind of like, let's go burn down the mayor's office in a situation where you're likely to burn down the mayor's office.
[01:53:18]  Defamation, you know, making a factual claim that someone has committed a crime, for example, saying that I know for a fact that you're a pedophile and these are the details, particularly when you know you're lying, is pretty much always defamation.
[01:53:35]  Obscenity, but that's defined as it's a convoluted explanation, but like extremely hardcore pornography is not protected the same way other forms of speech are protected.
[01:53:51]  Which is not necessarily defined.
[01:53:52]  It's just...
[01:53:54]  What did the Supreme Court justice say?
[01:53:55]  I'll know it when I see it.
[01:53:56]  I'll know that's Potter Stewart.
[01:53:57]  Yeah, it's purion interest, a word that you don't use otherwise.
[01:54:01]  It's contemporary community standards.
[01:54:04]  So what actually counts as unprotected obscenity has shrunk a lot over the years, but it is still a category of unprotected speech.
[01:54:12]  That's actually the one that I think the Supreme Court gets wrong.
[01:54:14]  I believe that essentially if it's sexual content and you're 18 or over, it should be protected.
[01:54:21]  Let me, going back to this concept of hate speech and political rhetoric, I want to play you White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt.
[01:54:34]  In light of the attempted shooting at the White House correspondents dinner, she was blaming essentially rhetoric, anti-Trump rhetoric on that shooting.
[01:54:46]  And here she is, and then I'll have you respond to it.
[01:54:48]  Sure, sure.
[01:54:49]  This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, yes, by elected members of the Democrat Party and even some in the media.
[01:55:01]  This hateful, inconstant, and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump day after day after day for 11 years has helped legitimize this violence and bring us to this dark moment.
[01:55:14]  Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.
[01:55:26]  The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple people hurt and killed, and it almost did so again this weekend.
[01:55:38]  When you read the manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves, how different is the rhetoric from this almost assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forums every single day?
[01:55:51]  The answer, if you're being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all.
[01:55:56]  Much of the manifesto of the would-be assassin is indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many.
[01:56:04]  What do you think?
[01:56:05]  She said that hateful, violent rhetoric is legitimizing the violence, and many people have been hurt by it, and the president could have been hurt as well.
[01:56:14]  So Carolyn Levitt has every right to say that we think the rhetoric is at a fever pitch or that we think that ultimately people should be more thoughtful in the way they talk about things.
[01:56:27]  The White House can say that, and that's okay.
[01:56:29]  But the problem here is that, and I recently wrote something on my Substack called The Eternally Radical Idea, where I just listed all the different unconstitutional actions this administration has taken against freedom of speech, particularly freedom of the press, whether it's through the FCC or through lawsuits or through other forms of action.
[01:56:50]  And if Carolyn Levitt was just criticizing the tenor of the way we argue today, that's fine.
[01:56:56]  You can agree or disagree with her.
[01:56:57]  But this administration has consistently gone after the press, it's consistently gone after its enemies every time they see an opening.
[01:57:05]  And, you know, First Amendment be damned in many cases.
[01:57:08]  If you've got a question for Greg Lukianov on the First Amendment on free speech, you can give us a call now.
[01:57:15]  The lines are bipartisan.
[01:57:16]  Democrats are on 202-748-8000.
[01:57:18]  Republicans 202-748-8001.
[01:57:22]  And Independents 202-748-8002.
[01:57:25]  You mentioned threats not being a form of protected speech.
[01:57:30]  This brings us to the case against former FBI director James Comey.
[01:57:34]  He posted an image of seashells on the beach that spelled out 8647.
[01:57:41]  The Justice Department has indicted him for threatening to kill the president.
[01:57:47]  Yeah.
[01:57:47]  Your take?
[01:57:48]  I think that's nuts.
[01:57:50]  Why?
[01:57:50]  Because the idea that seeing seashells arranged at saying 8647 would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death doesn't barely passes the laugh test.
[01:58:04]  And the idea that you would actually arrest someone for that is an escalation against his enemies that is very predictable from Trump.
[01:58:14]  But I do not believe this is anywhere near a true threat.
[01:58:18]  And by the way, 86, people are like, well, that means kill.
[01:58:21]  It doesn't.
[01:58:22]  I mean, in some old cartoons, I remember people saying, 86 them, you know.
[01:58:26]  But 86 mostly, I think it came originally from restaurants.
[01:58:29]  It's saying like 86 the mayo on this.
[01:58:31]  I used to work in restaurants too, and yes, you actually did say that kind of stuff.
[01:58:34]  So the idea that this is a credible threat is nonsensical.
[01:58:39]  Isn't there a different standard, though, for threats against the president than against you and me?
[01:58:45]  You still have to be able to show that you're talking about something that is sincere, something that basically like this is part of some kind of plan or serious attempt to get someone killed.
[01:58:56]  There are cases, there are Supreme Court cases that said, I believe, you know, like if I ever got a gun, the first thing I'd do would be shoot LBJ, is one famous case.
[01:59:06]  That was found to be entirely protected.
[01:59:09]  And I think that's much more explicit than someone seeing seashells on the beach that say 8647.
[01:59:14]  Now, concerning the press, I want to ask you about the Jimmy Kimmel issue.
[01:59:19]  There's been two issues now.
[01:59:20]  There was the comments he made following the shooting death of Charlie Kirk.
[01:59:27]  And then recently before the White House correspondence dinner about First Lady Melania Trump, the FCC has ordered a review of the license for ABC.
[01:59:38]  What's your reaction to that?
[01:59:40]  Brendan Carr's FCC has been a disgrace when it comes to freedom of speech.
[01:59:46]  Brendan Carr used to be someone who would say great things about freedom of speech before he was FCC commissioner.
[01:59:53]  And he would talk about how the FCC should not be weaponized to punish First Amendment protected speech.
[01:59:59]  But since he's been in charge, the abuse of the FCC's power has been rampant.
[02:00:05]  So the Jimmy Kimmel, the first Jimmy Kimmel investigation, which was again in a situation where Charlie Kirk was murdered, it was horrifying.
[02:00:14]  But unfortunately, the administration took advantage of that tragedy to go after their political enemies.
[02:00:20]  We saw dozens of cases of people getting in trouble across the country for saying things that were, in some cases, gross about basically saying Charlie Kirk had it coming, or people saying things as tame as my opinion of Charlie Kirk is that I disagreed with him on any number of things.
[02:00:37]  And they went after Jimmy Kimmel for making a joke related to what he saw as the scrambling of the administration to prove that, I think as Jimmy Kimmel put it, that the shooter wasn't actually conservative.
[02:00:53]  And that is absolutely protected speech.
[02:00:56]  But Brendan Carr was on the record saying we can either do this the hard way or the easy way, clearly threatening FCC attacks.
[02:01:04]  Meanwhile, Trump never, he must be the most frustrating client in the world because you could sometimes get away with pretextual punishments on speech as long as you don't actually say, by the way, I'm going after you for your speech.
[02:01:18]  Trump has been incredibly clear time and time again that the latest investigation of Jimmy Kimmel and of Disney broadcast, he's been very clear that this is about what you said, which of course is going to lead to them losing in court if this comes to court.
[02:01:36]  Let's talk to callers.
[02:01:38]  We'll start with James Madison, Wisconsin, Independent.
[02:01:40]  Good morning, James.
[02:01:43]  Thanks for taking my call.
[02:01:45]  I had a question when you played the thing with Caroline Levitt saying that the left is responsible for this and that.
[02:01:53]  But if people remember, Vice President, ex-vice president Dick Cheney went on national TV and stated that Trump is a threat to democracy.
[02:02:07]  This is a Republican ex-vice president.
[02:02:10]  This isn't the left.
[02:02:12]  And if free speech is protected, I had a question.
[02:02:18]  All the people that were chanting, hang pence, hang Pence, would that be a considerate protected speech?
[02:02:28]  What do you think, Greg?
[02:02:29]  When it comes to hang pence in a situation where you might actually be able to hang pence, that's arguably incitement.
[02:02:35]  But certainly in a lot of cases, those same people who were chouting hang pence were also guilty of other offenses.
[02:02:42]  So yeah, when you have a situation where something's possible or even likely to happen and you're actually saying, let's go do that thing, then you're really looking at something that's a lot more like Brandenburg incitement and might not be protected.
[02:02:54]  There's something called slap lawsuits.
[02:02:57]  What are those?
[02:02:58]  Slap lawsuits are strategic litigation against public participation, not necessarily like the most memorable name.
[02:03:04]  We've got to work on that.
[02:03:06]  But slap legislation is fantastic because what it does is if you file a frivolous, if I'm a jillionaire and someone says something hurdy about me and I'm like, you know what?
[02:03:18]  I'm not going to win this lawsuit, but if I file this lawsuit against this person, that's going to chill speech.
[02:03:24]  They're going to think twice about saying something against me again.
[02:03:27]  It's an expedited way rather than that person having to spend a ton of money to get that shot down in court.
[02:03:34]  So you're not actually, so that jillionaire cannot chill everyone else's speech.
[02:03:38]  Slap lawsuits are things that FIRE very much opposes.
[02:03:42]  And the administration, the Trump administration in particular, uses slap lawsuits all the time.
[02:03:48]  Like what?
[02:03:49]  I'd say probably like one of the most dramatic examples was the Wall Street Journal lawsuit, where essentially they published a picture that by all accounts was drawn by President Trump and sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
[02:04:05]  And Trump sued, saying that that's defamatory to have said that, when truth is an absolute defense to defamation.
[02:04:14]  So that's a slap lawsuit.
[02:04:16]  That's when someone engaged in clearly protected speech, but a powerful person is just trying to make sure that they think twice.
[02:04:23]  So in that case, he sues Rupert Murdoch, which is another powerful person.
[02:04:27]  Yeah.
[02:04:28]  But yes, I understand your point because, you know, there's a case, for instance, Kash Patel, FBI director, suing The Atlantic about their reporting.
[02:04:37]  Yeah, and that's one of the big ones in the news at the moment.
[02:04:41]  And what's amazing watching this develop on social media is that you have people saying, well, maybe this time it really is defamation.
[02:04:48]  And I'm like, after you've looked at three dozen of these kind of cases where the claim that's defamation is just nonsense, you have a right to be pretty skeptical anytime someone in this administration makes those allegations again.
[02:05:01]  All right.
[02:05:01]  We'll talk to Ken on the Republican line in New York.
[02:05:04]  Good morning, Ken.
[02:05:06]  Good morning.
[02:05:06]  How are you?
[02:05:07]  Good.
[02:05:09]  Yes.
[02:05:10]  The guy you're talking to right there, I got a question for him.
[02:05:13]  Bring it.
[02:05:14]  You know, if you don't mind.
[02:05:18]  Now, I know I've been sitting here listening to you, and all you do is talk about Trump.
[02:05:24]  Trump is this, Trump and that.
[02:05:26]  But I've never heard you say anything about what's going on in Chicago, what's going on in Minnesota, all the lets that are frauding.
[02:05:38]  I mean, the people who are talking about speech, Ken.
[02:05:41]  We're talking about free speech.
[02:05:42]  So is there some speech issues that you want to talk about?
[02:05:47]  Yeah, 8647 on the details.
[02:05:53]  Why would somebody put that up?
[02:05:56]  Why would he put that up if he didn't mean it?
[02:06:00]  If he didn't mean to threaten the life of the president, you mean, Ken?
[02:06:04]  Yeah.
[02:06:04]  Okay, let's get an answer for you.
[02:06:08]  Okay, so Ken, this is, and all of my Republican friends out there.
[02:06:13]  Nobody has done more to take on censorship from the left than me and fire.
[02:06:18]  We take it on all the time.
[02:06:21]  And I'm tired of the whatabout-ism as a way of not facing what your Republican president is currently doing against freedom of speech.
[02:06:29]  Now, your argument assumes the conclusion that 86 means kill as opposed to get rid of.
[02:06:36]  I'm used to 86 meaning get rid of and saying get rid of the current president to say like this person should no longer be in office is 100% protected speech.
[02:06:47]  And I believe, to be clear, I believe the administration even knows that.
[02:06:52]  And watching a lot of people line up to say, oh, this is definitely a threat on the president, try to be just as critical of your own side as you are of the other side sometimes.

=== First Amendment Debate (09:54) ===

[02:07:02]  And Robert is calling from Washington, D.C., Independent.
[02:07:05]  Hi, Robert.
[02:07:07]  Thank you for taking a call.
[02:07:09]  You had to say, you guys at C-SPRAG were the first casualty of Donald Trump's anti-speech movement.
[02:07:17]  Do you remember at the debate between Biden and Trump and one of your moderators from the Washington Journal, Mr. Scully?
[02:07:29]  And right after whatever, I don't know what happened, but the next day, I never heard of that basket since that time.
[02:07:37]  And what happened to Mr. Scully?
[02:07:39]  And I hope he's listening because he's one of the best moderators on the Washington Journal.
[02:07:44]  And I really miss that guy.
[02:07:46]  All right, Robert.
[02:07:47]  Let's talk to Maude in Toledo, Ohio.
[02:07:49]  Democrat, you're on the air.
[02:07:52]  Yes, I'd like to say I think that first you have the hostility, then you have the negative rhetoric, not the other way around.
[02:07:59]  When the Jews were being herded into the gas chamber, they were assured that it was a shower.
[02:08:04]  This assured peaceful assent to the wishes of their murderers.
[02:08:09]  I really think that you've got the cart before the horse.
[02:08:13]  The hostility is there first.
[02:08:15]  Wrinkles do not cause old age.
[02:08:17]  The older we get, the more wrinkled we become.
[02:08:19]  The more hostility, the worse the rhetoric.
[02:08:22]  The one is not causing the hostility.
[02:08:25]  So, and I think, in my opinion, the immigrants are the new Jews, trans people are the new homosexuals, and the homeless are the new Roma.
[02:08:36]  What do you think, Greg, about the hostility being the cause of the more violent rhetoric that you're hearing on the left specifically?
[02:08:45]  Yeah, no, I think that this is, it's kind of remarkable for me to watch the right sort of adopt language that was developed by the left on college campuses.
[02:08:54]  So, for example, like the really academic, awful term, to be frank, is called stochastic terrorism.
[02:09:00]  That essentially, like, if you say really negative things, it's going to have some kind of violent reaction.
[02:09:06]  So, therefore, maybe you can go after speech that we used to think of as protected because somehow down the line, it's harmful.
[02:09:14]  The right has entirely adopted this language as well.
[02:09:17]  And we've been through this before.
[02:09:20]  The Supreme Court used to have something called the bad tendency test for several years there, that essentially was saying that if you can make the argument that what I just said might somewhere down the line have a bad tendency to lead to bad results of some kind, then it isn't protected.
[02:09:37]  But here's what we found out pretty quick.
[02:09:38]  That means nothing is protected at all.
[02:09:41]  So we're going back in time to a darker period for freedom of speech on both right and left, justifying censorship that is rightfully banned by the First Amendment, but not even understanding our history well enough to know that we're doing that.
[02:09:57]  We've got a question for you from Sally Sue about AI.
[02:10:00]  And she says, as AI begins to moderate more of our online speech, how do we ensure First Amendment principles are baked into the algorithms rather than just corporate safety guidelines?
[02:10:12]  What an absolutely wonderful question.
[02:10:14]  I think about AI all the time, and I think everybody should be thinking about it as well.
[02:10:19]  And my position is that we need to be thinking about how we actually come to know what's true and how we actually better test the entire corpus of human knowledge and how we make sure that truth is not something that power is able to take over, that it's not hyper-centralized, that there are multiple nodes looking into it at the same time.
[02:10:39]  I think that you can, I think that you can turn AI into a technology for freedom and make sure it stays that way.
[02:10:47]  But one thing that's important is competition.
[02:10:49]  Make sure that power can't control it.
[02:10:51]  Make sure that ridiculous laws that will shift AI in the direction of what some people in power wish truth would be.
[02:10:58]  This is one of the reasons why we very much agree with XAI's lawsuit against algorithmic discrimination laws in Colorado.
[02:11:05]  So I think you were asking one of the most important questions of the day.
[02:11:09]  And I am working very hard to make sure that FHIR has a deeper bench and a larger tech practice so we can make the, so we can fight for the continuing existence of free speech and truth.
[02:11:20]  On the independent line, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Mark, you're on with Greg Lukianov.
[02:11:26]  Oh, good morning.
[02:11:28]  Thank you for C-SPAN, and thank you to the guest for defending free speech.
[02:11:33]  I actually was not going to call in on this because he's doing such a good job of explaining it and defending it.
[02:11:39]  But I got to tell you, Mimi, a moment ago, you really triggered me when some guy called and tried to bring up Steve Scully and how C-SPAN was one of the, and Steve Scully were one of the earliest victims of Trump attacking media and hurting media people.
[02:12:00]  And you kind of like brushed it off and said, okay, thanks, goodbye.
[02:12:03]  And never mind.
[02:12:03]  So, Mark, all that happened before I got here, and I really have nothing to say about that.
[02:12:10]  You don't have to discuss it.
[02:12:11]  You should let the guest discuss it.
[02:12:13]  Okay.
[02:12:14]  And tell us what he thought about that situation.
[02:12:16]  Okay.
[02:12:17]  Go ahead, Greg.
[02:12:18]  I don't know a lot about it.
[02:12:19]  He doesn't know about it.
[02:12:20]  Sorry about that, Mark.
[02:12:21]  Patricia, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Republican, you're on the air.
[02:12:26]  Yeah, I want to agree with that last caller.
[02:12:31]  Mimi, when somebody says something that you don't like, you cut them off and don't let them on you talk about it.
[02:12:40]  Do you have something for Greg Lukianov?
[02:12:42]  He's our guest right now.
[02:12:43]  Yeah, see?
[02:12:44]  You're doing it again.
[02:12:45]  And also, Ricky, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Independent, do you have a question for our guest?
[02:12:53]  Yes, ma'am.
[02:12:54]  Good morning to both of y'all.
[02:12:56]  My question is kind of different with free speech on the First Amendment.
[02:13:01]  I want to ask the guest, what is the difference between, like, you know, there's a former NBA player, Jalen Ivey, mentioned something about, you know, Pride Month against the LGBTQ community.
[02:13:16]  Now he was, you know, cut from the team and pretty much blackballed.
[02:13:21]  I just want to ask, like, what is the difference between, you know, if someone working in the private industry, if they say something, then they automatically get terminated and their livelihood is getting taken away from them, you know?
[02:13:38]  I know that's in between, you know, hateful speech, but if they make the speech against something they like disagree with, they get punished about it.
[02:13:48]  I just want to find out in that aspect.
[02:13:50]  So thank you very much, and I enjoy y'all day.
[02:13:54]  Excellent question.
[02:13:55]  And by the way, the headquarters of FHIR is actually in Philadelphia, so it's nice to hear from you.
[02:13:59]  So private employers are not bound by the First Amendment.
[02:14:03]  They can fire you for your opinion, even if it would be protected in other circumstances.
[02:14:09]  But I did write a whole book with the great Ricky Schlott called Canceling of the American Mind, where I try to make an argument that we shouldn't be always so technical about like the idea that, yeah, sure, I can fire someone for their speech, but employers should ask, but should I?
[02:14:26]  Because here's my caution.
[02:14:29]  Do you want to live in a country where you can have a job or an opinion, but not both?
[02:14:36]  And I think that we've been at different times in our history, particularly maybe 2020, 2021, at a moment where it did kind of seem like if you disagree with a lot of employees at your work on something of a hot-button political issue, your career might be over.
[02:14:53]  And I don't think that's very healthy for democracy.
[02:14:55]  I want the corporation to have the right to fire you, but I do want people to be a little more reflexive before they go right to getting rid of someone because they don't like what they have to say.
[02:15:05]  Jody, Independent, Seminole, Florida.
[02:15:08]  Good morning.
[02:15:10]  Yes, hello.
[02:15:12]  My question for your guest is, clearly he's coming from a Democratic view.
[02:15:18]  So I think it's kind of ironic that, you know, they're crying free speech now when all through 2020, 21, 22, anybody questioning, let's say, COVID was completely shut down, blacklisted.
[02:15:36]  Mark Zuckerberg, forgive me, I don't remember if it was Congress or Senate, went on and said he testified that the Biden administration reached out to him and was telling him to shut these accounts down.
[02:15:52]  Okay, let's get a response.
[02:15:54]  Okay.
[02:15:55]  So this is what's called whataboutism.
[02:15:57]  It's when, and this is something that the right has been doing this entire time, saying, where were you when this other thing was happening that was also bad for free speech?
[02:16:07]  Well, I'm here to tell you, FHIR has always been consistent on this.
[02:16:11]  We actually fought against what's called jawboning by the Biden administration, where they were pressuring social media companies to punish people for speech.
[02:16:21]  We've been leading the charge on that.
[02:16:23]  We've been recommending legislation on that.
[02:16:27]  We actually lamented the fact that Zuckerberg didn't join the lawsuit because by the way, they would have won that case at the Supreme Court if Zuckerberg or anybody else in social media had actually decided to fight.
[02:16:39]  They didn't get standing partially because a lot of people in social media weren't willing to fight.
[02:16:44]  But please stop it with the whataboutism.
[02:16:46]  FHIR is the most consistent free speech organization in the country.
[02:16:50]  But because someone did something bad in the past doesn't mean someone isn't doing something bad now.

=== Bipartisanship Challenges (02:09) ===

[02:16:57]  That's Greg Lukianov.
[02:16:58]  He is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[02:17:03]  He is co-author of the book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
[02:17:09]  You can find his organization at thefire.org.
[02:17:12]  Greg, thanks so much for joining us.
[02:17:14]  Thanks for having me.
[02:17:15]  Coming up next, former National Security Advisor John Bolton on the latest on the Iran war and other foreign policy challenges facing the administration.
[02:17:24]  We'll be right back.
[02:17:29]  Friday, on C-SPAN Ceasefire, former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschell and former Vice Chair of the Senate Republican Conference Roy Blunt join our host Dasha Burns for a conversation about whether bipartisanship is still possible in Washington amid the various challenges facing the country, such as the ongoing Iran war and concerns about the economy.
[02:17:50]  Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
[02:18:04]  American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
[02:18:11]  As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, join American History TV for our series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of the American story.
[02:18:22]  This weekend at 11 p.m. Eastern, we explore the role of the Cherokees in the American Revolution and talk about how combatants in conflict view the issue of slavery.
[02:18:31]  And at 8 p.m. Eastern, we'll show you a college lecture on the portrayal of immigrants in the video game Grand Theft Auto.
[02:18:37]  And then at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, the grandson of Bess Truman discusses the legacy of America's 33rd First Lady, exploring the American story.
[02:18:46]  Watch American History TV.
[02:18:47]  Saturday is on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/slash history.
[02:18:59]  Washington Journal continues.
[02:19:02]  Welcome back to Washington Journal.
[02:19:03]  We're joined now by John Bolton.

=== Regime Change Strategy (16:13) ===

[02:19:06]  He is former National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration, also former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.
[02:19:14]  Ambassador Bolton, welcome to the program.
[02:19:18]  Well, glad to be with you.
[02:19:19]  Thanks for having me.
[02:19:20]  Let's start with Iran.
[02:19:21]  The U.S. and Iran are reportedly closing in on what's being reported as a one-page memorandum to end the war.
[02:19:31]  What's your view of how that's going?
[02:19:34]  Well, I think it's a one-page memorandum that may establish a framework for discussions.
[02:19:41]  And I'm very dubious, even if we get a report today that Iran accepts it.
[02:19:46]  Very dubious.
[02:19:47]  This is really a satisfactory answer here.
[02:19:51]  I think that we made a mistake in giving a ceasefire to Iran several weeks ago.
[02:19:57]  I think the way to deal with the multiple threats that this regime poses is to use force and work with the opposition inside Iran ultimately to replace the regime because I think the word of the Ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard is essentially worthless.
[02:20:17]  So this is what Axios is reporting is in that proposed memorandum of understanding, a 15-year moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment.
[02:20:27]  The U.S. must lift sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian assets, and then each side ends the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
[02:20:34]  I want to ask you about that, the billions that would be released to Iran.
[02:20:39]  I'm assuming you would think that that's a mistake.
[02:20:42]  However, they probably won't make a deal without something like that.
[02:20:47]  Well, you know, this is deja vu all over again, as the saying goes.
[02:20:52]  This is like Obama's nuclear deal in 2015 that Trump rightly withdrew from in 2018 and said he would never go back into.
[02:21:00]  We give them billions of dollars of frozen assets.
[02:21:03]  We give up the sanctions.
[02:21:04]  We give up the blockade.
[02:21:06]  And they say, well, for 12 years, we promise not to enrich.
[02:21:09]  And there are obviously other specifics as well.
[02:21:13]  That assumes we can verify with 100% certainty that they're not enriching somewhere in Iran.
[02:21:21]  Or, alternatively, that they don't make a contract with their friends in Pyongyang to have North Korea do contract enrichment for them under a mountain in that country.
[02:21:33]  Nor, as I understand this one-pager, does it say anything about the plutonium that's found in the spent nuclear fuel at the Bushir reactor on the Gulf Coast, which,
[02:21:47]  according to Russian estimates and calculations based on IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency data, nuclear nonproliferation expert Henry Sikowski calculates would be enough plutonium in the spent fuel for 200 nuclear weapons.
[02:22:04]  No mention of that.
[02:22:06]  So I think this is a deal that smacks of political concern here in America with rising gasoline prices.
[02:22:15]  I understand that.
[02:22:16]  But that reality was, that potential was there before the war started, and the administration should have calculated it.
[02:22:23]  So just to be clear, you believe that no deal with Iran is necessary or possible?
[02:22:30]  Look, I think the problem is the regime.
[02:22:33]  I think the problem has been the regime for 47 years.
[02:22:36]  They want hegemony within Islam.
[02:22:39]  They want dominance in the Middle East.
[02:22:41]  They've been chanting death to Israel and death to the United States for 47 years.
[02:22:46]  They've made numerous promises going all the way back to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which they violated consistently.
[02:22:56]  And I think every time we make one of these deals, people sigh and say, oh, well, that's problem relieved.
[02:23:01]  In fact, it's not.
[02:23:02]  It's just kicking the can down the road.
[02:23:04]  If we let the regime get up from the situation they're in now, allow free export of their oil and gas, it is simply a matter of time before they rebuild the nuclear program, rebuild their terrorist networks, recreate the instruments of repression against the Iranian people, and always with the possibility of closing the Strait of Hormuz.
[02:23:28]  And regarding a closing of the Strait, you said that the Trump administration should have been better prepared for that.
[02:23:37]  I guess everybody would have known that, or at least Iran watchers would have known that that's their one point of strategic advantage is to close that strait.
[02:23:47]  Are you saying that the Trump administration didn't know?
[02:23:51]  No, well, I think the Department of Defense certainly knew, and honestly, anybody who can look at a map should have been able to figure out that this was an issue.
[02:24:00]  This was a question discussed during Trump's first term.
[02:24:04]  I was a favor of regime change in Iran back then, and the various things that Iran could do, closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking the Gulf Arab states, going after their oil infrastructure, has been plain to everyone for decades.
[02:24:20]  So then, how should the administration have been better prepared for that, in your opinion?
[02:24:25]  Well, they should have had the Department of Defense worried about how to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, really how to keep the entire Gulf open to maritime commerce.
[02:24:36]  Instead, for the first several weeks of the war, Iran was still sending out tankers with petroleum, presumably earning dollars on the international market that they could use to finance the war against us.
[02:24:49]  I don't think it was the Pentagon that was at fault here, though.
[02:24:52]  I mean, I think the Pentagon is very good at looking at potential contingencies in hostilities.
[02:25:00]  And they were certainly aware that the Strait of Hormuz was a potential choke point during Trump's first term.
[02:25:06]  They certainly understood that the Gulf Arab states and their oil infrastructure were potential targets in the first term.
[02:25:13]  The Pentagon didn't forget that between the first term and the second term.
[02:25:17]  I'm sure they raised it.
[02:25:19]  The question I can answer, but is the key question, is why didn't it get through in the Oval Office?
[02:25:26]  As you said, you've been in favor of regime change in Iran for a long time.
[02:25:30]  When you saw that the United States and Israel launched the attack on Iran at the end of February, were you pleased to see that?
[02:25:40]  Well, I was pleased with the attacks as I was pleased with the attacks on the nuclear program in Iran last summer, but there were many defects in what happened here.
[02:25:48]  Number one, it's not at all clear that regime change was ever Trump's objective.
[02:25:52]  It seemed like it was, but he's disavowed that since then.
[02:25:56]  In fact, he's gone beyond that and said, in any way, he has changed the regime because now they're subordinates instead of the people who were originally in charge when the attack began.
[02:26:06]  The subordinates are at least as hardlined as the people they've replaced, which obviously doesn't constitute regime change.
[02:26:14]  But I think a number of mistakes were made.
[02:26:16]  They didn't have to be fatal, but they may be becoming fatal now because of the way the administration has handled it.
[02:26:23]  There was no preparation of the American public, no making what I think is the very strong case for regime change or elimination of the nuclear program or eliminating Iran's capacity to support terrorism.
[02:26:37]  You know, when you ask people to put up with the prospect of higher gas prices just at a minimum, you have to make the case to them in a free society why it's in our national security interest to do that.
[02:26:49]  Trump never made the case.
[02:26:50]  It's more than one speech.
[02:26:52]  It's a preparation time.
[02:26:53]  He didn't engage in anything as far as I can tell.
[02:26:56]  And corollary to that.
[02:26:58]  Yeah, I was going to say, as you know, Ambassador, the United States does not have a good record when it comes to using the military for regime change.
[02:27:06]  Did you think that depends on how you look at the record?
[02:27:10]  If you want to start in 1945, we did pretty well in regime change.
[02:27:14]  But more recently.
[02:27:16]  Pardon me?
[02:27:17]  Yeah, I was going to say more recently, like the Taliban and Iraq.
[02:27:20]  Yeah.
[02:27:21]  Yeah, or like Grenada during the Reagan administration, Panama during the George H.W. Bush administration.
[02:27:29]  I think we did a good job of regime change in Afghanistan.
[02:27:32]  Our mistake there was to leave.
[02:27:35]  And we did a good job of regime change in Iraq.
[02:27:38]  Our mistake there was to become part of the political process.
[02:27:41]  But there were other things that Trump didn't do.
[02:27:44]  I don't want to leave this point because I think it's important.
[02:27:47]  He didn't consult with Congress.
[02:27:49]  He didn't build a base of support there.
[02:27:52]  And obviously, both the lack of public support and lack of congressional support for what he's doing or what his objectives are, whatever his objectives are, is weak.
[02:28:01]  He didn't consult allies.
[02:28:02]  He didn't consult NATO.
[02:28:04]  He didn't consult the Gulf Arabs.
[02:28:06]  He didn't consult our Asian allies like Japan, South Korea, and others, which purchase a lot of their oil and gas from the region.
[02:28:14]  And most important of all, as far as we can tell, he did not consult with the Iranian opposition, who are necessarily going to have a heavy part of the burden of bringing the regime apart at the top and eventually overthrowing it.
[02:28:28]  The opposition is very widespread inside Iran, but not well organized, and it could use assistance, material assistance like telecommunications, money, and weapons.
[02:28:39]  Again, as far as we can tell, none of that's been supplied.
[02:28:43]  And we'll go to call shortly.
[02:28:45]  Democrats are on 202748-8000.
[02:28:48]  Republicans 202-748-8001.
[02:28:50]  And Independents 202-748-8002.
[02:28:54]  Ambassador Bolton, we know that the Trump administration's Justice Department has indicted you for mishandling of classified information.
[02:29:03]  That case is ongoing, so I won't ask you for details about that.
[02:29:08]  But I wonder if you could outline what the policy issues were that led to the falling out between you and President Trump.
[02:29:17]  Well, I think I tried to describe them briefly in 400 or 500 pages in my book.
[02:29:23]  It was a long story.
[02:29:25]  I don't think that he thinks strategically about American national interest, and I think we suffer as a result of it in any number of circumstances around the world.
[02:29:35]  I said at the time the book came out, I didn't think he was fit to be president.
[02:29:40]  That was in his first term, and I have the same view in the second term.
[02:29:44]  All right, let's go to calls.
[02:29:45]  Start with Marty, Louisville, Kentucky.
[02:29:47]  Democrat.
[02:29:47]  Hi, Marty.
[02:29:48]  You're on with Ambassador Bolton.
[02:29:50]  Good morning, Mimi.
[02:29:52]  Mr. Bolton, a few months ago, there was a movement in Congress to provide an avenue for people in the military system to refuse to follow orders that they thought were unlawful.
[02:30:03]  And then a few weeks ago, Trump issued a statement that shocked a lot of people.
[02:30:07]  He said if an agreement's not met the next day, he was going to order the military to bomb all the bridges, the utility plants, and also wipe out a segment of the civilian population in Iran.
[02:30:17]  My question to you, sir, is, in your opinion, what would happen if he did issue that order and a military pilot flew over a bridge they were supposed to destroy and there was a human chain going across it?
[02:30:28]  What would happen if the pilot refused to follow that order and claimed it was unlawful?
[02:30:32]  Would they be court-martialed and severely punished?
[02:30:35]  And on the other side of the coin, what would happen if a military pilot did drop a bomb on a large gathering of civilians?
[02:30:41]  What would be the result of that?
[02:30:43]  In your opinion, would people in Congress change their mind about supporting the war and impeaching Donald Trump?
[02:30:49]  What do you think would happen?
[02:30:50]  Thank you.
[02:30:52]  Well, there are a lot of moving parts in that hypothetical, but the doctrine and training that our military goes through is very clear that you cannot deliberately target civilian facilities or populations.
[02:31:12]  And if you do target military operations, you have to conclude that any collateral damage to civilians would be incidental compared to the importance of the military target.
[02:31:25]  Those are the conventional rules that we operate under.
[02:31:28]  And I think depending on how you looked at each individual target, that's how you judge it.
[02:31:34]  I think the president's remarks about ending Iranian civilization were harmful to the United States.
[02:31:42]  That's not the issue, I think, here at all.
[02:31:46]  He's the only person I think I've heard talk about ending the civilization.
[02:31:51]  I want to end the regime, which represses the Iranian people as well as threaten the rest of us around the world.
[02:32:00]  Bob in New Jersey, line for Republicans.
[02:32:02]  Good morning, Bob.
[02:32:04]  Good morning.
[02:32:05]  I have one point and then a question for Mr. Bolton here.
[02:32:08]  So my point is, he's going to start this at 1979, but we meddled in Iran's government.
[02:32:16]  We led to this regime, as he calls it now, in 1953, CIA operation to install the Shah who repressed Iran's government, which led to the revolution, which is where we are now.
[02:32:30]  But I just wanted to say, people, we've been through this already, and I'm sure Mr. Bolton argued in favor of it through the 90s, telling us, oh, we need to destroy North Korea.
[02:32:39]  We need to destroy North Korea because if they do get the bomb, well, surely they're going to launch it on San Francisco or Los Angeles.
[02:32:45]  Never happened.
[02:32:46]  And North Korea, we know, now have many nuclear weapons.
[02:32:50]  Iran was a nuclear weapon.
[02:32:51]  There's no logic that says that they would even use the things.
[02:32:55]  It's a defensive weapon.
[02:32:56]  But my question to Mr. Bolton is, you supported every war since the Gulf War to the war now.
[02:33:05]  Why is it then when it came time for you to serve in Vietnam, you dodged the draft?
[02:33:11]  All right.
[02:33:13]  Well, there are a lot of places to start there.
[02:33:16]  Let's go back to 1953.
[02:33:19]  It was, in fact, the Shah of Iran at the time was the legitimate government of Iran.
[02:33:27]  And there's a lot of history there about Mohamed Mossadegh, the prime minister, and the constitutional failings that he engaged in that period of time.
[02:33:39]  And I think to be able to say that there's a direct line between what happened in 1953 when the Shah resumed power and then 1979, 26 years later, when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, is just ahistorical.
[02:33:54]  That's just simply not what happened.
[02:33:56]  And indeed, many people in Iran who opposed the Shah for good and sufficient reasons from their point of view were not in favor of Khomeini taking power and installing the dictatorship that we have in Iraq today.
[02:34:13]  Look, there's a lot of history that goes on in that country.
[02:34:19]  The question is, what is in America's national interest?
[02:34:22]  And the nuclear threat that Iran poses to us, to our friends in the region, and it's not just Israel, but it's the Gulf Arab states.
[02:34:29]  The support that the Ayatollahs have given all through 47 years for terrorist activity around the world is very, very real.
[02:34:40]  And in fact, I think that the North Korean nuclear threat has been mishandled by successive American administrations, which is now why they do have nuclear weapons and may well be continuing to cooperate with Iran, as they did in the Syrian desert, building a nuclear reactor for Iran that was a clone of their own reactor at Yangbyan.
[02:35:05]  That reactor never came into operation because the Israelis bombed it in September of 2007 and put it out of commission.
[02:35:13]  So I think the nuclear threat is a very real one.
[02:35:16]  I think the proliferation threat is real.

=== Iran Nuclear Threats (14:56) ===

[02:35:19]  And I think that Americans and their friends and allies need protection against would-be nuclear powers that can threaten the rest of the world.
[02:35:29]  And just to go back to what you said, you believe that Mossadegh was not legitimately and democratically elected by the people of Iran, that it was the Shah that was the democratically elected or legitimate leader?
[02:35:44]  Yeah, Mossadegh was appointed prime minister not as the result of an election, but by a vote in parliament.
[02:35:52]  That the Shah offered him the prime ministership when most of the parliament thought he would reject it.
[02:35:57]  So this is very complicated.
[02:35:59]  It would take hours to discuss.
[02:36:02]  And it's just propaganda by the regime in Iran that somehow all the troubles of Iran flowed from the events of 1953.
[02:36:11]  It's just simply not accurate.
[02:36:12]  All right, let's talk to John in Los Angeles, California, Independent.
[02:36:16]  Go ahead, John.
[02:36:18]  Good morning.
[02:36:18]  Thank you for taking my call.
[02:36:19]  I want to clear something about the 1953 Mossadegh situation.
[02:36:23]  Over the last 35 years that I've been watching Washington Journal, a lot of people call in about this 1953 coup by CIA and Hermit Roosevelt.
[02:36:33]  One thing people need to understand that Mossadegh wanted to nationalize the oil, wanted Great Britain out of the business of helping Iran develop its oil fields.
[02:36:45]  And then Iran had a Communist Party to the party.
[02:36:49]  They, along with the Soviet Union at that time, had their eyes on the Persian Gulf and the Iranian oil.
[02:36:55]  So we were in the midst of the Cold War here in the U.S.
[02:36:59]  The United States had to protect its interests in the Persian Gulf, the interest of the Western world.
[02:37:04]  So Mosaddegh was almost a traitor.
[02:37:07]  And when the Shah came back after spending 10 days in Rome, he became a dictator as a result of what Mossadr did to the monarchy.
[02:37:16]  So, John.
[02:37:17]  John, do you have a question, actually?
[02:37:20]  Yes, I do.
[02:37:20]  Go ahead.
[02:37:21]  My question is that Mr. Burlton has long advocated the regime change in Iran.
[02:37:26]  It's very commendable.
[02:37:28]  I agree that the Trump administration has done a poor job in the propaganda of the war, but they didn't declare a war.
[02:37:35]  They didn't, legal reasons, declare a regime change.
[02:37:38]  Now, he says that the Persian Gulf, the Trump administration in the Oval Office failed.
[02:37:44]  But right now, there is potentially 450-plus kilograms of enriched uranium in Iran.
[02:37:50]  And Trump is really trying hard to get that out in a friendly way.
[02:37:54]  How is it possible?
[02:37:55]  What do you suggest?
[02:37:56]  Should they send the 82nd airborne?
[02:37:58]  Should they send ground troops to Iran to get that uranium out?
[02:38:02]  Thank you very much.
[02:38:03]  Ambassador.
[02:38:05]  Yeah, look, I think the only certain way to end the nuclear program is by regime change, where we could remove not just the enriched uranium, but all aspects of the nuclear program, similar to what we did in Libya at the end of 2003 and 2004, where Gaddafi opened up the program, which was much more primitive, much earlier in its development than the Iranian program, which is very well advanced.
[02:38:32]  But Gaddafi opened it up and combined teams of U.S. and U.K. experts basically boxed up the Libyan nuclear weapons program and took it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it sits today.
[02:38:45]  That's what we should do with the Iranian program.
[02:38:48]  I'd rather do it in a permissive environment.
[02:38:51]  I do think if the Iranian regime began to crumble and there were instability internally, we would have to think about putting boots on the ground, at least at some of the key sites, to make sure that the material didn't fall into the wrong hands, didn't come into the hands of potential terrorists or officials of the regime who might sell it to terrorists or other rogue states.
[02:39:14]  I just want to make one comment, one more comment on 1953 and the Shah and Mossadegh.
[02:39:19]  Look, this is, as the last caller just indicated, this is a complex question with highly disputed contentions about fact among Iranians.
[02:39:30]  But even whatever you want to say about 1953, that doesn't justify the regime in Iran developing nuclear weapons to threaten the United States.
[02:39:40]  And it's a matter for our national security today whether we were nice people in 1953 or if we were not so nice people in 1953.
[02:39:49]  Ambassador Bolton, do you think that the Iranian, have you seen that the Iranian regime is more resilient than you expected over these past two plus months?
[02:40:00]  Well, I don't think it's resilient.
[02:40:02]  Let's be clear.
[02:40:03]  They have spent 47 years building a deep state.
[02:40:08]  I mean, people who talk about the deep state in the United States ought to take a look at the deep state in Iran.
[02:40:13]  This is a thoroughly authoritarian, militarized dictatorship of religious fanatics who have spent uncounted billions of dollars building missiles, nuclear weapons program, drone capabilities, cyber capabilities, to the detriment of the Iranian people, who are in desperate economic shape.
[02:40:35]  They were in desperate economic shape before the war, and it's only gotten worse since then.
[02:40:42]  We spent, we in Israel spent six weeks bombing it.
[02:40:46]  So the fact that that entire 47 years of effort hasn't been destroyed yet shouldn't surprise anybody.
[02:40:54]  It should remind us, I think, of the Israeli struggle against Hamas, where they found this incredible fortress of underground tunnels, again, which must have cost billions of dollars to build over decades to the detriment of the residents of the Gaza Strip, whose economic circumstances grew more and more serious.
[02:41:16]  So when you're faced with a regime like that filled with militaristic, authoritarian, religious fanatics, the fact that they're still willing to fight doesn't surprise anybody.
[02:41:26]  I think the regime has been very badly wounded.
[02:41:29]  I think a lot of the top leadership has been eliminated.
[02:41:32]  We can see that they really don't have a functioning, well-coordinated government by their inability to come up with coherent responses on the diplomatic front.
[02:41:43]  I really think it's a tragedy here.
[02:41:45]  We may be closer to regime change than we think.
[02:41:48]  If we had done the work we needed to do to help the opposition inside Iran, we might be even closer.
[02:41:53]  Is there an organized opposition in Iran?
[02:41:56]  Well, I think there are pieces of an organized opposition.
[02:41:59]  I think the Kurds are very well organized and armed.
[02:42:02]  I think the Baluchis in southern and southeastern Iraq are well organized and armed.
[02:42:08]  I think many of the dissidents around the country have tried to work on organization, but they lack some basics.
[02:42:19]  They lack telecommunications capability.
[02:42:22]  They need money.
[02:42:22]  They need weapons.
[02:42:24]  It's not a question of when the people go in the street.
[02:42:27]  It's a question of how they work with other figures in the regime, including in the conventional military, not the Revolutionary Guard, but the conventional military, who can look at what's happening and say to themselves, you know, I think this ship is going down, and maybe I don't want to go down with it.
[02:42:43]  The people have shown it again and again when they've gone out into the streets against the regime.
[02:42:48]  Young people, 70% of the population is under 30.
[02:42:53]  They know they could have a different life.
[02:42:55]  They can see it on the internet when it's allowed to work.
[02:42:58]  They can see it across the Gulf.
[02:43:00]  Women are enormously dissatisfied.
[02:43:03]  If you remember the killing of Masiy Amini, the young Kurdish woman who was murdered by the regime over three years ago because she refused to wear the hijab, mobilized the women of the country then.
[02:43:16]  And it's not just an argument about the dress code.
[02:43:18]  It's a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of the Ayatollahs who say they speak the word of God.
[02:43:24]  And the women and girls of Iran said, no, you don't, not on the dress code and not on anything else.
[02:43:30]  And you add all that together, the ethnic dissatisfaction, the economic dissatisfaction.
[02:43:35]  I think the regime, even before the attacks began, was at its weakest at any point since it took power in 1979.
[02:43:43]  And are you confident that if the regime were to fall or were to collapse, that Iran wouldn't descend into chaos, civil war, similar to what we saw in Iraq and then the rise of ISIS?
[02:43:57]  Well, it's hard to imagine a regime worse than this one.
[02:44:00]  I mean, really, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, although it was in a Shia, largely Shia country, inspired a lot of the radicalism around the region that led to al-Qaeda and ISIS and other terrorist groups.
[02:44:16]  So, yeah, I think there could be a lot of turmoil in Iran.
[02:44:19]  After 47 years of tyranny, there are a lot of scores to settle.
[02:44:23]  I think the most likely outcome, the most benign outcome, would be for the regular army to take control, and you'd have a military government necessary to restore order.
[02:44:32]  I'm not under any illusions that Jeffersonian democracy is going to break out immediately.
[02:44:38]  It would take time for the people of Iran.
[02:44:40]  It's a large country, 90 million plus people, to consult on what form of government they want going ahead.
[02:44:48]  They don't want to just replace a few leaders.
[02:44:50]  It's the entire regime of the entire structure that the Ayatollahs have set up that's the instrument of repression.
[02:44:58]  That all has to be swept away, and they have to come up with a new kind of constitutional structure that will take time to develop.
[02:45:04]  Linda Orange, Connecticut, Democrat, good morning.
[02:45:08]  You're on with John Bolton.
[02:45:10]  Good morning.
[02:45:11]  Mr. Bolton, you kind of led right to my question.
[02:45:16]  Because the Middle East is similarly geographically to like our state, you know, they're right on top of each other.
[02:45:24]  I'm a little concerned that we may destabilize, even if this regime falls, they will go into other states where they have Shia support and destabilize nations like Iraq, Oman, you know, the different ones.
[02:45:43]  I'd like your opinion on that, please.
[02:45:45]  Have a good one.
[02:45:47]  Well, I don't really think that that should be of much concern.
[02:45:53]  I do think that the ethnic groups, the Kurds, for example, who have for centuries felt they should have their own state, they are contiguous with Kurds in Iraq and in Turkey.
[02:46:05]  And the Baluchis in southern and southeastern Afghanistan, to be sure, joined with Baluchis in southwestern Pakistan, all of whom together have wanted their own Baluchistan as an independent country.
[02:46:19]  Those people aren't going anywhere.
[02:46:22]  They are after something else.
[02:46:24]  And I think the odds that the Persian part of the population would flee in large numbers is pretty remote.
[02:46:33]  Remember, the people of Iran overwhelmingly, I think, are against this regime.
[02:46:38]  And what we need is for more determination, more resolve to make that happen.
[02:46:44]  And I think you would find even more parts of the government in Tehran coming apart, defecting, as it were, to the opposition.
[02:46:53]  So that's why it's important, I think, to keep up the pressure and not allow the regime to recover, regroup, and start rebuilding this deep state that it created, which if they're allowed to do so, they would make even stronger and more dangerous than it was before the attacks.
[02:47:11]  We got a question on text asking, what's next if we can't reach a deal with Iran?
[02:47:17]  Take Karg Island, destroy all infrastructure, keep up the embargo.
[02:47:21]  What do you see?
[02:47:23]  What would you suggest is the best strategic move after this?
[02:47:27]  Well, I wouldn't destroy Karg Island or the oil infrastructure because I think we have to remember the objective here is to get a government other than the Ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard.
[02:47:39]  And a new government, even if it were a military government, if it were just, if I can use the phrase, a regular military government, would need to get the economy going again.
[02:47:48]  I think our blockade of the Strait of Hormuz out in the Gulf of Oman has been incredibly effective.
[02:47:54]  I think that should continue.
[02:47:55]  That's how you cut off Iran's oil revenue.
[02:47:58]  You don't need to destroy Carg Island to do that.
[02:48:01]  And I think what the president started on Sunday night and stopped on Tuesday, which is trying to clear the Strait of Hormuz so that Gulf Arab commercial traffic, obviously particularly oil and gas products, could get out and you could have free commerce basically on the Arab side of the Gulf while we were still embargoing for precluding Iran from getting any of their vessels in or out.
[02:48:28]  I think that would put pressure on.
[02:48:29]  And I think ultimately a resumption of military attacks would be warranted.
[02:48:34]  The intelligence we've gotten since the ceasefire began indicates there's still a lot of targets.
[02:48:40]  The Iranians are digging out in some places.
[02:48:42]  Great.
[02:48:43]  Now that they've shown us where they had further munitions stored, we can go in and destroy them as well.
[02:48:50]  On the Republican line, Darryl Shepherdsville, Kentucky.
[02:48:53]  Good morning.
[02:48:55]  Good morning.
[02:48:56]  I listen to some of these callers right here and here to Mr. Bullman right there.
[02:49:02]  I still think President Trump is doing a great job of taking out Iran because they got a nuclear weapon.
[02:49:10]  That's why he's doing the job properly.
[02:49:14]  And my second question is: he doesn't know his history.
[02:49:18]  Ask him right there, it happened in 1979 under Jimmy Carter when Iraq took three head of hostages 365 days.
[02:49:30]  Next one, there was a bombing in 1978.
[02:49:36]  A military people got killed in that area of, yeah, in Iraq right there.
[02:49:45]  CP knows his history.
[02:49:48]  So, Ambassador, I want to ask you, the caller said that he believes that President Trump is doing a good job with this Iran war.
[02:49:56]  Democratic Senator Jack Reed has called the administration's execution of this war, quote, strategic incoherence.
[02:50:06]  I wonder if you agree with that or what you would add to that.
[02:50:10]  Well, I don't know what Trump's objectives are.
[02:50:12]  That makes it hard to measure whether it's incoherent or not.

=== Strategic Incoherence (10:10) ===

[02:50:15]  I think we've done enormous damage to Iran, to its military capabilities, to the instruments of state power, to its production facilities.
[02:50:23]  I think there's more to do, but certainly we've done a lot and have set them back.
[02:50:29]  But my point is that it's while it's fine to have set them back if they can rebuild, it's simply a matter of time and we'll be right back where we are today.
[02:50:38]  I would rather pursue the route that is, I think, the only certain route to end the nuclear threat, to end the terrorist threat, to end the economic threat through control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and that's get a regime in that's not composed of religious fanatics.
[02:50:58]  And how long would you keep that embargo on the strait and Iranian vessels moving?
[02:51:05]  As long as it takes.
[02:51:06]  As long as it takes.
[02:51:09]  How else are they going to get oil out on train cars to China, you know, one at a time?
[02:51:14]  That is the major source of their earning.
[02:51:17]  And I just stress again, I encourage people to go do the research on this.
[02:51:21]  Before the strikes began, the Iranian economy was on the floor, and the people had been suffering.
[02:51:27]  They've had annual demonstrations almost every year for the last 10 years.
[02:51:32]  Things are so bad that the country itself is running out of groundwater.
[02:51:37]  There have been discussions about moving the capital from Tehran because the reservoirs are empty and the entire city is running out of water.
[02:51:45]  All of this before our attacks.
[02:51:48]  The country, the people of Iran, really were suffering significantly from the policies of the Ayatollahs domestically.
[02:51:57]  John LaSalle, Illinois, Independent Line, you're on with John Bolton.
[02:52:01]  Oh, thank you for taking my call.
[02:52:03]  God, Washington Journal is the best political program, bar none.
[02:52:06]  And Mimi, you do an excellent and a very fair job.
[02:52:09]  So thank you for what you do.
[02:52:10]  I have a quick question and a comment for Mr. Bolton.
[02:52:13]  My question is: why did Trump proceed with this war on Iran when everything I read newspapers, most of his advisors, General Kane and Rubio, Vance, told him it probably wasn't going to be a good idea?
[02:52:27]  My quick comment is: do you ever picture yourself as part of a group like with Bill Crystal and Lindsey Graham and John McCain for decades preaching wars with countries that don't do what we tell them to do, your neocon fever dreams?
[02:52:42]  And you're wrong.
[02:52:43]  You're wrong all the time.
[02:52:44]  All you got to do is a little research.
[02:52:46]  You really are terribly, terribly wrong.
[02:52:48]  Good.
[02:52:49]  Your response, Ambassador.
[02:52:51]  Well, thank you.
[02:52:52]  Look, I don't know why Trump did this.
[02:52:55]  As I say, I urged in the first term that we take up the objective of regime change without success.
[02:53:02]  And, you know, when you have people who are quoted in the paper after the fact about how they really didn't agree with the policy, that's not the ideal way to have teamwork within an administration.
[02:53:16]  And as you mentioned, Ambassador, during the first administration, President Trump did not want to launch a military attack on Iran.
[02:53:23]  And he is this time.
[02:53:25]  The critics have said that it's because of pressure from Prime Minister Netanyahu.
[02:53:30]  What do you think of that?
[02:53:31]  Well, I think it's important to say what he's doing.
[02:53:34]  It's not, do you favor attacking Iran or not?
[02:53:37]  The question should be, what's your objective?
[02:53:40]  And if your objective, for example, is regime change, how do you go about it?
[02:53:44]  If your objective is eliminating Iran's nuclear weapons program, then you might go with more limited attacks.
[02:53:52]  That's what Trump did in the summer of last year.
[02:53:57]  And it's why his inability to state consistently day to day what his objectives are that I think make it hard for everybody to evaluate what the best way forward is.
[02:54:08]  In terms of Netanyahu, all I can say is in the first term, Netanyahu believed in regime change in Iran.
[02:54:15]  He's believed in it probably longer than I have.
[02:54:18]  He made those points to Trump.
[02:54:20]  It didn't have any effect.
[02:54:21]  I don't know what Netanyahu could have said differently in the second term.
[02:54:25]  So for those who are following the theory that somehow Israel conned the administration into doing this, the poor, innocent, naive administration caught in the wiles of those clever Israelis, it's just wrong.
[02:54:39]  And I know that your time is running out, but I want to fit in Ark from Upland, California.
[02:54:44]  Democrat, go ahead, you're on the air.
[02:54:48]  Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my call.
[02:54:52]  My question for Mr. Bolton is that he is advocating regime change, but really doesn't have a very clear vision for the future regime in Iran.
[02:55:05]  I know he has been associated to a certain extent with Mujahideen who have a history of violence worse than the current regime.
[02:55:17]  So they must be out of the question.
[02:55:20]  There are certain people who rally around the son of the Shah.
[02:55:25]  He hasn't come to power even close to it, and yet he's threatening the court, the Baluch, the Ahwaziz, not to take any independent action outside of the rule of the central government in Iran.
[02:55:40]  So I don't think there is an alternative to run Iran as one country.
[02:55:47]  Therefore, Iran and the entire Middle East, in my opinion, needs to be redistricted based on the human rights violations of the minorities such as the courts.
[02:56:00]  The United Nations history has recorded to give the court their own independence.
[02:56:07]  So Ark, we are running out of time, so I'm going to give Ambassador Bolton a chance to respond to that.
[02:56:14]  Well, I've said for a long time I think the Kurds ought to have their own independent state, whether it includes part of Iran in the future would have to be determined.
[02:56:22]  But I don't think you can say, well, you have to have an alternative regime before overthrowing this one.
[02:56:29]  When the United States declared independence from the United Kingdom and won it by revolution, we didn't know what the successor regime would be either.
[02:56:38]  That wasn't a reason not to do it.
[02:56:41]  All right.
[02:56:42]  And I know that you have got to leave, Ambassador Bolton, so I'm trying to be respectful of your time.
[02:56:47]  John Bolton, former National Security Advisor in the Trump administration.
[02:56:50]  Thanks for joining us today, sir.
[02:56:52]  Well, thanks very much for having me.
[02:56:55]  And a couple of things for your schedule for later today.
[02:56:59]  President Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, will receive the Barbara K. Olson Woman of Valor Award.
[02:57:05]  It's presented by the conservative group Independent Women.
[02:57:08]  You can watch that award ceremony live at 6:30 p.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN.
[02:57:14]  At 7 p.m. over on C-SPAN 2, we've got three historians gathering to discuss books they've written, examining the origins of the Declaration of Independence.
[02:57:25]  Again, that is 7 p.m. from George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate, C-SPAN 2.
[02:57:31]  All of our programming you can see at C-SPANNOW and c-span.org.
[02:57:36]  We'll take one more call, even though Ambassador Bolton is not with us.
[02:57:40]  Dan Birdstown, Tennessee, Democrat.
[02:57:43]  Good morning.
[02:57:45]  Oh, hi.
[02:57:46]  Good morning, Mimi.
[02:57:47]  I wish I could have spoken to John.
[02:57:49]  I know.
[02:57:50]  He had to leave.
[02:57:51]  We wanted to hold on to him until the end of the show, but we couldn't.
[02:57:55]  Sorry.
[02:57:56]  But go ahead.
[02:57:57]  Good points.
[02:57:58]  Yeah, go ahead and make your points, man.
[02:57:59]  Start with him.
[02:58:01]  Okay.
[02:58:02]  I have his book right in front of me.
[02:58:06]  When he was in Trump's first term, he was the adult in the room.
[02:58:12]  And now, second term, the DOJ is coming after his ass.
[02:58:17]  Now, now he's beating the war drum.
[02:58:21]  Does he want regime change, nuclear material recovered, or what?
[02:58:26]  We want the truth in Birdstown here.
[02:58:28]  This will require an occupation of 30 to 50,000 troops for months or years.
[02:58:35]  I wanted him to opine on that.
[02:58:37]  Second point: the Caspian Sea, just between Iran and Russia.
[02:58:43]  I'm looking at my 16-inch globe right now, world globe, and anybody with a half a mind can see that Russia is sending supplies to Iran as we speak on a daily basis.
[02:58:56]  So I was going to ask Mr. Bolton.
[02:59:00]  I bought his book just like I bought the mailman book.
[02:59:04]  At least I'm on chapter seven with the mailman book.
[02:59:08]  But with Mr. Bolton's book, I never got past the first chapter since it's such dry reading.
[02:59:13]  But on his second chapter, the title is Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War.
[02:59:21]  Isn't that Trump's current strategy?
[02:59:24]  He himself admitted in his appearance this morning that he admits Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
[02:59:34]  So this is where we're at, America.
[02:59:36]  They're still eating the dogs here in Tennessee.
[02:59:40]  All right, got it, Dan.
[02:59:41]  That's the end of our program.
[02:59:43]  Thanks for watching, everybody.
[02:59:44]  We'll see you again tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern.
[02:59:47]  Have a great day.

=== Window Into Capital (00:32) ===

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