The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Hope everybody had a wonderful weekend, and it was great. I have to say, of all these contrived holidays, that’s not fair, all these holidays that are created, and I think that maybe Father’s Day is 100 years old. Maybe it was created around the time at Teddy Roosevelt. But anyway, it doesn’t matter when you have a family, and it’s a reason for the family to gather. It’s worth whatever background and all. It was a great weekend. So on Saturday, I was up in New Jersey to visit with some family at the funeral of my great aunt. My Aunt Mary. Not my great aunt, but she’s my legitimate straight up aunt. But she was wonderful. She was great. And so that was, I saw a bunch of family, including my father and my brother and some others, and then Father’s Day at home with some sports, with the kids and church as a family and out to dinner, and it was great. So hope you likewise had an eventful and fun Father’s Day.
All right, what do you need to know today? Well, this is really interesting.
Sunday, Father’s Day here in America, but over in France, it was again election day. Now, let me make two observations.
The first one procedural. The second one substantive, meaning the first one is about how things went. The second is about what happened.
How things went was another election day in France, where they voted on one day. Almost everybody voted that day, and they counted the votes that day, and they got results that day. Now, again, I always concede with people. There are 70 million or so people that live in France. I think they had less than 50% participation. So they only had let’s just pretend it’s 30, 35 million people voting. I don’t know the specifics, but somewhere around that. So that’s different than in America where we have 350,000,000 people, and if we get 50% turnout of our eligible voters and by the way, I’m doing the math wrong probably on that, because it’s 70 million. It’s probably I think it was 39 or 40% of eligible voters. Of course, not all are citizens. So whatever it is, it’s a much bigger problem to run 50 states and commonwealths like Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. And all these elections on any given national election. But, boy, my first comment is France does it pretty well. They do the voting, they do the counting, they do the participation. They don’t have a lot of mail in. They don’t have a lot of early voting. So I think they simplify it. But very impressive. Very impressive. And a model that we should all be conceding and agreeing should be a goal. I don’t know whether someone I haven’t seen or studied it do they think that it’s particularly easier or it adds to the ability to have a good election, that it’s on a Sunday? I don’t know that it’s a full on holiday. It’s not just another day that could be a holiday. I’m not sure of any of that. That’s one thing impressive, that they pull off the systems, the process and get the election done without any real major, you know, we got to stop and continue counting. We’ve got to wait three days, five days, ten days.
Now, the second thing, which is even more important than the first one, is, whoa, what just happened?
France just elected. They went from 80, excuse me, they went from eight members of the center right, we can call it the Conservative Party under Marine Le Pen, and she got 89 in the Parliament. And Mélenchon who’s a far left guy, increased his numbers to close to 200. The point here is it was a massive surge in what was described as populist nationalist people that were rejecting the status quo of Macron and what was happening, and especially when it comes to Marine Le Pen, it was only a few months ago when she lost the presidential race to Macron and people said, Oh, that’s the end of that. And actually commentators like Nigel Farage and others said, no, no, head to head presidential in a European nation like France is tough, but wait till you see what happens in the parliamentary election. That’s what Baraj said. Was it two months ago when there was a presidential election? And here it is.
I’m just telling you, it may remain that at the top of the ticket of races when it’s head to head that the decisions are different than what’s happening on the ground. What’s happening on the ground in this country and around the world is a siding of the voters with people who are running for office, who are candidates for office, who will be on the side of the people. So if you think that’s populism, then it’s populism. If you think it’s good representation, it’s good representation. If you think it’s something else, it’s something else. That’s what’s happening. It’s happening in every corner of every electorate.
Meaning it’s happening for school boards, it’s happening for county council, it’s happening for Congress, it’s happening against Democrats in America, it’s happening against some incumbent Republicans too, I think. Although maybe it’s harder to see, I mean, at the end of the day right now, at the end of the day, you have most of the country blaming associating the state of the country with the Democrat Party because the President is Democrat and both houses in the Senate and the Senate and the House are Democrat. So it’s pretty obvious and natural thing to do. You guys have had control. This is where we are. Holy cow, we don’t want any more of this. That’s what you see. That’s the association you definitely see.
So in France, you’re going to have now a parliamentary ruling majority and it looks like Macron will still control enough, but he’ll have to make some deals with some others. And he’s clearly going to have to adjust his approach and maybe even more. He did hang on. And so he will have control, he is president. But if the trend continues and inflation is high in France, and France’s energy costs are way up and all the fundamentals that we’re experiencing in America are the same as there. It’s very similar there. The French people are likely going to not be happy or not be happier tomorrow than they are today.
So when you, so when people say, oh, it’s a, it’s a nationalist movement or populist movement, I’m not sure what it is, except I know it is a dissatisfaction with the status quo in the direction of things. And in power right now are people leaders, combinations of leaders and their legislative bodies that are clearly, I’d say it this way, they feel to me, center left. But even if they’re not center left and more liberal, they certainly are for centralizing power. And more and more people are saying, hold on, I’m sick of you engineering everything from the economy to the judicial system to the fake news, one after another, areas of life, that people are just dissatisfied. They’re just saying it’s not working. And I blame this government. I blame that government. I blame the people in power.
And you know, in the French system, you stand for office and when you’re a member of parliament, you can be appointed to cabinet posts while you stay in parliament. It’s also a tradition in English, in the English system. So you could be like the secretary of, I think it was the secretary of Health, and she was also a member of parliament. She’d been elected.
Well, she lost.
So people are kind of really pushing back on the people that are in power. And I will say again, it feels to me, and we’ll see how it plays out. That part of this. It’s an ongoing rejection of the centralization of power, control over the economy, control over the lockdowns, control over COVID, control over all these different aspects of things, including the size and scope of government.
Now, France, well, they’ve got the same problem we have. The size and scope of government is extraordinary there too, but not like ours.
So what you should watch and what you need to know is this is another data point on the path towards the fall. And you can have as many hearings as you want in Washington about the January 6 committee and the select committee. And you can try to trot out somebody to say, I’m going to read minds on the January 6 select committee. I’m going to read Donald Trump’s mind and say this is what he meant when he was getting multiple different points of view from attorneys. What he meant was to believe one of them and all the rest of them he just wasn’t listening to.
It’s just so stupid.
If you know anything about Donald Trump, for example, you know that he loved to get lots of viewpoints. And so he’s getting one point from Bill Barr and one point from Professor Eastman and one point from this lawyer and one point from that lawyer. Probably doesn’t like lawyers any more than most Americans.
But you can have all those hearings all you want, but out in regular America, they’re looking up just like they did in France. And they’re saying this set of people that’s in charge, these people that have been running things for a while, they’re not on my side. They’re not looking out for me and my family. And more and more, I think you’re going to see a rejection of those in power in favor of new choices, new parties, a new party in this case in the fall, and new candidates. So we’ll see. That’s what you need to know.
All right, we’ll take a break. We’ll talk with one candidate in a few moments, Corey Gustafson, who is running for office out in California and San Diego in a congressional district there. And we will also have a chance to talk a little bit more about what you can do in terms of our next topic. I’ll be right back and talk about threats against we the people across the country not being covered by the press. Be right back.
Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
