Dunn on court election drama and global tariffs (04-08-2025--Hour1)

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[00:00:28] As we do every Tuesday at noon, we talk with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics. That's longleafpol.com. And he's also a contributing columnist to the Charlotte Observer. But we don't hold that against him. Andrew Dunn, welcome, sir. How are you? I'm doing great. Good to be with you.

[00:00:47] Good to have you here again. So yesterday, I covered the Jefferson Griffin, Allison Riggs, still unresolved election race. And so your position, you say on this, was that all of this should have ended months ago. So why do you say that? And then we'll get into where it goes from here.

[00:01:12] Yeah, thanks for the question. It's been pretty clear and consistent that I believe that the State Board of Elections has done a lot wrong. They've made a lot of mistakes. They have not enforced the law. And that does need to be rectified. However, I'm glad that this case is coming up because I think now the State Board of Elections is going to make those changes and is going to fix it.

[00:01:38] However, I don't think it's right to retroactively go back and throw out, you know, 60,000 plus votes in an election. I don't think that's the right remedy for this because a lot of these voters are actual legitimate voters. They did show voter ID at the polls this year and they followed the rules that were laid out by the State Board of Elections.

[00:02:03] There was not really anything that they could have done differently. So I do want to punish. I want to punish the right person for this mistake. And I think the group that punishes the State Board of Elections and not the individual voters. Right. And we and I said this yesterday, I completely agree. I said that the Board of Elections has royally messed up and they've been doing so for a long time.

[00:02:27] And the 60,000 voters, these are people that don't have Social Security last four digits of the Social Security number attached to their registration profile or they don't have a driver's license attached to that profile. And they were supposed to be given, you know, a personal identification number. And I guess some of them didn't even get that. It's just it's all just a mess.

[00:02:48] And the Board of Elections has known this for 20 years and they and they were alerted to this deficiency before the election and still couldn't couldn't adapt. And at some point I start wondering, is this willful or incompetence? And the longer it goes on, I got to believe it's more intentional. It may be or maybe they just don't care. I'm not entirely sure what's happening there.

[00:03:18] Yeah. You know, for most of the voters here, it was because the form, the registration form was incorrect. It basically said that it was optional to put in your Social Security number or driver's license number when it wasn't optional. I mean, that's kind of egregious and inexcusable. I don't know why that would happen. I mean, the form is updated now, but I'm not sure what's going on. I don't know how much time you've spent getting into the State Board of Elections data, but it's a complete mess.

[00:03:47] I don't know if they just haven't invested in it or haven't made it a priority. I will point out that the State Board of Elections has been run by Democrats almost exclusively over those last 20 years. Mm hmm. Yeah. And yeah. So these the problems I have full disclosure, I have not spent my free time delving into the data at the Board of Elections. I leave it for people like you to do that because, you know, what you're looking for.

[00:04:13] But I know I mean, you know, the guy Jay Delancey from the Voter Integrity Project and his group and others like his. They have been hammering the Board of Elections for two decades on their list maintenance procedures. And again, like I'm I fail to understand why this is so often overlooked when it is so vital to inspiring confidence in the system.

[00:04:41] And it and then it leaves them exposed to the attack that they do this stuff on purpose in order to allow fraud to occur. And I have no response to that argument because otherwise, like, why would you do this? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And it doesn't seem I mean, I haven't seen any evidence that fraud was involved in this.

[00:05:05] I I tend to, you know, anything related to government, I tend to believe the explanation is incompetence rather than malevolence. And so I haven't seen anything here that leads me to believe otherwise. However, you know, maybe we need to get a state auditor, Dave Bolick, on the case and figure out what's going on here. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a it's a fair point.

[00:05:28] And the other one was the the never present voters, which in reading through the dissent that came down on Friday from the Democrat judge, he actually raises, I think, completely valid points, which is that if you're a kid and you're overseas with your parents, you grow up in a foreign country, but they were last domiciled in North Carolina. That transfers to you until you choose a new domicile. And like I but but that was never explained at the outset.

[00:05:56] And so I find it difficult to toss those votes if that's who we're talking about. And then the thing with the military voters and the overseas voters not providing I.D. on the absentee ballots, I thought he made a compelling argument that their form is covered under a different statute, which was specifically designed to harmonize our state absentee ballots laws with all of the other states. So it's uniform.

[00:06:21] So this way, everybody overseas is basically following one set of standards. So it's easier to convey that standard to them. Um, so all of that makes sense from a legal perspective. Right. And I think that the military voters, especially, I have a hard time throwing out ballots of of military members, you know, are men and women in uniform overseas. And I really think that one is more clear cut.

[00:06:49] I think the federal courts will step in and allow those votes to go forward. The never residence is more questionable to me. Um, and I'm not a lawyer and I haven't, I'm not fully up to speed with North Carolina's voting laws. I've, I've looked at them, but I'm not an expert in them. You know, maybe we need to clarify what the law is there and clean up. But I can honestly see arguments either way on, on whether those folks, you know, should be able to vote in North Carolina elections or not.

[00:07:19] Um, I don't believe nuance is permitted any longer in America. Andrew. So, uh, no, I, I'm with you. I think there needs, yeah, I think there needs to be some, you know, to get specific with the types of classifications we're talking about for these overseas non or never residents, rather, because it does present an opportunity for abuse in my mind as well. Um, and that, that would be on the legislature. Um, speaking of, uh, no nuance, let's talk a little bit about tariffs. Um, because, uh, all right.

[00:07:48] So you said, uh, Democrats have slammed, uh, the plan that Trump has rolled out as a tax hike on American consumers. And a lot of Republicans seem uneasy about it too, but you write that in rural North Carolina, the news lands differently. Okay. So, uh, why does it land differently and where? Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:08:11] I mean, most of your listeners are probably familiar with this, but North Carolina for decades and decades was a big manufacturing state. We were big in textiles, big in furniture. There's a lot of small rural communities around the state, both east central, you know, all around the state, to be honest, you know, who used to be, who were most of the folks who lived there were either employed, um, by these, you know, manufacturing facilities or knew someone who was.

[00:08:40] And, you know, once NAFTA was passed, you know, a couple of decades ago, those jobs all went away and it happened slowly and then all at once. And a lot of these communities are now, uh, almost hollowed out and, you know, folks still live there who used to work at the factories, uh, you know, or their parents worked at the factories.

[00:08:58] And there's, um, you know, a certain nostalgia, uh, for those days, you know, where you could, you know, be a person without a college degree and have a solid middle-class job at the factory and raise a family and have a good life. And a lot of people, when they hear, um, President Trump's messaging around this, they think, you know, they, they hear, you know, Trump saying, I'm on your side. We're going to bring back those days where you could make a good, honest living, you know, throughout the state.

[00:09:29] Um, yeah. And I think you said the right word there, nostalgia, because I think a lot of people think back and through a, through a filter of only good times and only great conditions. Um, you know, if you've ever done repetitive, tedious work for eight, nine hours straight, it's repetitive and tedious. Uh, and, uh, so some of these jobs are not necessarily, uh, great jobs to have. Yes, they can give you a paycheck, but that's it. That's all it, that's all it's going to be.

[00:09:59] And that's all it ever will be. Right. Because it's just that you're, there's no room for advancement in that, in that profession. Um, now that being said, I was driving through a couple of, uh, small towns, um, on the way down, uh, uh, outside of Union County, uh, the other day. And I'm amazed at some of the downtowns that have now just been revitalized. I remember 25 years ago, uh, that was a pipe dream.

[00:10:25] And now it just seems like that's the case in all of, in, in many small towns, I should say. So there is hope. There certainly is hope. I mean, and what's one of the things I'm really interested in and digging more into, I think it's pretty clear that, you know, no matter how the tariffs go, you know, it's not going to be exactly like it was before. I mean, manufacturing has changed dramatically. Right. Um, you know, there's a lot fewer people that you need to run, you know, uh, uh, a factory because of technology. And you're right.

[00:10:55] I mean, there's, there's a whole generation of people who grew up telling their children, you know, go to college. So you don't have to work in a factory for 30 years like I did. So, I mean, there's certainly some, some rose tended glasses there. However, I do think that there needs to be a concerted strategy for how do we bring, you know, well-paying jobs to all corners of the state. Yeah, no, I agree. I appreciate the, uh, the time as always, Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics.

[00:11:23] You can also read this piece that he wrote on the tariffs at the Charlotte Observer. He's a contributing columnist over there. Andrew, thanks so much, man. Have a great week. Thank you. All right. Take care. 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.

[00:11:53] So you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.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.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:12:22] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% 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. Andrew Dunn's piece over at the Charlotte Observer, he quotes the Speaker of the North Carolina House, Destin Hall, talking about the tariff messaging from Donald Trump.

[00:12:51] And he says it resonates in a visceral way. They're more receptive, talking about rural residents. He says they are more receptive than ever to the message that the United States is a country, not an economic zone. And then Dunn points out that free trade used to be a bipartisan ideal in North Carolina. No matter if it was Governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat, or Governor Jim Holzhouser, a Republican,

[00:13:21] both men saw it as the pathway to growth. They championed open markets. They recruited foreign investment. They leaned into globalization. And in many ways, they were right. The state's economy modernized. New jobs came, but not everywhere. The jobs that replaced them came with college degrees and urban addresses. Textile and furniture towns got left behind, he says.

[00:13:50] Now, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson tried to bring this issue to the forefront. Remember, he worked in a furniture factory. He got let go. He talked about NAFTA. But that message was quickly drowned out. I don't even remember. What was it? No, never mind. He said, Destin Hall, the Speaker of the House, said, I am, as most conservatives are, a free market capitalist. But world trade is not a free market.

[00:14:17] When you talk about free trade, basically to them it means we gave all our jobs to China and in exchange we got cheaper TVs at Walmart. But we lost our jobs and have less money now. I do have some statistics on the middle class and GDP and household wealth.

[00:14:42] Because I think a lot of people are operating under feelings and not data. Let me go over to the phones first. Let me get to Mary. Hello, Mary. Welcome to the show. Oh, hey, Pete. Thanks for having me. Sure. You know, one of the things I like to bring up about bringing manufacturing back to the United States is that not only to revive these lost towns, these forgotten towns, but to make us self-reliant.

[00:15:09] I mean, during COVID, you couldn't get a bike for like two years because they wouldn't let them come in. And that could be so manipulative. Like, I can't believe when I'm at the grocery store and like a tomato's from Holland. I'm like, you've got to be kidding. It has to be expensive to bring a tomato here from Holland. Well, but why? But Mary, but Mary, all right, let's take the tomato example. What does it tell you then if you are seeing a tomato from Holland? What is that? What is the market signaling to you?

[00:15:39] I guess that it's cheaper to buy a tomato from there than here. Our farmers are too expensive. Is that it? I don't have enough farms. Right. The fact that the tomato went halfway around the world in order to land on your produce shelf means that it was cheaper for that good to make that journey than it was for it to make it from somewhere else for that price, whatever the price was.

[00:16:06] And I don't know if you actually saw like what did you actually see it was from Holland? Oh, yeah. Like, oh, OK. I didn't realize they grew a lot of tomatoes. But yeah. So even with the illegal labor, right, that that America has been utilizing, that we keep hearing the Democrats talking about, oh, you know, your crops are your produce is going to be way more expensive now if we, you know, kick out illegal immigrants and all of that. Even that wasn't apparently enough to to to beat the pricing from from Holland.

[00:16:38] Well, but that's because of tariffs, too. See, here's the lie that I think most Americans have. What was the what's the tariff on the Holland? Hang on. What's the tariff on the I don't on a Dutch? I don't know. But but here's what I just learned about China versus America. So, like, I was always under the impression that, like, just it's just cheaper to get everything elsewhere

[00:17:02] because our our lifestyle is so expensive that we pay our workers so much higher in a wage that we can't afford anything from America anymore. But that's not really true when you realize we're paying like like like some. I don't know, like they have slave labor in China. So that's not right either. I mean, I don't. Yeah, correct. So there's a there. Right. So there. Right. So there we cannot compete with if we're if China is making a TV and we are making a TV.

[00:17:31] We are paying workers way more than the Chinese slave labor. Right. So we can't compete on that price point. So I would argue that's not actually fair or free trade because there's no way to compete with human rights abuses in order to get that product to the market. Right. Right. So, like, but I mean, here's the thing. What if we had if we made it more?

[00:17:58] I mean, is it really impossible to grow food in America as cheap as Holland? Like, isn't there a way to solve that problem? There might. Well, yeah, there there very well might be. I think it's going to be crop specific. Like I just saw a write up this morning about rubber for tires and we rubber trees apparently don't grow in America.

[00:18:18] And so, I mean, I guess maybe we could set up greenhouses to start growing all the rubber necessary to supply all of the tire manufacturers so they can make tires. Because like you need those you need that product. You need that raw material. But most of the rubber comes from overseas. So we're importing all that. Well, when you, you know, when you you tax those things to come in, then it drives up the price or or takes it out of the market.

[00:18:44] And now they can't afford the tires and you're not going to get a car if it doesn't have tires. So like that's going to be a problem. So not all crops grow well. I think the other one we were talking about last week was bananas. You know, bananas don't necessarily grow very well in our climate. Coffee, I think, is another one.

[00:19:04] So so like some of these products really only grow well in certain climates and grow well enough where you could go at scale for a low price. Right. That's their advantage. And I, yeah, I saw a whole thing about South America and the avocados are really making towns in South America have no water because avocados require more water. They're built.

[00:19:29] They're making so many crops for avocados because of the demand that these poor people now have no water because it wouldn't be normal to grow that many avocados there because of the economic demand elsewhere. The locals are literally like without water for us to have our avocados. I think we could grow avocados. Well, we could. It's just at what cost. That's the other side of the equation. As Thomas Sowell famously says, right, there are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs. Mary, I appreciate the call. I got to go to news.

[00:19:58] If you think avocados use a lot of water, check out almonds. Good grief. Mary, I appreciate the call. 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,

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[00:21:12] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Let's jump over and talk with Scott. Hello, Scott. Welcome to the show. Hello. Hey. I have a question regarding the Griffin-Riggs election. There were over 5.5 million votes in North Carolina in that election.

[00:21:35] And the general vote went 50.2 for Griffin and 49.8 for Riggs. But when the provisional votes were counted, they went 60 for Riggs and 40 for Griffin. And that doesn't sound statistically legitimate. Well, he was up by like 10,000 votes on election day.

[00:22:04] And then after the canvas, the total flipped. I know. Yeah, by like 10,800 votes. Yeah, so that would have been 35,000 in the provisional votes for Riggs and 25,000 for Griffin. Right, so... To overcome that $10,000, I mean 10,000 vote deficit. Mm-hmm.

[00:22:31] So your question is about the provisional ballots? Yeah. Why was that sample so lopsided? So think about... Without Chapel Hill? Well, think about who is casting provisional ballots. Right? A provisional ballot gets cast if you show up at, say, your precinct, and you try to vote, and they're like, oh, you're not on the voter rolls. Or you're in the wrong precinct. Right?

[00:22:59] And so maybe there is something to be said about the demographic of the provisional voters that end up voting in the wrong place. That these are people that may be participating in the souls to the polls types of efforts. Right? People are busing voters around, taking them to their polling stations, and then they get it wrong a lot of times. They'll bring them to one place, and they weren't supposed to be there. That kind of thing. That's possible.

[00:23:28] You also have a lot of these overseas voters. Right? They were part of the mix. The military ballots were part of the mix. But the provisionals that get counted afterwards, there was some deficiency, and that's why they had to get scooped up with a provisional versus a ballot at the polling place. I don't know. This sounds fishy.

[00:23:59] Well, I'm... It's always the case when a Democrat needs more votes. There's some case of votes out there that votes about 90 or 100 percent for Democrats. It's either mail-in votes or provisional votes or whatever they can find. Well, I'm... I know there was one precinct in Georgia that went 100 percent for Biden. So, I don't know. It just seems like...

[00:24:25] Oh, there's a precinct here in Charlotte that comes in, and it's a very large box, and it is almost every single election cycle, it is 100 percent Democrat. But that's because that's all who lives there. I mean, with all of the... Oh, but think about it. With all of the sorting... With all of the sorting that is occurring, the self-sorting, right? We are self-segregating by political ideology.

[00:24:50] We have people that are moving into red areas because that's what politically aligns with their ideas and vice versa. And so, you end up with more densely populated areas in the cities, and they then become overwhelmingly Democrat, and those boxes are Democrat, and there are very few, if any, Republicans left in those precincts. But they are still large precincts.

[00:25:15] There are still a lot of people in there because it's densely populated versus going out to the suburbs, and it's not densely populated, but that means also on Election Day, you can get a lot of people to move through more quickly versus getting overwhelmed with people getting bussed in through their church or nonprofits or whatever, and I'm not alleging any illegal activity by getting people to the polls.

[00:25:43] But those types of operations put stress on the polling locations on the Election Day itself, and if somebody's name, if there's a problem on the books, then they have to file the provisional ballots. And out of 5 million votes that were cast, a change of 10,000 statistically is that, I mean, it was a close race before, right? It was already tight.

[00:26:10] And so, I mean, I guess I don't know if that's as clear-cut evidence of something fishy going on just because the provisionals came in more lopsided for Democrats, because they did come in for Republicans, too, like you said. So I don't know if that proves any kind of fraud. It doesn't prove it, but it certainly to me suggests it.

[00:26:38] Well, and this is why it's important to have systems that people have confidence in, because when—and this is one of the reasons why, you know, when the vote counts drag on for weeks and weeks after Election Day, everybody becomes suspicious with any result that comes out of that. And, you know, that's part of managing the system is that you've got perception of, you know, wrongdoing that's occurring, and you want to try to address that as well.

[00:27:07] And you do that by constructing a system that people can have confidence in. And I don't think we have that right now. I don't think we have a system that people have confidence in. I think you're an example of what happens when we don't. So, Scott, I appreciate the call. Yeah, I don't know if I—I can't say, yes, there was fraud, because I can't look at—I can't look at numbers of provisional ballots and say, aha, because the numbers went this one direction, therefore it was fraud.

[00:27:36] I can't say that. Now, if I can find actual—like, one of the things that I find to be suspicious about the provisionals is the way they get counted. And we know that in the past, they have counted double votes for people, like—because they go in on the initial tally, and if it's a provisional cast ballot, then in the past, I don't know if they have corrected it.

[00:28:02] It's been a while since I looked into it, but this was one of the problems, was that if somebody went and voted, and then they go to another precinct, try to vote there, and they're like, oh, you're not supposed to vote here, cast a provisional, and then that vote gets thrown into the hopper. But they're supposed to go back through and pull out any kind of double voting, that kind of thing. Yeah, it is a system that can be improved upon, and the Board of Elections has proven themselves,

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[00:29:27] Creative Video, preserving family memories since 1997. Located in Mint Hill, just off 485. Mail orders are accepted too. Get all the details at createavideo.com. I mentioned earlier the rubber trees needed for tire manufacturing and bananas. These are crops that America doesn't grow.

[00:29:51] And I don't even know if we can grow them, except in maybe high-tech greenhouses and all of that stuff. I mean, you think about, like, all of the crops, the different kinds of crops that you would need to grow, you know, in all of the different greenhouses because they don't grow naturally in our climate. But here's a solution, potentially. Timoteo points out rubber, bananas. Sounds like 52nd and 53rd beautiful states we can add.

[00:30:19] That's just take over, just colonize the rubber capital and the banana-producing countries. Why not? Does Greenland grow rubber trees? I don't think so. So back to Andrew Dunn's piece at the Charlotte Observer, talking about the tariffs and specifically North Carolina.

[00:30:45] He talked with the Speaker of the House, Destin Hall. And Hall said, you know, you talk about free trade. Basically, to a lot of rural voters, it meant we give away all our jobs to China in exchange for cheaper TVs. But we lost all of the jobs.

[00:31:10] Andrew Dunn goes on to say that we are one of the fastest-growing states in America, and most of it has been concentrated in our metro counties, which are booming. Half of the state's counties, though, have lost population over the last decade. All of those are rural. That creates more than just an economic gap. It's deepened the political one, too. Cities get bluer. Small towns are getting redder.

[00:31:40] And, by the way, the small towns are getting bigger, too. I drove through. So we went to watch a baseball game. My nephew was playing a baseball game down in Union County. And so they routed us through Waxhaw. I hadn't been in downtown Waxhaw in a while. It's been a long time.

[00:32:02] And, holy moly, downtown Belmont, downtown Rock Hill. Last time I was down there, last year, I want to say, just explosion of growth. I remember I worked at a bar slash restaurant in downtown Rock Hill. It was called For What It's Worth. And it sold after I was gone.

[00:32:31] But I worked there as a cook for several years. And downtown Rock Hill had nothing. It had the police department. It had a bank building. It had nothing. And they tried to get everybody to come down with the downtown, you know, live after five or whatever they called it, to try to get people to come downtown. I remember talking to a guy by the name of Clay Andrews, I believe.

[00:32:58] And he was the head of the Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation. And I would interview him regularly. And he was like, the thing I want to do if I do nothing else in this job is to get residential into downtown Rock Hill. And you drive through there now, and you've got apartment buildings going up all over the place. But that's bad, too, I think.

[00:33:25] Even though the retail follows the rooftops, right? So you get more people there, then you're going to have more retail services for those people. That's how that works, right? So I guess I'm unclear as to how we, like, what is it that, like, what is it that we're trying to do? What's the vision? I understand everybody's got a different answer to this.

[00:33:51] Is the vision to reopen a manufacturing plant, stick a bunch of people on, like, sewing machines for eight to nine hours a day? Just sewing stuff. Is that the idea? That's what we, and we want that for small towns. We want the whole town to be employed by the one factory. Again, we want that model.

[00:34:17] Because when that fact is the thing, and look, I understand this from a personal perspective. It's sort of like in the advertising world, you get either lots of little accounts or you get the big account. And if you live by only going after the big accounts, then you end up when that account says, hey, we're pulling our advertising. Now you have no accounts. You have lots of little ones. You got to, you know, you got to go out and get more of them.

[00:34:46] But if one of them says we're not going to advertise anymore, then you have others still and you still have revenue. It's like that's the, that's the all in, all your eggs in one basket. Is that the model we're trying to go back to where it's a one factory per rural town and everybody works at that factory? And then you don't have to get a high school degree. You could just graduate high school, go to work in the mill and never get out.

[00:35:16] Is that the, that's the benefit? Because like my parents did not go to college. They wanted all of their kids to go to college because they wanted us to have a better future than they had. And their parents wanted them to have a better future, right? That's always been sort of the natural progression, right? You want your kids to have a better life.

[00:35:40] And so I'm kind of, I like, I'm noticing a bit of a shift where we have gone from sort of the, well, first was the helicopter parents and then it became the bulldozer parents, you know, where he would just clean out every obstacle in front of their kids. So they don't have to worry about anything. And then of course the kids don't develop resiliency because they've, they've never encountered obstacles because mom and dad always push them out of the way for him being bulldozer parents.

[00:36:06] So are we shifting, we're going, we're moving away from that model maybe to one where it's like, no, sorry, junior, you got to go to work at the mill. You're going to go to work in the factory. Is that the thing to aspire to?

[00:36:21] Now that is a different, um, that's a different question also than, um, whether or not we should have industries that are vital to our national security that remain protected because they are vital to our national security.

[00:36:39] I mentioned this example the other day after Trump announced, uh, the tariffs, you know, like for example, I would not feel comfortable having all of our fighter jets and ammunition manufactured by the Chinese. That doesn't seem smart, right? It doesn't seem smart. And yeah, to the point where we are reliant on countries that hate us, that doesn't seem smart either. That was my argument, by the way, for us having our own, um, energy independence from the Middle East.

[00:37:09] I don't want to buy oil from those people. They don't like us. If they turn off the taps, we're in some serious trouble, right? I mean, how are we going to lubricate the windmills here without the oil? Um, same thing goes for China more so. They, and I was watching an interview Douglas Murray did, um, he's got a new book and, uh, he was on Piers Morgan, but he, he made a point.

[00:37:36] He said, America, there's this, this, this funny thing about Americans in that they want to be the global superpower, but they don't want to engage in the rest of the world. And I, I thought that, I thought that was accurate. And I guess we need to kind of figure out what our national identity should be. Is it Fortress America, close ourselves off to the rest of the world? Or is it, you know, we're the powerhouse, we're the superpower, you know, we're the top dog, which is it?

[00:38:06] 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 the Pete calendar show.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and, uh, don't break anything while I'm gone.