Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed conservative comedian and political writer Evan Sayet to the newsmaker line to discuss his move to Dallas and how personal communication is the only way to counteract the mainstream media’s lies.
Leahy: We welcome to our microphones a welcomed relief – a friend, a comedian. We need some laughs this morning – Evan Sayet. Good morning, Evan.
Sayet: Good morning, Michael. But if you think you’re getting laughs out of me at 6:15 a.m. my time, it ain’t happening.
Leahy: (Chuckles) What is your time? Is it 6:15 or 4:15?
Sayet: It’s 6:15 a.m. I’m in Dallas.
Leahy: Oh, you’re in Dallas? Have you moved to Dallas?
Sayet: It appears so. You know, these days, nothing’s permanent. Nothing has to be. All I need is an airport and an internet connection. But so far, Dallas has been very good to me.
Leahy: When did you move to Dallas?
Sayet: Oh, gee wiz. We made the move about two years ago to Nevada thinking maybe we could make a difference. It’s a purple state. Maybe we can make a difference. And two things I discovered.
One, if you’re a public speaker, you want a state that has more than two cities in it. There was Reno, and there was Las Vegas, and then everything in between was owned by the government.
Leahy: And desert.
Sayet: And the desert, indeed. And the other thing I learned to my great sadness was the Republican Party of the state really didn’t seem to care whether it’s red or whether it’s blue. So long as they kept their jobs, they were more than happy. And so we moved on to Texas, where we thought maybe we could do more.
Leahy: So when did you move to Dallas?
Sayet: It was January. I’ve only been here eight months now.
Leahy: And are you liking Dallas?
Sayet: I’m loving it. Absolutely loving it. The people are great. The environment is great. Even the weather, because having lived in Los Angeles and then for 35 years in Nevada for two, we didn’t have weather. Oh, boy, we’ve got weather here. (Laughter) It’s not bothering me too much.
Leahy: Are you more or less impressed with the Republican Party of Texas?
Sayet: Significantly more. And then not just from the top, but from the bottom up. There’s grassroots activity here. There are people who are truly involved. There’s just so much more activity.
And part of it is that there are so many more places for me to go and speak and be a part of it and see what they’re doing. It’s almost like Los Angeles, in that I used to be able to drive from my home for 30 minutes, go speak to the women in Woodland Hills.
The next week, I can do it with the same people in Canoga Park. And so here it’s the same thing. We got Plano next week. If it’s not Plano, it’s McCallen. If it’s not McAllen, it’s Parker. And so I’m out there seeing more. But there clearly is more.
Leahy: That makes an awful lot of sense to me. And I would say you’re in state tax-free Texas, you could have moved to state income tax-free Tennessee. But we’re smaller than Texas, and there are not as many opportunities here as there are in Texas.
It makes an awful lot of sense. Well, can you help me, Evan? I desperately need something funny to laugh at this morning because the school boards have been taken over by authoritarian lefties in many cases.
We just had a school board here, the Metro Nashville Public Schools, voted eight to one to impose mask mandates. And then in Williamson County, which is the suburb just in the south, last night, they voted seven to three impose mask mandates.
They can’t provide any studies that show the efficacy of it. I know that you’ve had some school board successes for a bunch of anti-CRT people – anti-Critical Race Theory people – in the suburbs of North Dallas. What’s your take on that down there?
Sayet: What it is here, there, and everywhere is we’re down to one last thing. They own the media. They own the schools. They own the indoctrination process, the universities. They own the propaganda machinery, news, and entertainment.
We’re down to one last thing, which is us. People, one-on-one going out and using your voice. My expression is they own the media, but we own the truth. That means that they can hit a million people at once with their lies.
We have to be a million people telling the truth to one person at a time. If you think that you’re going to be able to sit home and something’s going to change, the door is only going to continue to slam – and, every day that we wait before we take action.
And we see people taking action. We’ve seen the videos of various community leaders going into the school board meetings and making themselves heard.
Michael, every human decision, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, is based on a cost-benefit equation. What we’ve got to do is increase the cost to them of their totalitarianism, and decrease the benefits.
And one of the ways that you increase the cost is to get their face and let them know that they’re not going to be as comfortable as they would be if you just sit at home. That’s our last hope.
Leahy: When you go out and you speak, what sort of groups do you speak to, Evan?
Sayet: It goes all the way from the local women’s federated to 75 people in Plano to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 people at big events such as Freedom Fest or CPAC.
Leahy: Were you at CPAC down there?
Sayet: I didn’t get a chance to speak this year, but I have always many, many times in the past – at the big one in Washington or now down in National Harbor.
Leahy: What are the themes that you hit on these days? What’s the current theme that gets the most traction? Is there anything that you’re able to say that it’s funny?
Sayet: No. Not really. I’ll tell you why, and I apologize for that. That’s what you’re looking for. My humor is separate from my seriousness. And the reason for it is this. The arguments that I make in my serious lectures like my famous one to the Heritage Foundation and like the ones I’m giving now, I make claims that I do not want people to say to themselves, is he saying that for hyperbolic value to be funny?
No, when I say that I believe that the woke movement is a supremacist movement, I want this point to be understood and understood deeply.
If I were describing the Nazis, I wouldn’t throw in a couple of jokes along the way. In fact, the woke supremacist movement is a supremacist movement akin to – and is potentially dangerous as – any and every other supremacist movement that has ever been, including the big one. The Nazis.
Leahy: It’s interesting because I totally understand your perspective on it. But, you know, I desperately need to hear some jokes. (Laughs)
Sayet: Even when I do jokes, I don’t do jokes. I’m trying desperately in my head to see what I can pluck out. But I don’t do jokes. I do routines. I mean, it’s almost like saying, hey, Abbott and Costello, we got you on the air. Tell us a joke. Well, okay, who’s on first? That doesn’t work unless you go through the whole routine.
Leahy: Yeah, well, I’m up for our own version of the political version of who’s on first. I’ll be Abbott and you can be Costello or the other way around.
Sayet: I got it. It’s actually available in a number of places. You can see it on my Amazon Prime special. Evan Sayet: A Deplorable Mind. Or you can go to evansayet.com and click down to how the liberals reach the tops of their profession.
Leahy: When did you do that Amazon Prime special?
Sayet: Oh, geez, that must be four years ago now.
Leahy: Still pretty big. How has that been received?
Sayet: When people watch it, the response is phenomenal. The problem used to be to get something made. You had to go through the studios, and there was a doorkeeper, the gatekeepers.
But once you got something made, they had the publicity machine behind you, and there were so few things made that you stood out. Now it’s so easy to get things made that it’s no longer production that’s the question. It’s eyeballs. It’s publicity.
Leahy: Yeah, absolutely.
Sayet: It’s standing out from the other 10,000 things available on Netflix.
Leahy: Well you stand out always. Evansayet.com. Thanks so much for joining us. And we’ll have a more extended – we’ll have to work on our version of Abbott and Costello, who’s on first for politics.
Sayet: What I’ll do next time is you’ll give me five minutes, and I’ll give the entire routine.
Leahy: All right. We’re game. Evansayet.com.
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.
Photo “Evan Sayet” by Evan Sayet.
No, the “centrists” and the far right (like the late Rush Limbaugh) control the media. The genuine progressive Left such as AOC have never had control over the corporate media. The fact that she appears frequently on the media does not mean she is running the show. The Reoligious Right still has a bigger monopoly over the media as you see in the number of brainwashed white Tennesseans who believe anything the Tea Party and Cold War mongers tell them.
You don’t full me with your nonsense about leftist control. I wasn’t born yesterday!