Matthew Continetti on the Evolution of the Right 56:08

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Welcome to Breaking Battlegrounds, another great show on tap for you today. I'm your host, Sam Stone, with my co-host, Chuck Warren, in the studio today.

Kylie Kipper, the irrepressible Kylie Kipper, our producer, as with us as always. On the line, our first guest, someone I know Chuck and I are very excited to talk to, Matthew Continetti, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Work focuses on American political thought and history. He has a new book out. It is a fantastic read, which is actually kind of rare to say for political books, to be honest, Chuck. Especially from think tank people, yes.

Boy, he's breaking the mold. Yes, he is. Matthew Continetti, author of The Right, 100-Year War for American Conservatism. Highly recommend folks get the book and read it. Fantastic. And thank you for joining us on the program today. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Matthew, I think the one thing that would be interesting, and I would recommend people who follow politics to get this book.

that people don't realize. They think Trump came along and therefore he blew up the Republican Party. But we've really had these internal struggles for, as your book is, for 100 years. Is that correct?

I think that's right. I think there's been a long running debate within the Republican Party and even within the conservative movement about, you know, where the place of populism in our politics, how much we should be principled conservatives or how much we should be pragmatic. These debates have been going on for quite some time.

Matthew, how much of that do you think stems from sort of fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats, where Democrats generally tend to follow the line much more closely and as a group than Republicans do? I always say doing elections on the Republican side of the aisle, you are herding cats.

Right. Well, the Democratic Party is really a collection of interest groups. And so it's kind of good for each group to fall in line as long as they're getting what they want out of the federal government. There are

The Republican Party is slightly different, especially since the rise of the conservative movement over the last 50 years. It's really always engaged in debate over principle. You know, how are we going to limit government or how are we going to restore the principles of the American founding? And it's harder to reach an agreement on that because people have different views of the end goals and also people have different views of the means by which to attain those goals.

Well, I think one thing, too, reading your book and realizing is we're all we probably all here have sort of grew up at the age of Reagan or post Reagan. Right. So we always viewed this. This leader came along and he was able to unite the party because, frankly, he was able to unite them against Putin.

communism against Russia, right? There was this common denominator that all our various, our supply-siders, our pro-lifers, everybody was able to come together, and he had this unique talent for bringing us together. Is that a correct assumption? And do you see any leadership like that from anybody currently who's a Republican officeholder?

Well, I think you're right to say that the conservative movement was held together really for 50 years by anti-communism, by opposition to the Soviet Union and to the threat of world communism. And Ronald Reagan, as a conservative leader, prioritized the fight against the Soviet Union and the fight against communism. You know, his second most important issue, though, was combating stagflation in the economy. The economy of the late 1970s was

similar to the economy of today, high inflation and not much economic growth. And so Reagan really stressed the economy as well as foreign policy. He was a successful leader, an incredibly consequential president. When I look at the political landscape today, I don't see many people reflecting either Reagan's

principles or or is just important in my view his attitude his personality his optimism his future orientation and you know I I look for this in politicians all the time his sense of humor people people forget that having a sense of humor is a very important quality in a politician is it more important now when essentially you have a portion of the country that can't seem to take a joke

I actually think in a lot of ways it's more important because it humanizes that person for everybody else. Well, I have to say, for all of his faults, President Trump has a sense of humor, and he often makes people laugh. And he kind of understands the entertainment aspect of politics, I think, better than most anyone on the political scene. That's been to his advantage since he first appeared on the scene in 2015. Yeah.

You know, it seems like we're in a time when you have global forces with China, what's going on throughout the world and with inflation here in this, you know, in our economy. When someone could build that type of coalition like you're talking about with Reagan on essentially the same issues. But you're right. I don't really see anyone who can tap the full spectrum to do that.

Yeah, one of my heroes, the late political journalist Jack Drummond, used to say, when the economy is the issue, it's the only issue. And I think that's the case today. The American people think that we're in the middle of a recession, and I think they're looking for answers. There are plenty of people complaining about

about the high prices, about the loss in our standard of living. But there are very few people who are advancing ideas about how to correct that. And that was, I think, one of the strengths of the conservative movement in the years before the Reagan Revolution in 1980, which is that conservatives had a lot of populist grassroots support

But they also had a lot of ideas that had been shaped by intellectuals about what to do to increase freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing. Well, I remember running campaigns in the 90s.

And, you know, you had all these think tanks like the Heritage Foundation was one and you can go and they had these list of solutions and policy proposals that you can use on the campaign control. And we don't have that now. We were talking on the show a couple of weeks ago. I have a friend who's a chief of staff for a fairly prominent member of Congress who's a Republican. And we were discussing my point was unless we win 20 plus House seats, you cannot say there was a wave. And I said and I don't know what he goes on.

You mean our message? I go, so what's our message? Biden's bad. And he goes, is it that specific?

And we just we don't I mean, that's one thing I talk about. So you have three main issues right now. It seems like Republicans could really take advantage of crime, immigration and inflation. And I don't hear really one consistent solution. And that's something that's missing from the party a decade plus ago. There's just nothing there. It's just Biden's SOB.

Yeah, and I think that has to do a lot with kind of the role that the culture wars play in our politics now. The truth is a lot of our politics is just a...

endless culture war. It's a matter of faith, isn't it? I mean, politics has really replaced religion in a lot of senses. Yeah. I mean, arguments, you know, started by the woke left and then the right kind of response. And then the second part of it is just the place of Donald Trump in our politics. Really, our politics for the last seven years has been defined by how

an individual views Donald Trump and relates to him. And what struck me or reminded me of this the other day was, you know, the Democrats passed this reconciliation bill, the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act. Studies show it's not going to do anything about inflation. Independent studies show it will increase taxes on people, regardless of their income bracket. And yet, what did people fight about for a week?

the raid on Mar-a-Lago. That was what dominated the headlines. That was what was all over the cable channels. Not an argument over this big government bill. And I think that shows you kind of where the conservative movement has ended up. And I would say a third factor here is conservatives and Republicans, I think, have over time lost sight of what were the animating concerns of their movement. I mean, as I've mentioned before, communism, fighting communism was

definitely the main one. But the second one was increasing individual freedom in the economy. And, you know, you think about all of the votes that many Republicans have taken over the last five years to, you know, just blow up the federal deficit. Granted, there was the pandemic, there was emergency situations, no one really knew what to do. But it shows you how I think conservatives need to kind of reconnect with the original ideas of their movement.

We need some idea thought leaders to start pushing an agenda. And I just don't see that within our congressional leadership at all. No. You know, one thing I heard last night, and I could not believe this, I did not realize it had become this labyrinthine, is the federal government now employs – the U.S. federal government now employs more people than the population of 100 countries on Earth. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, that's just absurd. And why aren't we addressing things like that and going after it? Because Biden wants to add what tens of thousands of IRS agents, you know, I mean, that I think should be one of the number one ads any Republican running for Congress airs this campaign. Yeah.

You've taken the biggest college football stadiums in the country and filled them with new IRS. Yeah. So instead we're discussing again. Again, we're discussing, you know, poor Donald Trump's a martyr.

But we've hired 85,000 new IRS agents. I mean, we have more IRS agents than we have Border Patrol agents. And for some reason, our side can't seem to figure out that's an issue. You know, Matthew, I want to talk about, you know, in your book, you talked about, for example, there there was a chapter you talk about the 1958 midterm elections and Republicans did not do well. And so critics were.

writing up the Republican Party's dead, the conservative movement's dead. I remember Obama got elected. They're going to be a minority now because of Hispanic voters, which are now demographic destiny. We're almost evenly split. Is it just common for people to keep saying the conservative movement dies whenever we have a hiccup? It sure seems like it. Oh, absolutely. And that's one reason why I included that section on the reaction to the 1958 midterms.

Because to me, it just kind of illustrates how often these predictions look silly in retrospect. Yeah.

Conservatism faces a lot of challenges and often faces big setbacks, but it reanimates itself mainly because it is, at the end of the day, a body of doctrine. It's a way of looking at the world, a set of ideas more than anything. The mission of the conservative movement for much of the 20th century was making the Republican Party reflect those ideas.

And so that the Republican Party has become kind of synonymous with the conservative movement. But when the Republican Party faces defeat, that doesn't necessarily mean that the conservative ideas have been defeated. It just means that they need to be kind of restored and remobilized. We're getting ready to take a quick break here. The thing I always say is I know America's right of center because Republicans keep running elections and we generally have a bunch of idiots leading the party.

congressional leadership that do not articulate conservative principles or solutions well but yet we keep winning at all they don't and that is to me the biggest biggest biggest clue that the America is right of center absolutely and it's also the reason for a lot of Republican success not so much anything that GOP does but backlash against what Democrats do yeah absolutely breaking battlegrounds coming back with Matthew Contenani in just a moment

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. On the line with us today, Matthew Contenetti, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, author of the new book, The Right, 100-Year War for American Conservatism. And again, Matthew, thank you for joining us on the program today.

One of the things that's been happening in the Republican Party, obviously, I think Trump opened the door for this. We have a lot of populist candidates who have continued to work this angle. But the makeup of the Republican Party is changing. We're getting back a lot of blue collar workers. We're making huge inroads among Hispanics. These are not traditionally, or at least within the last 20, 30 years, the Republican conservative base. In many cases, they have different policy needs and priorities.

Are there historical examples for how the Republican Party has navigated that sort of balancing act? And what do you think they need to do, we need to do to both benefit from those trends, but also maintain our values?

Well, it's a big question. I mean, there's no question that the parties are realigning on the basis of education. It's been going on for decades, but it's really accelerated under President Trump. And in fact, we've seen some data that indicate that differences in education matter much more than differences in ethnicity or even race.

And so this is why you see the Latino vote, Hispanic vote split in some polls in recent months, split between the Republican and Democratic parties, which means huge gains for the Republicans.

So this educational sorting is important because it means that the Republican Party is filled with more voters who do not have a four-year college degree. And parties are ultimately reflections of

And so I do think that this new Republican Party, this non-college educated Republican Party, is more open, I think, to big government than earlier iterations of it. So for conservatives, the challenge is kind of doubled because you not only have to consolidate

convince the broader electorate that a limited government is worth fighting for. You also have to convince more and more people within your own party. And you are seeing strains within the Republican Party and even in the conservative movement kind of embrace a much more active federal government in the economy and society. And that's something that I think the founders of the conservative movement would have been very wary of.

Matthew, let's talk about let's use an example here. So I think most of us agree sort of a Bush Republican is Mitt Romney. Right. And he's proposed this this allowance, this monthly allowance for children. Is that something you see more coming out of the Republican Party? Here's 250. If you have a kid, anybody under 18, you get 250, 500 dollars to help offset costs. Do you see more of that coming?

I do. And the Romney plan is probably the one that has the most chance of success because he has this is now the second version of his plan. And it's one that includes a work requirement, which a lot of the mainline conservatives like myself were very insistent on having because a non-work requirement benefit is just the old welfare system. And that's something that conservatives fought decades to.

overturn. So this new Republican Party is very interested in the stability of the family. Republicans have always been interested in the family, but now it's more the economics of the family as opposed to, say, the family values, which were always hotly contested over the last 40 years. I do see similar proposals like that. I also would point to proposals that really want to kind of decouple our economy from that of China.

And this is a place where Senator Marco Rubio has taken the lead as well. And that means, you know, more government intervention in the economy simply to prevent China from, one, taking our technology, ripping it off, ripping us off, and two, insinuating

itself into our economy, into our institutions in ways that it eventually could use to coerce us. So you do see the way in which this new attitude towards the government is playing itself out both domestically and in foreign affairs.

Well, and that's, you know, we hear a lot, you know, if you go back 20 years or now, people say, you know, we got to stick to our principles. But sometimes you have to sort of be flexible on those principles. You still have them. I remember, for example, Sam and I have talked this before. When Mitt Romney decided to run for Senate, I was in the room. He had a bunch of bundlers from his presidential campaign there.

And he told his three major issues were, A, the budget deficit, B, the threat of China before it was popular, and three, the issue that concerned him the most is how technology and AI were going to disrupt the ability for about a third of the population to make a living. And I think this policy proposal is some of that. So if you're a conservative, it seems to me, even a free market conservative, which I think all of us are here,

You're going to have to find a way to take care of some people who just do not have the skills, and I'm not sure they can acquire the skills to really make a living, a household income, to survive in this economy. Is that fair to say? Yeah. I think that for the most part, unless you're a die-in-the-wool libertarian, conservatives have always thought that there should be a safety net, right, but that the safety net should be targeted to

to those who truly need it. It should be timely, which is to say there should be, you know, it's not an unending entitlement. It should be so that you can keep yourself, get yourself back on your feet. And there should also be conditions in the safety net. And one of those conditions usually is that you need to be looking for work or to have a job in order to receive benefits. So I think what differs a contractor

from a libertarian is this attitude, whether you would...

some level of government intervention in order to make a stable and prosperous society. And this is where the conservative embrace of our military is also a big point of difference between conservatives and libertarians who just see our military as another extension of big government that they want to zero out.

You know, I actually have come to question that precept that AI and the tech economy are going to take away so many jobs from people in part because we've seen a lot of people post-pandemic find ways to make money via the tech economy who you necessarily wouldn't have expected to. I mean, obviously, the most famous group are the Instagram influencers, right? But there's a lot of people finding ways to conduct commerce online.

I just think that requires a different mindset, quite frankly, than we teach in our schools.

Yeah, I think there's something to it. And of course, I thought you were going to cite the meme stock bros as well, right? The guys who are sitting around and making money off Robinhood and other trading platforms. I'd say a couple of things. One is we are dealing with a long-term decline in labor force participation in the United States, especially among able-bodied males, so men between the ages of 25 and 54.

they've been dropping out of the workforce. This is something conservatives have long been concerned about, but haven't been able to really address. And second, I think your larger point is absolutely true. The kind of the model that we've had, you know, the K through 12 schooling, four years of college, then kind of lifetime employment somewhere in some company, that's outmoded. And as conditions change, conservatives need to adapt to them. Well,

while keeping their principles in mind. Absolutely. We have just a few seconds before we go to break here, Chuck. When we come back, we're going to be coming back with more from Matthew Continetti. Matthew, how do people stay in touch with you? Well, they can follow me on Twitter at Continetti, or they can visit my page at the American Enterprise Institute, www.aei.org. Fantastic. Breaking Battlegrounds, coming right back.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. On the line with us right now, Matthew Contenani, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Follow him on Twitter at Contenani. Chuck, you had a question I thought was really good during the break, and I want to go straight to that. So in your book, in the chapter, A Movement Grows, you talk about the 1960 Republican Convention. And in that, Nixon bypassed Goldwater and the anti-communist congressmen.

and picked to appease Rockefeller, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.,

to be his vice president. Now, this was tantamount today to Trump coming back and picking Romney or Murkowski up in Alaska, right? Something like that. With a few extra last names. Yeah, yes, exactly. Well, he is an elitist New England person, right? Sam is too. I think you knew that right away. So, you know, Goldwater could have stormed off, right? He could have said, we're starting our own party, yada, yada, right? Instead, Goldwater addressed the convention and...

He just simply said, let's grow up conservatives. We want to take the party back. And I think someday we can. Let's get to work. That is so diametrically opposed to and I will call on this the Bill Kristol supposed Republicans who now for all these years, they pontificated on these conservative principles don't seem to have them anymore. It seems like a grift. Yeah, it seems like a grift.

Do you find this odd? I mean, I think that's the one thing that people between the coast, the red states, the flyover country, that people like Sam and I and others who are college educated, we just find it not only odd, but off-putting, if not grifty.

I would say that the better analogy might be on the Democratic Party. And what I mean by that is when the Republicans, when the Democrats nominated George McGovern in 1972, many Democrats voted.

who disagreed with George McGovern's attitudes toward Vietnam, you know, come home America, get out of Vietnam, and America was bad for going into Vietnam, and also his attitudes toward the counterculture, being very open toward the counterculture of the 1960s. Many Democrats began moving away from their party because of that nomination. Eventually, they ended up

in supporting Reagan in 1980, and then basically ended up becoming Republicans during the Reagan years. And what I find interesting is many of the people who have links to that group that moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party are now

leaving the Republican Party because of Donald Trump and because of their dislike of him and also their disagreements with him on some big questions like foreign policy and trade.

So I think it's interesting that this that this group of intellectuals who kind of can trace their roots back to the Democratic Party in some ways have come full circle. But I can also can can imagine how that might be confusing to a lot of people and and.

jarring in the sense that they're abandoning what they were saying for many years. I think it's more than confusing to a lot of people. I think it's in a certain sense a little bit insulting. I mean, we've just seen kind of a very classic gubernatorial race here in Arizona between a more establishment Republican and a Trump Republican. Establishment Republicans have run Arizona for 30, 40 years, at least at the statewide level.

And, you know, obviously the Trump movement has ties to previous other outsider movements here. That movement just came, you know, overcame with a victory. And the message to the establishment is, hey, we've backed your candidates for 30 years every time it came to a general. Isn't there sort of a I mean, quite frankly, for the future of the party, isn't there an obligation on some of these folks to say, look, I get it.

You didn't love what we were doing. I don't love what you're doing, but we got to stay together and play team baseball. I think that's a very powerful instinct and argument. And I'd say it would be more powerful if the differences were simply on the basis of policy.

But there are some cases now in the Republican Party where the differences aren't just about policy, but they're, you know, about the willingness to to go further than than the evidence on some questions related to the 2020 campaign. And that, I think, is just one of these reasons that that's blocking the type of unified party that could be very successful in the fall. Fair and good point. Yeah, absolutely. So, Matthew, as we close here.

Tell our listeners, are you hopeful and optimistic for America and the conservative movement, or do you think we have a long hill to walk and climb? Well, I mean, one lesson from my history is that things can change very quickly, and all it takes is the right combination of institutions, ideas, and leadership. And I think that we saw that in the 1980s and what was inaugurated under Ronald Reagan and carried through the Republican Revolution in Congress in 1994.

And then, of course, it all fell apart kind of in the George W. Bush years. But I think we can reclaim it again if we return to the original insights of American conservatism and find leaders who are able to present those insights in a way that draw Americans to them rather than repel them away. Fantastic. Matthew Continetti, thank you so much. Breaking Battlegrounds coming back in just a moment.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. In the studio with us as always, the irrepressible Kylie Kipper. Jamie Kleschek, our digital wizard. And in the audio booth, Jeremy, the god of audio. He makes us sound good, which is impossible. I don't know how he does it. Folks, on the line with us right now, a guest I'm very excited to talk to again.

Tom Horn, candidate for superintendent of public instruction, now the general election nominee for the Republican Party for the state of Arizona. Someone who has extensive experience in elections and is running against somebody, quite frankly, Chuck, who is a wackadoodle.

Yeah, you got it. What are the differences? Okay, so let's say you and I and Sam are going to go door to door, and we should go do that all of us one day, pick a neighborhood and go do that. And people say, what's the difference between you and your opponent? What is the difference between both of you?

uh... lots of them uh... in fact the most that one can conceive of uh... first of all when i left office as you know i was superintendent from two thousand three to twenty eleven at which time i became arizona attorney general and uh... when i left office as a as superintendent arizona students performed above the national average on the s_a_t_ test which is a a national test that states cannot manipulate uh... under the under hoffman

The test scores have declined precipitously. I'm about to tell you the reasons for it, to where a majority of Arizona students are not proficient even in reading and math. Now, what are the reasons? First of all, my focus was on academics. That's what I worked on. Her focus is on a lot of other things. One of them is social-emotional learning.

Social and emotional learning detracts from academics because they make teachers play games with the kids. My heroes are teachers who love their subject, science teachers who love science, math teachers who love math, and so on.

And they've been complaining to me because they want to teach their subject bell to bell, but under social-emotional learning, they have to play games with them, like having races where the kids have an egg on a spoon and that kind of nonsense. And one teacher said to me, she was a reading teacher, she said,

I told the administrator that my kids couldn't read. I needed to focus on that. And I was told if I didn't do social-emotional learning, I would be written up. So that's one distraction from academics. And it also, to the extent it's tied into critical race theory, there's also a derogation of the importance of studying hard. They will say things like...

You can't grade kids on whether they come late or you can't grade them on the basis of whether they do their homework because that just represents the oppression of the oppressors.

So it's actually a philosophy against academic achievement. Another big issue with respect to academic achievement is discipline. You've got to have discipline in the classroom for kids to learn. I served on a school board for 24 years, 10 years as its president, a taxidermist.

attended over 2,000 meetings as a school board member or president, so I know a little something about what goes on at that level. And I said to fellow school board members when I was elected, as school board members, you are advocates for parents, but the advocates for the majority of parents who want

Order in the classroom so the kids can learn. Don't be an advocate for the parent who comes in to complain that their child was disciplined for misbehavior and claims that my little darling can do no wrong. As a result of that, we did not reverse a teacher on discipline one time in 24 years. Not one time in 24 years. We were known as the toughest district around. The students had orderly classrooms where they learned. The learning went up. The test scores went up. And so...

Those are examples of the differences in philosophy and approach that resulted in higher test scores under my administration and much lower test scores under the Hoffman administration. So if your listeners are wondering who is better qualified to bring up learning and test scores, that's myself. You know, Tom, I actually equate this a little bit back to something I experienced in high school. I remember two teachers kind of very specifically saying,

one who turned their classroom into a fun and game zone. I don't remember a dang thing they tried to teach me. It was a science course, biology. I don't remember anything at all from it. We had an American history teacher, Dr. Priest, who every kid in that school hated. I remember his classes and what he taught me down to the nines. He enforced classroom discipline. He made sure it was about the academics. It was never about anything else.

I wonder if there's a connection. Obviously, they're pushing the CRT, social emotional learning, all this kind of garbage that is codified racism. It's bigotry and it's lowered expectations. But how much of this in a certain way comes from teachers who are trying to be friends with all the kids instead of leaders?

Well, that's absolutely correct. By the way, you mentioned history. That's another difference between myself and Hoffman. I believe in teaching objective history. She pushes the 1619 Project, which is fabricated history designed to make kids hate their country. Even its own authors admitted it is fabricated history designed to achieve a political outcome. A little further. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. You know, she has admitted a lot of things. When historians showed that the things were fabricated, her response is, oh, that's white historians. So that's another big difference. I'll give you a couple of examples. One example is the fabricated idea that the

that the American Revolution was fought not for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is what is in our Declaration of Independence, but that it was for protecting white slave owners in the South from interference with slavery by England. Historians have looked at it, and there's not one piece, not a scrap of paper from the time that would support that. It's just fabricated. And not only that, but...

I always actually go back to that period in history, whether we're talking about whether the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all these things were written to support slavery or whether you're talking about the origins of the Second Amendment. That period in history was in many ways sort of one of the most interesting because they wrote voluminous letters to each other back and forth discussing these ideas that would become these documents.

We can see the thought. If you actually pay attention to history, you can go back and see the thought processes that went into it.

And that is the opposite of what it was. They were trying to design an institution that would end slavery. They just knew they didn't have the support to do it at that time. That's absolutely right. And then another example is they teach the kids that Lincoln was a racist. This is the man who, by the stroke of his pen, against a lot of advice from other people, unilaterally freed all the slaves in the South and then pushing the 13th Amendment freed the rest of the slaves.

By doing that, he did more good for humanity than any human being in American history, and they're teaching our kids that he was a racist. I'll give you one other example. This is the last one. They teach that the cruelties of capitalism result from the cruelties of the plantation. That's straight Marxism, and it's completely disproved by history, which shows that capitalism raises people out of poverty, and socialism creates poverty.

And we can see this because we had a great experiment in the 20th century, Germany and Korea. You had in Germany the same people, the same culture, the same everything. But in the west of Germany, which had capitalism, they had prosperity in eastern Germany.

They had communism. They had poverty. The same thing with Korea. The difference between the gross natural product per person in South Korea is an almost unbelievable 100 times North Korea, and the North Koreans are several inches shorter because their nutrition is so bad. So it's completely contrary to history. It's Marxist propaganda, and we have a superintendent of schools...

statewide elected official who has offered teachers to pay them $5,000 if they'll teach the 1619 project. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. I think one critical factor, too, about this election is Governor Ducey signed this past week the school choice legislation, which allows money to follow students. I have no faith Kathy Hoffman will help implement that. What are your thoughts on that? No.

She's done everything that she can to obstruct the education scholarships up till now. This is a program that's been developing incrementally. I have bitter complaints from people about the way she's administered it, the roadblocks she put in the way of people who want to participate in it, that she asked an Indian tribe to return money that they couldn't afford to return, that she disclosed the names and contact information of the

of the parents who are in the program claiming it was a mistake, but it doesn't really seem like it's a mistake when she's so hostile to the program. But meanwhile, some of these parents are getting hate mail now. The war on parents being conducted by the left is really extraordinary. Well, they don't believe parents are qualified to teach their kids. I mean, that's what this boils down to. We know better. We got an education certificate. We know better. And I think that's something...

that you need to really express when you're out to people. There's just a clearly difference. There's you who believes parents know what's best for their kids and that schools should function on the three R's.

and she believes they're for indoctrination, and the parents don't know what the hell they're talking about. It just seems to be the critical difference between the two. There is no emotion in the human race more strong than the emotion that parents feel for their children. You know, if a child, God forbid, dies, it can ruin the rest of their lives emotionally. They're totally invested in the lives of their children. They want the best for their children. They know the most about their children.

And they are qualified to determine what is the best venue for the children to get the best possible education. Now, Tom, one of the discussions, obviously, that are always around education is teacher pay. But I've always said in talking to teachers that there is another element to recruiting and retaining good teachers, and that is classroom discipline and security. That a lot of them feel like they are in classrooms that are, quite frankly, dangerous, physically dangerous. And that is something that has gotten much, much worse in recent years.

That's a complete bullseye on your part. You hit the nail on the head. Because teachers are actually surveyed when they leave the profession, and the number one reason they leave is not salary. It's lack of support by the administration, and the main element of that is not supporting them on discipline. You have a lot of schools, partly because of the social-emotional learning issues

ideology that the current superintendent has promulgated, which says don't discipline kids because it hurts their feelings, classrooms have become anarchy. The administrators won't discipline kids who talk back to the teachers and disrupt the education of other students. When they see they can get away with it, the other students imitate it, and

and the class becomes anarchy and the teachers can't take it anymore and they leave, and I would leave too under those circumstances. I've been, as I mentioned earlier, I think I've been a very strong advocate of discipline in the classroom, and that along with we do need to pay our teachers more along with accountability for the results, but we do need to pay our teachers more along with that, along with classroom discipline will stop the exodus of our teachers and attract good teachers.

Now, what about all these school districts? And this is tied to the critical race theory, social emotional learning, all this kind of ideology they're teaching. We only have about two minutes left here. But what about all these schools that are rejecting the officers, the community action officers or student or school resource officers that cities can provide? Yeah, we call them school resource officers. Well, I have been an advocate for

As long as I've been in public life, for having a police officer at every school. When I was superintendent, I lobbied the legislature for more resources so we could have more school resource officers. They have to be there to protect the students and the teachers and the staff from some maniac who may come in to kill everybody, which we recently saw in Texas. Arizona isn't immune to it. If it happened in Texas, it can happen in

in Arizona. And then when I was Attorney General, I proposed that principals appoint a teacher from each school, preferably people who were retired police officers or military, to come get training. I would give the training for free for keeping a gun at school, you know, safely locked up so that the schools could protect themselves in addition to having a police officer.

And it failed in the legislature because all the Democrats voted against it and a few Republicans voted against it. And, you know, some of them would say, I want my schools to be gun free. That's like saying, come get come get us. We're easy targets because we're gun free and there's no one here to protect us. It's absolutely as you want. Tom, we got to go to break here in 30 seconds. How do people follow you? Stay up and support your campaign.

TomHorn.com, Horn with an E, T-O-M-H-O-R-N-E.com. There's a lot of information there about what I've done and what I believe and what I will do. And they can also contribute or volunteer for my campaign. Fantastic. It's going to be a tough election. I need all the help I can get. Fantastic. Thank you, Tom Horn, candidate for superintendent of public instruction in Arizona, breaking battlegrounds. Be sure to tune in for the podcast only segment. Let's go.

Welcome back to the podcast only segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Chuck, good guest today. Matthew Continetti had some great things to say. Tom Horn, boy, Arizona, if you don't pick this guy over Kathy Hoffman, we're crazy. Well, the problem is, I think, is if Tom could go out and make sure his message gets to voters, I think he'd win by 20 points. I agree. It really has to do with money. It really has to do with message.

I was thinking as we were talking, I was writing notes down here and Kylie was peeking. We need almost in a weekly newsletter of talking points to candidates. What are the three things you're going to do and be consistent? And I think Matthew Continetti was hitting on that as well. I am convinced how bad Republicans are at politics because we have so many elected offices with so many subpar people and we keep winning. And it just tells you internally a gut check.

This is a right of center nation. Yes. I think the one thing and I want to get into some Matthew continuity. Maybe we can get him back in sometime here in the future is whereas Trump broke people's minds like Bill Kristol and finally just realized, look, I'm just going to do my grift. He let he left a lot of broken bodies. Yeah. Yeah. What's he's also not understanding is look.

For any company, for any country to succeed, you have to have some people with institutional knowledge and experts. I think we both agree on that. Yeah, certainly. But the fact that these group of people have not come out and pointed the hypocrisy of attacks on the left or the right. For example, I can't take people seriously who don't take seriously that –

The press suppressed, as we know this week, we have the philosopher came out, suppressed the information about Hunter Biden. Polling has showed, and I looked at three different polls now, 4 to 17 percent of Democrats stating had they known about Hunter Biden and the laptop contents, they would not have voted for Biden.

And so what drives me nuts about the Republican Party is we keep pushing this 2,000 mule thing. And I haven't looked fully into it. Well, and actually, I think 2,000 mules is the very legitimate part of that argument. But the machines tied to Venezuela and stuff. And you and I have talked about this. Our party's missing what really happened. You had the suppression by the press who did everything. There really should be an FEC complaint filed against them for campaign finance irregularities. Yes.

Two, the Facebook money to these county recorders. I have a gentleman who's getting his PhD. He's looking now how much the vote increased for Democrats in the cities versus 2016. We'll have that for the show next week. And then, you know, so you have those two things and some other things. But, I mean, it just changes everything. It does. And ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting happened. Yes. And it just changes the whole dynamic. So, yeah.

I want our side to get back. That's the one thing I do feel that Trump did is sort of kill the intellectual upper hand that Republicans had during the 80s and 90s. I mean, we really own the Democrats really had nothing to give. And you had Heritage and these other think tanks continually churning out policy. You'd have to like them. But we were thinking we were thinking about the future. I don't I'm missing that. And I read a lot. Are you seeing any of it? Yeah.

You know where it's interesting. I think you see it with individual candidates. I think Ron DeSantis is a good example of that. But you don't have the institutional support. Right. Right. I mean, I think Carrie Lake here in Arizona for the flag she's taken, if you look at the policy she's adopted, are very forward thinking.

It's an actual agenda to do things. And I think that's what's missing more than anything else. So we don't have that unifying leader. I mean, I'll give you, for example, the Russia-Ukraine thing. Jeremy, would you play that episode from Star Trek movie? So recently I had a conversation with a friend, a big donor, big bundler, and he was against the whole Ukraine thing because I'll just leave Russia alone. Go ahead and play that. Do you know how I feel about them? They're animals, Jim.

There is an historic opportunity here. Don't believe them. Don't trust them. They are dying. Let them die.

So that was our... I'm basically Kirk with Russians. I don't trust them. I don't believe them. So he was going and saying, well, Ukraine's corrupt. I don't disagree, but I can't... I don't trust them. Let them die. I mean, I just... I don't trust the Russians. And what I noticed at that point is because he's more of a populist Republican now, and we both talked about he was big Reagan. I mean, he has a thank you letter still from Reagan for his $100 contribution. We don't have a leader...

that's unifying us and i realized that really at that point because i was just like they're russians like kirk on star trek let them die i don't care about them yeah but they saved the klingons they saved the klingons leonard neim boy spock was very you know and i'm not a star trek guy but i've always remembered that scene because it came out during the cold war was winding down and you know there was always references and culture that that's what they were talking about very much and i i'm very much that thing russians are my enemy i don't i don't i don't

view them as any sort of ally now or in the future. Chuck Warren, cold warrior. Still live. And don't forget my long list for capital punishment. Anyway, let's talk about some education stuff. Well, wait a minute. Before we talk about education stuff, let's talk steak knives. Yes. Because you were telling a story here. I think we have to tell in the air. I couldn't believe this when you told me this. So there is a restaurant in North Scottsdale Steakhouse. It's an independently owned, but it's a nice steakhouse. And so I was having dinner there a month or two ago and

They have very nice steak knives, right? Which you get at nice steak restaurants. This isn't Denny's or something or Sizzler. It's a nice steak restaurant. So I was telling the waiter, I go, these are really nice. And it's big. I mean, it's a big knife too, right? And you can take a bear hunting. And the guy goes, oh, yeah, people like it because we lose about 30 to 40 a week because people steal them. Right.

Folks, I don't know where you're putting this knife. I mean, Kylie carries around like luggage as her purse all day. I mean, she has a roll it in. It's so darn big. I mean, yesterday we went to lunch for a birthday party. You couldn't even put the bag down because it's so big. This is a tad dramatic. Did you not have a hard time putting your bag on the booth seat? Kylie, I have a question. Yes.

We will send a picture of this on Instagram so you can make a decision yourself. Does TSA allow you to carry it on the plane or do you have to check the bag? That fits under the seat. This is my personal item. I don't believe it. Yeah, we will send it. So anyway, I asked him, I said, what are the knives cost? He goes about 70, 80 bucks a piece. So 30, 40 knives disappear a week at 70, 80 bucks. I mean, how much extra are you paying for your steak for all these knife fees? I mean, it's, it's.

It's unbelievable. And I think part of it, too, is I go like when you go to a gym now, you know, because you wipe down, you're more conscious wiping it down. I take pictures all the time. People just like I'm just leaving my towel, you know, this this wet cloth that I wipe down just here.

You can't do the basic things right. You're not going to fix anything. I think it's a little thing. I think this all ties to the breakdown of society. Oh, my gosh. And the breakdown of culture that we're seeing. And I'm going to tell you a story now. This again, we're kind of jumping all over the place in this segment. But this just blew me away because, folks, I think you all know I'm policy director for Carrie Lake's campaign. So I'm talking to a lot of people.

One of the things I do for her is when we get emails on policy questions that our interns and staff can't handle, they come to me for answers. Got one from a couple in northern Arizona asking kind of general questions about mental health for adopted children, for children who have come out of the foster care system and that sort of thing who may have mental health issues.

I called these folks up. I talked to them. They are both federal government employees, so they have very good insurance and all that kind of thing. They have a kid who they adopted who's now 14. This kid is our next school shooter.

I mean, that's what they just described to me. He is a psychopath with multiple personality disorder, violent ideation, tried, I think, a couple of years ago, literally tried to kill his teacher, talks about killing, you know, mass murder all the time, totally focused on this, needs to be in inpatient care, but we don't have it for them. The state is literally telling him, just take him home and medicate him.

Just take them home and medicate them. And we wonder how these school shooters and these people who are doing these acts slip through the system. These folks have been reaching out and they're, you know, obviously they work for the federal government. They know how to pull the strings. They've been reaching out to everyone in the state to try to get some help, to try to figure out what they do with this kid. Obviously, they have to be very nervous. They have him right now in an inpatient facility in another state on their private insurance. That's running out.

This kid's going to be coming home to them. He's clearly a danger to himself and others, including them. What do they do? So what can the state do for that? Well, that's the problem. We have nothing. But what should we do for it? I think we have to come back to the realization that there are certain people that you cannot allow simply out in society, that there are people who need to be institutionalized.

It is. And it goes against, you know, I remember talking about gun control. So I was talking to a liberal reporter in Utah and he is very liberal. And I was talking to him about, I really think if you get, you know, an AR-15 that you should have a doctor's note that you're not on bipolar medication or antidepressants.

Now, this is a guy that's totally anti-Second Amendment. He said, oh, you can't do that. That's interfering in their privacy. Right. And I just said, what's the hell wrong with you? Yeah. I mean, you can't. I don't understand what you're saying. Well, I mean, to me, this is a complicated issue with so many different facets. But a lot of it comes back to the fact that when and it's the only mistake I can point to that Ronald Reagan made when he emptied out the mental institutions, they did not make allowances for what would happen afterwards. Right.

They didn't make a plan. No. Well, it goes what we did in Iraq. You kick Saddam out. What's your next? We didn't have a plan B once he was gone, right? And you have to with these kind of things. And if you're these parents and you're in this position, you're terrified. Can you just imagine the horror they have every night when they go to bed and wake up? Right. I mean, you don't know. Every phone call. Right.

I cannot imagine. But they're doing everything right. And if this kid goes berserk and does the most evil of acts, people are going to immediately point at the parents. And it is certainly not their fault in any way, shape or form. You have a kid who is very, very mentally ill, who needs to be in an inpatient treatment facility potentially for the rest of his life.

I do believe science will make advances in our understanding of the human brain and our ability to correct mental illness in time. But we're not there right now. And we don't have that system. And I think when we talk about school shootings and the violence we're seeing in cities and all these other things, there is a serious deficit in what we're doing for people who are mentally ill. And there is a lot of violence coming from it. Well, and this is something that we talked about that's very important.

of the free market, capitalist, limited government, Republican Party. And we have to realize that circumstances change and that we may make a serious investment in mental health.

I view it as infrastructure in a very significant way. Oh, my goodness. You just called the infrastructure. I knew you liked Joe Biden. Anyway. Folks, thank you for joining our potluck podcast. We hope you have a great weekend. This is Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Hashtag FJB. Have a great weekend.

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