A Reflection on America's Past and Present with Ken LaCorte, Martin Di Caro, and Jon Riches
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Sam Stone: Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Since we have absolutely nothing to talk about this week,

We have a jam-packed program for you guys. We are going to be leading off with friend of the program, Ken LaCourte. He is the host of the podcast, Elephant in the Room. He writes about censorship, media malfeasance, uncomfortable questions, and honest insight for people curious how the world really works.

You can follow him on Twitter at Ken LaCourte. And then do stay tuned, folks, because we've got a fantastic second couple of segments. Martin DiCaro, historian who does another wonderful podcast he's on. As always, we like to do a little bit around the holidays, the July 4th theme, getting into the founding of the country. That's good stuff. And then you're going to want to tune in for the podcast segment where we've got John Riches from the Goldwater Institute talking about some fairly momentous Supreme Court rulings.

But leading off, Ken LaCourte, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back. Hey, glad to be here. So, Ken, what the debate showed us last night is that 100 million plus people in this country, eyesight is pretty good. So what they've been seeing Joe Biden doing is not due to cheap fake videos, that he actually is what we've all seen with our eyes the past year. Is that a fair assessment? I think it's totally fair. I think half of, I think 30% of the country was shocked at what they saw.

Don't you find that shocking? That they're shocked? I mean, don't you find that shocking? Yeah, look, if you watched Fox News for an hour a month, you saw Joe being seen. I mean, they have it on a loop over there. If you watch and believe kind of the mainstream bubble...

They've been hardcore lying to you. And you expect that. Joe Scarbo said, I just met with him. He was sharper than he's ever been. But even the Nobel Prize winners at the New York Times were saying the same lies, saying, I just met with him three weeks ago, and he's 100% fine.

They all just finished trashing the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. These are the same people that told us not to believe the Wall Street Journal article that told us that the Russian hoax was real, that told us that Hunter Biden's laptop didn't exist. I mean, why would we? Why should that gave us coronavirus? Yeah. You know, the interesting thing on this one is is.

All of those other media complete lying narratives took months or even years to unravel. This one went from 60 to zero in 90 minutes. I mean, I've never seen a complete media obfuscation lie, whatever you want to call it, get exploded in one small instance. And I think that there's a large number of people who are

once again scratching their heads saying, why is my reality so wrong here? Well, it didn't take 90 minutes. It took five. I mean, you would think that Joe Biden, with all his Hollywood friends and donors, could find a good person to do Botox. His Botox wasn't even good last night. It's like a V on his forehead, and I don't want to criticize him for his looks, but that's not a good Botox job before a debate. That was lumpy. Yeah. So,

So I think this plays a role, though, in the mood of the country. I think we would all agree it's a good thing to have some trust in some institutions because they've merited the trust, right? The media has just lost all credibility. I mean, so...

They keep telling us, well, you don't what your eyes are telling you, what your bank account is telling you is not correct because the economy is doing great for me. It's doing great. If it's doing great for me, it's doing great for you. Joe Biden is not aging like you think he's sharp as a tack. So don't believe any of the videos that you see online or people talking about. They just they keep telling us, don't believe what you see, read or hear for yourself. Well,

Well, they're not doing that anymore. They finally, you know, even the sycophants couldn't pull it off last night. I mean, it was finally they crossed that Rubicon and said, we can't keep saying this. Look, I think in that sense, I think it's healthy for the country, right? Because you still have way too many, you're right that we need to trust our institutions, but only the institutions that deserve our trust.

And I think that there's still a very large minority of America who believes the crap they read in The New York Times and who believes that these institutions who pretend to be nonpartisan or at least fair arbiters of what's going on.

It's good that people finally or when more people finally realize, no, they're not. They're as partisan as Fox and as partisan as Breitbart. And so they just do it in different styles. I think, you know, I've never been addicted to anything besides pizza, but.

When people have a problem, the first step towards fixing that problem is acknowledging that they have a problem. And you had just too many people who were like, look, I just trust the New York Times. I've had people say that right to my face. They're going to have a harder time saying that, and that's healthy, I think, in the long term for us to fix the media problem, or at least...

when you understand that both sides are now being partisans, you got to then vary your, you know, you got to break out of your bubble and it's hard for Democrats to break out of their bubble because their bubble is encompassing still so much of, of, you know, you turn on the radio, you turn on local news, you turn on most of the national news broadcast, except for one or two tiny, one or two channels on, on, on there. So hopefully that that's a hopeful thing is, is,

them understanding how much they've been misled and that maybe people will be smarter moving forward by a little bit. We're talking with Ken LaCourte. He is the host of the Elephant in the Room podcast. Ken, did CNN salvage some few shreds of their credibility with their conduct of the debate last night? I was...

pleasantly surprised with their questions. Their questions weren't what I expected, so absolutely. I think they did for a little bit. But it's like, hey, what did you think of the color of that car? Did that look good right before it smashed into the 12-car pileup? I mean, you kind of noticed that as you were saying, like,

Holy shit, what's going on here? But yeah, look, I thought their questioning was fair. It was a little bit of a weird format. I mean, look, this whole concept of we're choosing presidents by how much they can pack into 60 or 120 seconds is still a weird way to decide a leader.

uh... you know i i would move prefer them just to be on a joe rogan podcast for three hours we would know so much more about them what they believe how they put problems others i think of life but the the format we got uh... but yeah i was the part of the questions are relatively fair you know they did they didn't stop trump when he didn't answer on that now the kind of brought that up there was there was less of them trying to inject themselves as we've seen in past debates and i think that that was probably a good thing just let me guys talk

And if a guy didn't answer the question or lied, the other candidate could deal with that as opposed to what we've seen in the past with them basically, you know, a three on one. Correct. Whatever, you know, against whatever Republican is standing at the podium. Well, I I think it also benefited Trump that they turned the mic off when they were done speaking. I think it really helped. Yeah. Look, I mean, all Trump had to do really was not.

I mean, that was like, that should have been at the top of his to-do list. And he did that fairly well. You know, he still was Trump. I'm the best president ever, and every soldier does this. And, you know, I mean, he said some dumb things. You know, every constitutional scholar wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade. Really? Okay, whatever. Whatever.

But of course, you know, Biden, besides being bumbly, he repeated just so many mainstream lies as well. You know, Trump never said he wanted to inject bleach into people. No. That was a radical thing. You know, he did that on, you know, you know,

billionaires aren't paying taxes. I mean, you know, so many of these things are, you know, we never talk about the lies of the other side because the fact checkers happen to be partisan themselves. But there was a lot of lying on the rare lucid moments from Biden as well. So let's talk about the lies for a minute. So Biden keeps pushing this lie about Charlottesville.

that Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people. Even Snopes debunked it. Yeah, Snopes debunked it this week. It took him 40 years. I know, but nonetheless, they debunked it and it got some coverage. Right. I mean, is that just how despicable and dishonest his handlers are, that they keep pushing this narrative that Trump said neo-Nazis were very fine people, which is not what he said?

But they keep pushing it.

What he said was absolutely fine unless you were being intellectually dishonest and pulling specific clips from that. But it's all over the left. And when I say it's all over the left, that means it's all over the media. It's like that's kind of – it's just one of those things. It's like the Russian hoax.

I have a good friend and I would consider a good friend who is a conservative commentator, but he's a never Trumper. And it's been interesting to watch his metamorphosis decline into some of his conservative principles are disappearing. And literally we had a conversation two months ago and he was just saying, well, the Russian hoax hasn't been disproved. And I just I just what are you talking about? There's literally no there's just nothing there.

I mean, so what concerned me about the debate last night is they knew some of these things aren't true. For example, unemployment was not 15 percent when Trump left office. It was a little over 6 percent versus when Obama and Biden or team one year after they were sworn in. Unemployment was 10 percent. They just they make up numbers. It's like this. But this deficit debt stuff. One percent. I mean, I just garbage. It's garbage, Ken.

Yep.

Look, because of the media bubble, when Republicans say stupid and wrong things, it turns into a huge... It's a subsection on Wikipedia of, oh, well, the stolen election machines and all of that. And when the Democrats do it, it's just kind of, well, no, you don't understand. Because if you look at the way that billionaires can do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can't prove Sasquatch doesn't exist. Show me. Show me where he doesn't exist. I mean...

It turns into the Zapruder film, right, where you're looking at it frame by frame, and that's just how the system works.

So, again, it was nice to see it get so blown up and people were baffled, I think. Will these pundits who have been wrong about so many things, will there be any ramifications for them career-wise going forward? I mean, they've been wrong about everything. Only in the long-term sense that when people keep unsubscribing to their, you know, I mean, the Washington Post,

would be out of business if it wasn't for a billionaire dumping in so much money every year. And their numbers, including clicks and all that stuff, have decreased by huge percentages over the last year. So, no, nobody's going to fire Thomas Friedman because he made something up, or Krugman, really. Well, if Krugman was going to get fired for making... Those institutions...

It's like you hear mass layoffs and this and that. As their credibility is chopped out, it's kind of like chopping out the roots of a tree and then some fall. And you're like, oh, well, what happened to Gawker? Oh, what happened to BuzzFeed? Oh, what happened to, you know, and that's a good thing, too. Absolutely. And if Paul Krugman was going to be fired for being wrong, that would have happened 20 years ago.

Hang on, Ken. I'm going to have to cut you off here because we're going to a break. We're going to be coming right back with more from Ken LaCourte in just a moment, folks. You can follow him on Twitter, at Ken LaCourte. And we're going to be talking about some articles he's written also about Hades, a topic we've touched on on this program before. So stay tuned for that and stay tuned for all the fantastic fun coming up. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. We're going to be continuing on in just a moment with Ken LaCourte, host of the podcast Elephant in the Room. You can follow him on Twitter at Ken LaCourte. But first, folks, again, check out our friends at YRefi. You can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return on a secure collateralized portfolio. It's a fantastic opportunity to do well for yourself and your family by helping others. You can also find us on Twitter at YRefi.

If you invest with Y Refi, you're helping college students pay off their high-interest student loans and get their lives on track and joining Chuck Warren as an investor. So check them out. Invest the letter Y, then refi.com or give them a call at 888-Y-REFI-24. So Ken, if you were asked, Ken, give us a strategy for the next five months for Trump. Give us the media strategy. And based on your experience and the years you've been in the industry –

What is the advice you would give Trump to build and sustain a lead that leads to victory, just not only electoral college states, but the popular vote as well, 50% plus one? What's the advice you would give the campaign and him?

I mean, even though I hate it when I watch football at this point, you're on prevent defense. Trump is Trump went into this debate fairly comfortably ahead in electoral votes. And to be honest, that's the only one that counts. He was, you know, out of out of a number of states that he lost. He's ahead three to five points in those. He's neck and neck in Wisconsin. He's neck and neck in Pennsylvania, all of the other battleground states. He's

three to six points ahead of. So he is in a comfortable position. He did not go into that debate as a toss-up. He went in with somebody who is the frontrunner. So the biggest thing is, A, don't screw up. I mean, look, there is no chance that Joe Biden beats Donald Trump outside of

stroke or an assassination or an asteroid or something like that. That is, we are kind of past that. So Trump needs to make sure that he doesn't somehow beat Trump by saying something really, really dumb. If he could, I mean, I've always believed, I mean, and it's hard to give somebody like Trump advice because it's working pretty well for him, right? I mean, everybody told him to apologize and stop saying the things he said in 2016 over and over and over again. He kept doing the

quote wrong things and and kept rising the polls that he did it for the instinct for very good if you can channel a little bit the more ronald reagan he can channel between now and november and the left p_p_ barnum the better he'll be if he just went out there and said good things about america said his his record said you know and go ahead and say you know everybody knows we had a great economy and you don't have to pay this was in the in on by box

I've done more for blacks than Abraham Lincoln. I mean, just calm down just a tad. I mean, look, he's a... Turn the volume down. Turn the volume down. Yeah, he's a real estate developer. He's New York. He's all of those things. He's got, you know... So combat your narcissism a little bit and just try to channel Ronald Reagan and not screw her up. That's his biggest... You know, he'd win by multiple points if he could do that.

Sam and I think his vice presidential picks actually fairly important. And we think for him, just a competent, respected, boring person with some gravitas would be a big deal for these voters to simply say, look, I don't love Trump, but I'm not with Biden. Right. There's these suburban small business owners, soccer moms who are educated and.

Who do you think the two or three people should be as vice president potential pick and why? You know, I haven't really given it a whole lot of thought, so I don't want to go through that list. I think – I'm not sure how important it is, but I definitely think the counterbalance to wild and crazy guy is calm, boring guy.

technocrat, right? He did that the first time. It made a lot of sense. It's why George Bush Sr. picked Dan Quayle. All of a sudden, Bush went from kind of a geeky nerd to a fatherly figure of a younger person. And you look for this when you're investing in a company. You see the flamboyant CEO out there. You want to look around and make sure that he's got a

a C, the next, what is it, COO who, you know, isn't wearing the newest design, fashion, and things and actually knows what's going on. So even a DeSantis would be fine. But somebody who is not making a big political statement is exactly what you said, a calm, cool, collected, kind of boring person to just kind of take a little bit of Trump's edge off.

Ken, we have just about four minutes left in the program here. You recently did an article that Chuck and I were both very interested in, something we've been talking about on this program, done a few segments on that doesn't seem like many news organizations around the country are really going anywhere near, which is what's going on in Haiti right now. You have a great piece on your sub stack, Haiti, the Anti-America Playbook.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and what the latest is there, if you will? Oh, I mean, the latest is just it went from bad to worse. I mean, it went from an average lifespan of 64 years old. You know, one out of 20 kids don't make it to their fifth birthday there. They die because they don't have electricity, clean water. You know, they don't have, you know, a third of the people use the outdoors as their toilet.

but it did that a bit but then like the gang came out of the gang took control of the country could be a bit the military kept overthrowing the country so they got rid of the military will then you know the gangs took over and and literally opened up the prisons and and and bolstered thanks

And I couldn't figure out, how did one country become such a failed state? And it shares an island with the Dominican Republic, which is actually doing pretty well. And every time I would research it, the same three things came up. Corruption, which is absolutely true.

But the first thing that always comes up is colonialism. It's the French's fault. It was like, really? And they ran a harsh slavery system there for many years. There were more than twice as many slaves brought to that one island than all of North America combined, which I was shocked at. It's pretty astounding. Wow. Yeah. And the other one was hurricanes and whatnot. But it's like they paid off this French debt 100 years ago.

Every country had crap going on, you know, 200, 300 years ago from slavery to things blowing up to the Bolsheviks to whatever. And everybody gets hit by hurricanes there. And what it really comes down to, and it has been the perpetuation of...

of corruption. And it's not just a handful of corrupt leaders that you think of. It's an entire corrupt society. And when you see that in the world, corrupt societies never thrive. I mean, you look at Mexico as a great example, but they've got every natural resource that one could have. It's a beautiful country. The people are cool. But the corruption is endemic throughout everything. When a cop pulls you over, you pull out your wallet. It's cultural.

Yes. And when it's embedded into that culture, the only – I literally looked at like the countries that rank high on corruption index and the countries per capita GDP. There's like four countries in the world that have both, are high in corruption and money, and all of them are sitting on barrels of oil. It's like all in the Mideast because it's free money, right? Do those countries also have – I thought there's two essential things. Getting rid of a culture of corruption, that obviously –

just destroys every country. The other is property rights, that if you don't have a culture of corruption and you protect property rights, you are a prosperous country. And if you do have cultural corruption and you don't protect property rights, you're a mess. Now, those two things are intertwined in with kind of a whole judicial system. So like contract rights. I mean, how can you operate a business when you can get ripped off by somebody else and there's nothing you can do about it? Property rights, you know, it's like

The majority of Haitian farmers are plowing on land that they don't have a clear title to. Okay, well, that means you can't get a loan for either a seed loan or for an improvement loan because the banks can't come in and take your property because you don't technically, you can't prove that you own it. So property rights, a judicial system, and all of that is really tied in heavily to corruption as well.

It's like, how do you run a business? Why would you invest in something like that? You would not. Ken LaCourte, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you back on the program. Look forward to your next visit, Breaking Battlegrounds. We'll be back here in just a moment.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, stop big tech from tracking your every move. Experience true freedom with 4FreedomMobile. Visit 4FreedomMobile.com today for top-notch coverage, digital security, and total freedom. If you use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Give them a look, 4FreedomMobile.com. And continuing on, Chuck, we always like to do these sort of

themed holiday shows. This one got overrun by a lot of news that came out at the end of this week. New history. I think folks can understand, but we wanted to continue on at least some of that tradition, and friend of the program,

Martin DeCaro is joining us right now. He is the award-winning broadcaster and host of History As It Happens, a podcast that delves into current events through a historical perspective. If you're not following it, you need to be, and you need to be following him on X, folks, at Martin DeCaro. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the program. Fucking Sam, thank you very much. Happy Independence Day, I guess. Yes, thank you. So, Martin, I was listening to a podcast you had last year with the author of We Always Remember Our First about George Washington.

And you had a conversation with the author, and it really struck me thinking about it at the debate last night. She said that Washington was quite hurt by the criticism he got. You know, we forget these guys are still human, but criticizing. And pretty young. And pretty young. Criticizing office holders is pretty much an American tradition, right? That's true. And why is this? I think it's important that we're able to criticize our leaders, don't you? And what should people take from that?

Well, in the early days of the Republic, it was a novel thing to have someone of George Washington's standing being criticized. And, you know, we tend to look back on on Washington anyway, as somebody who was beyond reproach. But his second term, he took a pretty rough treatment, especially in the Republican press, the Republican pamphlets. So this is the first opposition party in American history, Thomas Jefferson's

The Republicans sometimes are called the Jeffersonians. They were much better at this type of stuff in the early days of the pamphlets and the press. And they were scurrilous. I mean, you talk about ugly politics that we have to deal with today. The 1790s were a pretty ugly time. But anyway, your question about Washington. And this was a new idea. And, you know, in those days, there was a sense that.

The people should be governed by their betters, right? This is really before the democratic revolution, if you will, that Sean will answer. Great historian has written so extensively about the age of Jackson, the idea that disinterested gentlemen, not meaning uninterested or bored, disinterested, meaning they had no stake in holding office or they were independently wealthy. They were men of status who then could, uh,

Rule the country or govern, I should say, not above the fray in there. Yes. Yes. We just had a revolution about rulers. So, yeah, yeah, it was govern the country through disinterested. Right. There is a sense that you are doing it for right for the right reasons rather than self-interest.

So there's a lot of that going on there. But yeah, I mean, it did hurt Washington. He couldn't get he could not wait to get out of the presidency. And I've actually been reading before we connected here his farewell address where he warned about the, you know, the problems of faction and, you know, the swoonish nature of public opinion and guarding against factionalism, what we would today called excessive partisanship, which gets in the way of.

governing a unified country. Was that was the criticism to him? And we have just about two minutes left in this segment. Was the criticism of him in some sense a kind of a refutation of the limits of criticism of the British monarchy and leadership? I would think so, too. I mean, again, we would call it probably partisan today. So some people interpret Washington's farewell address, I think, incorrectly when they look at it and you say, oh, he's he's warning us about being partisan at all.

Washington was a federalist. He was really concerned about the criticism he was getting from the people he thought were being partisan. That was the Jeffersonians and really the Republicans. They're often called the Democratic Republicans or the hyphen. That's how we're often taught about that in elementary school. They were the Republicans, capital R. And Jefferson, even as he's one of Washington's cabinet secretaries, is already scheming, if you will, because he's

As I mentioned, the 1790s before, already, already, the two sides here, the two political parties that had been established for all the talk about not wanting to have political parties early in the early years of our republic. These two political parties saw the other, their opponents, as ruining the legacy of the American Revolution.

You know, the election of 1796, the election of 1800, where Jefferson does beat John Adams, who was the last Federalist president. These were really nasty affairs where Americans looked at each other with a great degree of suspicion, animosity, hatred even.

I've never heard of. We carry that tradition today. I've never heard of any such thing like that going on in this country, Chuck. We're going to be coming back with more here from Martin DeCara in just a moment. So stay tuned, folks. And we're definitely you are going to want to stay tuned for the podcast segment. We have John Riches from the Goldwater Institute coming on to talk about some of the unbelievable rulings coming down from the Supreme Court today. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back in just a moment.

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digital security, and total freedom. And if you use the code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get your first month of service for just $9 and save $10 a month for every month of service after that. Again, that's code BATTLEGROUND at checkout. Visit 4freedommobile.com to learn more.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Continuing on the line here with us in just a moment, Martin DeCaro. He is the award-winning broadcaster and host of History As It Happens. You can follow him on X at MartinDeCaro. But first, folks...

You've heard us talking about it for a while, but you need to go to the website, invest the letter Y, then refy.com. Learn how you can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return and secure collateralized portfolio, a portfolio that our very own Chuck Warren himself has invested in. You can't do better than that, folks. Check them out, invest the letter Y, then refy.com, or give them a call at 888-Y-REFY-24. So we're celebrating July 4th next week, Martin. And as people know, this is when the Second Continental Congress takes

adopted the Declaration of Independence announcing like, see you later, Great Britain. Okay. What did the founders, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, what did they sacrifice by doing this? Well, they put quite a bit on the line. You know, it's a good question because I spoke to Jack Rakow, the great scholar of early American history about this. I asked him, you know,

We look back on July 4th and the Declaration of Independence today with a very philosophical or through a philosophical lens, you know, the big ideas about self-government and the right of a people to, you know, throw off the shackles of monarchy, etc. The only legitimate government is one that consents or consults the consent of the people.

But, you know, the founders or the revolutionaries of 76 were often consumed with much more political or prosaic concerns, you know, keeping an army in the field, dealing with galloping inflation, all manner of things, right, that they had to deal with, putting together state constitutions, etc. But to answer your question, they did understand that they were on the stage of history. They did know that they were doing something special.

And, you know, what they sacrificed was, you know, from the British point of view, was a pretty good deal. They were British subjects. From the view of Parliament, they were the most free people, not counting enslaved Africans, of course, but British subjects were the most free people in the world. So why risk it with a bloody revolution, right? Well, we have to also keep in mind British stupidity or obstinacy here, right? It played a big role in all of this. So I would say that they definitely were

or they were aware that they were sacrificing quite a bit, taking a chance on something that might not, might not work out. And as we know, most or many revolutions do fail. And there was little reason to believe, uh,

in the early 1770s that the colonies would even win such a bloody affair, right? The British had pretty much every advantage that you can ask. They had a modern army, a professional army, a strong economy. They were industrializing, et cetera. Whereas, you know, those provincial rebels didn't really have much. Martin, from a British perspective, I'm, you know, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

When they wrote the declaration, one of the things that I think gets lost is it was intended as both a political and a legal document, not just a moral one. It was intended to have real force in the body politic of the country and of the United Kingdom. Correct? That's right. So they were declaring that the American colonists as a people, colonists,

had the same rights to self-government as all the other nations of the earth. They weren't really making a statement specifically or explicitly about individual rights

personal liberties, right? That was simply not what they were concerned with when they were meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. But yeah, I mean, certainly their views were informed by Enlightenment philosophy. They weren't really discussing or debating Locke or Descartes or whoever, right? I mean, that was a given. I mean, that is what undergirded this assertion of natural rights. John Locke was very important.

But, you know, at the same time, the language they used was universal. And even during the revolution, enslaved people, I can name two of them, Kwok Walker, Q-U-O-C-K Walker, and Google him, and Mum Bett, they were in Massachusetts. They cited the language in the Declaration of Independence to sue for their freedom, and they won.

I'm going to ask you a question. This is kind of just your opinion. I know there's not a lot of historical writing that undergirds this, but would history have played out very differently? Would there have been a revolution? Would the British Empire even maybe still exist had they offered seats in their parliament to the United States and all these other territories? It depends on when.

that offer might have been made. By the time of the period that we're discussing here, I would say no. I think at that point, the Americans were not interested any longer in having seats in parliament. They wanted to govern themselves. Of

Of course, this is a huge issue in the split. The idea of parliamentary sovereignty, that you don't actually have to have any – you don't have to have representatives in this body because we're looking out for your rights already. Of course, that was a huge sticking point and, you know –

As with any dispute, something that's relatively small can snowball and take on a life of its own. But there really were material and major philosophical questions at stake here. And I know really key turning point, too, is the British response to the Boston Tea Party, because, you know, the Boston Tea Party wasn't all that popular in some quarters in the colonies. After all, it was a crime colony.

It was destruction of property, but the way the British responded to that was a serious problem. And this goes to what your question was, basically, could this have been avoided at some point? I certainly think revolution could have been avoided, but not by offering seats in the parliament. It could have been avoided by coming to some kind of accommodation that would have given the colonists, again, we're talking maybe earlier than 1776, maybe early 1700s,

a degree of autonomy, if not outright independence. Some say in the taxes that they could not afford that the parliament insisted that they pay. So I would argue that instead. What would have happened to the signers of the Declaration of Independence if America had lost the Revolutionary War?

That's a difficult question to answer. I actually asked that question yesterday to Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. He's actually the guest in my January 4th episode of History As It Happens. He wrote a great book called The Men Who Lost America. Check that out. It came out about 10 years ago. It's really interesting. It's about the British leadership during the revolution. I asked him, would George Washington, would he have been hanged had he been caught at the Battle of New York in 1776?

And he says no. I mean, George Washington was greatly respected on both sides of the Atlantic. He believes that there probably would have been some kind of reprimand for the leaders of the revolution, but not capital punishment. And there probably would have been –

Something like taxing the colonists to pay for the costs of the war. But, you know, it's a real interesting question. What would have happened if the British had won? I think the colonies would have, and a lot of people think this, historians, I mean, would have eventually gotten their independence. I mean, Canada eventually got its independence, right? But just think of how important to our origin story are colonies.

self-image as a great country, winning the Revolutionary War was and is. We would have a much different sense of ourselves today had we gotten our independence, say, like Canada did, you know, not in a bloody revolution. And I have to wonder, too, if that would have changed the geographic boundaries of the current United States, because would Britain have wanted to push into a potential conflict with Spain in the West? Correct.

That's a very good point.

In 1765, King George III, the last king of America, drew a line on the map telling the colonists, you're not allowed to go west of here because you're going to cause problems with the Native Americans, the Indians. And we don't have enough soldiers in North America to referee all these disputes. And, you know, men like George Washington and Ben Franklin and others who were into colonization.

surveying land, land speculation, et cetera, you know, wanted nothing to do with that artificial limit. You know, we're talking about the West here. We're talking about western parts of Pennsylvania, the Ohio Valley. So that's an interesting thing, because Britain did have a history of recognizing native rule, even among fairly tribal states and nations around the globe in a way that the following American administrations did not. Right.

And the British tried to sign up, if you will, Native American peoples to fight, help fight the American Revolution because they did not have enough soldiers in North America to put down the revolt. I mean, just think of the size of the eastern seaborne of North America. Right. You know, they also brought in what were called Hessians. They were Germans. They were mercenaries. They were not all from Hess. But that was also very unpopular as well because of the way they they fought the war. So, yeah.

So the American Revolution, some say, was an incomplete revolution. Then we got the Civil War and got the 13th Amendment. Would you say it's still an incomplete revolution as of today? Yeah, I think we're still fighting over it.

maybe not fighting. We're still, well, there's still political conflict in our country, right? We're memeing over it. We're doing memes over it. Yeah, I mean, well, I would take memes over some of the other stuff. Correct, correct. Well, political conflict is part of living in a messy democracy, right? I guess what I'm more concerned about is it seems that our inability to unify people

to solve any major national problem. And I don't want to overstate the case, but you know, one of the reasons I returned to Independence Day, Fourth of July, Declaration of Independence, what have you, on my podcast every year at this time, is not to just kind of idealize some false sense of unity, but our origin story for a long time was a source of, if not unity, like a common understanding, right? Or a common inspiration, right?

for us as a people. I mean, the victory in Second World War also is a big one as well. That has a lot to do with our self-image today as a global superpower and a global leader, right? The leader of the free world. But even today, the American Revolution, and this is in part because of some of the pseudo scholarship of the 1619 Project, the American Revolution is a source of division.

And I don't know, our origin story doesn't seem to be in all origin stories for all nations are a mix of fact and myth. Right. But today it doesn't seem to be a source of much inspiration or source of inspiration or unity at all. I guess what I'm trying to say, guys, sometimes my answers do meander here is that it's hard not to look at our past through the lens of our current problems and

And, you know, searching for something here to try to pull us out of this morass to solve some of our problems. It seems to be very difficult going back to, you know, what Washington warned about in his farewell address. We talked about this in the first segment, the spirit of faction, the spirit of party. Campaigning is supposed to end when the campaign ends. Campaigns don't end anymore. I was just watching Hubert Humphreys to move to a different era of American history briefly.

Hubert Humphrey 1968 concession speech when he lost a very close race to Nixon.

He closed his remarks. It was very late at night or very early in the morning because that was a very close election. It took a long time to call by saying something. He's going to continue to fight for all the things he's fought for, human rights, civil rights, making the Democratic Party a party of the people, whatever he said, right? But he says, now, however, we must move on with the urgent task of unifying our country. We don't hear that anymore in our country. No, we do not hear that.

We've got two minutes left. I think holidays, birthdays, milestones like that are a good time to reflect, right? What would your recommendation be for families that are gathering and, you know, they enjoy it, but they forget what's happened, why we're celebrating it? What would be your recommendation that they should contemplate and think over this July 4th about the founding of this country?

How close it came to not succeeding at all. We do have a sense of inevitability from our modern day perspective. And as I mentioned before, we look back on these holidays with a philosophical lens, right? But that erases the urgency and the contingency of what's going on then. And I think if people are going to reflect on this at all,

Think about, you know, the day to day or the prosaic tasks and the politics. Right. That the Continental Congress was dealing with. What I guess this will do, it takes off some of the idealized, you know, or, yeah, the idealized sheen kind of this, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Heroicized version. Romanticized version of history. Yes. Romanticized. Thank you very much.

Maybe I need a vacation myself. We should look at history through a very honest lens. Thank you so much, Martin DiCaro. We really appreciate having you on the program as always. Folks, make sure you're downloading the podcast segment this week. We've got John Riches from the Goldwater Institute talking about the Supreme Court rulings that just came down. You don't want to miss it. Breaking Battlegrounds back on the air next week.

The 2022 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2024. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.votewebdomain from godaddy.com. Get yours now.

Welcome to the podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Thank you to both of our radio guests today, Ken LaCourte, Martin DeCaro. They were both fantastic. Now we've got someone up who was a friend of the program and a friend of both of us, Chris

Talking about some stuff that probably is flying under the radar given that it all came out, I assume, intentionally the day after the presidential debate. Actually more important than the debate. Much more important than the debate. John Riches, executive director of the Goldwater Institute, thank you so much for joining us today. Two cases came down that you guys are involved in either tangentially or directly, one relating to homelessness, one relating to regulations.

Can you tell us a little bit about those and what the importance of those rulings is? Yeah, sure thing. Good to see you guys. Let's start with Chevron because I think that one is very consequential. So it's important for your listeners to understand the state of the law in this area. So we live in a country where regulatory agencies can make their own rules through the rulemaking process and sometimes through less formal mechanisms.

If they believe somebody that they're regulating violated the rules, their own investigators get to investigate those alleged violations. The matter is then adjudicated before an administrative law judge who's hired by the agency. And then hired and carefully selected by those agencies. I think that's called a captured regulator. But continue. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And the ALJs are hired by the, literally paid by the agency. In some cases, the agency head can even flip the ALJ's determination. But importantly for this case, when a regulated party then gets to a real court, supposedly an impartial court, the courts prior to this decision

were obligated to defer to the agency on legal questions. That means Chuck or Sam, if the department of XYZ said you violated this law and you said, no, I don't. The law means A, but the agency said it means B. Courts were obligated to put their thumb on the scale for the agency. So imagine that you have the most powerful litigant in the entire country, the United States government,

And the courts under Chevron said that, well, we have to defer to their interpretation of the law. Truly extraordinary. So the decision today, Loper Bright, in a companion case called Relentless, reversed this pernicious doctrine.

And said that courts do the entire purpose of courts, which is to independently interpret the law rather than rubber stamp agency decisions. So it's a monumental decision for for regulatory action in this state or I'm sorry, in this country, in the administrative state, you know, the administrative state writ large.

In specifically in this case, and what I thought was interesting was part of their ruling and reading it. They really were very clear that Congress essentially has been negligent in their duties in these areas. Right. And what they were saying was these agencies can't replace the role of Congress no matter how much they want to, that laws can only be made by the elected representatives of the people.

Right. Yeah. And so this gets to the, this gets sort of to this non-delegation question. Look, Congress makes the law, but it has been very convenient for Congress as a, as a consequence of decisions like Chevron to punt to administrative agencies to actually make substantive policy, right? If you're a politician, you could say, oh, I voted for, you know, clean air, but agency, you do all the hard work of making the rules and the actual policy, right?

So Congress has been negligent and they've been aided by the courts up until now in that negligence by coming up with the actual substantive policy. So but importantly. Oh, sorry. No. So let me ask you this question then. So so when Congress passes a law now and because of the Chevron decision.

What will it require Congress to do? Say they want to do a regulation on streets. Does it require them to give more specific detail on the bill that you need to do X, Y, and Z? Is that how it does? Does it say you need to make a street cleaner, but instead it needs to say you need to do X, Y, Z? I mean, how will that in practice really work for our listeners?

So the prohibition will really be at the agency level rather than the congressional level. So what Chevron said is if a statute is arguably ambiguous in what's not, then the courts defer to the agency. So what this will really do is tell the agencies they're not going to get away with expansive rulemaking, with broad rulemaking that is not –

you know, effectively authorized by Congress. And if they do try to do that and it goes to court, courts aren't going to give them a free pass. So I think it will have some effects on the way Congress writes laws. I think they will be incentivized to write more specific laws, less vague laws, and that's an extraordinarily important outcome. But the real outcome here is that agencies are

are going to be restrained in their regulatory rulemaking and enforcement actions. And, you know, we're going to get back to the proper system of government under that. We're going to get back to a system of actual due process where each branch of government stays in its proper lane. Will there now be a flurry of lawsuits, you know, around all the rulemaking they've done and saying, OK, now that Chevron has been overturned,

All of these rules are now void. In other words, Congress didn't rule on them. We're taking issues that maybe had even been previously adjudicated back to the court to get rid of those. Become a Wild West sort of lawfare. Yeah.

Probably not. I mean, there's always these sorts of, you know, the sky is going to fall if, you know, the courts do their job and that sort of thing. And it never does. And you got to remember when these cases, the way these cases arise, there has to be some sort of enforcement mechanism or some sort of injury mechanism.

So, you know, it's not like litigants can just rush to court, you know, unless they can point to some particularized injury that they've suffered as the result of some administrative action. So I don't expect that to happen. What I do expect to happen are two things. When agencies go after regulated parties, they're going to be a lot more careful in doing that. They're going to have to have a lot clearer statutory basis for doing it.

And I think they're going to be more constrained in their rulemaking because now they don't automatically win. Now, if those actions are challenged, they know that they're going to get that the regulated party is going to get their fair day in court. So it's like those. It's like the SEC ruling yesterday saying you have to do this in a jury trial. You can't do it through an administrative judge.

Yeah, that was a really important decision. Yeah. I mean, well, it was also sort of the giveaway that today we were going to get Chevron. Right. Because they clearly had set the marker of what Chevron.

There is some relation. There's a relation between those cases. And folks, for case you don't know about the Chevron, this case is basically brought up. It was tested because an obscure agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, was ship boarding, ship boarding, harrying fishing boats. And not only were they ship boarding them, but they were acquiring the fishermen to pay for their fee, seven, eight hundred dollars a day.

And so it wasn't only the regulating them, they're making them pay for the regulation to come micromanage them. That's what brought this up. And some wise people said, you know what, this is probably a good time to challenge Chevron. And that's what we got. Yep.

Imagine if the Federal Communications Commission said, hey, Chuck and Sam, you have a program that's broadcast over the airways. You're going to have to have a monitor sit in your studio to observe your activities. And not only that, you're going to have to pay the monitor's salary. Well, that's not far from it. We're not paying salary, but we've been adding new stations in Utah, and we have to fill out a form. You're

You provide a huge amount of information. Yeah. It's amazing. It's sort of like on the HOA that I'm unfortunately on, in December they're going to make us all start giving personal information who's on the board to make sure we're not doing illegal business activity. And I actually had two board members last week say –

Yeah, I'll be resigning in December. I'm not doing this. And I probably am too. So this was a good thing. Yeah, see, I come from the school that says if you're going to board my boat, let's just pull it out beyond international waters. Yeah, exactly. And repel boarders, but okay.

Another case, which you good folks have, is about the homeless encampments. Tell us, give us a little background about it, what it is and what it really means. The shorthand for this one, grants pass, but it also relates to a case, I think Johnson v. Boise, that was the foundation of the prohibitions on cities or has been used by cities as a prohibition for them actually doing anything about their homeless population.

Yep. Before we switch to that, guys, do you mind if I mention one thing? No, sure. Go ahead.

in one form or another by the courts when we're dealing with state administrative action. So that's great. The Supreme Court got it right. Monumentally important. But there's still a lot of work to do at the state level. And the Institute, the Goldwater Institute, developed and then saw passed in Arizona a reform that eliminates deference at the state level. Several other states have now adopted it. Arizona was the first. But there's a lot more work to do on this one. So is that something states can do legislatively? Yep.

And so courts can do it or the legislatures. And I'm sure Goldwater will be involved in that process. How do folks get in touch with and support the mission of your work? That's obviously critically important. We need institutions like Goldwater and people like John Rich is out there fighting these fights or Chevron never happens. And none of these these things come down. Well, thanks. I appreciate it. And go to Goldwater Institute dot org and check out our work and ways to be helpful there.

Well, appreciate that. All right. Grants pass. Another big decision out of the Supreme Court today. So prior to this decision being issued, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in two decisions, grant pass decision and the one you mentioned out of Boise, held that it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. That's the Constitution's cruel and unusual punishment provision for local governments to enforce laws against things like public camping, right?

Unless the government had more government shelter beds than there were homeless individuals. So and by the way, they said that private shelter beds, things from religious organizations and charities don't count in that calculation, including some big ones like the Salvation Army and others that have very extensive resources for this.

Yeah, exactly. Sort of an extraordinary ruling, right? Like, and what they said is that if the government doesn't provide sufficient shelter beds, then the person is what they characterized as, quote, involuntarily homeless, whatever that means.

So that was the that was the lay of the land before today's decision. And what we ended up see what we saw happening as a result of that is cities either felt like they couldn't enforce things like vagrancy laws or laws against public camping, etc. Or in many cases, you know, they used those decisions as a.

excuse not to deal with homeless problems and problems that result from homelessness.

But what the Supreme Court said correctly was nothing in the Constitution creates a right to live in public parks. The Eighth Amendment doesn't speak to this. You know, there's not more shelter beds than there is homeless people. And effectively, as now said, local communities can take action to address vagrancy and other problems created by homelessness in their own cities. It's a health crisis.

It's a public safety crisis, and we've learned again Justice Sotomayor is a moron. Her comment on this is sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. Well, yeah, go to the shelters. I mean the specific city where they're talking about, Grants Pass, had shelters, but these people prefer to stay outside. That's not a right.

It's just unbelievable. This is just such a common sense verdict. I don't want to begin. It's taken way too long to come down. But the reason it finally got up this far is a lot due to the work of Goldwater and others like them. I know from direct involvement, you guys were critical to a lawsuit against the city of Phoenix that required them to clean up the enormous homeless encampment here known as the Zone.

That would never have happened without Goldwater. And John, I got to tell you, I'm just kind of passing this on from some of the community action officers, the Phoenix police that work directly with the homeless community. Every one of them has told me the same thing, that getting homeless people into treatment and off the street has gotten much easier since that lawsuit that you guys helped lead.

That's great to hear, Sam, and I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, Phoenix had a terrible problem with homelessness. We had the largest encampment in the country in the zone, which was several square city blocks of homeless encampments. And there was just no enforcement of the law going on there. People were engaging in drug activity, defecating on the street, engaging in prostitution. They found burned bodies everywhere.

I mean, it was just extraordinarily problematic. And of course, as a result, all of the surrounding properties and businesses had the properties reduced to virtually nothing. And we were involved in litigation where a state judge said that that was a public nuisance and Phoenix had to go in there and take action and address the problem. And as a result of that ruling, they have. So I'm grateful to hear that.

That's made the jobs easier for law enforcement. It's made a positive difference. I mean, this is the big thing that all these folks who are defending this system that we've had in place around homelessness don't seem to get is that when they did that, it helped the business owners. It helped the residents. It helped all the law-abiding citizens in the area. And it helped the homeless population. It's helping everybody to treat the problem rather than just enable it.

That's right. In fact, this November, again, on the Arizona ballot, there's going to be what's called Proposition 321, which says that if you're a property owner, and this is another initiative we've worked on at the Institute, it says if you're a property owner and you've had to take measures to protect against public nuisances, higher security, install cameras, install fencing, things like that,

and the city has neglected to enforce the law or otherwise created a nuisance, you can deduct the costs of those activities from your property taxes. And so we think that's very important for property owners and for small businesses.

And it will also incentivize cities here in Arizona, if it passes, to do the right thing and force the law and try and help homeless people in as most effective a way as possible. Sadly, as those of us who have worked around local government know,

Your local government is far less concerned with the quality of life they're offering to their citizens than the cash they're extracting from them. So I think that's a fantastic, fantastic bill. People do, you know, people often confuse local governments with somehow

you know local control is somehow a superior form of control and it's just not i mean local governments are very susceptible to special interest abuse from nimbyism and oftentimes in our work we see the the greatest violations of individual rights coming from local governments

John Riches, thank you so much, folks. You can check them out, goldwaterinstitute.org. They're doing fantastic work. We encourage everyone out there to support their mission. John, we really appreciate having you back on the show once again. And folks, stay tuned.

All sorts of crazy developments in Kylie's Corner. The Karen Reid case. All the fun from the murder and mayhem side of America. And I think we're even going to get a sunshine moment to wrap it all up. Yes, Jenna says yes. Sunshine moment coming up. So, John, thank you so much for joining us. And stay tuned for Kylie's Corner.

All right. Now, thank you to John Riches. Thank you to all our guests. I thought this was a great program today, but it would not be a Breaking Battlegrounds episode. It would not be complete without Kylie's Corner. Kylie, give it to us. What's the good stuff today? What is the good stuff? The jury's deliberating. That's good. Karen Reid is being groped by her attorney. Yes. In the Karen Reid case. So on Tuesday, the

Both the prosecution prosecutor and the defense team gave their closing arguments. And now the jury has been deliberating. There was a little kerfuffle on Wednesday when the defense attorney found out that there was no not guilty option for her lesser charges. So when you're reading the verdict slip, it just was, you know, read what the judge

What she was being charged with. And then next to it, just like had a spot for guilty. There was no spot for to mark not guilty. But are, were they then given instructions? Was that modified in some way? Cause that seemed really odd to me. Chuck had to step out, but he and I were like sitting there going, how is this possible that there's no, not guilty option.

Yeah, I found it very odd. The defense attorneys are saying like they've never seen a slip like this. And the judge is like, this is how it always is. But she did amend the slip. And now there is an option for not guilty. So this was all happening on Wednesday. And then yesterday there was a couple. Well, there's a couple of photos that have been released of the defense team. So Karen Reed with her lawyers out at dinner. And then there was a photo that was then turned into a live photo of like

one of her attorneys like grabbing onto it looked like she was going forward and he was like trying to pull her back but you know got a little handsy in the boob area yeah he definitely got a handful in that enforcement action of his so that's the new hot topic on Twitter right now is if Karen Reid took him up with her defense attorney or not

Well, and apparently according. So so Kylie told us off off air. She missed a fantastic opportunity. She was like at the restaurant next door to all this. Yes. Yes. At the restaurant. Because everyone on Twitter. Well, everyone. Half of Twitter was saying that these are photos and they're fake. You know, she's being framed and the other people are like, no, this is true. So the person that took the photo actually like.

like went into the details of their photo and showed like what restaurant it was at and like the time it was taken and all the details within Apple to prove that it was a real photo and not just AI. And so that's when I realized that I was right next door and I could have been the one breaking this news, but I was not. See, I think, I think we have to like slip a tracker onto Karen Reed so that Kylie can stalk her more effectively. We can know what's going on. But something that the jury did do today was they wrote,

a letter basically stating that they're unable to come to a unanimous verdict, to which the judge went back and said, you have not been deliberating long enough, so we're not going to accept that and told them to keep deliberating. So that's for folks who aren't familiar. That's a hung jury, which would be an acquittal for her. The state could then try to bring the charges back and retry the case. Yep. So that would be.

I think the state would probably retry the case and pretty much just, I think they would, if they do go into a, if they have a hung jury, then I think the prosecution will recharge because of how big this is.

Although they're generally pretty loathe to do that because it means – Yeah. Well, I mean the trick is how do you not get a hung jury with the same case or the same information? Sometimes they could come back. But if they come back with lesser charges, then the attorney can rightfully point out they're sort of just throwing chum in the water until they get a bite. Trying to see what they can do. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.

So you start running into some double jeopardy issues there. It's very rare for states to retry a case from a hung jury. So that would be very interesting in this one. Yeah. Yeah, that would be really interesting. But I thought hopefully by I thought by today we'd have a verdict. But we do not. They were told to keep.

So maybe on Monday we'll have one. And we may just do a Breaking Battlegrounds pod special for that if we do get one and we have some good info there. If not, you're definitely going to get an update on that again next week. Any other fun from this case or others or other situations? Well, I do have one other case really quickly that I want to talk about because it happened in Arizona while it's still happening. There's actually a missing woman. She's 46 years old and her car broke down.

on the I-10. And so the Buckeye Police has reached out to the public asking if they've seen her. So she's 46 years old. Her name is Hope Tucker. And she was driving her purple Dodge Charger when it broke down in Phoenix on Interstate 10 near Verrado Way. She was with her autistic son who has limited communication skills.

And so her family actually just reported her missing. She went missing on May 22nd. Her family just reported her missing on June 22nd, a month later. Yeah. Very weird. She was with her autistic son. And when,

When Hope was, when her family said that she was missing, they connected the case and said that they had actually found her son two days later urinating in public and that he was in a, he was in like, he was stressed and needed help. And so they actually, the Buckeye Fire Department actually took him to the hospital where he was in the hospital for a month. Wow.

And so I don't know why it took so long for the family. Cause so then the autistic son, when he came out of the hospital and he was living with the family members, that wasn't his mom. He then somehow communicated that when the car broke down, they went to go find shade and his mom was having a medical emergency. So he went to find help or something. And that's how they got separated. Yeah.

And so they have not. But so I don't know why it took a month. I was going to say that. Look, I have a hard time believing there's not more to a story when someone goes a month without reporting a family member missing and in her kid because they didn't know that the kid was in the hospital. Like her not going to the hospital. I don't know how it will even like hospital staff. Like, where's your direct family? You know, right. Weird. So you've seen hope.

She is, um, she's six, two. She's a very tall woman. So she's missing in Arizona. Okay. Wow. That's it. I had totally missed on that one. Uh, I know we do have some more stuff coming out about the Gilbert goons. The first one of them may be sentenced, uh, today or next week. So, Oh, I, okay. I also almost forgot. Speaking of the Gilbert goons, Brian Koberger from the Idaho four case, completely different cases. However, it reminded me, we do have both, um,

Teams have agreed that they're going to shoot to have their cases ready by June of 2025. So that's when the trial should be happening. Okay. We'll see. That's another fascinating case. That's the one where the guy was a forensic student, right? Yeah.

Yes. And that Washington state. Yeah. And is accused of committing a murder. And did he manage to use his forensics knowledge accurately and in a way that will get him out of this charge? Or was he not a very good student? I guess we're going to learn more. I guess we will find out. OK, well, that's all the murder and mayhem. And unless I'm missing anything.

No, no, not at all. That's all for this week. That's all the murder and mayhem for this week. So let us turn directly to the sunshine moment because, hey, yin and yang, why not just go for the black and white thing right now? What do we got?

Yeah, so this week's Sunshine Moment starts – it's kind of a different place than we've been used to. It starts behind the prison walls of Oregon's oldest prison. What is the Oregon's oldest prison? It is Salem – Salem something, I think. Okay, so Salem Correctional or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, but it's really old and it's known now for having – being really good with prison reform and helping people –

but what I'm going to talk about is they're, they're working on expanding that to a lot of different facilities in Oregon. So this place kind of started it out, but it kind of, this,

So it's a writing program for prisoners. And Enrique Bautista was serving time in a cell in Oregon, and he wanted to chat with his neighbor in the cell next to him. And so he would write out his dreams and different little things on a sheet of paper and pass it over to the cell next to him through –

through a hole in the door with string, which was pulled from the elastic bands of underwear.

OK, this sounds this sounds like solitary confinement because otherwise, like they can interact with each other. So, yeah, yeah. No, it was saying that he was in a in an isolated prison. So it's like an almost. Yeah, it feels like. Yeah, that's it. Some of them now, I think people don't realize that I really debate whether this is this might actually fall under crudely unusual. They're keeping people essentially in solitary confinement for very, you know, for years and years.

I could not handle that. I think I would do poorly in prison regardless, but being stuck in a cell where you don't have any other human contact all day would drive me out of my mind in days. Yeah, I think for anyone after COVID too, being stuck in – yeah. That was bad enough. Yeah.

It's like the mental health was bad for everyone. So I can't imagine it being that good. So, okay. So he's writing and passing notes with underwear strings. Yes. Yeah. So, but he eventually, so that was back in 2004 and he was, he served 21 years and towards the end of his sentencing, he found, he joined this program that had just started. That was a writing workshop where they write sentences.

It's for prisoners who write like poems and different things like that. And so he ended up joining and continuing afterwards. But it's there's a literary journal called The Pony Express, which is poetry and prose from incarcerated people throughout the state of Oregon that's been growing a lot recently. And so he became a part of this and started to write for it.

And he's been helping them expand it to other areas. So I just want to tell you just like really briefly kind of what, like how this has helped a couple different people. There is one man, Mr. Reyes, who said he was convicted of murder in 2018.

But he said that the writing program has helped him make sense of his past and kind of understand where like how he's been seeing things. And so he wrote one piece called I'm a Survivor and he described his family's generational trauma and reflects on like violence to protect his loved ones and said he realized I thought I only had two options either protect my family or be a coward and I can now see another option.

So it's very dark, but you can see, like, people are processing a lot. Sometimes you've got to get through the dark to get to the light, right? I mean, I think that's a great – that's fantastic. Our prisons are so poor generally at helping people establish themselves for a normal life afterwards that I love hearing about these programs. So, okay. So let's give us some more of the good stuff. So, yeah. No. And so he's –

So another man, Stresla—oh, it's a woman, sorry. Stresla Lynn Johnson tackles family trials in the writing. So he said that he helps—

Sorry, she says that she I don't know why I keep misundering this person, but she says that she's treating people's writing like they're letting me babysit for them. And so like the she said that the working with other people has helped a lot with like her writing and everything like that. And then there's another service that this has been providing within prison. I got to stop you again. Sorry. Is she a serial killer?

That's – yeah. Because when you use all three names, like that historically has been those are the serial killers, right? Like John Wayne Gacy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then normal like killers and prisoners just have their two names. Yeah. No. That would be really interesting to find out. That would be a heck of a twist. That would be a heck of a twist. I think it's great that for all kinds of people who like have committed crimes just to work through – I'm joking a little bit about this because we want to make this light and fun.

But this is fantastic. Yeah, there's one other just that it kind of brings people together. So if you've heard about prisons and stuff, I've ended up on that side of TikTok, like just prison tips and things like that. I don't know how. Prison TikTok? There's a prison TikTok? There's a prison TikTok. Okay. And...

apparently the cliques and gangs kind of define the social structure within prison. Um, and so Mr. Bautista, uh, the person I was talking about in the beginning, um, said that it doesn't, that the writing spheres became a place outside of these cliques. And he said, it didn't matter what race you were, what clique you were in or whatever was going on in the yard. Um, they were all able to, it was a space away from that. Um,

So now they're looking at expanding this to prisons across Oregon, and they're publishing The Pony Express to people outside of prison and also to incarcerated readers. And it's been able to get to people who are already incarcerated and help them out with their things. I love it. Yeah.

That's fantastic. Great. Great program. Folks. Well, you know, it's always nice to be able to close this show with something like that that's positive and that is, you know, actually helping people because so much I think Chuck had to step out, but I think I can say for him and I that so

So much of politics today is just a downer when you're dealing with it. Everything seems to be very traumatic and dramatic for people. So I love hearing about those kind of things, and hopefully we'll see that program expand.

Okay, fantastic. Jenna, thank you so much. Kylie, as always, brilliant job getting all the guests on today. We want to thank John Riches, Ken LaCourte, Martin DeCaro for their time. Really appreciate having them. And we appreciate all of you tuning into this. So thank you once again. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back next week.