The Big Beautiful Bill - In The Tank #497
Download MP3Alright. We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. So Trump's big beautiful bill has passed the house and there is some good stuff in it and some not so good, at least in my opinion. Elon is disappointed for one, but we'll have to take a look at it and see.
Linnea:This week, we're also going to take a look at a new grading system that San Francisco is rolling out called Grading for Equity. What could go wrong? And the DNC is considering shoveling money into trying to create a Democrat Joe Rogan, completely defeating the purpose of an organic commentator, but that's why they will fail. More information is coming out about the auto pen scandal. This time, a watchdog group found that the Biden administration or at least Biden himself didn't seem to know about several serious energy policy orders he allegedly signed, including the offshore drilling ban.
Linnea:We're gonna talk about all of this and more in episode 497 of the In The Tank podcast. Alright. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I'm Lynea Luken, your host, and we also have Jim Lakeley, vice president of the Heartland Institute. Jim?
Jim:Hey, everybody. It's it's good to be on the show again. I I noticed, dad, this is episode number four ninety seven. Three more episodes to the big five zero zeroes. So we're gonna have to do something special maybe for that episode.
Jim:That'll be fun. But I'm looking forward to the topics today. I picked a couple of them myself, so let's get rolling.
Linnea:Right. We also have Sam Karnik, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute. Sam, welcome back to the show.
S. T. Karnick:Thank you, Lynea. I'm very excited to be on this big, beautiful show today, and I hope everybody else is ready to see an exciting, exciting podcast.
Linnea:Alright. Absolutely. Great. And, unfortunately, guys, Chris couldn't be here today. But before we get started, as always, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there.
Linnea:Please also click that thumbs up to like the video. Remember that sharing it helps break through YouTube suppression. They really hate us. And frankly, we don't really care all that much anymore. We'll talk about what we want to.
Linnea:And anyway, but still leaving a comment helps. And if you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. So I want to launch right into our first subject here. It's too bad that Chris isn't here. We'll have to go over a little bit shallowly today until he's able to come back so that he can help us out with it.
Linnea:So today in our unhinged segment, we have grading for equity From news week, San Francisco public schools convert f's to c's, b's to a's in equity push. San Francisco's public high schools will implement a sweeping change to their grading system this fall replacing traditional methods with a policy that allows students to pass with scores as low as 41%. We used to call that grading on a curve when we were in college. But anyway, this is a little bit more extreme than that. The initiative, part of a broader grading for equity push, is stirring concern among educators, students and parents over academic standards and college readiness.
Linnea:Homework and classroom participation will no longer influence a student's final grade. Students will be assessed primarily on a final exam, which they can retake multiple times. Attendance and punctuality will not affect the academic standing. Supporters of the policy say that it better reflects real student learning by deemphasizing behavior based penalties like late work or missed assignments. The change comes amid ongoing financial strain.
Linnea:This is part of the key here and declining enrollment across the district. While intended to address achievement gaps, critics argue that the policy may only obscure the underlying academic challenges rather than solve them. And and, Andy, that that was on the the Newsweek post, not the voice of San Francisco that we're getting through in a minute. But anyway, guys, I once again, I'm sad that Chris isn't here because he was a teacher and he has firsthand experience with us or for us when it comes to educating students and knowing what works and what doesn't. But I don't think you have to be an educator to recognize the problems in this idea.
Linnea:Is it really helping kids learn how to read if you never ask them to prove that they know how to read and you just shove them through to the finish line? Is that helping kids or is that massively hindering their success later on? Guys?
S. T. Karnick:Obviously, this is a catastrophically stupid thing to do. It's interesting to me, though, because I think the premise behind it is pretty clear, which is that this is like the end game for the whole idea of equal opportunity. The notion that everyone should have the best possible start in life makes sense, but there has to be some sort of organizing principle for society in any case. And once you have people acting in the world, they're going to get different results based on who they are, what their capabilities are, and in particular, how much they put into it. I find it absolutely fascinating that this, says explicitly that, well, we don't want to have any kind of, effect on grades of the student's character, But your character is going to affect everything in your life.
S. T. Karnick:One of the great things about having, academic standards is that it teaches children that they have to do things certain ways in order to get on in life. And this is, this is really just going to continue to push this, entire education system down the drain. It's just an awful, silly, stupid idea.
Jim:Yeah. I mean, look. Equity grading I mean, equity is fake. Equity is not real life. You can't run a school or a business or a government or a society on equity.
Jim:And I think a lot of people might remember when Kamala Harris in 2020 when she was running as as vice president with Joe Biden talked a lot about equity. I think a lot of voters were still not quite up to speed on what equity actually means. It does not mean equality. It's very, very different from equality. Joe Biden would say things like, and Kamala Harris too, would say things like, Equity is going to be the base and always top of mind as we implement government policies in my administration.
Jim:Equity will be how we govern and manage all the federal departments, and that's what we saw. And now we see it. It's everywhere. So in the state of California, what a surprise. Once the home to the best public school system in K-twelve and free for a long time, but very affordable, high quality higher education was in California.
Jim:Over the last thirty, forty years, that's been completely destroyed, to now we get this idea that in San Francisco, of course, ground zero of an entire state that is completely run by insane people, people who should be in an insane asylum. We have this idea of equity grading. I was a writer. I ended up being a writer when I went to college because I stunk at math. Linea, I was graded on a curve in my trigonometry class.
Jim:I remember that when I was a junior in high school. And thank goodness for that. I think I probably ended up with 40s on some of those tests, but I ended up getting a D or a C minus instead of an F because the class was so hard, especially for somebody whose brain doesn't really work mathematically. This is equity grading and all of these things that the left, which has controlled not just Democrats, the left, the hard left, has controlled our education system for at least one generation, maybe two. I think I'm an old man yelling at cloud here in Gen X.
Jim:I tend to think, because I'm biased that way, that Generation X might have been the last generation to completely get through the system of education from K-twelve to college without being completely overrun by leftist gobbledygook from lesson plans to administrations to teachers and all of that stuff. But what this is doing, Sam touched on this, is we're robbing these kids from a proper education. Know, a movie that had a big influence on me was Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams standing on the desk and Captain, my Captain! And getting those kids passionate about poetry and about learning.
Jim:That inspired me. That's why I matriculated toward English and English literature and English writing and all that stuff. I have my copy of Leaves of Grass in my office. But that's not the education system that we have. Mean, was that said?
Jim:In the 40s, I think, or maybe the 30s? But obviously it was a generation or two before me. But we've now robbed kids. They can't have that education anymore. I mean, I guess you could in places like Hillsdale and Thomas Aquinas in California of all places and other places.
Jim:There still is the proper teaching of the classical texts that are taught because it's not just the material that you're learning. You are learning a lot more about the world and about how to think for yourself and how to absorb complex material, which is very important to being a well rounded, educated person. Modern kids are being robbed of all of this, and especially of all places in California. I mean, we already have people entering Ivy League schools, at least the American students anyway, who have to take remedial math. This has been going on for at least a decade.
Jim:They should have learned remedial math in high school or they should be going to a community college to learn that before they apply to, I don't know, maybe a state school. But we admit kids into the Ivy League that need remedial math courses. And you know, with the advent of AI, let's be real here, students use AI to cheat, and it's rampant because it's easy and it's difficult for teachers to catch it. It's hard to tell the difference between a very intelligent interpretation of a text and somebody asking Grock to do it for them and then putting that down on their paper. And so if you're not to have tests that can be measured, if you're not going to make them do homework, do they even go to labs anymore?
Jim:Do they go to physics lab or chemistry lab anymore? I don't know. Maybe it's probably too dangerous for them to go to those labs if they're not being taught the proper stuff in their practice to begin with. You see stories that just keeps coming up on social media and in legacy media about how professors in colleges have students that just can't do the reading. We live in a very small attention span society as it is with the advance of technology, but they have students that just really can't do the reading anymore that they used to.
Jim:To do it because of equity is actually insulting to the students you are trying to help. Young people need to be challenged. If you're not challenged, you're not going to grow. And we just keep dumbing down education in this society. And every time we hear a story like this, Lynne, I think back to the movie Apollo 13.
Jim:And you had people in the 1960s using slide rules and a chalkboard. I know it was a dramatic effect, but that's what they used to bring the stranded astronauts back to Earth. Today, that is completely impossible. It would seem almost impossible, unless you're an engineer working for Elon Musk, to be able to figure something like that out because our remedial instruction, the base that you need in order to expand your mind. It's a beautiful thing.
Jim:It's a wonderful thing. It makes us more human to be able to learn, we're just robbing generations of that. I guess the only upshot of this is that this will increase the demand for attendance at private schools and probably increase homeschooling as well.
Linnea:Right. And it's not like the data even bears it out, right? It would be one thing if it was like a fruity theory that actually was showing that there was learning going on somehow by some magic quantum learning, teleporting the information into their brains even though they're not doing any of the work or even showing up to class. But, I wanted to highlight this section from the voice of San Francisco that says, unsurprisingly, the most recent data from both middle schools in San Leandro San Leandro, is that right? Where grading reform started in 2016 documents significant continued disparities among student populations when it comes to performance on statewide assessment tests.
Linnea:In both English and math, the gaps range from twice to triple to even four times as many students meeting or exceeding the standard in some subgroups compared to others. So their whole thing, the equity issue is they're trying to, like, level it all out. Right? They're trying to make sure there aren't students who exceed and there aren't students who fall terribly behind. And it's actually having the opposite effect.
Linnea:So the gap is widening. It turns out that if, you know, a kid doesn't have a good, rigorous education minded home life, and then they make school no longer rigorous or education minded, the kid isn't magically improving on their own. So it's it's very, very bad anyway. So I just wanted to give you guys that black pill today before we move on to the next subject. But, no, the hopefully, I mean, eventually, reality is going to reassert itself.
Linnea:There's really no other option. Right? Unfortunately, there's probably gonna be quite a lot of pain and a lot of kids are being punished and suffering for some, you know, usually racial extremists, like pet projects that they inflict on everybody.
S. T. Karnick:Well, that's the big problem here. It's the whole idea that certain groups, if they're not doing as well as other groups, that that is a problem that requires some kind of forcible solution. Educating everybody to the best of their ability, would seem to be common sense. But we get away from that because we look at the numbers and then we say, well, we need this group to be up where this group is. Well, is that possible?
S. T. Karnick:We assume it is, and we make that to be our test for equal opportunity. But there is no such thing as equal opportunity. Everyone is different. We're made different genetically. We're made different by our upbringing, by nutrition and by our education.
S. T. Karnick:It would be nice if you would all in California there try to make the education as challenging as possible. And those who can't make it to the top level, they don't have to be at the top level. There is a nice world out there for people who are not PhDs in physics. So it's rather silly. And being able to use a slide rule to do calculations and to be able to diagram a sentence and to know what the history of The United States is.
S. T. Karnick:Jim just went ballistic on that one, think. But
Jim:those
S. T. Karnick:are all really important things. And if you know the fundamentals of something, then you know what the outcomes of actions are going to be. If you don't understand the fundamentals, this goes with the economy, it goes with the cars, it goes with anything you might wanna deal with. If you don't know the fundamentals, then you don't know anything. And we're getting away from that.
S. T. Karnick:We're really creating a situation where more and more people are just not ready for life. And that is pathetic. We really need to get our act together and stop talking so much about money and resources and start talking about actual teaching. This is not going to end well, as you say.
Linnea:Yeah. And this almost certainly this kind of thing almost certainly has to do. And I think this is true for Illinois schools as well with schools just trying to get more government funding. And if they have more people passing, like if they have more people graduating and they don't have people being held behind, held back and stuff, they get penalized for people being held back and for people not graduating. So they're doing this in order to get more funding to fund what your educational standards are slipping at best.
Linnea:And Sterling is in the comments here and he makes a good point. He says part of this is the move to focus on self esteem without accomplishment. I think that's certainly part of it. It's, you know, some people like to point a lot to the the participation trophy thing. And I think some of that's a little bit exaggerated, but there is some truth there.
Linnea:Not everybody deserves a trophy for everything they do. That's just a fact of life. And at one point in time, I would have said, well, when they get into the real world, it'll reassert itself and, you know, they'll they'll suffer for having that attitude. But the corporate world coddles that attitude, too. Now it's gotten completely out of control.
Linnea:Top and bottom. Anyway, I want to move on quick here. So this is another thing that Democrats seems to be completely and utterly deranged about. So honestly, this could probably go under unhinged too. But they are absolutely dumping me into a new program aimed at finding a Democrat Joe Rogan.
Linnea:This is a interesting one. So everyone here probably knows that Joe Rogan isn't exactly a lifetime card carrying Republican. In fact, he
S. T. Karnick:What?
Linnea:Yeah. Exactly. In fact, he said in the past that Democrats lost him by being so extreme. And it's also pretty clear that right wingers are just generally more popular online than leftists, not across the board. There are some exceptions in the podcasting world, but not many.
Linnea:People like Joe Rogan become popular not because they have so much political expertise. I mean, sometimes you see a take and you wanna tear your hair out, but it's actually for just being likable and willing to talk about topics that are difficult or talk to people from across the spectrum who do have interesting things to say, whether or not you agree. So Democrats took one look at this program or this system and his organic success, and they said to themselves, but can we make this in a lab? No. So from the federalist, we have Democrats are pursuing not one, not two, but a whopping 26 initiatives aimed at replicating Donald Trump's appeal with podcasters and influencers in the digital space.
Linnea:The party's goal is to develop influencers in a political spaces like sports or lifestyle podcasts who can resonate organically with audiences while subtly building online enthusiasm for Democrat candidates. They're hitting up donors to the tune of tens of millions of dollars to do it. The Times profiled several of these burgeoning initiatives, all with similar vaguely empowering names that say nothing substantial at all. And the solution would require, though, for them to succeed, the Federalist writes, it would require them letting go of the reins of power and allowing the marketplace of ideas to work freely or even especially when it leads to new ideas that buck party consensus. Think with Donald Trump and RFK, for example.
Linnea:Rogan and other independent podcasters don't take their cues from on high. They're actually just naturally curious and bring people on from all walks of life to explore ideas that they find interesting. So meeting people where they're at. This is what democracy is supposed to be about. It makes what shows like the Joe Rogan experience so appealing to people in the first place.
Linnea:Yet it's the one thing that the Democrat party with its obsession with rigid conformity that crushes people for the mildest descent cannot accept. And this is so true to quote to quote our wonderful president. So true. The Democrats and people who are leftist or like social justice social justice warrior minded in general, their entire worldview depends on building very rigid lines of how you can talk about certain subjects, or you're canceled, or you're ostracized in some way or another. And it's led to tons of people who would otherwise probably be Democrats leaning into the right.
Linnea:And and so it's the way that they approach politics, the way that they approach life in general is almost impossible to replicate organic like impossible to make an organic allowable kind of like fun show that all people from all walks of life are going to enjoy. They just can't. I mean, imagine a Democrat Joe Rogan trying to allow someone on who will talk about like how harmful transgender surgery is to kids. They're not going to be able to do it. They just can't.
Linnea:Regardless of whether or not there's broad support from like normal voting Democrats and Republicans that this stuff is bad for kids. Democrats cannot allow a representative of theirs to talk about It's they're asking for something that is counter to their entire, like, policy positions. Go ahead, guys.
Jim:Well, the last go ahead, Sam. You go first. I have one bit of random to do.
S. T. Karnick:Okay, good. And I'll just set you up then. The left really starts with results. They know what result they want and then they decide this is how we're going to do The perfect example is the previous example we had grading for equity in San Francisco. We want young people all to have the same level of achievement.
S. T. Karnick:So we will just simply, oh, we'll just obliterate achievement and then everyone will have the same level. And this is what's going on, here with this, with this action is that there's saying we need to have, an influence in this space where all these frankly, where all these young males are and and especially the the, ones who are drifting toward the right and toward conservatism. And so the idea is, well, we need to get into that space and show these people how awesome the left is and how great our ideas are and how, for example, wrong it is for men to think that, let's say, an attractive woman has some appeal to her or that cars are pretty darn cool things when they have internal combustion engines. That walking around out in the woods and shooting at deer is a fulfilling and good thing to do. So we need to change their minds about all those things and many more.
S. T. Karnick:And so we'll get somebody out there who's really influential and we'll build them up so that they will be the biggest thing ever. And then we'll get a whole bunch of little minions who will also, work toward that end. And then we'll have what we want. Whereas the right, you mentioned the term organic and that's really what happens. Right is all about organic things because what the right starts with is processes.
S. T. Karnick:And then they they you expect that the results will be the best because most people want to to have a good life. So they do they do the kinds of things that would give them a good life. And that always involves, always involves benefiting other people. You don't get to be the, you don't get to be Facebook, for example, by, by not benefiting people. You get to be mad at by, by doing that.
S. T. Karnick:And say you don't get to be old Google by not benefiting people. You get to be current Google by doing that. And these are fading efforts and they will decline over time and it may be very fast. So if you look at how the two visions for our country, one is that we, the experts will figure out what's best. The progressive vision, the experts will figure out what's best and they'll impose it on everyone and that'll be that.
S. T. Karnick:Whereas, and that's a goal oriented. We know what we want and we're going to, completely twist the world into, into, into a little piece of ball, a little ball if we want to, if it takes that to get it there and everyone will be stupid and poor but we will have equality which is the thing that we want. Whereas, on the right, the whole idea is that we will put in place the right processes and, decent processes that are fair and that are blind, for example, or visually impaired processes. And then people will put out the effort and whatever happens, that will be what, we end up with. And as I said, the important thing is that because people want to benefit themselves as as Adam Smith observed, it's not their desire to benefit other people that makes people make bread or nowadays automobiles or planes or whatever or software, it's their desire to benefit themselves and their family.
S. T. Karnick:And so this approach of having an organic way where you just believe in processes and let them roll is in a complete 100% contrast with the idea of imposing from above. So you would think that this effort would fail spectacularly.
Linnea:Yeah. And Chris Shattuck asked the question, whose money are they using to find a DEM alternative, to Joe Rogan? And that is donor money. I mean, they're they're courting donors on specifically, doing, like influencer peddling. So what what's interesting here?
Linnea:Let me I'll let you take it for a second, Jim, because I'm gonna pull that article back up again.
Jim:Well, it's gonna take me more than a second. But
Linnea:No. No. Please.
Jim:Well, yeah. Mean, just let me say, look, right leaning, if you want to call them that, right leaning podcast rose because they were shut out of the legacy media. When I saw these stories, I thought of the same thing. Again, I'm old enough to remember the rise of Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh invented an entire industry by himself because of his success in the late 1980s nationally syndicating with his own company a talk show in the middle of the day from twelve to noon eastern time when everybody in the industry told him that that would fail miserably because people are at work.
Jim:How the hell are they gonna listen to you in the middle of the day? And he proved them all wrong, but he existed. He was able to succeed because he filled a need in the media. He filled a void in the marketplace of ideas because conservative voices were largely shut out of legacy media. And that's the same thing here with right leaning podcasts, and they are successful because they have been shut out of the legacy media or even worse, called disinformation or misinformation and attacked and censored.
Jim:And all of that does is just add more fuel to the fire. But Democrats can't pod because they're not interested in having conversations with people. They're interested in running ops, in running operation you know, information operation campaigns. They're about pushing propaganda. You know, they they have called podcasts.
Jim:They they spent four years calling Joe Rogan's super successful podcast disinformation, trying to get a deep platform, trying to get Spotify after he signed his contract to take him off the air. These things happened and I remember them and I think most people should remember them. Joe Rogan certainly remembers them. He just had another podcast with AJ from The Y Files, another not a right wing podcast, but a super successful independent content creator on YouTube. Fantastic conversation.
Jim:You should check it out. And they talked about this. But the thing about podcasts, and I've mentioned this a couple of times, is that authenticity is the coin of the realm in the new media. Robert Meyer Burnett had that great quote. And the left and the Democrats don't have any authenticity because they're running they're running psyops.
Jim:They're not and they're doing propaganda. They are not having actual conversations. You have to build an audience organically. There aren't any shortcuts. God bless the young consultants who are going to be stealing money out of the pockets of rich democrat donors, but you can't buy what has been created by Joe Rogan and others because there's no shortcuts because you rise and you fall on your ability to attract and keep people interested in your show and what you are saying.
Jim:Two good examples of this, and I have more to say, but I'll just put these examples out there for you, Lanea. Megan Kelly, former Fox News star, has a super successful podcast. I watch it almost every episode because it's fun, it's interesting, and she keeps my interest. Meghan Markle, the former duchess of Sussex, also has a podcast that is failing. She tried to buy influence.
Jim:She tried to buy an audience, and you can't buy it. Michelle Obama has a pod everybody has a freaking podcast. You know, we started that. We're almost 500 episodes in, five hundred weeks into this thing. But Michelle Obama has a podcast.
Jim:Have you listened to her podcast? Anybody here? I I've not listened to a whole episode, but I've seen clips. She's miserable. There is no joy.
Jim:She's almost always complaining about something. Who wants to sit and listen to that? And she was even on Amy Poehler, comedian Amy Poehler has a podcast, of course. Michelle Obama was a guest. You could see the fear in Amy Poehler's eyes.
Jim:She's not gonna ask, you know, Big Mike any real questions. You know? And so compare that interview to Joe Rogan having Donald Trump on his program. They just talked about whatever the hell Joe wanted to talk about for three hours, and then Trump would bring up UFC, and they talked about that for forty minutes. You know, I skipped through that.
Jim:I don't care about that. But, you know, look, you you know, you you succeed and fail on what you actually bring to the audience. And the audience does not wanna sit there and listen to democratic propaganda every day. And there is nobody on the left that I've ever seen that has the talent to do that. The reason this is going to fail, and hit this perfectly, Linea, is that there are things you're not allowed to talk about on the in the Democratic Party.
Jim:And you there are all these no go zones that ordinary people like to talk about or things that interest them or things that trouble them. Like, know, transgenders playing girls sports, you know. You can't talk about that on anybody else's podcast on on the left. So, you know, they they won't succeed because they can't. They don't have the talent to do it, but they cannot actually talk genuinely to people.
Jim:And and so they're they're lost, and I hope they stay lost.
Linnea:Yeah. And I mean, it's it's not just that, you know, oh, well, if you have right wing content on your podcast, it'll be popular online. That's definitely not true. But if you look at, you know, some of the most popular podcasts that the Democrats or at least the left in general have been trying to rip down recently, there's like the unsubscribe podcast, which is just a bunch of, like, cops and military veteran, like, gun tuber bros sitting around drinking alcohol, talking about whatever they feel like talking about. They've had guys come on and talk about, like, ghosts and cryptids and stuff.
Linnea:Like, it's just it's silly, goofy, fun stuff. And it's wildly popular. Why? Because they're genuine. They're doing stuff organically.
Linnea:They care about the stuff that they talk about, and they're not being, like, paid by political operatives. Right. So I want to give some context to the audience here. The Federalist does a good job of listing some of the programs that this money is going towards. The first one is called a n d media, achieve narrative dominance media, which plans to fund influencers while co producing their content.
Linnea:And it's raised $7,000,000. Another project bullhorn will back creators while working as a matchmaking service to book them with influential YouTube podcasts. Channel zero will provide back office services to content creators, while Double Tap Democracy will help to grow 2,000 smaller apolitical accounts. And Project Echo, which has pledged $52,000,000 war chest to a vague influencer program, most of which it aims to obtain from donors. So that's all those guys.
Linnea:And Federalist says that, you know, there's a predictably swampy who's who of professional operatives and corporate elites all as promising donors. And they're promising donors a major return on investment. So good luck. Even the New York Times on this topic said that the quiet effort amounts to an audacious, skeptics might say desperate bet that Democrats can buy cultural relevance online despite the fact that casually right leaning touchstones like mister Rogan's podcasts were built not by political donors and did not rise overnight. So yeah.
Linnea:I mean, this stuff takes forever to grind out. I mean, if you weren't if you're like a new a newer YouTuber and you're trying to grow in the, like, I don't know, like, political podcaster space, I guess it might be a little bit easier for Democrats because they're not suppressed by YouTube's algorithm, like, not targeted specifically. And I'm talking about, like, general politics, not like the Heartland Institute with our with our, you know, think tank space, but, like, someone trying to be the next Matt Walsh or something is gonna have a heck of a fight on YouTube now compared to fifteen years ago. Right? So it's kind of like it's harder to become an influencer, and I hate that word so much.
Linnea:But it's harder to grow in that area and have influence now than it was if you got in when get the getting was good. And so that the Democrats are trying to, like, force this like a square peg in a round hole. It's just not gonna work out for them. I wish them luck. I wish them many, many donations.
Linnea:I wish them spending lots of money on this effort. But I I think it's doomed to fail. And you look at they've been they did it during the last election too. I mean, the amount of money that they spent on, like, Sisan and a bunch of other TikTok influencers and stuff was immense, but nobody really likes it. It's it's just gross, especially when you find out that someone you've been following is now, like, being paid to pitch political propaganda.
Linnea:On the right and the left, it comes off as gross. Anyway, I thought you guys in the audience would enjoy to hear about that and to kind of chuckle at it with us a little bit because there's just the structures of the left just aren't capable of producing that kind of organic influence. Alright. So Biden's auto pen presidency. We talked about this a few weeks ago, how it was discovered that Biden or someone was using auto pen, the auto pen signing machine to sign a very large number of his executive orders.
Linnea:And this alone isn't proof of anything. It's legal. And Trump has used the auto pen from time to time, although not anywhere near as often as Biden did. No one can sign that much stuff without their hand, like, breaking off. But what's different with Biden is that he doesn't seem to have any clue whatsoever what it is that he actually apparently signed.
Linnea:We saw or asked the auto pen to sign. We saw it tons of times when he was pressed on very specific executive orders that he denied ever signing. So in comes this watchdog group, Power of the Future, which took a look at eight executive orders having to do with energy policy. And Fox News reports on what they found. Power the future, a nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs, reviewed eight Biden executive orders that it says were significant shifts in domestic energy policy and said it found no evidence of the president speaking about any of them publicly, raising concerns that the orders were signed by Autopen and that he was not aware of them.
Linnea:These are not obscure bureaucratic memos. These are foundational shifts in American energy policy, yet not once did Joe Biden speak about them publicly. Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power of the Future told them, the executive orders reviewed by Power of the Future include an Arctic drilling ban in 2023, a 2021 executive order committing the federal government to net zero emissions by 2050, an executive order mandating clean energy AI centers, and an offshore drilling ban executive order shortly before leaving office in 2025. Now I know we talked about this at on this show, if not also on the climate realism show. If you guys remember when Biden insisted that he never signed a pause on LNG exports, like the very day that he did allegedly appear to have signed a pause on LNG exports.
Linnea:And everyone was extremely concerned that he had apparently no idea or he was just so blatantly lying when he was on the White House website. He did it or that they were bragging about the pause on LNG exports for climate reasons. So, guys
Jim:Do you want do you wanna see that clip? I have that clip. Oh, good. Yep.
Linnea:Let's do it.
Speaker 4:And I said, mister president, thanks for the moments. You know, this is very important. I got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I heard, and I think you know, and what do we do? And but first, real quickly, mister president, can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this to from my, constituents in Louisiana.
Speaker 4:Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Like, I don't under you know, liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Because you understand we just talked about Ukraine. You understand you're fueling Vladimir Putin's war machine because they gotta get their gas from him.
Speaker 4:You know? And he looks at me stunned with this and he said I didn't I didn't do that. And I said, mister president you yes you did. It was an executive order like you know three weeks ago. He goes, no I didn't do that.
Speaker 4:He's arguing with me. I said, president respectfully can I could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We'll read it together. You definitely did that. And he goes, Oh, you talk about natural gas.
Speaker 4:Yes, sir. He said, No, no, you misunderstand. He said, What I did is I signed this thing to we're gonna conduct a study on the effects of LNG. I said no you're not sir, you paused it. I know I I have the terminal, the export terminal in my state.
Speaker 4:I talked to those people this morning. You're this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security. It occurred to me Barry, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed. And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, we're in serious trouble.
Speaker 4:Who is running the country? Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know.
Linnea:Yeah. And and speaker Johnson's position or comments on this are not the only time that we've seen this either. It there were a multitude of especially energy related executive orders that Biden would go right in front of television cameras and say, no. I didn't sign that and, like, wave reporters off when they asked about it. But it's on the White House website saying that he signed it.
Linnea:It's yeah. It was very bad. What does this mean? I mean, I have no idea how you would even prove that the president didn't actually sign off on this stuff without him coming out publicly and saying, hey, I just found out that my cabinet had been forging my signature basically for years. Not only is he not going to do that because he just wanted to do what well, in insofar as he had the mental capacity to agree with his party on things, which is dubious, I think.
Linnea:He's not gonna backtrack on them now when the Democrats are scrambling to become reunified to try and beat Republicans in the next election. So, I mean, we already knew the Biden presidency was illegitimate in certain respects, especially with regards to his mental health. But what does this actually mean for all of the things that he signed into law? I mean, can we even do anything about this?
S. T. Karnick:No. Nothing will be done. These things will all stay. It's a pity. But one thing that has happened is that the whole left has been tarred by this lack of authenticity.
S. T. Karnick:This is very important to the American people that their leaders in particular be authentic and be true to themselves truth. What we had there was a situation where the president of The United States was clearly incapable. We all knew it, we all saw it and we were told that's disinformation, he's doing great. And then they said, these EOs are all coming from the president. Well, they're not, they weren't.
S. T. Karnick:But this happened more than a hundred years ago in These United States under President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was incapacitated by, I think it was a stroke and he was not functioning, he was just in bed and his wife was running the government and signing all the bills and the orders. So this has happened before. And the strange coincidence is that they were both heavily progressive leaders at the time who were used to create an extremely strong government and transfer power from people to government. And so this is, as I say, it's happened before.
S. T. Karnick:Let's hope it won't ever happen again. But the only way that these things can be fixed at this point is for Congress to go and legislate them out of existence. That those just whatever is in those EOs, executive orders, they just come up with legislation that would cancel it. That's the only thing that can be done. No court is going to, and certainly not our courageous Supreme Court is going to come through and say, well, yeah, these look hinky.
S. T. Karnick:This whole thing is suspicious. So unless we have proof that these executive orders are legitimate, we're not going to allow them to be enforced. Well, that's not going to happen. One of the big element here is that this is all Congress has control over these things, but Congress does not exert control. And that's a real problem.
S. T. Karnick:We have to get our Congress back in control because then they'll be responsible when these things go wrong.
Jim:Yeah. I mean, one of the ironies here is that we have courts stopping executive orders that Trump signed in public with his big black Sharpie in front of everybody, and those things are not legitimate. But we're gonna be told that everything that Biden signed with his auto pen is legit and the law of the land for forever or for as long as they can make it happen. Look. From from that clip with speaker Mike Johnson, if you take it at face value if you take it at face value, Biden was told by his staff that what he was signing was just a study about perhaps banning LNG exports.
Jim:Obviously, it was not. This was a full on ban that he had signed and either Joe Biden didn't remember or Joe Biden was lied to by his own staff so that these unnamed, unelected staff members could impose their personal personal policy preferences and not that of the president or the American people. I don't know. That seems like a pretty big deal and perhaps even a crime in this country. Joe Biden signed more than 4,200 pardons and commutations.
Jim:That's as many as were signed by every single previous president going back to Clinton's first term, which began in 1993. I'm going to do the math. I said I was bad at math. That's twenty eight years. He signed more of those in one month, basically, than all the previous presidents going back twenty eight years had done.
Jim:I don't know how you investigate something like this. I suppose we're going to have grandstanding congressional hearings. But it seems quite obvious, and there's a lot of this in Jake Tapper's new book Original Sin, that the hard left leftist staffers that were surrounding Joe Biden, they were the ones coming up with and writing these executive orders and writing these policies that were signed by Autopen, and that Joe Biden obviously did not he was not briefed on every one of those pardons and commutations that he signed in his only term as president, considering that he only worked about a five hour day at most, he would have done he would have had to do nothing but read every one of those pardons and commutations for the entire four years in order to have considered all of them individually in that manner. So look, the the auto pen, how it's how it's supposed to work, it's it's supposed to be used for, like, routine stuff, like naming a post office, you know, sign the sign the resolution naming a post office after somebody, you know, in Missouri. That that's the kind of stuff it was used for.
Jim:Or when a president is traveling, but, you know, the system, what a shock, was abused by the leftists when they got power in in Washington DC. And then at the same time, they are they are canceling every legitimate executive order. The use of executive power that Trump is is exercising legitimately, all of that has to be opposed and a lot of it is being stopped while the abuse of executive authority by people who are not president is just brushed off and allowed to happen. You know, this is a problem. And I like I said, I hope I'm sure Jim Jordan or somebody in the House is going to do some hearings on this and try to get down to the bottom of it.
Jim:And absolutely nothing nothing will be done. In fact, if anything is done, they'll probably restrict Trump's power to sign executive orders by the by the time it's all done.
Linnea:Yeah. Well, and I I wanna move because I know Sam's gotta leave us in a couple of minutes here, a couple of seconds here, maybe even. But, Sam, before we before we have to let you go, I do want you to comment really fast on our on our last topic, which was about the big, beautiful bill. There is some there there's room to be skeptical, hopeful, frustrated, happy, angry, all of it at the same time with this bill, it seems. I've been leaning pretty hard on the epic times coverage for it, but I wanna know what your takeaway is from this bill.
Linnea:Are you happy with it, Sam?
S. T. Karnick:I'm happy with it as far as it goes. It's it's big and beautiful, but not enough of either. But it never was intended to be be any any more than what it is. And I I was writing about that at at my Life Liberty Property, newsletter for Heartland, about that months, months ago, you know, saying that this is necessary. We absolutely have to get the the tax, the 2017 tax cuts extended.
S. T. Karnick:If we don't do that, we will, the economy will absolutely crash. So we had to do that. But the only way to do it was through a reconciliation bill. So complaining that the bill doesn't have, for example, Doge cuts in it is silly. You can't put those in a reconciliation bill.
S. T. Karnick:In a reconciliation bill, the only kind of spending that you can change is mandatory spending. And that's the one thing they weren't going to really, really going to touch very much. But to the extent that they did put spending cuts in there, that's what they were. So things like food stamps and Medicaid. So right from the start, and if you knew what was going on, you knew that this bill was only going to extend the tax rate cuts and that those tax rate cuts in order to be expended had to in order to be extended had to be allied with some spending cuts.
S. T. Karnick:But that's all the spending cuts you were going to get because you needed those tax cuts. You you have to get that through Congress. So if you say, well, we're gonna cut spending by $4,000,000,000,000 which I'm fine with, I would love to see that, but you're not going to get that bill through. So you can't do it through reconciliation. So what you need to do then is have another bill.
S. T. Karnick:And that's what I said from the start is that this is the beginning and the hard work becomes when you start to make cuts. But that starts now. And I'm sure that they've already put in a lot of work on that behind the scenes. But as far as congress goes, you have to get the reconciliation bill done first. You have to get that signed.
S. T. Karnick:So we avert an absolute horrific economic catastrophe because raising taxes by the amount that the loss of the tax cutting extension would do would be an economic catastrophe. It would be the biggest tax increase of all time, and that would smash the economy. So you had to get that done. But now once you get that done, which is we're looking, think probably early July before it's actually, in law. And those those extension, the tax cuts end in September.
S. T. Karnick:So you have to get that done. And it's not going to be everything we want. But why does it have to be everything we want? It's a big beautiful bill on its own. It's not enough of of either to be ideal, but that's more work.
S. T. Karnick:You just you have to do that through other bills. And I believe that that is that work is is ongoing. We definitely better see it happen because spending must be cut and it must be cut by we're talking in the trillions of dollars, at least a couple of trillion per year. So we have to have that. But you can't get that through the reconciliation bill.
S. T. Karnick:So people who are complaining about it not cutting spending enough are being absolutely disingenuous in my view. This is big. It's beautiful. It's not enough of either. But there's there are other venues to get the rest of it done.
S. T. Karnick:Let's get it done after we get this finished.
Linnea:Absolutely. Thank you, Sam. In fact, the White House is sending Congress a recessions package to try to claw back some of that $9,400,000,000 in appropriated funds. The Epic Times reports that they are looking at a total of $8,300,000,000 to be cut from the US Agency for International Development, which is USAID, and then the African Development Foundation. And then another 1,100,000,000.0 are going to be rescinded from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which we will all just cry when NPR and PBS are no longer getting federal funds.
Linnea:So they are trying to do more besides just pass this bill. It's not like Trump has passed the bill and then is saying, okay, we're done. You know, the Elon Musk is disappointed with it. I think it's understandable that he's disappointed with it because I think he was really hoping that a ton of stuff was gonna happen while he was in government or helping Trump, and his time in the White House was always going to be limited. So, Jim, on what we have so far, like, on what on what Sam has said, what are your thoughts?
Linnea:And I have an epic time story that goes over some of the things that I definitely do not like in this bill along with
Jim:Go over that first. Yeah.
Linnea:Extra little goodies that are super, super good or at least very promising. So the lesser known provision story, we'll go over, but I want to get your take first, Jim.
Jim:Yeah. Well, you mentioned Elon Musk, he wanted to maybe see more done while he was still in government. We should remember that when Doge and Elon Musk's involvement and then his smart people to staff Doge was announced, the plan, as announced, was that the Doge cuts and Doge is really going to be sprinting hard to get everything done or as much as they could through our 200 birthday celebration in July of twenty twenty six. So, you know, it's very easy to forget that we are not even two hundred days into a new administration, and we're starting to maybe complain that everything isn't done already. It's still quite early, and they are doing a lot.
Jim:And, yes, they're going to, you know, trip over a couple hurdles. They're going to have to brush, you know, bugs out of their face as they continue running forward. But so I'm trying to be patient. And I also try to put it in perspective. Two other notable times were the reconciliation bill, which is the budget reconciliation bill, which means it's filibuster proof.
Jim:In the Senate. It only needs 51 votes or a majority that just need to win by one vote or get a tiebreak vote. In other words, it could even be tied and then Vance would break the tiebreak. And so the last two times the reconciliation bill was to do something big that I recall. We got Obamacare and then we got the Green New Deal under Biden.
Jim:I'm sorry, they called it the Inflation Reduction Act, but it was the Green New Deal. At least this one, this use of the reconciliation bill, as Sam mentioned before he had to run off, locks in Donald Trump's, you know, twenty seventeen tax cuts and then puts in a few more, and that's a good thing. This is something that we should all be celebrating. It's pretty much washed off. Don't even think about that.
Jim:We're just thinking about spending. We're concentrating on Doge. And then about Elon Musk. You know, there's a bit of a tragedy about this, and you can kind of see it in Elon Musk's body language over the last couple of weeks. You know, he risked everything.
Jim:His business, his public reputation, his personal safety, and perhaps even his very freedom to support Donald Trump to defeat the Biden, the Obama Biden regime, and to try to reset our federal government, reset the way we think about federal spending, get a handle on how much spending is actually happening. I mean, one of the things that he did, he went into the Treasury Department, and they're not tracking any of the spending. In fact, they've never said no to any spending button that was hit. They never said no. Just goes out.
Jim:There's very little tracking. We don't know what's going on. He's already exposed so much graft and grift and let alone spending on wasteful projects, but people that are basically using politically connected Democrats mostly using the federal treasury as a personal piggy bank. A lot of that has already been exposed. There's still a lot of work to do on that, and that's a good thing.
Jim:And as you mentioned, you couldn't do everything that Doge has identified in this particular bill. And as you mentioned, there's a rescissions package coming up that cuts $9400000000.0.8300000000.0 of that is USAID, USAID money, and $1,100,000,000 is for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So almost the entire rescissions bill is just those two things. That's a good thing. We'll see if we can get that passed in the House and the Senate.
Jim:And that would start to go a long way. That would be the first time anything like that has ever been done in the lifetime of anybody listening to this podcast. So cutting spending to that level is just unheard of. So there are things to be happy, I suppose, about. You can't get everything done in a reconciliation bill.
Jim:There are spending on things that you can go over them here, Lynneha, that we might not like. Discontinuation of programs. But look, politics is the art of the possible, and it's not possible to do everything at once. We should keep the pressure on on our elected leaders, especially the Republican Party, to actually cut wasteful spending as they've been promising to do for literally decades. We need to keep the pressure on so that that comes to be comes to pass.
Jim:But we also, I think, should exercise a little bit of patience while we apply that pressure.
Linnea:Yeah, that's fair enough. I think so. But I also don't want to be blowing smoke on our audience here. So I I do think that there are some things that especially are listed here over at the times over there that are not ideal or at least I don't quite understand what they're going for with it or how it benefits us in any way. It seems like some sneaky rhino pork.
Linnea:The first one is with regards to AI. The bill would begin to integrate artificial intelligence into various sectors of the federal government while restricting state's ability to regulate the technology for a ten year period. The text of the bill reads, no state or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the ten year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this act. Additionally, the bill delegates hundreds of millions of dollars to use AI and government functions like examining Medicare payments, naval shipbuilding, and audits of the Department of Defense. I have conflicting feelings about this one.
Linnea:On the one hand, we're not usually in the business of promoting additional regulation. However, there's some there's some serious concerns that I have with integration of artificial intelligence into federal processes. Whose model? What what kind of inputs is it operating on? I don't know.
Linnea:It it seems a little bit hasty. Not really sure about that one. We'll have to have Donnie on and see what he thinks about that one. Jim, do you have strong opinions about it to begin with?
Jim:No. I mean, you know, if Elon Musk was teaching the federal government how to use AI to find inefficiencies in the government, I would be very comfortable with that because he's already done it with Doge. But, yeah, we'd have to see the details on that.
Linnea:John z, so funny. I've got major concerns about AI. I've seen AI Darth Vader on the Fortnite game. Thank you, John. Very cool.
Linnea:Alright. Courts barred from enforcing content amid the administration's ongoing depend disputes with the judiciary, particularly over issues related to Trump's mass deportation operation, such that it is anyway, the bill would limit federal court's ability to hold members of the administration in contempt. Specifically, the bill would require plaintiffs to provide a band a bond before a judge could enforce contempt orders. So this one, one, the executive is the executive and the judiciary is the judiciary. At first glance, I think this sounds reasonable, but changes to things like this always make me a little bit uncomfortable, even if right now it's a huge pain in the ass.
Linnea:Oh, I'm sorry. I just said that on air. A huge pain in the butt when the, you know, judiciary or some random district court judge is able to block everything that the executive tries to do. That definitely needs to stop. But I'm not entirely sure that this is the way to stop it.
Jim:Well, think the I think the law actually requires plaintiffs to provide that bond. In other words, you know, when when you're suing to stop a government action, and I think judges routinely waive it so that it really has no effect at all. And this and this would put a stop to I mean, every single executive action that Trump has made has been has been challenged in court. And a a lowly district court judge is are issuing what they should not be doing. They don't have the authority to do it, but they do it and say, dare Dare you to stop me.
Jim:You know, a nationwide injunction from a judge in Hawaii. That's not how our judiciary and executive branch conflicts are supposed to work. So I am actually pretty fine with this. In fact, it's getting increasingly frustrating that the left has such an expertise and hold on the judiciary, the federal judiciary in this country, despite the fact that Trump has appointed quite a few federal judges in his first term, that they are just able to and this is the strategy, and it's working. And this is why I'm not I'm pretty pretty okay with this, is to delay as much Trump stuff as possible, then hopefully win the midterm elections, and then you impeach him and get him out of there.
Jim:And and, you know so this is all a flood the zone, slow it all down as much as possible no matter what it takes until 2026. That strategy needs to be thwarted because the American people voted for what we're getting.
Linnea:Yep. Here's a good one that we should be happy about. So I'm guessing that this is an RFK related kind of thing, but HSAs boosted legislation would enhance health savings accounts, which are federal accounts that allow taxpayers to save tax free money for eligible medical services by making gym memberships also eligible for the program, you know, within reasonable limits, of course. It is that seems like a fair a fair thing. HSAs are pretty nice.
Linnea:This is another good one, estate taxes. The bill would extend the twenty seventeen estate tax cuts, allowing single owned estates to pass on up to $15,000,000 tax free and allowing couple owned estates to pass up on $30,000,000 tax free. I think all estate taxes are an abomination, but this is a good step forward.
Jim:Yeah. We're taxed to we're taxed to death while we're alive, and then we're taxed again after we're dead and before our you know, before you can leave on something to somebody else. I mean, estate taxes are are are morally wrong.
Linnea:Yes. Absolutely. There's some kind of a tax filing tool that Biden put in place that this bill repeals. I have no thoughts about that whatsoever. I don't think very many people were using it.
Linnea:I'm not sure, though. Trump accounts. The bill adds a pilot program for Trump accounts, which is a type of federal trust account that would offer parents a thousand dollar bonus per child when they sign up for the program. That's good, depending on what the limitations on that are. You wouldn't want to encourage, like, single parent child homes and stuff.
Linnea:There are there are areas where you can debate that. This one's kind of weird. Tobacco industry perks repealed. Another component to the legislation would strip a tax write off that some US tobacco companies rely on. Under current law, tobacco companies pay an excise tax when they manufacture or import tobacco into The United States.
Linnea:But a loophole has historically allowed them to recoup much of the tax through a process known as substitution drawback. I guess this might be like a protectionist thing for domestic tobacco, which there isn't a whole lot of. What do you think? I mean. Well, all I
Jim:think is whenever I see the word loophole, I get triggered because there's no such thing as a tax loophole. There is tax law, period. That's it. And if somebody is if an entity or an industry or an individual is within the current tax law, that should be the end of it. You want to, you know, repeal the tax or rewrite the tax, but that the whole idea that it's a loophole is is absurd.
Jim:You know?
Linnea:Yeah. There's the revocable tax exemptions for terrorists supporting nonprofits, which would enable the administration to revoke tax exempt status of a nonprofit organization deemed as terrorist supporting. I thought we already did that, so I'm not really sure what this changes. Don't know. Anyway, we don't like the Patriot Act generally.
Linnea:Right. Right. In the Heartland Institute. So I don't think we're particularly pleased, although federal funds probably or at least tax exemption probably shouldn't be going if there if there was like Hamas USA or something, we probably shouldn't let them be tax exempt. But I do not know what exactly they mean by this.
Linnea:And then this is a good one, but it's not as good as I thought it was. So this is ending the excise tax on firearm silencers. Legislation includes a provision to remove the requirement to pay a tax on silencer attachments under the National Firearms Act of 1934. So this is part of the like Hearing Protection Act, which makes sense. Europe is well, at least The UK have always classified or for a long time have classified suppressors or silencers as hearing protection devices, which they are.
Linnea:The fear mongering around like, oh, it's going to make it harder to find a shooter or something is total nonsense. And it is an infringement on the second amendment to even ask for attacks on, like, any firearm purchase. But also the idea that, like, accessories need to be specially penalized is is very dumb. There's there was yeah. Go ahead.
Jim:No. I was just gonna say, I first of all, I wanna congratulate you for not pulling out your firearm while talking about this on the air so that we don't get demonetized again.
Linnea:You don't wanna see the you don't wanna see a can come out on screen on air while we're talking about suppressing the the thing is there's been a lot of conflicting information about what exactly was ending up in this bill with regards to the silencers issue. They were also talking about removing silencers from the NFA in general. And I think the NFA should be repealed entirely, but the suppressors should definitely not be on it. Suppressors are not a weapon. Suppressors are not a firearm.
Linnea:They are an accessory, so they do not belong in the National Firearms Act. But it seems to have disappeared somewhere between when it was proposed and when it was passed. And I know that they are working on it. They're trying to get that and to get short barreled rifles removed from the NFA in the Senate version. But I do not know if that's going to go through, but hopefully.
Linnea:I don't know. So those are kind of a lot of the iffy or the better than hoped or worse than promised type situations that are in this bill. There's a lot to debate in it. I mean, it's, as we said, big, beautiful bill. It's gigantic.
Linnea:It's another one of those things that would be agony to read the entire thing or maybe even impossible for a layperson to do so. So, yeah, it's it's it's not not perfect, but we can't sacrifice good for the perfect. Right?
Jim:Absolutely. Absolutely. And just to go back to the gun thing, with the silencers, it strikes me as you're reading through all that, Lynea, that so much of our anti gun legislation in this country is fueled by the way the left thinks about firearms, and they learn all of it in movies. Like, they think a silencer is like, you know, like a little like a they think that's the sound it makes when a when a silencer is on there. That's not real.
Jim:That's that's Hollywood and TV. That's not the way those things actually work.
Linnea:Yeah. But I mean, even if it did, it it would still be stupid to regulate that.
Jim:It would be 100% stupid to regulate that. But it's regulated and it gets attention because so many people who vote on these policies have a fantasy worldview of firearms and not any experience with firearms. And so a lot of the gun laws we have in this country are based on complete unreasonable fears based out of ignorance, not on any actual knowledge of the subject.
Linnea:Yeah. Our producer Andy in the background is pointing out to us that that's what silencers sound like in Call of Duty, though. So it must be true. And he's absolutely right. I recant everything I just said.
Linnea:Just kidding. No, I don't. The yeah, the firearms issue is very complicated, not because it should be because all you need to do is say shall not be infringed and leave it at that. But, you know, people always want to just add a bunch of stuff. The Sterling is right.
Linnea:He's in the in the comments again. He says the NFA was a response to the prohibition mob use of Tommy guns. That is one of the original justifications for it was that they wanted to take, like, machine guns off the streets because the mob was using them. Of course, although the mob did use some, that wasn't primarily what they were using to do hits. So it didn't even fix anything there.
Linnea:I think part of it had to do with a particular massacre that is rather famous. And it's yeah. Just very stupid. Like I said, Great Britain, where you can it's very, very difficult to have permission to own a firearm compared to The United States. Does not regulate silencers.
Linnea:You can just buy them over the counter because they are a hearing protection device. So yeah. No. I could go on about that for a while, but I'm, like, strangling myself from saying
Jim:things. We're we're gonna have to have a guns episode. We'll have a guns episode. I'll host it. You can talk.
Jim:I'll drink lots of coffee and sit back, and then you could just go crazy. Yeah.
Linnea:Fun. Anyway. Yep. Okay. Andrew Godridge says that they are regulated under the Firearms Act of 1968, but I'm fairly confident that it's less regulated than ours.
Linnea:Like, with ours for a while there, you couldn't even get them. But anyway, and it takes months and months and months to get them, and you can get them over the counter there. Yeah. Sterling can come on as a guest, too. All right.
Linnea:Thanks, guys. Sorry for our the end of our show kind of slipping into just casual chatting with the audience here. But, Jim, overall, what's your take on even some of the, like, worst parts of this bill? Is this the kind of thing that we're gonna have to put up with forever when it comes to getting bills passed? I mean, Sterling in the comments mentioned that we need to stop passing these, like, big omnibus bills and that things need to be passed individually, which I very much agree with.
Linnea:But I almost wonder if that's even possible at this point. I hope it is, but I don't know.
Jim:Yeah. Like I've said, you know, a hundred times on this podcast, I used to cover congress for The Washington Times. I know how the system worked as designed for the most part back then in the early 2000s. It's been completely abandoned, that's because this system of government works. Until it doesn't, it will continue to be used and abused by both parties.
Jim:It's actually shameful the way this has happened. But again, there's a lot about this and the way it's happening that is distasteful. There's a lot of things in this bill. Like I said, I think Grok would probably give up trying to read this bill and summarize it for us. It's monstrous and bad.
Jim:But, you know, I am just trying to be patient. It has been two hundred days. This is the way our government works now. This is frankly the way, the only way Donald Trump is going to be able to get his tax cuts renewed from 2017. That in itself is going to have enormous economic benefit for The United States, people of all incomes.
Jim:And so, you know, as distasteful as it is, I'm trying to be patient. I'm trying to hold my nose past this one. And we can hold our elected officials' feet to the fire to, one, do things the right way and, two, do things that they were elected to do, which is cut the size of government, increase our freedom, and grow the economy.
Linnea:Well, guys, I think that's all the time that we have. I'm sorry that our panelists dropped out like flies as we were going along. I would ask Sam if he has anything to pitch, but he had to go. Jim, what do you have for us this week?
Jim:Well, tomorrow at the same time, one p. M. Eastern Time on this very channel, the Climate Realism Show, we will be interviewing Heartland President James Taylor and the Executive Director of Heartland UKEurope, Lois Perry. They are on a tour of Europe right now, helping to defeat the Net Zero movement on that continent and in The United Kingdom. They've had a very successful trip so far.
Jim:They're gonna be checking in to let us know how it's going over there. And I gotta say, there's a lot of good news.
Linnea:Alrighty. Well, thank you everyone for tuning in this week. We are live every single week, Thursdays at noon central. So the same time we are on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. I'm sure you guys are watching from all over the place anyway, so you already know this.
Linnea:Anyway, so for audio listeners, please give us a nice rating on whatever service you're using and leave us a review. And thank you so much to everyone. Jim is the only one left, so I guess goodbye, Jim. Thanks, everyone. We will see you again next week.
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