Author Paul Eckert joins the show to talk about his new book, Healing Middle-Class Democracy: Respecting Each Other, Negotiating Honestly, Cooperating Fairly
Finally, the panel gives their picks for the weekly “You Cannot Be Serious?!” roundup of entertaining headlines.
You can listen to the show live, weekdays at 11:00 a.m. on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111, and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website.
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The show opens with the president scaring the Senate into passing a compromise on TSA funding by threatening to do it by executive order. The House has since rejected the Senate’s plan, with Speaker Mike Johnson calling it a “joke.” Should we just go back to the pre-9/11 status quo of private airport security?
“I’m not sure Republicans come off looking great either,” Tom Bevan said. “Democrats can claim they got what they wanted, which was TSA agents paid without a resolution on the issue of ICE and Border Patrol.”
“This underscores how dysfunctional Washington is now. They’re spending more time arguing over who gets credit than making sure Americans can conduct their business or go to funerals,” Cannon added. “The reason they’re federal employees is so they can be vetted and can’t strike; no one ever thought they wouldn’t be paid over some unrelated political fight.”
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At minute 12, they turn to Nobel Prize recipient, Oscar winner, and former Vice President Al Gore joining another round of “No Kings” protests planned for Saturday, and whether America is losing democracy.
“It’s so tiresome,” Tom Bevan said. “The country is strong enough and durable enough to outlast both Joe Biden and Donald Trump and whoever’s coming next and whoever’s coming after that. It’s fantasyland.”
“Your faith in the institutions of America is very appealing and heartwarming. But I don’t know that we can stand 12 more years like we’ve just had,” Cannon said.
“I think when the government does less, the better in general,” Andrew Walworth said, but added that evaluations from groups like Freedom House are worth paying attention to. “Good news is that Bolivia, Malawi, and Fiji were all upgraded. Finland is at 100%, that’s where you wanna live. Sudan, zero. We’re at 83%, so we’re still punching.”
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At minute 23, author Paul Eckert joins the show to talk about his new book, Healing Middle-Class Democracy: Respecting Each Other, Negotiating Honestly, Cooperating Fairly
“Middle-class means working for a living,” he explained. “You’ve got the poor, who are struggling for subsistence, and you’ve got the wealthy, the top 1%, for simplicity, who are really insulated from any sort of concerns. But the middle class, whether it’s people who make a lot of money or less, they depend on income and depend on working, at least for most of their lives.”
“I think we have to begin to question things that people take for granted, that people say are baked into the system,” he said. “There have been times in the past when people who were favored by the system, and had done well through a combination of good luck and hard work, took leadership and decided society needed to work for everybody, not just for them.”
“You could argue that the biggest issue in America is not left versus right, it’s higher versus lower,” he said. “What’s happened in America is that most people in either party who are in leadership are in what we would call the upper middle class, and the lower middle class is not represented well.”
“My book is built on three principles. How do you bring the upper and the lower middle class back together?” Eckert said. “That means respect for anybody who works hard, regardless of the kind of work they do or the level or the income that’s associated with it.”
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At minute 37, the group breaks down the fallout from revelations of a pattern of sexual abuse by labor leader Cesar Chavez, who has been commemorated with a federal holiday on March 31 since 2014. Are they going to change it to “Farm Workers’ Day” and move on?
“Cesar Chavez was born in Arizona, but he moved to California and made his movement here. There isn’t just a state holiday commemorating his birthday, but there are hundreds of parks and roads and libraries and schools, and more,” Carl Cannon said. “This is a heartbreaking story to so many people, and we’re learning how to deal with it.”
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Finally, 47 minutes into the show, the panel gives their weekly “You Cannot Be Serious?!” roundup of entertaining headlines.
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