On Friday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
At the end of the second hour, Carmichael discussed the concept of contact tracing and suggested that perhaps the Democratic elite and the media should be the first to explore that option. He reflected on the House Democrats that recently proposed that the country could employ millions of people as contract tracers and speculated that the ultimate goal would be to have them unionized.
(President Trump clip plays)
A permanent lock down is not a strategy for a healthy state or a healthy country. Our country wasn’t meant to be shut down. We did the right thing but now its time to it open up. A never ending lock down would invite a public health calamity. To protect the health of our people we must have a functioning economy.
Leahy: President Trump making some common sense there so, of course, the left hates him.
Carmichael: Yes. I want to talk about contact tracing but before we do that just for a second, The Wall Street Journal had an article about Italy. Now Italy went into the coronavirus outbreak economically in much much worse shape than the US. Almost the entire middle class in Italy now is in desperate poverty. And this is a fascinating article. They are saying it will take 20 years.
Leahy: To overcome…
Carmichael: An entire generation. That assumes certain good policies. It gives you an idea of what can happen. Let me just say this because I used to teach a class, and I said now let’s say you have one person on an island who is working 16 hours a day seven days a week to survive.
Now this person on the island happens to represent both the perfect dictatorship and the perfect democracy all rolled into one. So whatever policy that one person wants to have on the island, that person can say I dictate this will be the policy or I vote that this will be the policy and its one and the same.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carmichael: So this person one day wakes up and says there will be national healthcare on this island from this day forward, this moment forward. And then that day that person goes while he’s working 16 hours a day seven days a week to survive on that particular day breaks his leg and can’t move for 10 days.
I asked my high school students, what happens to that person? And it actually took them a while as they looked around at each other. And finally one of them says, didn’t they die? And I said, yes. He died but that morning he dictated that there would be national healthcare on that island and he died anyway.
And it takes a little while to get around to the fundamental fact that if you don’t have the fundamental resources to support some program that benefits all of the people and if you don’t have the resources than you can make the claim anytime you want to. You just can’t fulfill it. And what Italy is running into now is that their social safety net is falling completely apart because they don’t have the means to sustain hardly any part of it.
That goes to what Trump was saying. We have got to reopen. We have to have a functioning economy of the rich. I’m talking about wealth in the sense of rich. I’m talking about the wealth of the society of food shelter, healthcare. You have to have a functioning society that is generating a certain amount of wealth to do that.
But getting back to what we were talking about with contact tracing. I have said that contact tracing is actually an impossible thing to achieve. But the Democrats have pushed it and pushed it and pushed it as part of the reopening. That we cannot reopen without contact tracing. Then you have these people from Johns Hopkins who are despicable people who are getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.
Leahy: And the public school health is called the John Hopkins Public School of Health, wait for it… The Bloomberg School of Health.
Carmichael: There you go. Ok. So you’ve got these people that go on there. If they were told to support Andrew Cuomo’s call on nursing homes they would get up there and do it. If they were told to do it they would do it. They are the ones who talk about contact tracing as if we have to have it.
There was a Democrat House member who yesterday got up on the House floor that said, we have 35 million people that are unemployed we can take millions of those people, that’s what he said, millions of those people and train them to be contact tracers. Now, what else would he want them to be?
Leahy: I think I know.
Carmichael: Union members.
Leahy: Ah-ha!
Carmichael: He would want them to be union members. He would want them to be union members. So that you have millions of union members paying dues that then goes to the Democrat Party. At the end of all this and you’re trying to dig down deep, this gets into complex problem-solving. That because on the face of it it makes no sense. Because it literally says you have to be able to identify who you’ve been within six feet of for the last 14 days.
Nobody can do that. That’s not even possible. If everybody has an app on their phone, I don’t think apps get you down to the exact foot especially in a grocery store. They might know you are in the grocery store but they won’t know everybody you were next to. But think how frightening it would be if they did?
I think contact tracing is an interesting idea. We need to test it. Let’s take all the members of the Democratic Party who are elected legislators in every state and we’re going to contact trace them as a test to see if it’s even possible. So we’ll figure out what they do, who they talk to, and what they say. Because when you talk there are spittles of little things that come out of your mouth that might and depending on what word…
Leahy: Respiratory droplets.
Carmichael: Thank you. That’s it! (Leahy laughs) the respiratory droplet might go farther than another word. So we need to know what Democrats are saying.
Leahy: Which words are going to shoot the respiratory droplets the farthest?
Carmichael: So we need to know what Democrats are saying regardless of who is saying it. It might be a member of the press that they are talking to. And then we need to contact trace the press.
Leahy: So you see the American Federation of Contact Tracers being part of the AFCAL with the political move to do what?
Carmichael: That’s what the Democrats would like. The Democrats would only support the TSA if they were union members.
Leahy: There you go.
Carmichael: That’s what this is all about.
Leahy: So I told you before you were going to tell me. They actually are trying to get everybody to be contact traced and tested so that they could have a federal database of DNA to track everybody. But I was wrong.
Carmichael: This is more simple than that. That is very complex. This is all about the money. This is all about the money. But there is a way to test it and that’s to test the elites of the Democratic Party and the elites in the media.
Leahy: I like that.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
