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 Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss historian Jon Meacham’s recent appointment to the board of taxpayer-funded Institute for American Civics at University of Tennessee, and describe their efforts to verify Meacham penned Joe Biden’s hate speech last week.
Leahy: Our virtue-signaling foil, Jon Meacham – who is the self-anointed arbiter of all that is good and is the biographer of several presidents, a professor at Vanderbilt – apparently, according to German-owned Politico and The New York Times, is the author of Joe Biden’s speech from Hell.
Carmichael: You mean the hate speech? Where he says that the MAGA Republicans are evil, bad people who hate democracy.
Leahy: Right. Now, this guy, Jon Meacham …
Carmichael: He’s the one who actually wrote those words.
Leahy: According to German-owned Politico and The New York Times. Now Jon Meacham is a very difficult man to reach. We’ve tried many times. We’ve invited him to come on the program, how many times over the past two or three years? Many times.
Carmichael: Since I’ve been here, at least a dozen.
Leahy: And the message has gotten to him, I’m sure. When the phone didn’t ring, we knew it was Jon Meacham accepting our invitation to come on. It’s very difficult to find a contact point for Jon Meacham.
He will go on MSNBC, CNN, and other outlets where he can control the message, but he doesn’t go where somebody will challenge him. So if you go to the Vanderbilt website, you can’t find contact information for him.
But we are clever, and we found a way to reach out to his representatives. You see, he gives speeches and he gets paid lots of money to give speeches at left-wing groups. And there is a big Hollywood agency, one of the big ones called ICM Partners. And you can go on to that website and ask to connect with Jon Meacham.
And we did that, we did that on Monday, and said, hey, we would like to have Jon Meacham confirm or deny the report in Politico that he is the author, the originator, of the speech from Hell by Joe Biden. And they promise, by the way, that they’ll respond within 24 hours.
Carmichael: And when was it that you contacted them?
Leahy: Monday. Today’s Wednesday. They have not responded in 24 hours.
Carmichael: Anyway, so he did not respond?
Leahy: Yes. Did not respond.
     Voice: Jon Meacham’s on the phone.
     Leahy: (playing along) Jon, we’ll take you on. Jon, are you there? (brief, comic pretense ensues)
    Carmichael: So, he did not respond. They promised that he would respond. This reminds me very much of Joe Biden claiming that he knew nothing about the raid on Mar-a-Lago, because      he was asked directly and he said “I knew nothing about it. I had no advance knowledge.” And you now have information that disproves that statement.
Leahy: The Federal District Court Judge who said, yes, Donald Trump should have a Special Master to review these documents, wrote the following: On May 10, 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration informed the plaintiff, Donald Trump, that it would proceed with, “providing the FBI access to the records in question as requested by the incumbent president.”
Carmichael: That’s Biden.
Leahy: That’s Biden. That’s in their own letter from the National Archives.
Carmichael:Â So one of two things is true with Jon Meacham. Either he is writing speeches for somebody who is a known liar, and by the way, this is not a small lie, about my crowd for the inauguration being bigger than Obama’s crowd.
That is something that the Left keeps saying over and over again as an indication that Trump can’t possibly tell the truth. And in the world of the Catholic religion, that would be called a minor sin. And you don’t have to get a confession.
Leahy: A venial sin, not a mortal sin.
Carmichael: Not a mortal sin. Venial sin.
Leahy: Said the one-time Catholic.
Carmichael: And in the case of standing before the public and saying, “I knew nothing about the FBI raid before it happened,” that’s a mortal sin. And Jon Meacham apparently either is incapable of determining before he helped Biden write the speech whether or not Biden was lying to the American people about probably the most egregious and over-the-top political act by any president ever against a former president. It is, as we like to say here, crossing the Rubicon.
Leahy: Cross the Rubicon. The historical reference is a river in Italy called the Rubicon in northern Italy. And any general back in Roman times would never cross the Rubicon to get that close to Rome with his army. Caesar did that.
Carmichael: And then took Rome by force.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: Okay. And that’s, by the way, exactly what Biden wants to do. Biden is saying, apparently with Jon Meacham’s, not only help – but if this is true, that Jon Meacham actually wrote the words, Jon Meacham is actually participating in writing speeches calling for truly, a true insurrection, in that one political party will destroy the ability of the other political party to mount a campaign …
Leahy: Here’s the other shoe to drop, Crom. And this came out the day before the speech from Hell. Randy Boyd, president of the University of Tennessee, has named Jon Meacham to the 13-member board of the Tennessee taxpayer-funded Institute for American Civics.
Jon Meacham is on that board. It’s supposed to be about bipartisanship and dialogue. It is incredible. And I can confirm that the president did “consult,” as required by law, with the Speaker of the House and with the governor. And they apparently did not object to the appointment of Jon Meacham. I think now there are second thoughts about that.
Carmichael: Can he be fired?
Leahy: He could be, by Randy Boyd.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this 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.
Photo “Jon Meacham” by Jon Meacham. Background Photo “University of Tennessee Knoxville Campus” by Nightryder84. CC BY-SA 3.0.
