March 25, 2025 • 33 mins
In this episode, Mary Katharine Ham and Karol Markowicz discuss various political topics, including the recent Bernie Sanders and AOC rally, the dynamics within the Democratic Party, and the implications of education policy changes under the Trump administration. They also delve into the impact of teachers' unions during the COVID pandemic and the ongoing debate surrounding SNAP benefits and health-related government interventions. Normally is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Thursday.
#BernieSanders #AOC #DemocraticParty #EducationPolicy #TeachersUnions #SNAPBenefits #PoliticalCommentary #SeasonalAllergies #VoterSentiment #MediaLiteracy
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, and welcome back to normally the show with
normalish takes for when the.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
News gets weird. I am Mary Catherine.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Ham and I am Carol Marco. It's him, Mary Catherine.
How was you again?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Oh it's pretty good, uneventful.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I have the annual denial that I have seasonal allergies,
and then acceptance that I have season's seasonal allergies because
I'm like, I am young and vibrant and no thing
bothers me, and then right around mid March or late March,
I'm like, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yes, that takes some zerts head girl.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I don't know if it's youth related. My middle son
has had it real bad his whole life. We moved
to Florida three years ago. It largely went away. We
were like, oh, Florida's the best. This is you know,
all fixed this year came back with vengeance they were
Florida was like, no, actually, we have all the pollen
here and you will suffer.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sometimes the different kind of pollen. Will you save you?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
See, my pride comes from living in North Carolina and
Georgia before coming here. So I was like, Paul can't
touch me, and it turns out here it can pollen man.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, well, there's a lot of news today. Our first
story is the Bernie AOC rally, and they had a
rally that had spillover crowds.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
My normy husband pointed out, like they only reserved arena
for eight hundred people and then they got like more
than that, and so it's like not these humongous numbers
that it seems to be. But anyway, the Wall Street
Journal reports they initially reserved a space at their first
stop of Omaha, Nebraska that could hold eight hundred people,
but had to move to our bigger venue so thirty
(01:39):
four hundred could attend. Bernie said, this is insane. I'm
not running for anything, and two time presidential you know,
the two time presidential candidates set in an interview. People
are outraged and they're frightened, and they want to fight back,
and this is one form of beginning that struggle to
fight back. Maybe maybe or Bernie has always had a
(01:59):
very passionate fan base, and I think that that passionate
fan base is looking for something to do right now,
and they love coming out and hearing from Bernie and
the new Bernie AOC.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, they were in several places, so I think they
were in Nebraska, They went to Denver, Colorado, and they
were in Tempe, Arizona, where AOC will give you a
little taste of what the messaging was like. Here she
is talking about the fight Oligarchy tour, and we'll talk
about the clumsiness of that phrase in a moment.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
But first, AOC, we need a Democratic party that fights
harder for us too.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
But but that means here's what that means. That means
our commune, each and every one of us choosing and
voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to
(03:08):
stand for.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
The working class.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
And Tempe, I want to give.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
You your flowers for a second, because you all have been
working over time to make that happen. In fact, one
thing I love about Arizonans is that you all have
shown that if a US senator isn't fighting hard enough
for you, you're not afraid to replace her with one
(03:37):
who will and win.
Speaker 5 (03:45):
And that's how you.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
Got two fantastic senators and Mark.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Kelly and Reuben Diego.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So a couple things that was shots fired at Kirsten Sinema,
by the way, was up all of her former colleagues
for having been for taking out the filibuster.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And now they need it. And so she was.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Lighting up AOC for her hypocrisy and convenient change on
this issue just last week on X.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So that's partly where this is coming from.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Hereson Cinema is no longer a senator because the Democratic
Party was like, she seems very reasonable.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Get her out of here and have that.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So another thing that I noticed about this clip in Arizona.
Behind her, you have white women wearing a tax the
Rich t shirt, what looks like a Union T shirt,
a rainbow T shirt, and a one Amacha Latte t shirt,
one which came with the pink hair in the front.
(04:48):
This is the picture of the base that wants to
be enthused, that wants to come out, that wants to
really fight. And how do you take that message, which
I think, honestly, I think Bernie and AOC a better
messengers than establishment.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Folks at the shoint probably, But how do.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
You take that and connect it with regular people who
are not the people standing behind AOC and that.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's their big problem there?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, are you know Bernie's a normal guy.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I don't think Bernie's a normal guy. He really hates billionaires.
I mean, he really hates billionaires, hates them, could not
stand them. Multimillionaires though he hates them a little less.
He talked about his net worth on the Lex Friedman
Show a few years ago. Let's roll that clip.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Do I own three residences? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I do.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a
middle class and they would guess what. I'm the United
States Centator and I own a home in Washington, d C.
And guess what, Like many thousands of people in the
state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It's a
nice one on Lake Champlain. That's it. Now, how did
I get the money? I wrote two best selling books,
including this book on capitalism, and I make kind one
(05:55):
hundred and seventy five thousand to you. And that's more
or less how I became the zillionaire that I am.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
As opposed to the billionaires who killed little babies and
drank their blood. That's how they made their money. He
made his money via capitalism, so he.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Should be able to keep his money because he did
it doing the right thing right.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And that's the only way you're allowed to keep your
money is if you are Bernie Sanders, and you do
it the way he does it. And even if you
do it the way he does it, he still might
not like that because you might have the wrong opinions.
You might have written the pro capitalism book as well.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
No, you can't do that as.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
You committed capitalism.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I think one of the problems for them is they
try to reorganize. And I don't think people are off
base here. Politico's comparing it to the Tea Party anger
of the early Obama years. The people who are coming
out are angry at establishment Democrats. Those establishment Democrats, to
some extent, as we saw with Schumer and the government
shutdown fight, are sort of handcuffed by the impotence of
(06:56):
not being in charge of anything in Washington, right, and
also sort of handcuffed by the fact that they love
a really powerful executive and then they handed all that
power to Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yeah oopsie, yeah oops right. So, and that also explains
why they're so excited about these attacks on Tesla, because
it seems like doing something like, look, they're doing something.
They're firebombing Tesla manufacturers, they're keying Tesla cars. They're really
showing that Elon Musk of course, and I've been loving
following the Tesla stock because it looks like Tim Walls
(07:28):
really did call the bottom of it.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
But that's very it was.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It was two twenty five when Tim Walls was super
excited about the stock dropping. It's two seventy one today
and climbing. Literally, we should have bought the dip when
Tim Walls talked about.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It, He's like our new Jim Kramer. It's the opposite
Jim Kramer.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Politico noted congressional Democrats have typically enjoyed higher popularity with
their voting base than their Republican counterparts, but the trauma
of the twenty twenty four presidential election defeat appears to
have ruptured that reallyationship. Congressional Democrats are now underwater with
their own voters in approval ratings, and this is the
first time that's happened in this particular poll's history, and
(08:09):
that super majorities of them want them to do more
to fight Donald Trump. This is different from twenty seventeen
because they got real excited about how the party resisted
in twenty seventeen, but resisting didn't work, and it's not
working now, so they're less satisfied.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Pink hats back out. I don't think there's anything wrong
with that. Go go on to march kids do it.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
They need something, but they don't know what the thing is,
which is again I think to your point, why they
end up oops burning Tesla's like that doesn't seem like
a great idea. Bernie, for his part, was asked about
some of the intra party conflict in the lightest way
possible by Jonathan Carl. Let's run that clip and see
(08:54):
how he reacted.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
She and sphy is young people all over the country.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Would you like to see her joining the Senate?
Speaker 6 (09:00):
Right now? We have, as I said, just a whole
lot of people in the Congress. Okay, got it?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
And thanks way, I got one that's important.
Speaker 6 (09:07):
Well, I asked you, okay, you know you want to
do nonsense nonsense.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
No, I don't want.
Speaker 6 (09:12):
To talk about inside the beltway stuff. I got thirty
two thousand people. I was just asking me about AOC
because she was well, everything fine, but I don't want
to talk about this.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I might even think that he was being asked about
the INJA party stuff. I mean, I guess if you could,
he could have seen it as a do you like her?
Do you like Chuck? Schumer, But actually what he came
off as is anti AOC to me. He came off
as not liking her and not wanting to talk about her.
It could have it was such a layup. He could
(09:38):
have said anything. He could have just said, sure, down
the road, she would make a fantastic senator.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Anything was possible, anything would have been better than this,
which brings attention to this and sort of reveals just
how sensitive a subject it is, maybe not just for him,
but for everyone in the Democratic Party, because the question
would you like to see in the Senate implies that
Schumer might not be there, that Schumer shouldn't be at
the top of the party. But again in the most
(10:04):
friendly and innocuous way possible, and you could have just
been like, oh, up and come, or love to be
on the trail of or just dance around it. I
think this is a problem for Democrats going forward. They
do not face adversarial press, so when asked very easy
questions that you should very easily anticipate, they end up
(10:26):
doing this, which I don't think bodes well for the teamwork.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And John Carl was like, what, no, come.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Back, you want to do nonsense, nonsense, I just looked
it up.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Chuck Schumer is seventy four years old. I'm sorry. I
know he's not Mitch McConnell eighty three or Nancy Pelosi
eighty six or whatever eighty four, but these people are
getting up in age. It's not even crazy to say,
should AOC be Senator after Chuck Schumer is done with it?
Speaker 7 (10:56):
Right?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I just I don't know. Again, did you I feel
the Bernie AOC strife there? I felt like when I
saw that clip, I thought, wow, Bernie doesn't like her,
and then you know, I thought about all the other possibilities,
but that was my first thought.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
No, that's interesting because you know they seem to have
made some agreement that they are mutually beneficial to each other.
Sure that she's the new face of Bernie, which, let's
be serious, they do need they do. Bernie has this
fan group, but you know, he's older and irascible. He
might be annoyed that his fan base is turning to her.
I suppose exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Right, and I to get to write another bestseller about
capitalism if she's there. Yeah, about having a capitalism is obviously.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I am on record that AOC, despite seeming quite silly
sometimes and being quite wrong should not be underestimated because
she's a pretty good speaker, can be pretty good on
social media, has some has a few chops. I think
it's decent at speaking to the working class and middle class,
(12:02):
and like hitting some notes that other Democrats are not
so good at hitting anymore, including the other day at
one of these rallies, she said, you know, I'm for
these things because I was a waitress. I understand what
it feels like to be left behind, and so I
think that message could be powerful in some places. It's
not backed up with a lot of experience doing other things.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And the longer she's away from that life, the more
Washington she's becoming. There's just no doubt that the AOC
who came out as the bartender from the Bronx or
Queens is not the woman we see today. In fact,
she drove a tesla. I wonder if she still drives one.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
She drove her tesla while visiting Florida during the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yes, she did what she know might be moving. It
might be a way to move more to the middle.
Speaker 6 (12:53):
Well.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
I think her Met Gala appearance with her stupid tax
the rich dress, which by the way, was also, like
I think twenty twenty one their first event back, and
they were pretending like they were COVID safe when they
were not at all. They built an entire outdoor space
that was a building so that we could have a runway.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
The right inside outside.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I think that was her peak elitist, democrat, clueless spot.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And since then she's done some work to be more normal. Right,
she really got out over Skis on that one. I think, well,
we'll see.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
We'll see if she challenges Schumer or if she just
waits it out, which is again not the worst idea either.
But yeah, is a senator AOC from New York a possibility?
I think it might be. We're going to take a
short break and come right back with normally.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
You know that we love to talk about the education
on this show, Yeah, we do. The Department of Education
met with an aggressive new executive order from Donald Trump
last week that we haven't discussed in depth, but it
was entitled Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States and Communities.
And what it does is it empowers Linda McMahon, who
(14:12):
is the newly minted Education Secretary, to dismantle and transfer
out of the Department of education as much money and
as many duties as possible so that it is not
running through a federal bureaucracy. Noting that taxpayers spent around
two hundred billion at the federal level on schools during
the COVID nineteen pandemic, on top of more than sixty
(14:33):
billion they spend annually on federal school funding. This money
is largely distributed by one of the newest cabinet agencies,
and basically it concludes.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
We haven't gotten a lot out.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
That's right. Their budget is close to seventy billion a year,
So what are we getting for it? Who gets that money?
All of these are great questions, and I think that
that's the goal here. I think a lot of people
are misled to believe that the end of DOE means
no funding for you know, schools, and they always try
(15:02):
to say, like, oh, the free lunch programs or whatever
will not be funded, and schools are primarily funded by
state governments.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Well, free lunch is USDA. That's the entirely difference that's
always slipped in there.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
The average per state is around eleven percent from the
federal DOE. Some states get a little more, but you
could still have that funding, just not through the boondoggle
of the Department of Education.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Well, and the executive order also notes that the Department
of Education, though it does not actually educate anyone and
sort of funnels money, contains a pr office that includes
over eighty staffers at a cost of more than ten
million a year. Oh yeah, so, like, I'm happy to
take that off the top. Caroline Levitt was asked about
this on the outside of the White House and said
(15:48):
what many of us think, which is the Department of
Education was founded in nineteen seventy or nineteen seventy nine,
and since then we have spent more than three trillion
at this bureaucracy. What has been the ROI for the taxpayer?
Our children's testcores are incredibly concerning when it comes to
literacy rates, math and science test scores. I do think
that there's power in returning this money and these decision
(16:10):
making processes to the states without strings attached. I believe
Florida in the past, under Desanta's has tried to refuse want.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
To send the money back.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I love that guy. The only person in America is
you know.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
What, I want you to take this giant chunk of
cash back to Washington, because we don't want it to
need your strings here.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Amazing. Yeah, he's so good, that's so Yeah. And look,
Democrats keep throwing kind of nonsense at this plan. Madeline Dean,
who is a congresswoman in Pennsylvania, said, what you do
want is an educated electorate, not if you're Donald Trump
and a cult like like members. They want citizens who
(16:49):
are not educated. And of course uneducated is what we
have now. So maybe that's you know, he's trying to
actually get people educated. I think we've thrown these numbers
out before, but in New York, for example, only twenty
three percent of eighth graders of provision in math, and
numbers only a little bit better for reading at twenty
(17:09):
eight percent, and a third of the kids just don't
go to school. So and these are education we won't
miss you.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, these are exacerbated trends, almost entirely caused by COVID
provisions that went on way too long. It were a
racket for teachers unions, right and the teachers union leaders
who caused many of these problems.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
We were on a bad trajectory.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
To begin with, but they caused and exacerbated many of
the problems, especially absenteeism and some of this learning laws.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So when they said school was not essential, people believe them.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, that's what happened there, and we told them while
that was happening, that that would happen.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
They are, of course very angry about.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
This, But I would note that it is states that
have led the way when it comes to the few
bright spots education in our country, Louisiana, Mississippi, this sort
of Southern surge of literacy.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
It's because those states.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Made curriculum changes that were not dictated by the federal government,
that were dictated by evidence based research that perhaps we
should be teaching children to actually read with phonics that
would be safe. Yeah. The extent to which those guys
get more power and other states can learn from them,
huge thumbs up.
Speaker 8 (18:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I caught Randy Winegarden's giant lie this week talking to
Brandon Heeler at CNN.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Let's run that for the parents who remember the COVID.
Speaker 9 (18:41):
COVID was a terrible time for us, and as you
know because I was on your show a lot and
other shows, I wanted schools to be reopen as early
as April of twenty twenty. The issue was the fear
and the issue was to safety issues. But COVID has
really hurt in so many ways. But this has been
(19:02):
a Republican talking point for a long time, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
To be fair to her, a lot of Republican talking
points from COVID are just the truth.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, and I really bother her.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Our talking point is the truth when it comes to
teachers unions fighting to keep schools closed.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
In fact, our friend.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Tom Elliott over at Graveyan has a giant supercut of
Randy Winegarden talking talking about this and debating current Randy
Wine Garden.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
So I just want to play a few of those
real quick.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Let's do it.
Speaker 9 (19:35):
Remote and hybrid are really the only two ways you
can reopen schools safely.
Speaker 10 (19:44):
We've got at the Lady School opening, because if you
don't have the mask, how are you going to be
able to do this. There's a huge difference between working
in Walmart and working as a school.
Speaker 7 (19:55):
You know, even a situation like Florida where it was
pretty clear that schools should not reopen and where Miami
schools did not reopen because you had people who were
courageous and who were willing to divide.
Speaker 9 (20:08):
De Santosi's denials.
Speaker 11 (20:10):
And why are they closing now, Martha.
Speaker 8 (20:14):
They're closing now because what the city said, and frankly,
what lots of other places are also seeing is a
huge skyrocking increase.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Now, you're not listening to me.
Speaker 11 (20:29):
What they're telling us though, is that the wisest scientific
move is to have children in school.
Speaker 8 (20:34):
Because that they're trying to figure out a regional, a
regional way of opening and closing like they did after they.
Speaker 11 (20:43):
Don't need to close it in the middle, don't need
to close is the point marka that when you hit
that there. It as a measurement established by the teachers
Union over the summer in order to reach an agreement
to reopen in the first place, was a three percent threshold.
Speaker 8 (20:55):
The mayor set the three percent threshold. What the teachers
Union did in New York City afterwards was to say,
these are the safeguards that we need, and this is
the testing.
Speaker 11 (21:05):
We need, given that all of these experts and scientists
say that children are safer in school. It's worked across Europe,
it's worked across the UK. They never closed their schools
during their second spike, and now they're in recovery, they're
down ten percent and the kids are not missing out.
Speaker 8 (21:19):
And what they did and what they did in Europe
and what they did in New Zealand is that they
had national leadership that closed that, that did mass that
actually closed the bars, that did some of those things.
Speaker 7 (21:37):
The stimulus.
Speaker 11 (21:38):
Yeah, given all that, they still say the kids are
safer and they're connected Martha, the numbers rising, But don't
they're safer in school?
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I've re tweeted that with the note that I always
want to say is that it wasn't just school year
twenty twenty that she tried to keep schools closed. She
actually tried to keep schools closed for another school year
in twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. In summer
of twenty one, she said, we will try to open
(22:06):
schools in September. Now, as everyone knows, schools were already
open in places not under Randy Wingarten's control. She was
the one literally blocking schools from opening. She rewrote CDC
policy so that schools couldn't open. They wanted to change
the distance from six feet to three feet, which is
(22:27):
all a bunch of nonsense. Six feet, three feet, two
feet one foot. It makes no difference at all, None
of it had any scientific basis, and we knew this
at that time already she was able to stop the
CDC from making that change, which at the time I noted,
you can't have even three feet of space in New
York City public schools, for example. So it was only
(22:49):
places that were that she was allowed to influence that
still had closed schools, and she was trying to keep
them closed for a second or really a third school year.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, and she did do that.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
They all did this dishonest dance where they're like, oh,
they would often, you know, perfunctorily say it is my
heart's desire to have schools open, obviously, but also, screens
are fine, your kids are doing fine, everything's good. We
just need a boatload more money and a bunch of
precautions that you won't possibly able to be able to
(23:23):
take within this timeframe, and then we'll totally go back.
And then in places like where I live, they got
basically everything they wanted, and they still did not go
back to school because the union heads were like, ah,
not enough.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Still need more.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Yeah, And then it was like, okay, but now we're
gonna we're gonna need vaccines. You know, we can't go
back until there's vaccines, and then there were vaccines, and
they were still like, but the kids don't have vaccines,
so they.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Were like the vaccines were too quick.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
No, it's it's mind boggling to watch these people argue this.
And I just always want to mind people that the
folks who are complaining the hardest about the Department of Education,
which does not educate students and largely does not even
fund educating students being closed, are the same people who
were happy for millions of students to be out of
(24:15):
school for eighteen months.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Yeah, that's it. They didn't care. Then they want to
pretend that they care now. I don't believe them. I
just don't believe them. There are a bunch of liars.
The fact that Randy Weingarten is trying to rewrite what
she did during the pandemic, You and I are never
going to let her do that now.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
And I think Becky Pringle, by the way, who's the
head of the other major teachers unions, she was a
little bit more saying the quiet part out loud because
she said, like, what about all these jobs for my
union members that are getting cut? It's like, okay, see,
that should not be your first priority, or at least
you shouldn't tell people it is.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
But parents have picked up on this.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Yeah, yeah, we'll be right back on normally our third story. MAGA,
Aligned Influence all posted very similar content over the weekend
arguing that Snap benefits and that's what they call food
stamps now, should extend to soda. There. You know, the
(25:10):
new MAHA movement Make America Healthy Again is trying to
get rid of the ability to purchase soda with your
food stamps. And you know, I'm kind of you know,
I'm going to be a very middle ground on this
whole story because I'm torn about the ability to use
Snap for soda. I actually don't drink soda, which is
(25:32):
I've got a lot of advices, but not that one.
I get it, it's empty calories. Why should you have
it subsidized for you by the government. But then I
just feel like there's so many other things, like should
they be able to buy Skittles, Like there's a lot
of other questions about what Snap benefits should be used for.
If you want to go the whole distance, I don't
think it should just be soda. I think it should
(25:54):
be like maybe you're only able to buy certain items
with it, but that's going to be just so difficult,
and I don't know that this is the right way
to go. Several of the influencers pointed out that Donald
Trump enjoys his diet coke. I occasionally you will have
a diet coke. I get it, Donald. Why should poor
people not get to And the fact that all of
(26:15):
these people are on the right is what's kind of
interesting about this story, because they're there to pressure Donald
Trump and his administration not to follow this idea. I
don't know. I'm sort of a mix on this. What
do you think?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Well, okay, I'm I apologize for being squishy, but I'm
sort of in the middle with you on the snap
benefits because it is I understand the logical argument. They're like,
should this just be for staples and should we not
have it for these kind of things?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And you use your own.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Money for that kind of shit, right, But then you
get into the question of yet, what are the categories
that are going to be cut? And then you get
a giant lobbying effort, as we're sort of seeing there
when anything tries.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
To get cut. So let's put that aside.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
I do think it's interesting to watch an independent reporter
uncover this.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
By the way, it was a Nick sord Or wrote
out who spotted this.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
I think one of the lessons is that you're not
going to get away with this stuff when you are
challenging a Trump or a DeSantis, people who other right
leaning folks are invested in. I think you're going to
get found out if you don't say what you're doing.
I don't really mind people saying these kind of things,
(27:29):
even if they're paid. If they say that's what they're doing,
that's right, right. There's a lot of squishiness or like
there's a lot of blurred lines in social media and
on Instagram and all these places about you know, endorsements
and sponsorship and like, as long as you're making clear
to me what you're doing, yeah, I'm fairly comfortable with it.
But be ready to be found out, I think right,
(27:51):
And I.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Think it's better to say I actually believe this already
and being paid to say this because I believe this.
I've been accused a number of different times in my
career being paid to say something. I have never once
taken a penny from anybody. But again, I am sympathetic
(28:12):
to these influencers because I do get paid to give
my opinion, So I am paid to tell you what
I think. I'm just not paid by the individual interests.
And I get that this is sort of the wild
West and they don't really know how it's supposed to go.
So I think that, you know, kind of going forward.
And I maybe I'm sympathetic because I followed a few
(28:34):
of these people, but I was also I have been
sympathetic in the past to people I don't agree with
that I felt, were they see this as a way
to make money saying what they already believe they were
already going to do, right, Yeah, So I get that argument.
I do, but it's just you have to kind of
look at it as you're blowing up your reputation. Yes
(28:56):
you might already believe it, but unless you disclose it,
you are just putting yourself in a jam. Christina Pshaw,
who works for Rond DeSantis and has had some very
interesting things to say about this is She tweeted, Here's
how I see it. Influencers are the new generation of advertisers.
Advertising It isn't unethical in itself, but it can be
(29:17):
done unethically. Influencers that promote products, and brands legally have
to disclose paid partnerships in their content, and that's you know,
she said, it's common on other apps like TikTok and Instagram,
but there's no such regulation for politics and policy, and
it might be tricky to regulate. So I think it
has to be kind of pressure from the audience to
say you can't do this without telling us you're doing this,
(29:41):
even if and again, I think it would be just
as strong to say I don't want to see government
cutting down, you know, or making policy where they for
what's better best for us. Now, of course, Maha was
instrumental in winning Trump this selection, so I think it's
kind of a tough to argue right now to say, oh,
(30:02):
I don't think the government should get involved in what's
healthy and not healthy, when literally that argument the government
should get involved in telling us what's healthy and not
healthy just one an election one.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, yeah, So I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
There is an interesting part of this that is the evolution,
and honestly, I'm sort of part of it. Right Like
when journalists Lee Fong was reporting that this happened in
the past where in New York then Mayor Michael Bloomberg
proposed size restrictions on sugary drinks, and the NAACP and
Hispanic Federation opposed the regulation without disclosing financial connections to
(30:37):
Coca Cola. The thing is back then that many years ago,
you could have had me for free.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
For big soda. I was like, I love soda, it's great.
Stop restricting sizes.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
No, I didn't even drink soda, and I still was
pro not restricting sizes because I thought, like, stay out
a big government. I still do. I still kind of
think that, I you know, but I understand that there's
a large segment of the pipeloe that doesn't agree made
thinks the government should be involved in it. And those
people just won an election.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Well, and I also like have been the person that
at least on my personal health decisions, has changed a
lot since then, Right, Soda can be really bad for you.
I love a coke every now and then. But I
did realize at one point that I had been dehydrated
most of my life because I was just like drinking
coke all the time.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's all of us going from the nineties now, like
we just didn't drink any water ever.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So like if I as a personal liberty person who
still doesn't want a bunch of mucking around with sizes
and what people can buy at the convenience store. But
if I have changed to that degree, then there is
a large segment of the voting public who's very happy
for government to meddle.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So I think that political consideration is a huge part
of this, right.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Last thing I'll say is that I also see this
as an opportunity and I think again, Christina Pshaw said
something along these lines. But it teaches you to be
more skeptical. Why are your favorite influencers arguing something is
somebody paying them? And I think that if you consume
Internet at high levels, you kind of start to realize
(32:10):
that there are people getting paid for their opinion to
say certain things. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don't.
But it teaches you to be kind of more aware
of this kind of thing and to again be discern
for yourself whether or not this is real or this
is paid for content.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, And this is one of the things I tell
when people ask me about media literacy, or I'll talk
to college students, and like, the hard and correct answer
is that it's your responsibility to understand what you're consuming
in media, and it's become very, very difficult, which is
why I think disclosure is helpful. It follows the same
(32:50):
ethical guidelines that like say, lawyers and journalists should follow,
although we see that journalists often don't disclose their conflicts
of interest, but it helps people understand what they're dealing with.
Just as you and I we disclose what our ideological
leanings are so that people can judge what they think
of our dissection of the facts.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Everyone has a bias, let's just be open about it. Yeah,
all right, Well, thanks for joining us on normally. Normally
airs Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you can subscribe anywhere you
get your podcasts. Get in touch with us at Normallythepod
at gmail dot com. Thanks for listening, and when things
get weird, act normally
Hey guys, and welcome back to normally the show with
normalish takes for when the.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
News gets weird. I am Mary Catherine.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Ham and I am Carol Marco. It's him, Mary Catherine.
How was you again?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Oh it's pretty good, uneventful.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
I have the annual denial that I have seasonal allergies,
and then acceptance that I have season's seasonal allergies because
I'm like, I am young and vibrant and no thing
bothers me, and then right around mid March or late March,
I'm like, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yes, that takes some zerts head girl.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I don't know if it's youth related. My middle son
has had it real bad his whole life. We moved
to Florida three years ago. It largely went away. We
were like, oh, Florida's the best. This is you know,
all fixed this year came back with vengeance they were
Florida was like, no, actually, we have all the pollen
here and you will suffer.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sometimes the different kind of pollen. Will you save you?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
See, my pride comes from living in North Carolina and
Georgia before coming here. So I was like, Paul can't
touch me, and it turns out here it can pollen man.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, well, there's a lot of news today. Our first
story is the Bernie AOC rally, and they had a
rally that had spillover crowds.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
My normy husband pointed out, like they only reserved arena
for eight hundred people and then they got like more
than that, and so it's like not these humongous numbers
that it seems to be. But anyway, the Wall Street
Journal reports they initially reserved a space at their first
stop of Omaha, Nebraska that could hold eight hundred people,
but had to move to our bigger venue so thirty
(01:39):
four hundred could attend. Bernie said, this is insane. I'm
not running for anything, and two time presidential you know,
the two time presidential candidates set in an interview. People
are outraged and they're frightened, and they want to fight back,
and this is one form of beginning that struggle to
fight back. Maybe maybe or Bernie has always had a
(01:59):
very passionate fan base, and I think that that passionate
fan base is looking for something to do right now,
and they love coming out and hearing from Bernie and
the new Bernie AOC.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, they were in several places, so I think they
were in Nebraska, They went to Denver, Colorado, and they
were in Tempe, Arizona, where AOC will give you a
little taste of what the messaging was like. Here she
is talking about the fight Oligarchy tour, and we'll talk
about the clumsiness of that phrase in a moment.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
But first, AOC, we need a Democratic party that fights
harder for us too.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
But but that means here's what that means. That means
our commune, each and every one of us choosing and
voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to
(03:08):
stand for.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
The working class.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
And Tempe, I want to give.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
You your flowers for a second, because you all have been
working over time to make that happen. In fact, one
thing I love about Arizonans is that you all have
shown that if a US senator isn't fighting hard enough
for you, you're not afraid to replace her with one
(03:37):
who will and win.
Speaker 5 (03:45):
And that's how you.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
Got two fantastic senators and Mark.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Kelly and Reuben Diego.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So a couple things that was shots fired at Kirsten Sinema,
by the way, was up all of her former colleagues
for having been for taking out the filibuster.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
And now they need it. And so she was.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Lighting up AOC for her hypocrisy and convenient change on
this issue just last week on X.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So that's partly where this is coming from.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Hereson Cinema is no longer a senator because the Democratic
Party was like, she seems very reasonable.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Get her out of here and have that.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So another thing that I noticed about this clip in Arizona.
Behind her, you have white women wearing a tax the
Rich t shirt, what looks like a Union T shirt,
a rainbow T shirt, and a one Amacha Latte t shirt,
one which came with the pink hair in the front.
(04:48):
This is the picture of the base that wants to
be enthused, that wants to come out, that wants to
really fight. And how do you take that message, which
I think, honestly, I think Bernie and AOC a better
messengers than establishment.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Folks at the shoint probably, But how do.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
You take that and connect it with regular people who
are not the people standing behind AOC and that.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's their big problem there?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, are you know Bernie's a normal guy.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I don't think Bernie's a normal guy. He really hates billionaires.
I mean, he really hates billionaires, hates them, could not
stand them. Multimillionaires though he hates them a little less.
He talked about his net worth on the Lex Friedman
Show a few years ago. Let's roll that clip.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Do I own three residences? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I do.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a
middle class and they would guess what. I'm the United
States Centator and I own a home in Washington, d C.
And guess what, Like many thousands of people in the
state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It's a
nice one on Lake Champlain. That's it. Now, how did
I get the money? I wrote two best selling books,
including this book on capitalism, and I make kind one
(05:55):
hundred and seventy five thousand to you. And that's more
or less how I became the zillionaire that I am.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
As opposed to the billionaires who killed little babies and
drank their blood. That's how they made their money. He
made his money via capitalism, so he.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Should be able to keep his money because he did
it doing the right thing right.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And that's the only way you're allowed to keep your
money is if you are Bernie Sanders, and you do
it the way he does it. And even if you
do it the way he does it, he still might
not like that because you might have the wrong opinions.
You might have written the pro capitalism book as well.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
No, you can't do that as.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
You committed capitalism.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I think one of the problems for them is they
try to reorganize. And I don't think people are off
base here. Politico's comparing it to the Tea Party anger
of the early Obama years. The people who are coming
out are angry at establishment Democrats. Those establishment Democrats, to
some extent, as we saw with Schumer and the government
shutdown fight, are sort of handcuffed by the impotence of
(06:56):
not being in charge of anything in Washington, right, and
also sort of handcuffed by the fact that they love
a really powerful executive and then they handed all that
power to Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yeah oopsie, yeah oops right. So, and that also explains
why they're so excited about these attacks on Tesla, because
it seems like doing something like, look, they're doing something.
They're firebombing Tesla manufacturers, they're keying Tesla cars. They're really
showing that Elon Musk of course, and I've been loving
following the Tesla stock because it looks like Tim Walls
(07:28):
really did call the bottom of it.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
But that's very it was.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
It was two twenty five when Tim Walls was super
excited about the stock dropping. It's two seventy one today
and climbing. Literally, we should have bought the dip when
Tim Walls talked about.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
It, He's like our new Jim Kramer. It's the opposite
Jim Kramer.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Politico noted congressional Democrats have typically enjoyed higher popularity with
their voting base than their Republican counterparts, but the trauma
of the twenty twenty four presidential election defeat appears to
have ruptured that reallyationship. Congressional Democrats are now underwater with
their own voters in approval ratings, and this is the
first time that's happened in this particular poll's history, and
(08:09):
that super majorities of them want them to do more
to fight Donald Trump. This is different from twenty seventeen
because they got real excited about how the party resisted
in twenty seventeen, but resisting didn't work, and it's not
working now, so they're less satisfied.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Pink hats back out. I don't think there's anything wrong
with that. Go go on to march kids do it.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
They need something, but they don't know what the thing is,
which is again I think to your point, why they
end up oops burning Tesla's like that doesn't seem like
a great idea. Bernie, for his part, was asked about
some of the intra party conflict in the lightest way
possible by Jonathan Carl. Let's run that clip and see
(08:54):
how he reacted.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
She and sphy is young people all over the country.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Would you like to see her joining the Senate?
Speaker 6 (09:00):
Right now? We have, as I said, just a whole
lot of people in the Congress. Okay, got it?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
And thanks way, I got one that's important.
Speaker 6 (09:07):
Well, I asked you, okay, you know you want to
do nonsense nonsense.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
No, I don't want.
Speaker 6 (09:12):
To talk about inside the beltway stuff. I got thirty
two thousand people. I was just asking me about AOC
because she was well, everything fine, but I don't want
to talk about this.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I might even think that he was being asked about
the INJA party stuff. I mean, I guess if you could,
he could have seen it as a do you like her?
Do you like Chuck? Schumer, But actually what he came
off as is anti AOC to me. He came off
as not liking her and not wanting to talk about her.
It could have it was such a layup. He could
(09:38):
have said anything. He could have just said, sure, down
the road, she would make a fantastic senator.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Anything was possible, anything would have been better than this,
which brings attention to this and sort of reveals just
how sensitive a subject it is, maybe not just for him,
but for everyone in the Democratic Party, because the question
would you like to see in the Senate implies that
Schumer might not be there, that Schumer shouldn't be at
the top of the party. But again in the most
(10:04):
friendly and innocuous way possible, and you could have just
been like, oh, up and come, or love to be
on the trail of or just dance around it. I
think this is a problem for Democrats going forward. They
do not face adversarial press, so when asked very easy
questions that you should very easily anticipate, they end up
(10:26):
doing this, which I don't think bodes well for the teamwork.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And John Carl was like, what, no, come.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Back, you want to do nonsense, nonsense, I just looked
it up.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Chuck Schumer is seventy four years old. I'm sorry. I
know he's not Mitch McConnell eighty three or Nancy Pelosi
eighty six or whatever eighty four, but these people are
getting up in age. It's not even crazy to say,
should AOC be Senator after Chuck Schumer is done with it?
Speaker 7 (10:56):
Right?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I just I don't know. Again, did you I feel
the Bernie AOC strife there? I felt like when I
saw that clip, I thought, wow, Bernie doesn't like her,
and then you know, I thought about all the other possibilities,
but that was my first thought.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
No, that's interesting because you know they seem to have
made some agreement that they are mutually beneficial to each other.
Sure that she's the new face of Bernie, which, let's
be serious, they do need they do. Bernie has this
fan group, but you know, he's older and irascible. He
might be annoyed that his fan base is turning to her.
I suppose exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Right, and I to get to write another bestseller about
capitalism if she's there. Yeah, about having a capitalism is obviously.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I am on record that AOC, despite seeming quite silly
sometimes and being quite wrong should not be underestimated because
she's a pretty good speaker, can be pretty good on
social media, has some has a few chops. I think
it's decent at speaking to the working class and middle class,
(12:02):
and like hitting some notes that other Democrats are not
so good at hitting anymore, including the other day at
one of these rallies, she said, you know, I'm for
these things because I was a waitress. I understand what
it feels like to be left behind, and so I
think that message could be powerful in some places. It's
not backed up with a lot of experience doing other things.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And the longer she's away from that life, the more
Washington she's becoming. There's just no doubt that the AOC
who came out as the bartender from the Bronx or
Queens is not the woman we see today. In fact,
she drove a tesla. I wonder if she still drives one.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
She drove her tesla while visiting Florida during the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yes, she did what she know might be moving. It
might be a way to move more to the middle.
Speaker 6 (12:53):
Well.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
I think her Met Gala appearance with her stupid tax
the rich dress, which by the way, was also, like
I think twenty twenty one their first event back, and
they were pretending like they were COVID safe when they
were not at all. They built an entire outdoor space
that was a building so that we could have a runway.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
The right inside outside.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I think that was her peak elitist, democrat, clueless spot.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And since then she's done some work to be more normal. Right,
she really got out over Skis on that one. I think, well,
we'll see.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
We'll see if she challenges Schumer or if she just
waits it out, which is again not the worst idea either.
But yeah, is a senator AOC from New York a possibility?
I think it might be. We're going to take a
short break and come right back with normally.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
You know that we love to talk about the education
on this show, Yeah, we do. The Department of Education
met with an aggressive new executive order from Donald Trump
last week that we haven't discussed in depth, but it
was entitled Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States and Communities.
And what it does is it empowers Linda McMahon, who
(14:12):
is the newly minted Education Secretary, to dismantle and transfer
out of the Department of education as much money and
as many duties as possible so that it is not
running through a federal bureaucracy. Noting that taxpayers spent around
two hundred billion at the federal level on schools during
the COVID nineteen pandemic, on top of more than sixty
(14:33):
billion they spend annually on federal school funding. This money
is largely distributed by one of the newest cabinet agencies,
and basically it concludes.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
We haven't gotten a lot out.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
That's right. Their budget is close to seventy billion a year,
So what are we getting for it? Who gets that money?
All of these are great questions, and I think that
that's the goal here. I think a lot of people
are misled to believe that the end of DOE means
no funding for you know, schools, and they always try
(15:02):
to say, like, oh, the free lunch programs or whatever
will not be funded, and schools are primarily funded by
state governments.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Well, free lunch is USDA. That's the entirely difference that's
always slipped in there.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
The average per state is around eleven percent from the
federal DOE. Some states get a little more, but you
could still have that funding, just not through the boondoggle
of the Department of Education.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Well, and the executive order also notes that the Department
of Education, though it does not actually educate anyone and
sort of funnels money, contains a pr office that includes
over eighty staffers at a cost of more than ten
million a year. Oh yeah, so, like, I'm happy to
take that off the top. Caroline Levitt was asked about
this on the outside of the White House and said
(15:48):
what many of us think, which is the Department of
Education was founded in nineteen seventy or nineteen seventy nine,
and since then we have spent more than three trillion
at this bureaucracy. What has been the ROI for the taxpayer?
Our children's testcores are incredibly concerning when it comes to
literacy rates, math and science test scores. I do think
that there's power in returning this money and these decision
(16:10):
making processes to the states without strings attached. I believe
Florida in the past, under Desanta's has tried to refuse want.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
To send the money back.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I love that guy. The only person in America is
you know.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
What, I want you to take this giant chunk of
cash back to Washington, because we don't want it to
need your strings here.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Amazing. Yeah, he's so good, that's so Yeah. And look,
Democrats keep throwing kind of nonsense at this plan. Madeline Dean,
who is a congresswoman in Pennsylvania, said, what you do
want is an educated electorate, not if you're Donald Trump
and a cult like like members. They want citizens who
(16:49):
are not educated. And of course uneducated is what we
have now. So maybe that's you know, he's trying to
actually get people educated. I think we've thrown these numbers
out before, but in New York, for example, only twenty
three percent of eighth graders of provision in math, and
numbers only a little bit better for reading at twenty
(17:09):
eight percent, and a third of the kids just don't
go to school. So and these are education we won't
miss you.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, these are exacerbated trends, almost entirely caused by COVID
provisions that went on way too long. It were a
racket for teachers unions, right and the teachers union leaders
who caused many of these problems.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
We were on a bad trajectory.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
To begin with, but they caused and exacerbated many of
the problems, especially absenteeism and some of this learning laws.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So when they said school was not essential, people believe them.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, that's what happened there, and we told them while
that was happening, that that would happen.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
They are, of course very angry about.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
This, But I would note that it is states that
have led the way when it comes to the few
bright spots education in our country, Louisiana, Mississippi, this sort
of Southern surge of literacy.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
It's because those states.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Made curriculum changes that were not dictated by the federal government,
that were dictated by evidence based research that perhaps we
should be teaching children to actually read with phonics that
would be safe. Yeah. The extent to which those guys
get more power and other states can learn from them,
huge thumbs up.
Speaker 8 (18:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
I caught Randy Winegarden's giant lie this week talking to
Brandon Heeler at CNN.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Let's run that for the parents who remember the COVID.
Speaker 9 (18:41):
COVID was a terrible time for us, and as you
know because I was on your show a lot and
other shows, I wanted schools to be reopen as early
as April of twenty twenty. The issue was the fear
and the issue was to safety issues. But COVID has
really hurt in so many ways. But this has been
(19:02):
a Republican talking point for a long time, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
To be fair to her, a lot of Republican talking
points from COVID are just the truth.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, and I really bother her.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Our talking point is the truth when it comes to
teachers unions fighting to keep schools closed.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
In fact, our friend.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Tom Elliott over at Graveyan has a giant supercut of
Randy Winegarden talking talking about this and debating current Randy
Wine Garden.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
So I just want to play a few of those
real quick.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Let's do it.
Speaker 9 (19:35):
Remote and hybrid are really the only two ways you
can reopen schools safely.
Speaker 10 (19:44):
We've got at the Lady School opening, because if you
don't have the mask, how are you going to be
able to do this. There's a huge difference between working
in Walmart and working as a school.
Speaker 7 (19:55):
You know, even a situation like Florida where it was
pretty clear that schools should not reopen and where Miami
schools did not reopen because you had people who were
courageous and who were willing to divide.
Speaker 9 (20:08):
De Santosi's denials.
Speaker 11 (20:10):
And why are they closing now, Martha.
Speaker 8 (20:14):
They're closing now because what the city said, and frankly,
what lots of other places are also seeing is a
huge skyrocking increase.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Now, you're not listening to me.
Speaker 11 (20:29):
What they're telling us though, is that the wisest scientific
move is to have children in school.
Speaker 8 (20:34):
Because that they're trying to figure out a regional, a
regional way of opening and closing like they did after they.
Speaker 11 (20:43):
Don't need to close it in the middle, don't need
to close is the point marka that when you hit
that there. It as a measurement established by the teachers
Union over the summer in order to reach an agreement
to reopen in the first place, was a three percent threshold.
Speaker 8 (20:55):
The mayor set the three percent threshold. What the teachers
Union did in New York City afterwards was to say,
these are the safeguards that we need, and this is
the testing.
Speaker 11 (21:05):
We need, given that all of these experts and scientists
say that children are safer in school. It's worked across Europe,
it's worked across the UK. They never closed their schools
during their second spike, and now they're in recovery, they're
down ten percent and the kids are not missing out.
Speaker 8 (21:19):
And what they did and what they did in Europe
and what they did in New Zealand is that they
had national leadership that closed that, that did mass that
actually closed the bars, that did some of those things.
Speaker 7 (21:37):
The stimulus.
Speaker 11 (21:38):
Yeah, given all that, they still say the kids are
safer and they're connected Martha, the numbers rising, But don't
they're safer in school?
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I've re tweeted that with the note that I always
want to say is that it wasn't just school year
twenty twenty that she tried to keep schools closed. She
actually tried to keep schools closed for another school year
in twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. In summer
of twenty one, she said, we will try to open
(22:06):
schools in September. Now, as everyone knows, schools were already
open in places not under Randy Wingarten's control. She was
the one literally blocking schools from opening. She rewrote CDC
policy so that schools couldn't open. They wanted to change
the distance from six feet to three feet, which is
(22:27):
all a bunch of nonsense. Six feet, three feet, two
feet one foot. It makes no difference at all, None
of it had any scientific basis, and we knew this
at that time already she was able to stop the
CDC from making that change, which at the time I noted,
you can't have even three feet of space in New
York City public schools, for example. So it was only
(22:49):
places that were that she was allowed to influence that
still had closed schools, and she was trying to keep
them closed for a second or really a third school year.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, and she did do that.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
They all did this dishonest dance where they're like, oh,
they would often, you know, perfunctorily say it is my
heart's desire to have schools open, obviously, but also, screens
are fine, your kids are doing fine, everything's good. We
just need a boatload more money and a bunch of
precautions that you won't possibly able to be able to
(23:23):
take within this timeframe, and then we'll totally go back.
And then in places like where I live, they got
basically everything they wanted, and they still did not go
back to school because the union heads were like, ah,
not enough.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Still need more.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Yeah, And then it was like, okay, but now we're
gonna we're gonna need vaccines. You know, we can't go
back until there's vaccines, and then there were vaccines, and
they were still like, but the kids don't have vaccines,
so they.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Were like the vaccines were too quick.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
No, it's it's mind boggling to watch these people argue this.
And I just always want to mind people that the
folks who are complaining the hardest about the Department of Education,
which does not educate students and largely does not even
fund educating students being closed, are the same people who
were happy for millions of students to be out of
(24:15):
school for eighteen months.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Yeah, that's it. They didn't care. Then they want to
pretend that they care now. I don't believe them. I
just don't believe them. There are a bunch of liars.
The fact that Randy Weingarten is trying to rewrite what
she did during the pandemic, You and I are never
going to let her do that now.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
And I think Becky Pringle, by the way, who's the
head of the other major teachers unions, she was a
little bit more saying the quiet part out loud because
she said, like, what about all these jobs for my
union members that are getting cut? It's like, okay, see,
that should not be your first priority, or at least
you shouldn't tell people it is.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
But parents have picked up on this.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Yeah, yeah, we'll be right back on normally our third story. MAGA,
Aligned Influence all posted very similar content over the weekend
arguing that Snap benefits and that's what they call food
stamps now, should extend to soda. There. You know, the
(25:10):
new MAHA movement Make America Healthy Again is trying to
get rid of the ability to purchase soda with your
food stamps. And you know, I'm kind of you know,
I'm going to be a very middle ground on this
whole story because I'm torn about the ability to use
Snap for soda. I actually don't drink soda, which is
(25:32):
I've got a lot of advices, but not that one.
I get it, it's empty calories. Why should you have
it subsidized for you by the government. But then I
just feel like there's so many other things, like should
they be able to buy Skittles, Like there's a lot
of other questions about what Snap benefits should be used for.
If you want to go the whole distance, I don't
think it should just be soda. I think it should
(25:54):
be like maybe you're only able to buy certain items
with it, but that's going to be just so difficult,
and I don't know that this is the right way
to go. Several of the influencers pointed out that Donald
Trump enjoys his diet coke. I occasionally you will have
a diet coke. I get it, Donald. Why should poor
people not get to And the fact that all of
(26:15):
these people are on the right is what's kind of
interesting about this story, because they're there to pressure Donald
Trump and his administration not to follow this idea. I
don't know. I'm sort of a mix on this. What
do you think?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Well, okay, I'm I apologize for being squishy, but I'm
sort of in the middle with you on the snap
benefits because it is I understand the logical argument. They're like,
should this just be for staples and should we not
have it for these kind of things?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And you use your own.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Money for that kind of shit, right, But then you
get into the question of yet, what are the categories
that are going to be cut? And then you get
a giant lobbying effort, as we're sort of seeing there
when anything tries.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
To get cut. So let's put that aside.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
I do think it's interesting to watch an independent reporter
uncover this.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
By the way, it was a Nick sord Or wrote
out who spotted this.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
I think one of the lessons is that you're not
going to get away with this stuff when you are
challenging a Trump or a DeSantis, people who other right
leaning folks are invested in. I think you're going to
get found out if you don't say what you're doing.
I don't really mind people saying these kind of things,
(27:29):
even if they're paid. If they say that's what they're doing,
that's right, right. There's a lot of squishiness or like
there's a lot of blurred lines in social media and
on Instagram and all these places about you know, endorsements
and sponsorship and like, as long as you're making clear
to me what you're doing, yeah, I'm fairly comfortable with it.
But be ready to be found out, I think right,
(27:51):
And I.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Think it's better to say I actually believe this already
and being paid to say this because I believe this.
I've been accused a number of different times in my
career being paid to say something. I have never once
taken a penny from anybody. But again, I am sympathetic
(28:12):
to these influencers because I do get paid to give
my opinion, So I am paid to tell you what
I think. I'm just not paid by the individual interests.
And I get that this is sort of the wild
West and they don't really know how it's supposed to go.
So I think that, you know, kind of going forward.
And I maybe I'm sympathetic because I followed a few
(28:34):
of these people, but I was also I have been
sympathetic in the past to people I don't agree with
that I felt, were they see this as a way
to make money saying what they already believe they were
already going to do, right, Yeah, So I get that argument.
I do, but it's just you have to kind of
look at it as you're blowing up your reputation. Yes
(28:56):
you might already believe it, but unless you disclose it,
you are just putting yourself in a jam. Christina Pshaw,
who works for Rond DeSantis and has had some very
interesting things to say about this is She tweeted, Here's
how I see it. Influencers are the new generation of advertisers.
Advertising It isn't unethical in itself, but it can be
(29:17):
done unethically. Influencers that promote products, and brands legally have
to disclose paid partnerships in their content, and that's you know,
she said, it's common on other apps like TikTok and Instagram,
but there's no such regulation for politics and policy, and
it might be tricky to regulate. So I think it
has to be kind of pressure from the audience to
say you can't do this without telling us you're doing this,
(29:41):
even if and again, I think it would be just
as strong to say I don't want to see government
cutting down, you know, or making policy where they for
what's better best for us. Now, of course, Maha was
instrumental in winning Trump this selection, so I think it's
kind of a tough to argue right now to say, oh,
(30:02):
I don't think the government should get involved in what's
healthy and not healthy, when literally that argument the government
should get involved in telling us what's healthy and not
healthy just one an election one.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, yeah, So I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
There is an interesting part of this that is the evolution,
and honestly, I'm sort of part of it. Right Like
when journalists Lee Fong was reporting that this happened in
the past where in New York then Mayor Michael Bloomberg
proposed size restrictions on sugary drinks, and the NAACP and
Hispanic Federation opposed the regulation without disclosing financial connections to
(30:37):
Coca Cola. The thing is back then that many years ago,
you could have had me for free.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
For big soda. I was like, I love soda, it's great.
Stop restricting sizes.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
No, I didn't even drink soda, and I still was
pro not restricting sizes because I thought, like, stay out
a big government. I still do. I still kind of
think that, I you know, but I understand that there's
a large segment of the pipeloe that doesn't agree made
thinks the government should be involved in it. And those
people just won an election.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Well, and I also like have been the person that
at least on my personal health decisions, has changed a
lot since then, Right, Soda can be really bad for you.
I love a coke every now and then. But I
did realize at one point that I had been dehydrated
most of my life because I was just like drinking
coke all the time.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's all of us going from the nineties now, like
we just didn't drink any water ever.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So like if I as a personal liberty person who
still doesn't want a bunch of mucking around with sizes
and what people can buy at the convenience store. But
if I have changed to that degree, then there is
a large segment of the voting public who's very happy
for government to meddle.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So I think that political consideration is a huge part
of this, right.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Last thing I'll say is that I also see this
as an opportunity and I think again, Christina Pshaw said
something along these lines. But it teaches you to be
more skeptical. Why are your favorite influencers arguing something is
somebody paying them? And I think that if you consume
Internet at high levels, you kind of start to realize
(32:10):
that there are people getting paid for their opinion to
say certain things. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don't.
But it teaches you to be kind of more aware
of this kind of thing and to again be discern
for yourself whether or not this is real or this
is paid for content.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, And this is one of the things I tell
when people ask me about media literacy, or I'll talk
to college students, and like, the hard and correct answer
is that it's your responsibility to understand what you're consuming
in media, and it's become very, very difficult, which is
why I think disclosure is helpful. It follows the same
(32:50):
ethical guidelines that like say, lawyers and journalists should follow,
although we see that journalists often don't disclose their conflicts
of interest, but it helps people understand what they're dealing with.
Just as you and I we disclose what our ideological
leanings are so that people can judge what they think
of our dissection of the facts.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Everyone has a bias, let's just be open about it. Yeah,
all right, Well, thanks for joining us on normally. Normally
airs Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you can subscribe anywhere you
get your podcasts. Get in touch with us at Normallythepod
at gmail dot com. Thanks for listening, and when things
get weird, act normally
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!