The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together. We got a great interview coming up with Eddie Scarry of The Federalist, thefederalist.com, about a piece he wrote on transgenderism. And an interesting detail, he listened to a podcast of The New York Times reporters. What he discovered was he got more context for the coverage of the article, the articles that he was reading. He got more details. And it’s a very interesting idea. In other words, doing sort of analysis of what’s written by listening to the authors who almost always want to talk about their stuff on podcast. So anyway, we’ll talk with Eddie Scarry in a few moments and we’ve got a lot more.
Hey, what do you need to know today? What you need to know today… Today is an interesting day. And I want to start by telling you a story, and then I want to finish by tying it into what is the big news of the day. Okay? So the first part of the story is I got to the office early today. I’m in the swamp. I’m in Washington, DC, and I went for an early morning walk. And I like to do that. Get out. It’s a nice day today. It’s a little bit cooler. And I’m walking. So I walk out and I get to the Union Station not far from our office, which is up on Capitol Hill, the office of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles. And there are a whole bunch of tents.
And what has happened over the last few months, maybe six months, is that the DC powers that be have pushed all of the homeless people, or not all, but homeless people out of some of the areas. You’d see them in neighborhoods. And they ended up at the Union Station right there, not a few blocks from Capitol Hill, from the capitol, actually. And so as I stood there and I was like, wow, I was counting them… like 40, 50, I think I got up to 43. And I stopped counting. Of these tents, real tents, tents with rain covers on them, like real substantial. In fact, I noticed that the grass on which they picked their tent was cut around them like they had cut the grass around the tent pegs and the tent lines, the lines coming out of the tent. And I stood there, and I was getting kind of amazed.
So let me flash back another story. About three years ago, my family and I went to Verona, Italy, to go to the World Congress on the Family. I was giving a speech there. And so we all went over as a family. And at one point we went into the train station at Milan to rent a car. The rental car was right next to the train station in Milan. And so we took the train, the subway from in Milan to the main like Union Station of Milan and came up the steps and we were confronted in front of the station, not just dozens, but hundreds and hundreds of men living in a tent city, really much bigger than even DC.
And at one point – it’s midday, it’s like 1030 in the morning, eleven in the morning – and we’re walking past this massive sort of city block, open park full of people, and there’s a man 30 or 40ft away. I didn’t point him out to my family. We’re all walking kind of just walking briskly to a few blocks away. He went to the bathroom right there, just went right there. Didn’t particularly go hide behind a tree or anything, just went right there. And I thought, wow, Milan, what is this crazy? And they have an immigration issue in Milan, a broken system where people can get into Italy, into Europe, and they’re just a lot of people and a lot of inability to handle it.
So I’m standing in front of Union Station in DC early this morning and I’m saying to myself, this system looks like it’s broken. They haven’t addressed the mental health issue. As I’m standing there, a man climbs out of his tent and he clearly had mental health issues, probably substance abuse issues, but mental health issues. I thought to myself, nothing is being seriously done when you’re just pushing these people all over town and think about how in our great nation, our great American capital, a few blocks from the capitol building, you’ve got a tent city? Clearly, the system is not working. The system is not addressing the problem.
Which brings me to what happens. What should happen when systems aren’t working is you change your approach. Our other guest today on today’s program is Todd Bensman. We’ll get an update on the border and the system is not working in this country, on our border, but we’re not changing it. We’re not adjusting. We’re going to keep going, it looks like. We’ll get an update on that.
But so my point here is what you need to know is we have a set of problems that it looks like we’ve stopped even trying to change our approach, because if you were serious about what’s happening, you would say to yourself, I’m going to change the way we’re doing this. I’m going to change the approach that we’re taking to this and see what we can do to make it better. And the example I have there is we’re in the midst now of full blown inflation. Since a year… The numbers came out earlier today, we’re in full blown inflation. In fact, it’s being spun so pathetically by the media. They’re saying if you take out the highly volatile areas of food and energy, the inflation is still a record high. What? If you take out gas and food? That’s where we all feel it the most. And my point is the system isn’t working.
What’s not working? And the number one thing that’s not working in this country right now is the fact that we have a president who decided that his policies would be to make America not energy independent. So we would be relying on other nations. We would be relying on other nations and then there’s a war going on. We’re being pulled into it or pushed into it by our own leadership.
But be that is a may, that’s disrupting the energy resources in the country, too. So we have a set of decisions, a system that is being used to our detriment, and no one is adjusting it. I actually have been arguing for a number of years now – you’ve heard me say it – that social media plus the 24 hour nature and not just even the 24 hours like the 60-second nature of social media and attention and all makes it so that you get faster results, you get faster shifts, you get faster changes because you can see what’s happening and you can have adjustments happen quicker in real time.
But maybe I’m wrong about that. Because what appears to be happening is when there’s major systems failing, the powers that be will just ignore the blowback and keep plowing ahead and hope that people forget about it. And so inflation, you don’t have to do a survey for people to tell you that they’re feeling it. You don’t have to do a poll-tested focus group, anything. But people are feeling it.
And we’re not changing our approach. We’re not taking a serious approach. And part of it is because we’re sort of Balkanized, that people are going to always fight. But part of it is just that the powers of people don’t care to change. And so we are faced with a system: inflation, energy costs are going up, food costs are going up. It’s not going to stop.
And I have an 18 year old daughter. I have four children, and the oldest is 18. She’s going to get a summer job. And she put the word out she wanted a summer job. She’s got job offers all over the place to work as a waitress, to work an entry level work because they need workers. So it’s not that there’s not lots happening. But the point is the fundamentals are off and nobody’s changing it.
And Meanwhile, or similarly on a similar track, here in the swamp, you have more spending happening. You have more spending. I mean, I could bemoan and I did it yesterday. I would say it again, we’re going to spend 33 more billion dollars. Joe Biden wants it for the Ukraine war, giving money to Ukraine, and again, poorly managing it, I’m sure. But be that as it may, we spend hundreds of billions, trillions on all the Covid stuff. We’re just printing money. We just are making it up as we go along. And no one is changing the system. No one. And perhaps in the fall you’ll get Republicans that will change the direction, try to change the system.
But right now what you need to know is we’re stuck with leaders that won’t adjust, in part because I think they don’t want to be embarrassed that they have to backtrack. But in part because I don’t think that they mind. I think that they’re in a bubble. They’re in a cocoon. They’re in a world where they don’t mind that the rest of the country is being impacted because they have a vision of what they want to do. Whether it’s green energy, I don’t know. Is that supposed to be the solution? We have a few more electric cars. We’ll get some electric charging stations. That’s going to change the economy? By the time we get to the electric cars charging stations that were in one of the recent bills, they’ll be built in the next 18 months, the economy will be in the tank by then.
We haven’t even seen interest rates go up which are coming this year. The fed has already said. And once they go up, the economy is going to take another jolt. This is real, it’s serious. And the one solution that you can see available is to return us to energy independence. Whether it means drilling on public lands, whether it means changing EPA requirements, whether it means going to the clean, the safe nuclear. Whatever it means, we ought to be trying it. Because just like standing in front of Union Station and seeing that we pushed the homeless people from all over the northeast section of D. C. into one place, didn’t solve a problem at all. Didn’t solve any aspect of the problem. Except maybe that the neighborhood where they were before didn’t like having them, didn’t like having people there.
But just like that, we see the numbers – inflation back up again. This is the announcement of the numbers, inflation way back, way up. People are feeling it. And the powerful, protected by the swamp and their swamp jobs, and the wealthy, protected by the fact that they have enough wealth, are going to do okay. And we the people are getting short changed. That’s what you need to know. All right. We’ll take a break. We’ll come back, We’ll talk with Todd Bensman and also Eddie Scarry. Be right back. Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report, back in a moment.
