Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The 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 all-star panelist and senior editor-at-large at The Epoch Times, Roger Simon, in-studio to discuss his upcoming trip to Minnesota’s Center for the American Experiment and to California for the recall election.
Leahy: In-studio with us all-star panelist Roger Simon. Roger is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, my former boss at PJTV, and also a senior editor-at-large at The Epoch Times. Roger, you’re going up to Minnesota to go to a conference on how to run for school board. Tell us about that.
Simon: I’m going up to get out of the heat. (Laughter) An operation called the Center of the American Experiment.
Leahy: It’s John Hinderaker group who does Powerline Blog.
Simon: They are giving a one-day course in how to run for school board. So that lots of people who never thought of doing it before and now are. And there are a lot of people like that I can tell, I was in big meetings in Williamson County.
And they can learn exactly the best practices to win. And I and my wife, Cheryl, are going up there with the absolute intensity and the desire of these people for us to bring their techniques down here to Tennessee.
Leahy: Let me ask you the big question, Roger. You don’t have to make any announcements now, but there are a couple of things about school boards in Davidson County. The problems, of course, in Davidson County are manifold.
Kids can’t learn to read and write. Their scores are at the absolute bottom of the state in terms of public schools. They’re not really teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic very well. They have imposed the stupid mask mandates, eight to one school board vote.
Simon: And post-school choice, which, of course, is probably the root of a lot of it.
Leahy: And although they claim they’re not teaching Critical Race Theory, they’re doing all the social-emotional learning type stuff, which is basically Critical Race Theory. We’re not teaching Critical Race Theory, except we are.
Just you and me talking here. That’s the deal. So they’re left-wing lunatics. There are nine members of the school board elections in Davidson County, which is 65 percent Democrat, 35 percent Republican, more or less, depending.
The school board elections, it’s a four-year term. They rotate. Four are up in 2022 in August and then five are up in August of 2024. Did a little research on this. Apparently, according to the Metro Charter, you can do recall elections for all school board members.
How about that? So this thing could get started right away. The big question, though, Roger. Do you know anybody personally who might not only attend this conference and perhaps run for school board in Davidson County?
Simon: Not us. It’s not because I’m too lazy to do it or anything like that, it’s because I take my responsibility as an editor-at-large at The Epoch Times pretty seriously, and they’d be unhappy if I took a public office.
Leahy: Yeah, that makes sense.
Simon: Journalistic integrity is hard enough to keep. You know what I’m talking about. Because look where human beings were biased. I’ve never met an unbiased human being. If you have one and know one, he’s probably dead. I shouldn’t be doing things like that.
Leahy: You’re not going to run. But you will learn the techniques.
Simon: And I will write about it, and I will teach it. And one of the interesting techniques, by the way, that I do know about, is not to run by yourself.
To run as a ticket of three or four people for two reasons. One is that if you run by yourself and win, you’re just one person and a woman on this board. But if you win as a little group, you have real power.
Secondly, it’s very easy to be attacked at the last moment by one person who accuses you of beating your wife or whatever they like to do. And the defense becomes very difficult because, oh time’s up.
Leahy: When did you stop beating your wife? That’s the question. It’ll come like 24 hours before the election. By the way, when are you going up? And when will you come back and tell us what you learned?
Simon: Well, I’m going up on the 27th of August and it takes place on the 28th. On the 29th, I’m leaving from Minneapolis back to my old home, Los Angeles, because I’ll be covering for The Epoch Times, the recall election of Gavin Newsom.
And speaking of people who wear two hats, journalistically, my old friend is Larry Elder running for governor of California.
Leahy: And all the polls indicate that right now it’s 50/50 whether Gavin Newsom will be recalled.
Simon: And, you know, I have to think the Afghanistan situation, which tarnishes all Democrats as it well should.
Leahy: And he was asked about Biden, and he didn’t exactly say he totally did a bad job in Afghanistan, but he did say nice things about Biden. I don’t think that’s going to help him.
Simon: No. Right now, anybody who’s a decent human being is so fed up with Biden. You have to be Nancy Pelosi to defend Biden.
Leahy: She did actually. So let me ask you this. You see that Nancy Pelosi has defended Joe Biden’s utter incompetence. I think an argument can be made that his orders were treasonous. I think he could make that argument.
Simon: Oh, easily. And the reason Nancy Pelosi covers for him is she’s a fanatic for political power and cares nothing about anything else. It’s power, power, power, power. Every second of the day. It could be about anything. She could be in any political power party. She has no center except power.
Leahy: So my question to you, Roger, is: there are 222 Democrats in the House of Representatives. And can they all be so callous as to not realize how awful Nancy Pelosi is? Are they that fearful of her own power?
Simon: Yes. (Laughter)
Leahy: Yes is the answer.
Simon: Yes, because she controls the money for them to run her office.
Leahy: But don’t they have any honor?
Simon: No.
Leahy: Okay, I mean, that was a rhetorical question.
Simon: There are things that take a complicated answer in life, you know? And there are some things out there that are just yes or no.
Leahy: A nation run on fear and bad intention. That’s where we are.
Simon: If we have a minute to talk about fear I have something very interesting to say.
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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.
