Socialism In Our Schools — In The Tank Podcast #527
Download MP3Alright. We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. We are going to check-in on New York City to see how they're doing under mom Donnie. Surely, rent and housing costs are declining.
Linnea Lueken:Right? We'll see. Also, Trump made a trade deal with Japan that seems to be a pretty sly way for both Japan and The US to sidestep China in some industries while aiding American energy independence. And it's no wonder that New York is struggling under socialist leadership. Schools in The United States don't teach American exceptionalism, but rather diminish American success while lauding the alleged achievements of socialism despite the fact that there are no real achievements.
Linnea Lueken:And for Unhinged, Obama's presidential library opens this spring, and boy, is it ugly. They cut down all the trees and surrounding park, and I think that they're just waiting to install that giant fiery eye that follows you and your every move on top before it's open to the public. It's the kind of thing that I would build if I hated the people in the neighborhood that it's going up in. But even, you know, I myself, I do not hate anyone that much anyway. We are going to talk about all of this and more on episode 527 of the In The Tank podcast.
Speaker 2:It's alright.
Linnea Lueken:Nice. Alright. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I am Lynea Luken, your host. And as always, we have Jim Lakeley, vice president and director of communications at the Heartland Institute, Sam Karnik, senior fellow, and Chris Talgo, editorial director and socialism research fellow.
Linnea Lueken:Before we get started, you guys, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there. Please also click the thumbs up to like the video. Guys, I see all you watching. You're all watching. Click the like right now.
Linnea Lueken:It helps us out a lot. And also sharing it helps to break through some of YouTube's suppression. They really don't like this channel, and leaving a comment helps us too. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. Alright, guys.
Linnea Lueken:We're gonna jump right into this because, unfortunately, Chris has to duck out for a very important interview on where are you going, Chris? Who are you interviewing with?
Speaker 3:Well, it's gonna be about it's it's gonna be about socialism and our education system. So this can be a good little primer for me to, you know, to get ready here.
Linnea Lueken:Excellent. Little a
Speaker 3:little warm up.
Linnea Lueken:And then maybe
Speaker 3:it is the Ellen Nathan show.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. So you guys, I would say go tune into that, but I also don't you can play that and also this show at the same time. Don't leave us. But also go watch Chris on the show. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:So we're gonna get right into our unhinged topic today. I was excited to talk about this because it is hideous. The Obama Center is ugly on purpose is what I titled this segment. So as a little history lesson for our non American viewers or even just Americans who don't know very much about this. Pretty much since the days of, I think, president Hoover, presidents have donated their documents and records from their time in the Oval Office to the National Archives and built public research centers slash library slash museums on top of it.
Linnea Lueken:But since Obama is so special, not only is the Barack Obama Presidential Center not going to be part of the National Archives, but rather the Obama Foundation is gonna run it. It also will contain no research library. It's the only one that will not actually have a research library. And though there will be some books selected by the Obamas transferred over from one of the Chicago Public Libraries, it's mostly just displaying, I don't know, I guess, like, weird art and the dresses of Michelle Obama, stuff like that. So that's fun.
Linnea Lueken:The most fun part about this, though, is that the area that the center has been built on is in the South Side Of Chicago, which is where the Obamas met, where Michelle Obama grew up, and where Barack was doing his, like, community work, I guess, organizer work. And so that story gives us the impression that this thing is gonna be, like, some kind of acute nostalgic thing for them. Oh, you know, so sweet. But then you see the building. As one ex user put it, Barack says, I want a brutal forbidding citadel embodying raw sovereign power.
Linnea Lueken:I want it to look the way a drone strike feels. People should shiver and scurry across the street when they pass it. And Michelle says, and put some eat, pray, love word art on it too, but like civil rights. Anyway, so if you guys have seen pictures of this thing, there's a couple of funny memes of it in the in the comments underneath there. It really is an extremely hideous, brutalist architectural piece, I guess.
Linnea Lueken:They really upset the locals, though, by destroying the historic Jackson Park in order to raise this monstrosity. They cut down over a thousand old growth trees in the area. And locals also pointed out that their rents are gonna rise because of it. Because, of course, when you put in a, you know, attraction I guess it's an attraction. I'm not very attracted to it.
Linnea Lueken:You put an attraction like that in, it forces a lot of the people out of their homes that they can already barely afford. And so like I said at the intro, this thing is a monument to loathing and contempt, and it looks like. But, Jim, is this not a great monument to the whole Obama presidency? Is it not apt?
Speaker 4:It it is apt. I mean, it it looks like, you know, there's some the memes are endless for this. It's really funny. I mean, you know, looks like emperor Palpatine's summer cottage. It it looks like a poop emoji in poured concrete.
Speaker 4:You had said in the in the opener there that that, you know, this is how you would design a building if you hated the person it was in tribute to, or or you couldn't imagine this being, you know, done in with love and with affection for the person it is celebrating. But, yeah, that's how I would design a building if I really hated the person it was in tribute to. This is this is the this would be the presidential library for Joseph Stalin and then some of the worst people on Earth. It's it's amazingly ugly and and frankly This photo during construction. Yeah.
Speaker 4:During construction. Yeah. I mean and when it's finished, it's not gonna look it's not going to look much better. You know, I've been to the Reagan presidential library out in Simi Valley, California. In fact, relative of mine was one of the original docents at the Reagan library, and it is in a beautiful location.
Speaker 4:On a clear day from behind the library, there's, like, a there's, like, a veranda and patio. On a clear day, you can see the Pacific Ocean from there in in Ventura County, California. There's there are pieces of the Berlin Wall in tribute to Ronald Reagan's work that crumbled global capitalism, at least for a while, but certainly Soviet Soviet capitalism or Soviet communism, that is. And it's and and as you mentioned, it the Reagan library has his presidential papers. It is a research library.
Speaker 4:Many biographers of Ronald Reagan have started and ended their work with the original documents that he'd had with him in his in his library. It serves an actual purpose. What purpose does the Obama I guess they can't call the presidential library. You know, what purpose does this facility actually serve other than to be an ugly blight upon the the South Side Of Chicago and to serve as an example of the bad taste of the Obamas and a monument to their vanity. It's it's I I don't understand its its entire purpose.
Speaker 4:I Andy, I have a picture. I don't wonder if you can share it up on screen too. It's actually the ugliness and and uselessness of this presidential center is in keeping with you guys remember the official Obama portrait and how awful that was? You can put that up and yeah. That that monstrosity, that absolute mediocrity piece of garbage art, you know, that's the official Obama portrait.
Speaker 4:And so when you consider that was his choice in artist and style for his official presidential portrait, you know, that goes up there with Washington and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It is no it is no shock at all that his presidential center, as I said, looks like a a poop emoji in poured concrete.
Speaker 2:Now, Jim, that that portrait is not mediocre. It's horrible and infantile. Evil. But I love what the I love what the Obama presidential center says. First of all, it's not a library.
Speaker 2:That's great because, hey, people who are smart and really care about things go to libraries. Everybody goes to centers. You know? What's this center for anyway? It's just some some place.
Speaker 2:The other thing is that the calling it a center is great because Obama always wanted to be the center of attention, and now he is. And his, the attention that's going to be, given to him is that this is the ugliest place we've ever seen, for certainly to honor a president, it's just absolutely absurd. So that's great. I think it's great, especially as someone who very seldom goes down to the Jackson Park neighborhood of Chicago where this blight is located. So I think I think it's wonderful.
Speaker 2:People will drive past that every day and say, yes. That man was president for eight years. I'm so glad that's over.
Speaker 3:They'll they'll drive by
Speaker 4:it while they're going to the the Bears New Stadium in Northwest, Northwest Indiana and and curse it.
Speaker 3:So I went down to Chicago last weekend. We went to the Dryhouse Museum, which is actually a pretty cool museum. It was a, Gilded Age mansion, the Nickerson family, and it was redone. But my point is that it costs $40 for us to park. We saw probably a dozen homeless people in the glitzy, like, Michigan Avenue area.
Speaker 3:I mean, it was we were walking through, you know, pot smoke just because people openly smoke, you know, weed and probably other, you know, drugs in Downtown Chicago. So I was just reminded, because I don't go down to Chicago very often, just how disgusting the city is. And I think this just embodies that, and, you know, I just I I I really should not go to Chicago anymore. I should not help them. I should not give them a penny for their, you know, crazy taxes and fees and everything.
Speaker 3:I mean, the tour too was just outrageous. But, yeah, this is just par for the course for Chicago in my mind.
Linnea Lueken:The fun thing is when you look at the, like, renderings of this building, and they the renderings were ugly. Right? They were very hideous too. But they were in, like, this with, like, white marble. So, you know, it was kind of like a Saruman monument instead of a Saruman monument.
Linnea Lueken:But it was still, you know, pretty pretty unattractive in terms of its shape and stuff. And supposedly, it was supposed to look like yeah. These white buildings. It's supposed to look like like four hands clasped together in solidarity or something. I don't see it.
Linnea Lueken:I think you have to, like I don't even
Speaker 3:know. I really you and Jim were in us in Zurich not that long ago, and I've only been to Europe once. I wanna go again. But one of the things that stood out to me was just how beautiful the architecture was architecture was. And when I look back, you know, at, like, Washington DC, I mean, that's beautiful architecture.
Speaker 3:And even some of the state houses, you know, across this country, why would you wanna put something that's just so ugly? I do I mean, I'm I'm no, you know, expert architect here, but, I mean, just that's really that's really just not it's an eyesore.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Looking at it on the screen, I don't see four hands coming together. I see actually a giant middle finger. I mean, or Isengard, as you said, that is the home of Saruman the White.
Speaker 3:And from what I've read about, it's not gonna it's it's gonna be a community organizing, you know, hub, of course.
Speaker 4:That's what we need more of for sure.
Speaker 2:Another great thing about it is look at the beautiful surroundings. It's such a it's such a lovely place, and I say, well, okay. Let's dump this incredibly ugly thing right in the middle of it because that's what we did during our, term as president.
Speaker 3:Keep in mind that that rendering does not capture the
Speaker 2:reality of what that what that neighborhood looks like.
Linnea Lueken:I've driven I've driven to be a nice green park, but that's all been obliterated.
Speaker 3:Well, let me tell you that there's a lot a lot of, homeless tents and, other, you know, things.
Speaker 2:Look. You know, they've fixed all that. They've they've fixed all the beauty of it, in Chicago.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, people rip on Donald Trump for his, you know, gold plated and gold leaf tastes, you know, but I'll take that any day over, you know, the brutalist architecture instincts of of president Obama. I mean, you know, are they gonna have a special room? I mean, what's gonna be in this thing? Is there gonna be a special, you know, never been proud of my country display on for there for Michelle or her her fashion sense with her her muumuu dresses?
Speaker 4:I mean, it's it's I don't
Speaker 2:know how to display her dresses.
Speaker 4:Beauty organizing spot, but, really, what what purpose is that? Do you need what is that? Is that, like, 40 stories? I mean, I don't even know. I didn't look into it.
Speaker 4:But it's I don't it doesn't serve a purpose, and it's ruined that neighborhood. And in fact, that's one of the people here in Chicago know this, but people around the country probably don't. This was extremely controversial and has been from the very beginning, from its very first proposal. And it was opposed by the local residents, mostly black, who did not want this in their neighborhood, and especially when they saw the architecture. And the Obamas and and the people that he's friends with in Chicago just rolled them right over, ran right over him.
Speaker 4:And so this is what they're gonna have to have instead of, well, anything else.
Linnea Lueken:I found a I'm gonna put for Andy to pull up because it's been it's actually kinda hard. There there actually are Oh, can I not put links in that chat? Okay. I guess I'll put the link in the other chat. That picture there.
Linnea Lueken:But it actually it's so that they don't have very many official graphs of it, it seems, online or just Google image search and stuff is totally toasted by AI. So it's kinda hard to find anything these days anyway. But it is the, like, street view photographs that people from that area have taken are it is an imposing yeah. The Obama maximum security prison. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:It is it is an imposing obelisk that yeah. There it is. It is horrible to look at. I mean, I don't know who would and it's not just because it's winter there in Chicago, and so it's ugly dead trees anyway right now anyway. Even if the trees were all green Yeah.
Speaker 3:You had a blue sky there.
Linnea Lueken:Abomination of a thing. I I've seen so I don't wanna be I have seen some occasions where brutalist architecture was interesting, but that was only because it was, like, a specific art piece. And I think the goal of it was to look like an alien summoning zone, like an alien landing site or something. Those at least have some intrigue, but this is just terrible. I'm tired of this stuff.
Linnea Lueken:I wish that we would make things that look
Speaker 3:something out of the Soviet Union. And then brutalist architecture is supposed to remind the person that they are tiny and that they, you know, are nothing compared to the collective or whatever it be. So I think this is just Yeah. You know, Barack Obama just reminding all those citizens on the South Side that government, you know, and and big government is is best.
Speaker 2:If anybody wants to understand if anyone wants to know what kind of what this kind of architecture means, read the book From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe. It's a terrific short book, and it explains exactly how this came about and what it's, what it's supposed to be telling you. And what it's telling you is exactly what we've been saying on the air here. And, Wolfe really, documents that very well and gives you a little history of it.
Linnea Lueken:So, Nick Orama on Red State had a good piece on it. He wrote, like everything having to do with Obama, it started at one price, $500,000,000, but then the cost of it ballooned. And now it's at 830,000,000, and it's still not done yet. And Obama was very involved in the monstrosity according to Obama Foundation CEO, Valerie Jarrett. So there you go.
Linnea Lueken:If that name rings a bell for people. I actually
Speaker 4:Almost a billion dollars for that building. Are you kidding?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. The lettering so one of our viewers is asking about the lettering. The lettering is a piece of one of his speeches. So it's literally just an Obama speech that Obama put on his own building. So that's nice.
Speaker 4:That that reminds me of the gift that he gave queen Elizabeth when he first visited her, a an an iPod full of his speeches. Oh my god. Gosh. And now he has them on his building.
Linnea Lueken:Man, guys, just remember how that was when Obama was present. It's kinda crazy to look back. Alright. But I do wanna get to our main topic quickly here because Chris has to go. We're gonna skip ahead to our topic number four, which is, you know, it's not enough that we should have, the the beauty of communist architecture in Downtown Chicago.
Linnea Lueken:We also have socialism in our school. So, Chris, I wanted to make sure that we covered this subject, this week, especially because you recently came out with a really great policy brief over on heartland.org titled teaching the truth about socialism in America's public schools. So in it, you make the point that most kids in The United States go to public school, which is true. About, like, 90% of kids go to public school. And that civic scores civics test scores have been declining alongside test scores in general just across the board, but especially in history and similar subjects.
Linnea Lueken:So at the same time, youth support for socialism and socialist candidates have skyrocketed even when kids can't define what socialism means. So you reference a poll from 2019 by the Young America's Foundation, which found that more than half of students cannot actually define the term socialism. And a 2023 poll that found less than a third of young Americans properly define socialism as government taking control of companies and industries such that the state, not individuals and entrepreneurs, control the economy. And on the other hand, 66% of young Americans aged 18 to 24 define socialism as the government providing services. To me, that sounds like people are taking to heart that nonsense idea that, like, having a fire department is socialism.
Linnea Lueken:So, Chris, what is going on here?
Speaker 3:Well, this is something I encountered with during my teaching career. And, you know, I've written about this for many years that one of the things that just shocked me was how openly sympathetic to socialist policies, ideology so many of my colleagues were. And, you know, I I cite some of those tests like civics and US history because I was a US history teacher. And when you teach US history, you do go into, a lot of socialism in terms of the Soviet Union, in terms of the Cold War, China, and all these things. And one of the things that I noticed was that there was a tendency, on on most teachers to downplay the whores of those socialist regimes.
Speaker 3:And here's just another, you know, anecdotal example. They would always say that, you know, Nazi Germany, national socialism, was actually far right. And, you know, what they're doing is they are, you know, revising history, and they are trying to teach their kids that, you know, socialism actually you know, it can work. It's good. It's moral.
Speaker 3:They they really play down the emotional side of it and how it's it's it's the only way to, you know, guarantee that everyone has the, you know, the basics, but they never get they never really dive into the lack of freedom, the surveillance, the mass murder, all those kinds of things. So a couple years ago, Florida passed a bill, and it said basically that you have to teach the truth about communism in Florida public schools. And then last year, the Florida Board of Education came out, and they laid out specific standards and specific topics. Like, if you're gonna you know, like, if you're talking about the the Chimera Rouge, you have to you have to actually tell that they, you know, murdered millions of people, that they took them from the city and tried to build this utopia in the in the countryside and just all that kind of stuff. You can't just say, well, they tried this and it didn't work, and it probably, you know, didn't work mostly because capitalist, countries were trying to, you know, undermine them.
Speaker 3:So that to me is a huge step forward because the first thing you gotta do is you gotta just make sure that these kids know that the Soviet Union was the union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the longest experiment in, in socialism in the world. You know? And what happened? What's happening now with China?
Speaker 3:What's happening now with North Korea? What happened with Venezuela? What happened in Cuba? You gotta go through these things, and you've gotta you've gotta just, you know, teach the the facts. The facts are the facts.
Speaker 3:And this is not about ideology. This is not about saying capitalism is perfect and socialism is terrible. It's about saying socialism has been tried. Let's study what happened when it was tried, and let's all understand why it failed. And that's not happening.
Speaker 3:And to me, that is a huge, you know, disservice to generations of Americans, and we are starting to see the results of that because we are starting to see huge chunks. Like, eight out of 10 young people vote for Zora Mamdami in New York City, Katie Wilson in, Seattle. And as some of the polls show that you didn't cite, there's a lot of popular you know, there's a lot of popularity among young people to have a Democratic socialist in the White House in 2028. So I think that even this year in the midterm elections, we're seeing a bunch of Democratic socialist candidates, you know, trying to primary so called moderate democrats. And this is what happens when you teach a generation that socialism is is is a good thing, and it just hasn't been done, you know, properly yet.
Speaker 3:But in the wealthiest country in the world, United States, it can and should happen.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And, I mean, the obviously, these, like, you know, so called moderate Democrats who are being primaried in this stuff deserve what's what's happened to them. Right? I mean, because they've been playing footsy with this stuff for decades and and maybe even worse. So now they now they act like surprised and appalled.
Linnea Lueken:It's funny to watch a lot of the New York leadership, and ex New York leadership cry about mom Donnie when it's like, but you guys have been doing like like, Eric Adams talking about how great, you know, the whole, like, green new deal stuff and it and it all of that stuff is for years. And then getting upset when mom Donnie wins is just, like, kind of I don't know. You reap what you sow kind of a situation, but it's obviously not good for anyone else. And this is, you know, more about school stuff, but it's just in general, the Democrats and the Republicans have been kinda dropping the ball on this. And I don't wanna take too much it's kind of a little bit like, some sometimes libertarians have contributed to this too because libertarians, for a while, at least during my time growing up, used to say stuff like we shouldn't have public funding for roads because that's socialism.
Linnea Lueken:And so when you have that being hit at you and also the stuff from the Democrats, I I I can understand where this came from, especially since our schools are run by crazy people.
Speaker 3:What what I what I'd like to do later this year is do a, you know, a more fully throated, you know, policy study as to why this happened. And I've been doing a lot of research on this, and it's something that I'm just very interested in. And this goes back, you know, to John Dewey and the Progressive Era, and we are gonna make public schools based upon the Prussian model, and we are gonna make them basically just, you know, good compliant, people. And that has, I think, definitely happened. And it's just gotten more radical.
Speaker 3:It's you know, it really also started, you know, Columbia University, Frankfurt School, like, all this stuff. But now in you know, it's seeped it's seeped down into k through 12. It's seeped down into kindergarten. It's seeped down into, you know, seventh grade, fifth grade. You know?
Speaker 3:So it's it's happening much much earlier. And as a teacher, we were told, you know, obviously, you know, young people, their their minds are are are sponges. So you can manipulate them. And I saw, you know, with my own eyes, many teachers manipulating their students into thinking that socialism is good, and, you know, that is we're seeing the, you know, the results of that.
Speaker 2:Schools that are run by the government and or just merely controlled by the government will naturally serve the purposes of the state. And since the state became bureaucratized and social, socialist over the course of decades, the that has happened throughout the education system in the country. And what happens is that even when states, decide that the that the the state legislature and the government decide that, well, we're going to have better standards. We're going to to teach people about the evils of socialism and the like. It doesn't happen because the bureaucrats stand in the way, and they just don't do it.
Speaker 2:And they don't get fired. They don't get put in prison for the terrible things that they do in in creating this perverted mindset among the people that they're supposed to be teaching. So this is a a natural process, quite frankly. And the only way to dial it back, we we talk about school choice, and that is an important thing. But even more important, frankly, is to end the unionization of public employees.
Speaker 2:Even Franklin Roosevelt was against that. The teachers' unions are extremely powerful. They really control everything that happens in the schools. As much as the state legislatures and the governors would like to make things better or different at least, they they can't. They can't.
Speaker 2:The bureaucrats simply don't do it. And that was a there was a terrific article by ex Heartland Institute, research fellow, Joy Pullman, in the Federalist that documents this brilliantly. So we we really need to stop having public employee unions. That's one thing. And, also, remember, the public employee unions, the whole public employee power used to be that it was patronage, and it is patronage, but it used to be blue collar.
Speaker 2:So the measurement of the value of having a patronage system in a city or state was that the garbage was collected, the libraries were there, the streets were cleaned up, the streets were maintained and so forth. When it's education, people don't know what's going on there. They get these they get these numbers from the national the national tests and so forth, and they're all fake anyway. So it takes a long time for the ills of education to be exposed. It's something that Chris is working on very diligently for us at Heartland, and I think that this is an issue that is goes to the center, the absolute center of how we are going to perceive The United States, perceive our history, perceive what we're supposed to be, and how we will get to a better country, how how we will make things better in this country.
Speaker 2:So this is a this is a problem that has a couple of very simple solutions that are very difficult to create and enforce.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And I want to, point out that that Joy Pullman piece in The Federalist titled red states struggling to deliver on promises of pro American history in public schools. So, Chris had mentioned Florida trying to do a good job at this, and it seems like they're the only ones who are actually kind of pulling it off. Republican controlled Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are revising social studies curricula for k through 12 public schools, promising voters accurate non leftist revisions. Yet Iowa recently delivered new k through 12 curricula that entrench rather than solve the nationwide crisis of fact challenged anti American Marxist controlling publicly financed history instruction.
Linnea Lueken:Oklahoma is one public comment period away from a similar outcome. A February 17 report on civic civics education from the America First Policy Institute underscores the existential threat poor history instruction poses to the American way of life. A 2024 survey found that half fewer than half of adult Americans can name most of the rights of the First Amendment, and one third could not name all three branches of government, a fourth grade level fact. And in fact, we saw this on the stand from a judge recent or from a a police chief or something recently who was being drilled by I can't quite remember exactly what the context was, but I was appalled to see a police chief insist that he's part of the the judicial branch. So that was pretty fun.
Linnea Lueken:And on the most recent national civics exam, seventy seven percent of American eighth graders scored below proficient, and most did not have a civics class in eighth grade. Three in five adult Americans can't pass a basic civics exam, yet nearly all are eligible to vote. Despite asking for less DEI and revisionist history in classes, these states have not received it, mostly because they're relying on the same old education boards that introduced that stuff in the first place to the redrafts. So they have not overturned they've not gotten rid of these, like, educational boards that pass these, you know, curricula. And so they're asking them the same people who put the DEI stuff into the curriculum in the first place or the sixteen nineteen project stuff in the first place, they asked them to tone it down and they just basically said, no.
Linnea Lueken:We're not gonna do that. And these states feel like they don't have very much recourse to make that change even though they totally do. They could just fire all them. But
Speaker 2:That's the key difference between Iowa and Florida. Florida has a governor who fired all those people, and Kim Reynolds, is a conservative and calls herself a social conservative and a traditionalist and all that, doesn't. It takes, I guess, it takes guts.
Speaker 3:The dirty little secret, though, that I encountered throughout my my teaching career was that most teachers, and I mean, probably, like, 90%, don't even care or even look at the standards. So here and I'm gonna get into the, like, you know, just a little bit of, the weeds here. So when I was in South Carolina, Linea, South Carolina has The US history and, of course, exam. You have to take it sophomore year. It is a it is a requirement to pass that test in order for you to graduate from high school.
Speaker 3:So it was very important, and I spent an entire study an an entire, summer studying The US history, curriculum standards for the state of Carolina because I needed to make sure that the students knew all those things in order to pass the test. That does not apply for world history or for a lot of the electives that the veteran teachers teach, they don't care about the standards. So in world history, you know, they can just they can just, you know, do whatever they want. There's no accountability. And I I noticed that, you know, happening time and time and time again.
Speaker 3:So what what gives the Florida, you know, law, I think, teeth is that they're saying you have to specifically teach this stuff. And if you don't do that, you are not obeying this law. It's it's different than the the board of education saying, hey. Because the the standards, as I've read them in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, they're voluntary. No teacher is literally has to abide by them.
Speaker 3:That's what students, quote, should know. And I think that what we need to do is we need to be and and, you know, as a libertarian, it's it's it's like, you know, this is a a double edged sword for me here. We do need to get, you know, more involved and say, okay, teachers. If you don't teach this, then you're not doing your job because every American needs to know you know, every American student needs to know the basics of socialism, capitalism, and just history in general. And if you're teaching them things that are not true and you're giving them, you know, revisionist history, well, then we're gonna have a, you know, ignorant population.
Speaker 3:We're gonna have a population that is not virtuous. We're gonna have a population that does not even care about upholding the constitution and, you know, the the founding principles. And it worries me that we're kinda, you know, getting close to that, but I hope that there's still time to, you know, reverse that tide.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, do do you think do you guys think the teachers and their union are upset that their kids don't understand how our government was set up and how it's supposed to work in in the constitution. No. Of course not. They did a great job.
Speaker 4:That's a job well done from their perspective. If the youth have an appreciation or an even or even a love for their country, then we can't have a revolution. Who's gonna revolt against the country they love and appreciate? You know, they're not gonna be taken to the streets unless they are ignorant of the truth and indoctrinated with lies. You know, for ages, public school teachers, protected again by their unions, have treated their our public school classrooms like their personal fiefdoms.
Speaker 4:But and but the truth is that they are, a lot of them, are abusing that public trust, you know, and we give them that trust to teach them what they're supposed to know to become successful and productive citizens. That is the that is the purpose of public education. If we must have it, that is its that's its only purpose. But when Howard Zinn's history books, full of lies about The United States and our history, when that that is curriculum in many, many, many public schools. Even the really even if you live in a very, you know, you have one of the best school districts in your state or in your area, guarantee a Howard's Inn is in there and is being taught, to people.
Speaker 4:Same thing with the 1619 project, you know, which was in the curriculum for years and probably is still in many places. You know what book is probably not in the syllabus? The Black Book of Communism. That actually tells the truth about global communism in the twentieth century. The bloody brutal truth about communism.
Speaker 4:But, you know, these public school teachers, a lot of them absolutely have the attitude, like, who are you to tell me what to teach in my classroom? Exactly. You're the person I get to tell who to teach in the classroom. We pay you. It is a public school.
Speaker 4:If the state or the school board wants you to teach a social studies course that tells the truth about how this country was founded and to and to instill in them an appreciation for our system of government and our freedoms. If you don't wanna teach that, get out. You can go find another job somewhere else. You know, I mean, Chris Chris points this out in his study, and it was alluded to with what you were reading too, Lynea. And you could go please go to heartland.org.
Speaker 4:You can check out what Chris wrote. It's a it's a very brief report, but it's very informative. But generations of kids are dumber than we were, you know, us olds when we went through school in general. Now there are exceptions, of course, especially Lynnea, Lucan, you know, and your mileage may vary, but the test scores are down. Even these kids who get into Ivy League schools need remedial instruction on things.
Speaker 4:And why is that? It is because they are not they are not they're they don't see their job in general as preparing the youth to live successful and productive lives and to love their country and to understand the history so that we don't repeat it, so that we don't have communist revolutions on the streets like we're having now. But what have we had over the last decade or two? You know, trans ideology indoctrination, gender confusion. Now we have anti ICE protests led by teachers.
Speaker 4:Yes. Young minds are impressionable. That's why the left has worked so hard to completely overwhelm and take over the public school system. Because if you don't get them young, if they're if they're not indoctrinated from the drop, as as you said, Chris, starting in kindergarten, then you cannot have a revolution. It is a shame that it seems only Florida, although there seem to be or at least they they a lot of governors and conservatives in in positions of power in states who have the mandate to direct our public school systems.
Speaker 4:They talk to good game, but unless they're doing what Florida is doing and mandating and firing people who do not teach the truth about America, we're none of this is gonna get fixed.
Speaker 3:Well, Jim, that's a really good point. And the and I've thought about this a lot. Why Florida? Why why is Florida the the, like, the only state doing this? And here's what I think.
Speaker 3:I think that a lot of people who have suffered under communism and socialism now live in Florida, and they wanna do everything possible to make sure that their children don't suffer under it. And it's the people who are in, Chicago and New York City and LA who have not actually lived under socialism who are the ones who are trying to, you know, push it upon, you know, the heartland. And that's why I think, you know, we need to make sure that other states like Oklahoma and, you know, all states should should pass similar legislation, to the Florida model just to say and it's not political whatsoever. It's just saying, hey. Socialism, you know, has, like Jim's like you said, the black book of communism has said that it has resulted in the murder of hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 3:We're talking concentration camps. We're talking famines. We're talking all sorts of just terrible stuff. Kids should know that. Kids should know that.
Speaker 2:The, people in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles have lived under socialism for for several decades now, but the productive ones have moved out. They've gone to places like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and the like, Tennessee. And so, the they're they're the ones who remain are are overwhelmingly people who are, frankly, less capable. And the the schools create this dependency. By not educating people, they create dependency.
Speaker 2:And because how how are you going to get a really good job if you're really, quite frankly, ignorant of pretty much everything, you know, except whatever's on social media that week. So they're living in a socialist world, and they're perfectly content to draw their dole and and not have any particular ambitions. Those who have ambitions move to other places.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I have a question that kinda, you know, spin us off on a little bit of a tangent. I think that all the things that you guys have said about, you know, the reasons for our test scores dropping is true in terms of the, like, political environment, and the public school system is just an abject failure. But I had there's, like, another element of this that I think has something to do with some of our test scores not being so great. And so my my question or, like, comment on the side is this. So there are a lot of studies that indicate that the actual way that the human brain stores and handles information changes as the availability of technology changes.
Linnea Lueken:So, like, before the written word, the vast majority of human history occurred before literature or recorded history exists the way that we understand it today. Right? Vast amounts of knowledge was memorized and passed down orally. And those oral traditions kind of remained strong, but mostly just kind of in the, like, educated class into the nineteenth century. Right?
Linnea Lueken:Because, like, reciting stuff was a big part of education. But the average person actually had less stuff memorized than we would have a hundred years ago to or a hundred years before that, five hundred years before that, a thousand years before that. And it's even more true today. So do you think it's possible that, like, part of the reason that we our our kids and also, like, my generation and newer generations' test scores are dropping is because of the existence of, like, Google making recall a less necessary skill. As in as in because we're aware that you can just look something up, your brain just doesn't store things the way that previous generations would have.
Speaker 3:I disagree with that because the whole point of education is to teach you how to think. And t and schools and teachers aren't doing that. You know what they're doing? And I saw this with my own eyes for years. They're teaching them what to think.
Speaker 3:So, really and I I mean, I tried to do this to the best of my ability. I tried to to to you know, as a history teacher, social studies, whatever it, you know, was whatever subject it was that I was teaching was to give them the most factual account and then let them make their mind up, but not to guide them and manipulate them into, like, oh, this is good, but it should it should be, interpreted this way or that way, which is what a lot of the teachers did. So that to me is the fundamental difference. Schools are not teaching kids how to think, how to analyze. Is socialism good?
Speaker 3:Is it bad? What are the benefits? What are the downsides? They're just they're just teaching them slogans and, you know, literally, for lack of a better word, brainwashing them.
Linnea Lueken:Anyway? Nope.
Speaker 2:I I tend agree with Chris. I tend to agree with Chris that the, that what's going on is not a matter of just coming from the outside. That's always the excuse that the education establishment gives. It's the parents' fault. Now it's the interwebs' fault.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. It's like, no. It's your fault. You don't teach well, and you are and frankly, you don't give a damn. So maybe we should not pay you to do these things.
Speaker 4:Maybe we can just wrap this up because I know Chris has to go, and he's gonna be on the Ellen Nathan show in a few minutes. But, you know, Sam, you've said this a lot. Like, the public school model is old and failing. It doesn't really have a future. With the advancement of technology, especially with AI, the good news is that, you know, the the grip that the public schools and the teachers' unions have on the youth is probably slipping.
Speaker 4:It's it's it's loosening now. And in the future, maybe twenty years from now, you know, talking about public school we would not be able to talk about public schools the way we talk about them now in twenty years because it'll look completely different. And, hopefully, that's gonna be for the better because kids won't be indoctrinated as much. There'll be more freedom of choice, and parents can have a lot more control and influence on what the children learn. And maybe they'll actually be prepared to be to live productive and and patriotic lives in America.
Speaker 3:Lynette, before I go, I just do wanna say that, you know, although the situation is bad, there is so much room for improvement. And I think school choice would, you know, just destroy the the system as it is. And we are seeing school choice become so popular, and we are seeing states embracing school choice. So, you know, I think, you know, Florida's done a great job, and hopefully, states will follow.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. Alright. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for your perspective on this. It's always very great and and well thought out and everything. Your everyone go read Chris's, policy paper on heartland.org.
Linnea Lueken:It is available easily. It is under the title of let me pull it up again. Teaching the truth about socialism in America's public schools.
Speaker 3:After you read this book first. So
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And read Justin Haskin's book. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Alright, guys. Have a good one. I'll see you later.
Linnea Lueken:See you later, Chris. Bye. Alright. So we are going to check on New York City. Speaking of socialists, Mahmdani said that he was running on making sure that New York was more affordable for people.
Linnea Lueken:Let's see how that's going. Can we play the polymarket video, please?
Speaker 5:They are so that the city can be on firm financial footing. However, in order to get to this point of closing the gap on both this fiscal year and the next fiscal year, we are forced to raid the rainy day fund, the retiree health benefits trust reserve, and to increase property taxes across these other years.
Linnea Lueken:Great. Do we have I think, Jim, you had another video too. I don't know. I don't think we reviewed it beforehand, but there's the video of him making excuses about this, property tax raise. I believe we have it in the, lineup here.
Speaker 4:Yep. It's called mom Donnie. You could get that, Andy.
Speaker 5:Tax increase. This would effectively be a tax on working and middle class New Yorkers who have a median income of a $122,000. The second path also requires us to raid our reserves. It would mean withdrawing $980,000,000 from our city's rainy day fund in fiscal year twenty twenty six and $229,000,000 from the retiree health benefit trust in fiscal year twenty twenty seven. These are steps that have been taken before, but only in moments of extraordinary external crisis.
Speaker 5:Mayor Bloomberg's response to the two thousand eight financial collapse and mayor de Blasio's response to the enormous revenue shortfall caused by the pandemic. We do not want to have to turn to such drastic measures to balance our budget.
Linnea Lueken:Uh-huh. Anyway, so, from my a blog called Quoth the Raven, we have this analysis here, if you guys didn't quite catch what was going on there. Basically, Mamdani is being forced to somehow come up with some kind of a payment pro or a a payment strategy just for the budget that they already have, not even including all the stuff that he promised when he ran for mayor. He sold New Yorkers a vision of relief, free childcare, free buses, a rent freeze, a city that would finally tilt toward the struggling rather than the secure. What he did not campaign on was a nearly 10% property tax hike affecting more than 3,000,000 residences or residents and over a 100,000 commercial properties.
Linnea Lueken:The proposal floated as leverage in a standoff with Kathy Hochul is being marketed as a reluctant last resort. Instead of rethinking the scale of the agenda, the answer was to reach for the biggest local tax lever available. Property taxes are the most predictable blunt instrument in municipal finance. They are also uniquely capable of through the housing market in exactly the way Mamdani claims to oppose. Owners of small apartment buildings do not absorb cost increases out of civic virtue.
Linnea Lueken:Co op boards don't shrug off higher levies as symbolic gestures. Costs get passed along where they can be. Where they can't, maintenance gets deferred. Either way, the renters feel it. It's a strange approach for a mayor who built his brand on a rent freeze.
Linnea Lueken:Even in regulated markets, rising operating costs create pressure. Insurance goes up. Taxes go up. Financing tightens. The idea that rents will somehow remain untouched while property taxes jump by nearly double digits requires a level of magical thinking that would make even this idiot's campaign rally blush.
Linnea Lueken:So who could have seen this coming, Sam?
Speaker 2:People could have if they read my newsletter, Life, Liberty, Property. Seriously, I I actually did point this out several weeks ago that property taxes are the most reliable source of government revenue. And so they're where evil governments go when things go bad. And the funny thing about this is that, well, what is the catastrophe that has led to this particular, problem, in New York City recently? You had you had the financial crisis, which was very much concentrated in New York City because that's where the, you know, The US financial services industry was largely located at the time.
Speaker 2:So when you had the great recession, that that really hurt New York City. I can see how you would have a temporary crisis there in terms of revenues and expenditures. Although, you know, cutting expenditures is always an option, and yet it never seems to happen. And part of that is government employee unions, thank you very much. So that is a big problem.
Speaker 2:But and and so and so was the pandemic, although, of course, again, if there's nobody on the streets, why are you having to, spend so much to maintain your city? Well, I guess because you can't fire anybody, you can't lay anybody off for a short time, none of that can happen. You just have to keep spending. And in fact, you have to spend more because you have to pretend that you're doing something about a pandemic, which we now know wasn't particularly real in the first place. Well, what's the what's the crisis now?
Speaker 2:What's the catastrophe? What happened? I'll wait for my answer. It was inflation, frankly. What the crisis is caused by is the inflation that was brought on by incredible an incredible increase in government definite deficit spending in 2021 and 2022.
Speaker 2:2020 was was bad, but that was simply that was easily, that was coming down, basically. The spending was coming back down in 2021, and then they jacked it up again. And and I have a graph that that shows that in a couple of my life liberty property articles where you show that the the the spend the federal spending was coming back down, which would would stop the inflation, but then they jacked it back up again. And that was in 2021 and 2022. You can figure out who was in congress and who was president at that time and draw your own conclusions about what the motivation was.
Speaker 2:In any case, the because that federal spending went up so high, it unleashed really horrific inflation. The other interesting thing about this is if you look at, if you look at the CPI, that was it was the consumer price index, which is the official headline inflation number that people use. If you look at that number, you see that it was, up to 9%, in 2021, 2022 in that period. That's absolutely awful, of course. The Fed's target is 2%, and reasonable inflation would be 0%.
Speaker 2:But there so there you go. So that was very high inflation. But guess what? If you look at a an another number, there is a there's a better number because the CPI is not a very good measurement for very technical reasons. But there's another measurement that is very good for one big reason.
Speaker 2:They actually look at real prices and throw them into the database, and and it's literally millions of real prices per day. So this this, this by this measure, inflation was well over 20% in 2022 and is now below 1%. So the crisis that New York City is going through is a crisis that was caused by the people that the state of New York voted for for president and the people that they put in the congress. So they really I'm sorry, but they're stuck with what they asked for. The problem is now that on top of all that, New York City has been mismanaged terribly for quite some time now, really since Bloomberg left.
Speaker 2:And, Bloomberg was a was a extremely elitist and absurd person, but at least he knew how to, keep the city going. What has happened since has been absolutely catastrophic, and so now they're in a crisis that's caused both on the national level and on the local level. And this is why there's such a dispute between Mamdani and governor Kathy Hochul, who doesn't wanna be stuck with these expenses. But it all goes back to property taxes because they're the easiest thing to raise. You know you're going to get them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, look, Mamdani said, you know, we have no choice, and Sam pointed out. Yes. You do. You you have choices.
Speaker 4:You can cut spending. You can pick out what your real priorities are and and direct the budget toward there. As a matter of fact, Mamdani is cutting the cops by 5,000. And so while he was announcing this, you know, Mamdani has picked his priorities. You know, Sam, you talk you know, with the property tax hikes in New York City, who pays those?
Speaker 4:Well, you know, ostensibly, to a to a commie idiot who's never had a real job like Zoran Mamdani, he thinks the owner of the rental properties pay those taxes. No. Right. Who actually pays those taxes are the renters because they they don't just this it's a childlike view of economics by so many of these commies, and that's giving it the best spin you can. That's being that's being good hearted in in that because I I and a lot of me, don't think they're actually ignorant.
Speaker 4:They this is all punitive on purpose because it's about class war. It's that's the that's the philosophy of a socialist and a communist. You know, it's to, you know, find out who the kulaks are and oppress them. But, you know, unless the city makes it illegal to raise rents, which in a lot of place in a lot of aspects, it is, you know, it's not the owners of these apartment buildings who are paying these these higher taxes. It is it is the renters who can hardly afford where they're at in the first place.
Speaker 4:And so look. We we played a clip from what whatever the commissar for public housing or housing or whatever in New York City. We played her clip a few weeks ago, and she has this grand plan to basically bankrupt the the owners of the apartment buildings in New York City so that the city can take them over and make them public housing and run them even better. You know, that that's insane. But, again, take take what these people do seriously and and and think about what their real aims are.
Speaker 4:And this is exactly what you would do if that was your aim, to take over as much property as possible for the public good. Someone here in the chat pointed out that taxes increasing taxes has never created prosperity and that you can't tax yourself into a sunny prosperous future, which is what Zoramamdani had promised. And that is true now, as true as it's ever been. I wanna read quickly. There was a there x x under under Elon Musk is such a is such a wonderful thing because if you look at one story on the mom Mamdani thing, the the algorithm now is gonna feed you all this great stuff.
Speaker 4:I found out using x that Tokyo Tokyo is a bigger metropolitan area than New York City. Its annual budget is $61,000,000,000. Again, New York City's budget on well, done around here is a $127,000,000,000. To a socialist, it's never there is never ever enough money. They have never confiscated enough money for a socialist.
Speaker 4:So Tokyo and by the way, of course, Tokyo was one of the cleanest, safest, most beautiful cities in the world, and New York City is increasingly swirling down into shithole status, which is what it was in the nineteen seventies when my family moved out of New York City. It's also been pointed out on x that the state of Florida has 23,000,000 people in it. There's only 8,000,000 people live in New York City. The state of Florida doesn't have an income tax. It doesn't it has property taxes, but it has very low taxes in in comparison to New York City, and its budget is about half of what it is just for New York City.
Speaker 4:And then there's a great there there I saw a great tweet by somebody called House of Yogi, and I I can send it to to Andy to put up on screen, but it's it really it really you know, we're we're not we're not trying to be obsessed with New York City. We we're covering this because this is we cover socialism. We push back on socialism and the rise of socialism, and this is really the greatest example of what could come to the country if if this ideology was was embraced more widely. But didn't he say he's only gonna increase taxes on people who make a $120,000, a $122,000? Isn't that something that he said?
Speaker 4:If you live in New York City, you are almost literally taxed to death. I mean, you know, he says here, imagine you're 26 years old, you got your first real job, it's $85,000, and you feel rich. Then you see your paycheck, the federal government takes a cut. Then New York state takes 6%. Then New York City takes another 3.5% in an income tax.
Speaker 4:Then there's the Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Tax that you've never heard of until yesterday. And just from those things, now your 85,000 is $54,000. That's all you have left in your pocket before rent. Then you grab a coffee, and that's about a 9% sales tax on that on that coffee. Then you take an Uber to the airport for maybe a job interview for somewhere else, but then the congestion pricing just added $9 to that to that to that ride, and then the landlord has to raise the rent because he's passing along the property tax increases.
Speaker 4:It's insane. And the idea they always sell it like this. The idea that we're just gonna be taxing the rich, the people who who can afford it. They can't afford it. It's actually not a big deal for them.
Speaker 4:In fact, most of them are move a lot of them are moving to Florida. But in the year 2000, New York City's budget was $40,000,000,000 for 8,000,000 people, about $5,000 per person. Today, it is a $121,000,000,000 for 8,500,000 people, $14,244 per person. Population up 6%, inflation and spending up tripled. So it's it's there's to a socialist, there's never enough money, and and they don't care to to make priorities.
Speaker 4:They don't wanna make your life better. They want to control everything, and they wanna, frankly, confiscate, if not the means of production, all of the fruits of your production and distribute it better because you do not have frankly, in in the eyes of a socialist and a communist, you do not have a moral right to your own money. It's immoral to keep the fruits of your labor. It's it's the moral thing is to have it seized and shared.
Linnea Lueken:Jim, you mentioned how to money just evaporates into the ether of a million different, pockets involved in government. Right? I mean, what you pointed out earlier about New York City, not New York state, but New York City alone having a bigger budget than the entire state of Florida. And in New York City, 40% of that budget goes to the Department of Education, which is amazing. Even though enrollment has fallen by almost a quarter million students in the last handful of years.
Linnea Lueken:And according at least to Ian Miller here, it's the lowest level since the nineteen fifties, but the budget gets higher every single year. And it's not just because costs get higher every single year. The budget is pushing the costs too. It's just this this awful spiraling situation.
Speaker 2:It's Well, they're adding staff. They're adding administrators. Yeah. So they're adding many, many administrators, and it's simply a vote buying operation at this point. But it's it's such an absurdly expensive vote buying operation.
Speaker 2:It's it's incredibly inefficient just like everything in New York.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, and the irony is he's gonna be raiding the public pension fund so the teachers' unions that wanted him to be mayor are not now he's taking money out of their pockets. See how they like it.
Speaker 2:You gotta love that irony.
Linnea Lueken:But but the reason you guys to our to our audience here who might be tired of hearing about New York City is it's not just that New York City is like a microcosm for socialist policy. Right? Because we could look at Seattle or some or Portland or something too. Those places are are nightmare zones as well at this moment. But New York City is culturally probably the most important city in The United States, I would say, in terms of, like, cultural impact over more than a 100 years.
Linnea Lueken:It's it's incredible. It's like it's like it's the capital of The United States without being the government capital of The United States, but it's the financial capital of The United States. It's the the, like, visible cultural capital of The United States. Whenever you see a film made from a different country that's talking about America, it's either talking about it has, like, shots from New York City or it has shots from, like, a a spaghetti version of Texas. You know?
Linnea Lueken:Like, something like that. That's that's America to people outside of America. So it is important. We don't want we don't want these places to die and collapse and be terrible. We want them to wake up and and get rid of these loons and not collapse.
Linnea Lueken:But, unfortunately, sometimes it takes a whole lot of pain to learn the lesson. But yep. Alright. So speaking of lessons that we are learning, but that we are doing the right thing, That would be our final topic today, which probably won't take too long, but I did wanna touch on it, which is Trump's big Japan deal. Like I said, I wanted to make sure that we covered this since, one, not a lot of people are.
Linnea Lueken:I I've I've hardly seen anyone at all talk about this, but I think it's a pretty big deal. Trump just announced this trade deal with Japan, and the first parts of it are beginning to come to fruition. So from the epic times, Trump announces three projects backed by investment under US Japan trade deal. President Donald Trump has announced three new projects worth a total of $36,000,000,000 as the first stage of a trade deal with Japan, that ultimately includes more than half $1,000,000,000,000 of funding for US manufacturing and energy development. The first phase of the agreement includes a natural gas power facility in Ohio capable capable of generating nine ten point two gigawatts of electricity.
Linnea Lueken:So Japan is helping us to fund a new natural gas plant. Cool. Alright. Another project. We'll develop a facility to export $20,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 worth of crude from deepwater in the Gulf Of America near Texas.
Linnea Lueken:Also, nice. Again, exports. And a new synthetic diamond manufacturing facility destined for Georgia will produce industrial grit supplying enough of the critical material to satisfy US demand. So we're going to be independent on synthetic diamond. Administration officials said that the deal will prove mutually beneficial.
Linnea Lueken:The proceeds are structured so that Japan earns its return and America gains strategic assets, expanded industrial capacity, and strengthened energy dominance. So this is important, you guys. Not like I said at the beginning here, not a lot of people are talking about this. But synthetic diamonds, they kinda, like, downplay for some reason in this article a little bit how important these things are. They're used in everything.
Linnea Lueken:They're used in those fine saws that they use for fabricating computer chips. They're used in optics. They're used in larger cutting tools like oil well drill bits and stuff. And Japan has been very, very annoyed with China lately. And for many decades now, but especially the last couple years, Japan Japan, has been threatened by China that China is going to withhold critical manufacturing and defense related products from Japan, which Japan was buying from them over the Taiwan issue because Japan has indicated that they would go hot for Taiwan, basically.
Linnea Lueken:They would they would fight against China. And so China dominates, like many industries, the synthetic diamond industry. They make more than half of the world's supply of high quality synthetic diamonds. And though China themselves, they like to say that they produce more than, like, 80 or 95% or something, but that's kind of like propaganda from them. They don't control that much, but they do control more than half.
Linnea Lueken:So they they reign supreme in the manufacturing of synthetic diamonds. And so The US and Japan are basically, like, casually sidestepping at least that part of Chinese of a major Chinese feedstock industry. And so, Sam, I know that this, like, specific topic might not be your main focus of research. But to me, these alliances and, like, bites off the edges of China's manufacturing seem at least, like, really good beginning steps or really smart steps, you know, solidifying our alliance with Japan, which I think is probably one of our best friends in the in the world. They don't seem to, bite us in the back as much as many of our other allies do.
Linnea Lueken:And it's just it's been insane. And I talked about this at the World, Prosperity Forum, but it's crazy that we depend so strongly on China who are very much not friends of ours, so much for critical and defense materials.
Speaker 2:It's you're so right. The this is a part of a grand movement in The United States that president Trump has initiated, and it's a long term game. And because China's been playing a long term game against us, I'm I'm I don't you know, I'm not a xenophobe or anything, but to be realistic, the government of China, which is a communist government, does want to increase its power in the world, and they look at The United States as the one place that is really a threat to, greater hegemony on their part. So they want to try and bring us down in multiple ways, and they have made many efforts to do that. We've we've seen that.
Speaker 2:We've we've seen that. It's pretty clear. So what Trump, though, has done is recalibrated what The United States is looking for in terms of the international economy. One of the things that we have to recognize is that Europe is a is a declining place. Their economies are in very bad shape.
Speaker 2:One way to to make that clear to them has been to withdraw from them and to make sure that they that they that they suffer the damage of their own policies. You look at a place like New York City, and right now, they're starting to, realize that they're suffering the damage of the policies that have gone before and their present policies. The same thing is happening in Europe. The only way to do that has been through trade and through currency. And what's interesting to me about this this, Japan deal is that it it fixes the currency problems that are created by having a strong dollar and and a lot of international trade.
Speaker 2:When you have a strong dollar, other countries want your dollars, and so they have to sell you things to get them, or they have to invest in your country. They've been selling us things. That's the easiest and and most straightforward way of getting dollars. And, though, the Chinese have invested in very strategically buying farmland and the like. So that gives them more power within The United States, especially because, you know, that farmland is is paid a lot of it's paid for by the taxpayers through the supplemental nutrition program.
Speaker 2:So the Chinese are actually getting government money for US government money for that farmland. So what happens here, though, is that you're going to have to invest or sell to The United States in order to get dollars. And what Japan is going to be doing is investing in The United States, but putting the money into facilities that will remain in The United States that are strategically valuable to us and that will employ Americans. These are all absolutely huge pluses, and they are exactly the right way to grow the nation, The United States, to grow our economy and have a strong dollar without it corrupting, international markets and forcing The United States continually to buy more and more goods from other countries. So this is a sort of different tide.
Speaker 2:The tide is moving in a different direction from what it was before, and it is a long term plan that is really brilliantly strategic and is a great answer to what China has been trying to do over the past few decades.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. One of these days, we need to talk about not just the Chinese farm purchasing issue, but also the Chinese fishing issue, which I think is increasingly becoming one of the biggest, not just ecological travesties on the planet, but also economic. A lot of island nations and stuff suffering from China literally gobbling up all the fish in their path. And, Jim, I'm gonna make you hold for just a second on on your comment because I wanna talk about synthetic diamonds for a second here because they are really important and they are really cool. And they have some nice ones, you know, not just for industrial purposes, but also for decorative and jewelry purposes as well these days.
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Linnea Lueken:That helps us as you're helping your financial future by diversifying with precious metals from Advisor Metals. Alright. But I but the diamonds thing is important. Okay? Because and it's not just that cute, like, fun little lab grown diamonds that you can get at, like, a department store or something.
Linnea Lueken:I I didn't know before I started researching for this particular topic that China controlled such a huge chunk of the synthetic diamond industry. I shoulda I kind of should have assumed, but I just never thought about it. Even as I've done research on critical minerals and critical materials in China dominates all of those, that just wasn't one that came across my radar because I've been, like, mostly worried about energy related stuff, so, like, magnets and whatnot. But the the the diamonds thing is huge because that not just for the, like, drill bit related uses, But the high quality, like, gemstone quality ones too are the ones that they like to use for optics. Optics for, different types of, like, microscopes and lasers and all sorts of things.
Linnea Lueken:And and the idea that we would allow China once again, same issue with the magnets thing, China to control our supply of these things is just outrageous. And the fact that we let this creep up on us over the last couple of decades in part because George h w Bush thought it would be a really good idea to be very, very friendly towards China even while they were not being particularly friendly towards us or their own people. Giving them a pass, basically, in order to prop them up as an economic superpower was a colossal mistake, and it's going to take many, many decades to unwind that. Jim?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm having trouble finding my place where I where I was in my notes because that segue was so spectacular that it just knocked me off my chair and I can't really really get get my focus back here. You know, I just wanna say on the on this issue, you know, thinking about this as we're going over the the topic, you know, again, I keep I keep revealing my age. But Sam also remembers when Japan was considered a real economic threat to The United States. The movie Gung Ho with Michael Keaton, you know, was kind of kind of was funny.
Speaker 4:It was a comedy about how Japan was basically outdoing us in making cars and so that they so the Japanese came over to teach us how to do it right and, you know, Clash of Cultures and all that stuff. Die Hard, you know, with Takachi Tower. Right? So that was owned by the Japanese. There was all this talk in the eighties about how the the Japanese were buying up all of these properties in The United States.
Speaker 4:They were taking us over economically. And now look at us. We are partnering with Japan to counter China, and it's brilliant. I mean, I think Trump is is he he's probably gonna go down as one of the best foreign policy presidents of the twenty first century. I think he is already that right now.
Speaker 4:I know for the midterms, he needs to focus on domestic policy and, you know, prosperity here at home. But, you know, the the mainstream media and the Democratic party do not take have never taken Trump seriously. But what he understands are incentives. And he under his his it seems like his he's always reaching out a hand in friendship. They keep criticizing him for his harsh tone and words and all that stuff.
Speaker 4:But there's always a handout in friendship, both to our allies in Europe and especially with the Japanese in in the in the Far East. And his philosophy and it's a really great selling point. It's like, hey, guys. We're all gonna make a a buttload of money. You know?
Speaker 4:We're all gonna be rich after this. Look at these great deals. And so he wants Japan to invest in The United States. He wants American companies to invest in The United States as well, but there's plenty of prosperity to go around because there's so much untapped economic potential in both of these countries. And just for a foreign policy aspect of it, the friendlier and the and the more partnerships that we have with Japan, especially economic ties, the more isolated China gets.
Speaker 4:As people in the chat here or a few people in chat here have noted, you know, China is considered this economic colossus. They are the economy of the future. That's not necessarily so, and many analysts believe that they are teetering at the edge of an economic collapse of their own. They already have a demographic collapse coming because of their one child policy for a long time. And in fact, I've read some recent musings that the that the population of China itself is not nearly as big as advertised.
Speaker 4:Right. They do not have a billion and a half people or a billion people, whatever it is. They have under a billion people that are actually in China because, again, of decades of a one child policy, math just doesn't just doesn't add up. So this this it's it's brilliant what Donald Trump has been doing because through economic diplomacy and, you know, more straightforward government diplomacy, he is continually isolating the enemies of The United States and bringing the friends and the economic powers of the world closer to The United States. He doesn't get nearly enough credit for it.
Speaker 4:And, again, the voters of the the voters the people that had supported him, you know, MAGA America, they want MAGA. They want to make America great again, not make Japan great again. But in the long term, these sorts of deals do make America better and stronger and more influential. And the more influential we are, the less influential China is, and everything that makes them a little bit more nervous, especially with the historic enemy, you know, not a shooting enemy these days, but certainly a cultural and economic enemy, China and Japan, that that's a good thing. And so, you know, this this is all this is all to the good.
Speaker 4:Again, Trump doesn't get a nearly enough credit for these sorts of things, and it's a different kind of diplomacy. It's an economic diplomacy that, frankly, a person like Obama does isn't frankly smart enough to figure out, and someone like Biden is and his the socialist that ran his administration and did the real work don't believe in economic diplomacy. So this is kind of really refreshing, and you haven't seen this sort of thing since Ronald Reagan really in the eighties when he was bolstering the Western world to as a counter to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2:Like to follow-up with one quick point about that because it's very interesting that this is a this has not been a big story, the the deal with Japan. But the deal with Japan is what it's all about. Because if you look at what's what happened in Venezuela and what's happening in Iran, that is Trump peeling off countries that are close to China and that provide China with very specific benefits. And so those benefits are now being taken away from China, and the White House is working with, other countries to, get better deals for the American people. And, of course, a deal that is, really pushed by markets, which these are really when you come down to it.
Speaker 2:There are recognitions by the president that markets are important, which, few presidents in recent decades have have done. And the when you have a deal that that is pushed by markets, that deal will benefit both parties because otherwise, you don't you don't get the deal. And so Japan benefits from this. That's great. Why is it great that Japan benefits from this?
Speaker 2:Because that means The United States benefits from this, or we wouldn't make the deal. So this is part of a big picture as I've mentioned earlier. And if you look at his in international relations movements lately, they don't look very small government, but I think ultimately that's their intention.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today, you guys. But thank you everyone for all of your discussion and everything. And also thank you to Chris who is no longer here, but, he definitely had a fantastic segment about socialism in schools. But, yeah, that is all the time we have today, unfortunately, you guys.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you everyone for your attention to these matters. We are live every week on Thursdays at noon central on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. Jim, what have you got for our audience today?
Speaker 4:We have the climate realism show tomorrow on these very same channels at, 1PM eastern time. Our special guest is gonna be Anika Sweetland. If you are not familiar with her, you're gonna wanna tune in and be familiar with her. She's fantastic.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. She's awesome. Sam, what do we got?
Speaker 2:Well, if you wanna know what's happening before anybody else can tell you, go to life liberty property at stcarnek.substack.com and directly on the Heartland Institute website, which is heartland.org.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Thank you very much. For audio listeners, please rate us well on whatever service you're using and leave a review. Thank And you so much to all of our usual panelists and to our viewers. We will see you again next week.
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