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 The Epoch Times’ Editor at Large Roger Simon in-studio to talk about his recent visit up at the Tennessee State Capitol and describes the process by which legislation is made.
Leahy: I am delighted to have in our studio, my good friend, all-star panelist Roger Simon, my former boss at PJ TV, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and a guy who, like me, loves the great state of Tennessee.
Simon: I do.
Leahy: It’s hard not to love Tennessee and the people, and the culture, and the no state income tax.
Simon: Oh, I don’t know about that. (Laughter)
Leahy: By the way, how fun is it not to have to file a state income tax return?
Simon: Well, I’ve almost been here four years now, so I’ve forgotten about … what was that?
Leahy: What was that? And by the way, Roger, you’re not going to do this, you actually do not fit the definition of carpetbagger, because you’ve been here for more than three years.
Simon: Well, yes.
Leahy: You’ve been a resident for more than three years.
Simon: Should I run for office then?
Leahy: I think you would improve the field if you did. (Laughs)
Simon: What’s the saying? If I’m elected I will not serve.
Leahy: Shermanesque.
Simon: Yes. But I will stick to being a pundit because it’s easier. And I can pretend I didn’t say it. “Oh, that was a long time ago.”
Leahy: By the way, we’ll get to your experience at the state legislature in a bit. But you’re so right. If you want to run for public office and you’re representing people in a district, your time is really not your own. You have a duty to respond to every single constituent in that district. That’s a lot.
Simon: It’s hard work. I have tremendous respect. I saw them the other night at the Williamson Families event.
Leahy: Yes. Did you go to that?
Simon: Yes, and I wrote about it for The Epoch Times briefly. But the people who are running for the school board now get my tremendous respect. They are the true Americans.
Leahy: They have a slate of 19 running for the school board and for the County Commission in Williamson County. This is what Americans should do.
Simon: Absolutely.
Leahy: If you don’t like what the school board is doing, run for the school board yourself.
Simon: You know, Tip O’Neill was right years ago. All politics is local. Because if you want to overcome the Bill Gates of the world and The Great Reset, and all the horrible stuff you hear about on The Glenn Beck Show and other places – and it certainly is horrible – the way to start is local.
Leahy: Absolutely.
Simon: In fact, it’s the only place.
Leahy: And just so you know, as you know, The Star News Network and Stephen K. Bannon’s WarRoom have announced a strategic partnership.
Simon: Yes, sir.
Leahy: He’s got a fourth hour of his WarRoom program on radio, the John Fredericks Radio Network, and also – they’re not carrying it on Real America’s Voice, but you can get it on Rumble, GETTR, and other outlets.
But he’s focused on, and it’s really quite good because they focus on key swing states and key swing congressional districts. But what they’ve been talking about there is the importance of the precinct strategy.
Our friend Dan Schultz, an attorney from Arizona, said, look, to be a precinct committeeman means you’re getting out the vote. Right now in the Republican Party, 50 percent of those slots are empty, so run for it. And that’s what you can do.
Simon: Speaking of empty slots, the district attorney of Nashville is not running a Republican. And how ridiculous is that in a society where crime is rampant?
Leahy: I have no answer to that.
Simon: That’s a failure of an amazing sort. Hello, Scott Golden. What are you guys doing?
Leahy: And it would also be the Davidson County Republican Party. We’ll get Jim Garrett on. He’s the chairman. But I think you’re right. You gotta show up.
Simon: Jim Garrett is a nice guy, but they gotta go get a candidate to run. A good one. And some of the people in Williamson were very good. One of them was, by the way, “Doc” Holladay.
Leahy: What a great name.
Simon: Yes. It is the fourth cousin of the original Doc Holliday.
Leahy: Well, there you go.
Simon: And he’s very much alive, as opposed to the other one … at the OK Corral.
Leahy: Let’s talk about this. We’ve said many a time that Tennessee is the greatest state in the country by far, in my view, for any number of reasons. And part of it has to do with, I love the fact that we have a part-time state legislature.
And that state legislators do their normal jobs and they come back. They’re closer to us than they are in the big states, the mostly blue states where the state legislature, it’s a full-time gig. They’re really not of the people in California or New York.
Simon: These places are so big, too, that it becomes totally lost. I mean, I lived there.
Leahy: Roger, you had an excellent adventure the other day. You went up to the Capitol. Tell us about that.
Simon: The Cordell Hull building. I went down there because of The Epoch Times people wanted me to go down because one of the heroes of The Epoch Times and everybody’s hero in my book, Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA technology of the famous shots, who has warned us against the dangers of them now.
Ironically, Dr. Malone didn’t testify that much, because everybody was already on his side, I think. And two things transpired that shocked me.
One is, and get ready for this: The Senate committee already passed, and the General Assembly probably will, made ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine legal. (Chuckles) All this time, we’ve been told, stay away from these things.
They don’t work. And all of a sudden we’re being told they do work. Well, of course, they do work. And the other thing that got passed is that acquired immunity or normal immunity now is equal to vaccine immunity. It’s something we knew all along.
Leahy: Pretty significant.
Simon: These are things we knew all along.
Leahy: So did you go to a committee hearing up there?
Simon: I went to two committee hearings.
Leahy: Tell us what that’s like for those in our listening audience who’ve never gone to a Tennessee state Senate or state House hearing, just describe it. Paint a word picture about that experience.
Simon: First of all, a lot of people were there, because these are hot-button issues to do with COVID, of course. But what happens is in the House and in the Senate a member of the House or the Senate presents the bill and the others discuss it and vote on it.
It happens very fast, actually. So my impression was that people had pretty much decided how they were going to vote before this happened.
Leahy: So it wasn’t really a hearing. It was more perfunctory. It had been wired before.
Simon: Yes. It’s a little bit wired. Malone was there with two other doctors to speak, but they spoke very briefly. So you had the impression that each person knew how he or she was going to vote frankly.
Leahy: Yes. I think a lot of bills are like that.
Simon: Because they had so many on the docket. The sausage is the sausage. What’s the old expression? How the sausage is made?
Leahy: If you like sausage and legislation, don’t watch how either of them is made.
Simon: Exactly.
Listen to the full interview:
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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.
