Chad Adams in for Pete Kaliner (07-09-2025--Hour2)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Just a lot going on. The weather, summer sun. Hey, if you ever were a pilot, they'll tell you the sun causes all of it. It's big ball of flames in the air. It causes everything. It drives. Now, when we went to the break, Chad Adams, your guesto sitting in for Pete Calendar. Hope he's enjoyed his time off News Talk eleven ten ninety nine three WBT seven O four five seven oh eleven ten. The Call in numbers whatever you're doing to live, thrive and survive five seven to eleven to the Call in Numbers. We appreciate you listening now. You know, as I'm sitting here studio doing my thing, all of you out there are doing yours that are listening. Whether you're out there on the road, you're driving around, you might be listening on the app, on the WBT app, you might be listening online. You could be anywhere literally listening to this show on this amazing station. But if you're at work, maybe you're at home, whatever you're doing, all of these issues, you have a perspective on those. The problem with social media is has elevated so many people to subject matter experts, primarily the listeners of a show like this are looking at their own lives. What do I think about these issues, How do I feel about what's going on? What do I feel is important, especially if you have kids. If you have kids, you've got so much coming at you. As I said yesterday, and I told my sister over the weekend, you know what, you may not want to be political, but if you have kids, they're bringing the politics home to you. They're bringing the stuff. That's one thing to be spoon fed, you know, Aristotle and Archimedes and math and geography and science and all that. It's another to be bringing home this gobblbee gook political stuff and dropping it in your living room where you have to kind of take this you know, backstep and figure out what the hell just happened. When your kid doesn't think you should open the door for a woman because well I would. Oh no, you're saying something negative about women, or your daughter says hey, there's any number of things. I don't want to get into it too much. But you may not want to be political, but I guarantee you it's coming to you so and I say this and this next story. It is not going to make you feel better. I'll guarantee you it's not going to make you. It's the Washington Examiner tends to be a conservative viewpoint. I'll tell you that up front. But Byron York has long been a journalist, leans more right now than probably ever before. It's I don't think his perspectives are extreme. You can see him on on Twitter and other or x I guess is the way to say. And he and he he. Has documented where the political left's activism has taken them. And you could remember you've seen if you, if you, if you lean conservative, whatsoever, you've seen the clips where Maxine Waters when Trump first got elected, when she's screaming at a small gathering to say, you need to find them in restaurants or wherever, and you need to tell them they're not welcome here. It was. It was a call to interrupt an attack. And Betsy Devalis was in a restaurant or by the way, or vote got attack. They were self with Chuck Schumer, you know, stood on the steps of the Supreme's Court and basically said you're gonna regret the day. It was a threat to we know you are gorsts, we know who you are. Comey buried. It was a threat. He was issuing threats on the steps of the courthouse. That's why the left always screams about Trump, right Trump's trying to people hate immigrants. Know, he's trying to say it's a bad ombrace and there are but words these people. So here's where we go where the political left. And again I frame this with respect to where Democrats in North Carolina right now, they have a wall between themselves and their national Party and they're doing and the political party, the DNC, well is well aware that they cannot in many parts of this country allow that wall to shatter because if all of a sudden, the races next year, the governor's race, the Senate race, well, if those races and there's no governor's race next year, starck Sorry, if the Senate race becomes a referendum on people like Mumdani and the political left and where it finds itself, no Democrat will well, only maybe Chapel Hill, maybe a few precincts in Charlotte, Asheville, Wilmington, the large cities, but it will be a blood letting for Democrats if next year is a referendum on the left of the new Left. So there has to be this wall of separation between people like Josh Stein and Jeff Jackson and their Democrat politics and those of Mamdani and California, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, AOC. I'll guarantee you, promise you this. AOC and Jasmine Crockett will not be coming to North Carolina and speaking with Roy Cooper on stage. They will do everything in their power to stop that. So here are the disturbing glimpses, the disturbing glimpses of Democrat Annger. We know many Democrats were stunned when Donald Trump won a second term. This is Byron York. We know many are still angry about it, but we're just now learning how angry some of them are it's not just grandstanding Democrat lawmakers like Jasmine Crockett actually reports that quote at town halls in their districts and in one on one meetings with constituents and activists. Crockett's more centrist Democrat House colleagues are quote facing a growing thrum of demands to the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. End quote quote. Our own base is telling us that what we're doing is not good enough, said one Democrat lawmaker out of nine quoted in the Axious articles. Some of them have suggested what we really need to do is be willing to get shot in protest around ice of facilities. That there needs to be blood to grab attention of the press of the public. End quote. Another lawmaker told, and this is Axios is reporting. This isn't this person that Byron York's rephrasing, what actually is reported that ACXIOS constituents say quote civility isn't working and to get ready for quote violence, to fight to protect our democracy and another set it's like the Roman colicy on people just want more and more of this spectacle. Obviously, these are Democrats who have moved beyond the defeat them at the ballot box stage of politics, and even beyond the protest by civil disobedient stage. They're ready to turn a political fight into a physical one. Violence is already going on and Alvarado, Texas, a militant group broadly allied with Democrat views, launched what officials call a coordinated attack on the Ice Prairie Land Attention Center on the fourth of July. According to court documents, it started at ten thirty PM when a group of ten to twelve ANTIFA radicals dressed in all black began shooting fireworks towards the building. Some began to vandalize parked cars when unarmed ICE workers called nine to one one and Alvarado Police Department officer arrived. Immediately after the. APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck. Then another government also opened fire at the unarmed Department of Homeland Security correctional officers. In total, the assailants shot approximately twenty to thirty rounds at the correctional officers. Police later found two ar style rifles and spent casings in the nearby woods. When the radicals ran away, police got them. Some were still in the woods and some were escaping down a nearby road, including seven suspects who were dressed in black military style clothing. Some had body armor on, some covered in mud, some were armed, some had radios. The officer was hitting the next survived, and ten suspects were charged with attempted murder, the violent tip of the protests against the Trump enforcement of immigration. Another example of recent radicalization include far left Free Palestine extremists Elias Elias Rodriguez, who is accused of killing two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington. Luigi Mangioni, considered a hear by many on the left, the accused killer of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on December fourth, And this goes on and on. So what we're seeing, and that's just I'm only getting to have I'm not going to read the entirety of the column. But what you see is an escalation. Once you cannot be civil, you get angry, and once your anger is not met with public support, it turns to outrage. And when your outrage is unmatched by public support, you turn to violence, and that's the radical left. And this is where people like Cliburne and others. At some point the Democrats need to stand up to their own. There's plenty of division on the right. I'm not going to pretend there's not. There is, but the political situation on the left is damn near beyond unhealthy. It's bad, all right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check Dot Ground, dot News slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent to me. And I'm going to kind of rip the band aid off a little bit for myself because I've tried to be more I mean, I've really tried to reach to be more than fair. I'm going to say something that people in the audience, if they lean left, are going to say, Oh, we're not surprised. People on the right, we knew it. I think that the most substantive wrecking ball that's been taken to the DC establishment in my life, to him as a guy that's in the Oval office right now, I had as many questions about him in twenty sixteen as anyone after the first term, looking at what he was attempting to do and what was done to him. I've never seen the entirety of a given political class be so hell bent on destroying a single individual as I have this. I've never seen anything like it. He can be bombassed. He can say outrageous things, many of them have. Depends on what the definition of the word is is right, You heard Bill Clinton say that almost it's some outrageous stuff. But they all knew they'd play the game. You could play ball with them with this president, he's he's not a pole driven guy. And he says, it's so refreshing to hear a president that will answer a question, to hear any politician that'll just answer it didn't consult the polls. It's the Democrats, you know, constantly are using these poll tested phrases, and you see it. They all say the same thing, and it's like, are you capable of independent thought? I don't know. But the most significant crime at the highest level to me and Democrats ought to be as incensed as anyone, is the cover up of the Biden mental detachment for the most powerful nation in the world to not know who's in charge. We had a duly elected president who was clearly mentally vacant, who everyone who had een could see saw it. You could see it, the wandering off stage, the incoherence about answering the you know, and then he would. If he wants. The most coherent he ever is is when he's angry, Like when you see him get like, he would go from being Joe to angry Joe. And that was the only and it was an inability and that comes from an inability to gauge your emotional tracking that in order to be taken serious, you have to be angry. It's this overreaction to things. Clearly he had issues. His staff knew he has had issues. His wife knew it. They knew it. And the most telling, and this is incredulous to me, that who had access to the football? Not to me, whenever anything goes sideways, where's the football? That's the number one question anyone should ask? Who has the football? Who can authorize a nuclear strike on another country? Who can the president has that ultimately, and he wasn't all there. So who was doing. Who had access to all of that? Who was driving the ship? It was it was an unelected individual or individuals. It was a team of conspira co conspirators. It's treason. They were circumventing the entirety of the US Constitution. Why there's not more outrage about this is beyond me to anyone who seriously looks at this. It's beyond them. You hear Jonathan Turley talk about this all the time. Completely subverted the US Constitution, completely bypassed chain of command, completely went around the will of the American people, and just left a doddering guy up there wandering off the halls of the White House while they were doing everything. Who were they and what gives more credence to this is what happened today. So there was an oversight committee meeting, the House Oversight Committee. The Biden's physition, Kevin O'Connor, went to a closed door he was subpoena. He goes to a closed door meeting where they're asked that at lasted less than an hour, it should have been hours long. What happened, Well, the guy walked out. His lawyer said one thing. He pleaded the fifth a question after question after question, anything about Joe Biden. Hastien. I'm going to read. So James Comber comes out, and many of the people know that Cumber's been on this committee. Chairman James Comber from Kentucky has been on this circuit or this belief system for a very long time. I'm going to read the first two questions that were asked, were you ever told to lie about the president's health? He asked the president's physician. The president's physician played the fifth. I cannot answer that question on the grounds that it may impugne my imply my guilt or whatever. He would not answer that question. Second question, did you ever believe that President Biden was unfit to. Execute his duty? I can't answer the question on the grounds that might answer my incriminating So he clearly that that I mean. I know in America is you have to prove something. But this isn't a court of law. Include the fifth but it is. Again, it's it's really unpressed for this level love cover up to go unanswered by the way investigations were announced. I'm not a big fan of announcing investigations into James Comy and Brennan. The investigations announced, I'd rather you see indictments or prosecutions or arrest or something. But they are looking at those folks in the way they conducted themselves for the past few years, using their positions of government power to punish and go after and use all of the resources to go after certain individuals. It looks like we don't know. But again the. President's physician goes before the House Oversight Committee. They ask him questions, he won't answer them, pleads the fifth and they say, you know, hey, that his lawyer said. This is not an admission of guilt, but a response to what they say was an unprecedented investigatory scope that could have violated the bounds of patient position privilege. Now, if they were to cross that bridge and go to they, he could easily say, hey, I can't answer that because it's patient physician confidence. Jelly with ask him, were you pressured by anyone outside of that? Any wouldn't answer. That's a very different if I say, if you can't answer questions about the president's health, Okay, I get that, were you pressured by anybody else? You can answer that question. That has nothing to do with patient confidentiality, zero to do with it. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Asheville. Is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal or get family and friends together for a big old Reunion. Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. 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He's got more degrees than you can shake a stick out. Just he's He's such a down to earth individual, easy to talk to, funny, great sense of humor, but at the same time, highly educated, very profound in his approach to stuff. And so we're going to talk a little bit about, you know, what's happening in North Carolina, what he sees on the regulatory front. Now, of course, you know, and Cooper was in. He's out, even though a stellar career there. He's still active in North Carolina, lives in the Wilington area, but he works in Raleigh. But just a very interesting gentleman. I've spoken to him on many occasions about the Coastalaria Management Authority, which is an agency that has very little, if any oversight, that controls a great deal of what happens in the coast. You find this that you know, the corp of engineers used to be very very Hey, here's how to solve the problem. Now it's become very political, and we see this kind of erosion. We bear witness to the erosion of property rights vis the environmental regulations, some of which have no bearing on making society better in any substantive way. I mean a good example that is the Endangered Species Act. Oh, before your heads explode, hear me out on this Dangered Species Act. A great piece of legislation. In some ways, it recognizes that, hey, we need to be aware of certain species that are being affected by over a hunting or whatever, whatever the case may be. But the problem with it is that it's not necessarily about the species. It's about where the species is. If if on one side of the mountain there's five thousand red toed knucklehead squirrels and on the other side of the mountain there's two, then massive, you know, regulatory issues kick in and on that side of the mountain, everybody loses anything. Even though the species the red tod knucklehead squirrel, which doesn't exist. I'm using it to make a point. There's plenty of them. They just happen to exist, not there. They exist here plentiful not so plentiful over here, and that's a problem. A really good example of this is down in Brunswick County. The government was doing so there's a little town called Bowling Spring Lake and it's funny it's not a lake anymore because it was the dam was destroyed by a hurricane and they've never rebuilt it, or they haven't for years now. And the irony there is again government not being able to get stuff done that is not redone. So you drive through the lake and there's no lake. There's the bridge, but there's no lake. Now, having said that the government was going to do a survey geographical surveys in this area to look for the red kackatd woodpecker, not the pilot one, but the kakai anyway, they were looking to see where suitable habitat might be. So the goal red headed, red headed red cockadi woodpecker are there is there suitable habitat in this area? They put it on the map. Yes this is suitable. Now, when you get into people's property and you say that area is suitable, that means that individual can no longer build a house on that lot. They can no longer. So if people had saved up money, had a lot down near the coast, and they wanted to build on it. One day, all of a sudden, if that lot was considered suitable habitat, you're not allowed to build on it. So what happened. What was the net result of the surveys that were going to be done in that area of your great state. It was that there was a record number of people clearcutting their land and their property. Why because if it's not suitable habitat, they can build on it. So what did the Endangered Species Act and the guidelines therein create. What it actually did was create a situation that made it less likely for that species to proliferate. The truth of the matter is had there been exceptional or the ability to build and say, hey, this is suitable habitat, but we're looking at the you know, if it's still ninety percent suitable or eighty percent, so whatever, that's better than zero. But no, the Endangered Species Act, like all acts, like the American with Disabilities Act, these things are so pervasive and so aggressive that the deliterious to what actually they wanted to achieve. And that's the problem. They never get. They never get revised. They never get updated, and they're egregiously bad for many of the species and many of the people that is affected. If you ever go to a hotel that doesn't have a swimming pool, you can thank the American with Disabilities Act because they made them put in a ludicrous crane that they have to maintain and keep that's very expensive for the one or two people that might use it. It's hardly ever used can be. But because of that, so a lot it was cheaper for the hotel to just fill it in with cement, not have a pool. That's just the nature of the way that game gets played. Now we get back, I do want to continue down, not with the Endangered Species Act, but to talk about the confusion and the ways, and we've talked about this the entirety of the program so far, how society and how the clickbait world and how social media and everybody's opinion matters, how it's made things much more confused, using then they need to be, and there's a perpet in perpetuity, they desire to push people into more ignorance. And I don't mean that people are here. I think they choose to be or are selectively ignorant and don't confuse me. My mind's already made up. Don't confuse me with acts you know kind of mentality you know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. 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Appreciate everyone being a part of the broadcast right now. Do have a wonderful listener that I can't wait to hear from. His name is Glenn, and thank you Glenn. If I understand right, you are a veteran. Thanks for calling and thanks for your service. What's on your brain? Thank you? Can you hear me? I hear you. Fine. I may sound strange to you. You sound perfect on the radio. Okay, that's fine. I love telling this story. I was a National Guard officer North Carolina National Guard artillery type we to train at Fort Bragg. We still do, I'm sure. I was fire direction officer for a unit and we had red cock hated with pecker nest or enclaves on the impact areas at Fort Bragg, And any time that I received a fire mission, I had to go to a map that we called the Pecker Woods map and the coordinates to make sure that we were not firing into a little red goose egg that was a red cock heated woodpecker area. It just, uh, you know, here we are firing artillery with high explosives and somebody actually got out there in the middle of all this impact area when they weren't shooting and figured out that red cockaked woodpeckers would be much at home at this area. So that's just. Glenn. Did you say you had to check out the picker maps? They were called the pecker woods peckerwood. That still cracks me up. I mean I lived at adjacent to that area in Lee County, just north of Fort Bragg, and you could you could tell when they were doing shelling and heavy art. You could always sell when they were ramping up for something. Right before a desert storm. It goes crazy crazy. You hear it, You hear you kind of feel that. Muffled impact stuff, and then it just went silent and said, oh, something's getting ready to happen. But this is an interesting story, Glenn, and I appreciate your call because it is a great story about the red cockaded woodpecker, and that is that the military was doing live train Huh are you there? Baby? Did? Okay? Just I speak quickly sometimes. So the military is doing these live fires, they've done it for decades and it would spark forest fires, and those forest fires ended up protecting the long leaf pines. So these long leaf pines have done very well in Fort Bragg because now they intentionally burn out underbrush, but in so doing and protecting the long leaf pine, it made it better for the woodpeckers. Then the woodpeckers come in and all of a sudden, the military can't perform missions because of the woodpecker. But it's considered a success story for the woodpecker. So if you if you want to. It certainly was a detractor to our training. That's all I'll say to. That, to our training. I've Glenn, thank you for the levity that I appreciate the call, and thank you for being a part of the show. Okay, I love that the. Cockaded woodpecker story and four Bragg and absolutely true. And the military's inadvertent rescuing of the long leaf pines Visa VI live fire exercises stat of the GROUNDIFI. By the way, long long leaf pines are designed by nature, are designed for forest fires. In other words, when a forest fire comes through. Two things. The long leaf pines have very thick, deep bark that helped protect the tree. So as underbrush is getting burned, that pine tree is really good at surviving. Also, the roots go straight down. That's why not many people grow them for wood is because the roots go straight down and so for the first couple of years that tree barely grows, but underground it's burrowing deeper and deeper and deeper. Why they survived drought fairly. Well, that's why they're really amazing trees. But they're also good for woodpeckers, the red cockaded woodpecker. All of a sudden, just imagine military units going back and say, okay, fellas freeze, there's three nests downrange. Go find out. You, John, you, Henry, go down range. See if you find the nest. We'll shoot around him, look for any other nest while you're there, and we'll add it up to the woodpecker nest the woodpecker maps. So we've got to have special wood. It's a way to avoid targets. I guess, so you pretend those are civilians. Maybe, I don't know, just seems like. And now the funny thing is the wildlife people consider that a massive success story because they've got the military working alongside the environmentalist Well, I guess you would call the military conservationists because they're conservationists are just environmentalists with guns, right, and they have really big guns. And so now adjacent properties are joining the effort. Now, what those adjacent property owners don't understand is if their lands become red cockaded woodpecker habitats, then they are kind of stuck still. The red kackady woodpecker doing very well, by the way, kind of like polar bears. People keeping the polar bears are doing very well. They had been. There's twenty nine thousand polar bears now, so contrary to what they said in nineteen eighty eight, the polar bears, I guess they have a way of finding other polar bears and making baby polar bears. And I didn't mean to digress, but my mind works that way, and so I wouldn't give you a little known fact about polar bears, but I don't want to distract you from what we're talking about. Again, great story, Glenn, Thank you for the call. I appreciate you being a part of the broadcast as always. By the way, on the other side of this hour, we're gonna get to Donald Van Dervar. He the former head of the environment it's DEEQ, the environment of Department of Environmental Quality. He led that department under the McCory administration. He's been. He was part of that department for two decades prior to becoming head of that department. Highly educated guy. I look forward to the conversation because he has been on the front lines of these kind of stories like Glenn talks about. He can tell you at where it's gone, where it is. We knew the department went from d NR Department of Environment Natural Resources. They kind of split the department off and now it's just d EQ. But I look forward to that conversation with vander Roll on the other side of the break. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.