Chicago Way w/John Kass: 250 years of common sense, now this?

You shouldn't need a game plan just to get out of the car. Joint Relief Institute can help you fast, non-surgical, immediate pain relief and covered by Medicare. Call 708-888-000000. Some of you may know that I grew up in a family business. run by my dad, a grocery store, but it had a butcher shop. It was known far and wide on the southwest side, and I know that quality means something, and that's why we drive two hours from northwest Indiana all the way to the northwest side of the city of Chicago to Joseph's finest meats at 7101 West Addison Street. Before you go there, you've got to be prepared, so I've got a list for you. Do you have a pen? Italian sausage hot. Italian sausage mild. Get pork chops, but order them thick. And of course, get some beef too, like bone in ribby steaks, nothing like it. And if you don't know exactly what to get or how to cook it, ask Ben or sell. and tell them John Cassing. And I'd like to tip my hat to Joseph, the patriarch, the owner, the founder who built this store for his family with his two sons, Ben and Sal. In his mid-90s, he had serious heart surgery, and he made a triumphant return. He loves his place. And I do too. And so does anyone who shops there. It's like family. They care about the details. They care about you. Joseph's finest meets 7101 West Addison Street, Chicago, a family tradition since 1977, and a proud sponsor of John Cass News and the Chicago Way podcast. Well, I know that you're still struggling to recover from that awesome 250th birthday celebration for America. But my voice is gone. I can't speak because I was shouting. I believe that we will win at the top of my lungs. And now Jeff Carlin is going to pick it up. Thanks, John. Yes, as you can hear, John's voice is raspy at best, but he'll fight through for this episode of the Chicago Way podcast on WGM Plus with myself, Jeff Carlin, executive producer at WGN Radio, and of course, Johncast, executive editor of Johncast News.com, where for less than a dollar a week, you can get a full cup of Midwestern Common Sense served right to your mailbox. And what are we talking about today? We are talking about just that. The idea that it's 250 years and where are we? And where have we been? And where should we go? With none other than Charles Lipson, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago, our friend, big brain, big mind, who writes so eloquently about really complex things and makes them very simple to understand. Check him out at charleslipson.com for his latest and greatest.

And where are you as the smoke settles on fireworks display near you and the mortar shells are hitting planes coming in and out of midway? And the Republic hopes to make a bid for another 250 years. You're on the Chicago Way podcast on WGM Plus. So this is a guy who lives high on the hog and he has this Tammany Hall style attitude to power. And it is, it's the Chicago Way, absolutely. The Chicago Way is a deep cultural phenomenon. It's the Chicago Way. The Chicago Way, that's the focus. In a tower by the river, there lived a man. There was a man who took a stand with pen and paper in his hand. Defeating foes in every ward with a pen more mighty than the sword. No escape from his ink lasso in a tower by the river. Castle. Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife. You pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital. You say one of his to the morgue. That's the shanklew him. Castle. I'm stuffy. I believe it. I don't know it. I'm stuffy. A lot of allergies, pollen in the air. And that's too bad because I wanted to serenate our friend, Charles Lipson, the cowboy from... Austin, Texas. John, it's the only way you could ever be stuffy. Exactly. Well, John, I paid my admittance. I'd like to hear you sing. Let's get it going. One, two, three. I'm leaving Cheyenne. I'm bound for Montana. I'm leaving Cheyenne. Goodbye, old paint. I'm leaving Cheyenne. How's that? That's great. So that's an illusion to Charles picking up his stakes and heading to Austin. Yeah, John picked up from Chicago and got as far as the Indiana border, and that was it for him. But I kept moving. I was trying to get back east. He didn't want to abandon the snow. And the Italian beef. Oh, man. Oh, man. Well, I'm here in Austin where both my adult children live with their families, and we move from the Hyde Park neighborhood, and I want to tell you something about the celebration of the fourth here, not the public fireworks and so forth, but the kind of quiet things that people do on their own street. And in Chicago, in my neighborhood, which was near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, you could go all around Hyde Park, and you would just not see an American flag on the fourth. I flew one on my front porch, and one of my neighbors who is a...

professor who studies the period before the Civil War flies one that has the circle, the stars in a circle from the 1830s. But that's really it. Here in my little neighborhood, which is on the outskirts of Austin, a middle class type neighborhood. I would say every other house, maybe more, has at least one flag and sometimes more than one. Do they have that don't tread out bee flag? No, no, they don't. I love that. I do too. I do too. But the state that originated it, they're the ones who lie down and are treaded upon. But I'll tell you how many flags there are here, John. There are so many that... There is one house with a sign supporting a Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico, that actually has an American flag. That's how patriotic people are. There was a democratic household that flew an American flag. With over three decades of serving up streetwise insight and local perspective on page two, the voice of John Cass has a home at Johncastnews.com. There's a new sheriff in town. This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to have. But as he settles in, can you deal with the hysteria, the meltdowns, the constant whining? I don't know what to do. You know what you need? You need a good cup of common sense. Like the kind of common sense you get when you subscribe to Johncastnews.com. I'm John Cass. 40 years a journalist in Chicago. That's the Chicago way. I opened this website, Johncast News, so that you could have a decent cup of common sense. This great country of ours was built on its entrepreneurial spirit. It's time that you join the frontier of independent journalism at Johncastnews.com. Subscribe today to get access to great columns from John Cass, Dan Proft, and others. Don't be a chum alone, and subscribe at Johncastnews.com. Lindholm roofing has appointments available now to provide you a complete roofing, siding, gutter, and tuck pointing inspection. Call 773-283-283-7675 or Lindholmroofing.com. Tell them that Lou sent you. Lindholm roofing, their family, has your family covered. Is that the fellow who's running that? on the platform that God is not binary or something, that God is all. Well, I think he means that God can go in, use either locker room in a high school. But he's also said, he's also said things like the American flag is a very complicated symbol. But I've got to tell you that the guy who's running against him has got a lot of problems to Ken Paxton. Right. But I don't want to get into, you know, Texas politics. Why not? I don't care.

I don't pay any attention. I hardly paid attention in Chicago to local politics. I just watched it circle the drain. The thing about the thing you notice here in Texas, although Austin, you know, is a liberal city, is that you just have really good public services. And the streets are well paved. There's not a lick of garbage on the streets. Everything is picked up. There's no state taxes. So they're not doing it with that kind of funding. It's just a well-governed. state and people are moving here. They're moving to Tennessee, which has no state taxes. They're moving to Florida. But it's not just the lack of state taxes. It's that public services are much more competent. I was just seeing that in California now, They are functionally bankrupt. There's no way they can pay the pension obligations that they now have to state employees, and there are federal court rulings, longstanding federal court rulings that promised pension benefits cannot be reduced for public employees. So they've got to pay these people, and they have not funded these. And I think this is true. across a lot of blue states, you're also seeing something, and none of the European states allow this, right? If you live in Manchester or Birmingham or something, you can't, or you live in London, you can move to Manchester or Birmingham if you think that there is sort of better local governance, but you won't get any difference in taxes or anything like that. That's just not true in America. That's interesting. And Charles, what do you make of the reasoning? I mean, the size difference alone probably has something to do with the service piece. But is there, in your estimation so far, being there, you know, I hate to say this way, but like a suckling class, a class that is just living off of entirely off of taxes like in Chicago? Not nearly as much. I mean, it's certainly true that you have public sector unions. It's worth remembering that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a major friend of labor, opposed public sector unions. And the reason that public sector unions are different from private unions is that the people who are negotiating with a private union are the people who manage the company, and they are... ultimately responsible to shareholders. So they want to have good workers and they can't pay them too little or those workers will go to another company. They can't pay them too much or the company won't have profits and they'll lose out to their competitors. But in the case of a public sector union, the people sitting across the table

It's often blacks in the South, it certainly was. Never Greeks, though. I don't know why Greeks have been saved. Why? Because they're so hospitable, John. Yeah, I don't know. I personally, John, I personally would never oppose any group that could serve me gyros. Yeah, with onions. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the old saying, John, you don't bleep where you eat. And if you're going to eat somewhere in a major city, there's a good chance someone Greek has had their hands on it. And I got to tell you, I got to tell you, the idea, the idea that you could look at a gyros and that people looked at those gyros roasting and invented the gyroscope from that. I think that's so impressive. I mean, that's what Hank Johnson believes in. Hank Johnson, Representative Johnson, was the one who said that if the U.S., he actually asked a senior admiral, if we moved all of our troops to one side of an island, wouldn't the island tilt over and sink? And that guy's still in Congress. Yep. That's New York for you. All right. Well, in Chicago... He's from Georgia. He's from Georgia. Oh, yes. I take that back. He is from Georgia. Now, in Chicago, we have a routine weekend. Mayhem. People getting slaughtered in the streets. And what happens? I don't know if it's really news yet. But Larry Snelling, the police superintendent, has had it up to hear with, according to my sources, with Johnson. Yeah. And Johnson wanted him to hold a joint news conference to kind of spread around the pain that he was giving. And Larry said no. Superintendent said no. And I give him 100% on that. He wasn't going to go out. He wasn't going to play the fool for Johnson on the way out. What do you guys think of that? Well, I think it's a very serious matter. They haven't hired enough police. The police are not backed by the administration. And then you have judges that let these people out as soon as they come into court. It's a circular system that's very, very bad news. And my sense is that ordinary people have had it. And it's shocking, really, that this sort of thing passes for social justice. Who are the people who are most hurt? They're sort of ordinary law-abiding, especially lower middle-class people who are just trying to raise their children, get them an education, and have them rise up. Black women are victims of these thugs. monsters. They're pawns. They have no chance. And they're the ones who have to take public transportation at night to get to their jobs. Let me build on that for a second. Have you seen the demographics of the vote for the so-called Democratic Socialists of America?

Let's hear about it. It is 4% black. 4% and it's about the same number of working class. It is something on the order of 30% of the membership have graduate degrees. I'll imagine mostly in social work or something. But the fact is it's sort of These people who've come out of college with a psychology, sociology, or gender studies degree can't get a job. or can't get a job that they think is right for themselves, and then they vote for people like Zohran Mamdani for mayor, and he imposes rent control. The landlords can't make any money, so there's no new building. People don't maintain their apartments because, I mean, you know, the landlords don't maintain their apartments because there's no money to do it. It just leads to predictable decline. They're undereducated and they're underqualified, but they have great egos and they believe they're worth all the money that Obama and other people are making. And they're upset that they're not making it. So they're going to wreak havoc on our culture until they get it. Well, it started with my generation in the 60s of rebelling. And we had a good reason to rebel against the Vietnam War. It was a costly mistake and a deadly one. But since then, the educated classes... of America have been more and more removed from contact with ordinary working people. They claim on the left to be the voice of those people. But I mean, the only ones that they ever see are the people who mow their yards. Well, that's amazing staff. And I have no doubt it's true. Only 4% of the... Democratic Socialists. How does it go? Are black. I mean, look, and you can see this actually in the elections in New York for Congress and so forth. They're different. These congressional districts run across different demographic areas. And you have working class areas, lower middle class, working class areas. And those areas are not voting for the people who claim to be the flag carriers for those people. The ones who are voting for them are the baristas at Starbucks. The white chicks. The new.

newly hired, fresh out of Yale law school at a big law firm, but these people are not going to make partner, and they're angry. They're making a huge amount of money. They're making $200,000 a year, those people, not the barista. That's not enough for that. Yeah, and for them, I mean, there's a, there's a book by a guy, God, S-A-D-S-A-A-D. Right. I'm familiar with him, yeah. Interesting. Yes, on sort of this empathy that eats itself. It's suicidal. It is suicidal. The idea is, by the way, the other statistic, if you were to look at these people who are so interested in the downtrodden, they give no money to charity. Yeah. They absolutely give no money to charity. And you look at, you look at... People who are the people that they hate, you know, the conservative Christians and so forth. And they give huge amounts to charity. How do you trust people like that? And then they call themselves all these weird things like socialist feminists and, you know, a democratic socialist or markets. And they don't even realize what they're saying. Like they come out and say, oh, America's bad. We're bad. We've done bad things. Well, that was Zohran Mamdani's speech. Right. His fourth of July speech was. you know, what an awful country it is. And it's so odd to see these first generation immigrants. who hate the country. John, you can speak to that a lot better than I can because not only did your family move here, but you must have known lots of other people who did. There's a striking difference between people who moved here from Greece after World War II and people who moved from Somalia. Well, you know what? Madabians of the class, Indians, I think his... South Asian. Yeah. Ethnic background, Indian, right? Well, Indians who lived in Africa. Yes. In other words, colonists. Yes? Well, that's the thing. They get so mad about the U.S. and say, we're so bad, and we've done all these horrible things, and then they call themselves Marxists. And they're like, you know how many people Marxism has killed over the years, right? Oh, no. 150 billion. Well, that's come to never do it, right? That's because they never did it right. Right, yeah, right, exactly. That's the thing it kills me. We want to just go down to the facts, and I'm all about numbers. Republicans and democracies, I think, are way behind anything that Marxist and communists put up as far as raw numbers and ruining humanity and killing people. What was my mind? It's important to look at one underlying fact there.

If basically transactions are voluntary, that is, I buy a car because I want to buy that car. Those people want to sell it to me. We agree on a price. Everything in the car was manufactured by somebody who sold it at that price in a voluntary transaction. The people who work at every place that made those things. did so voluntarily. And then you switch to a system that is a command system. Everything ultimately is going to be done by someone who has the power to command you. And they can command you where to live. In the Soviet Union, there were internal passports. So I couldn't have moved. from Chicago to Texas without a permission from the government. I couldn't have worked in any job without permission from the government. And it's not just that I needed permission. The government would have decided which sectors were going to receive. capital and they can't they have no way to set a price either on anything how much should a television sell for and the answer is we know what it will sell for in in a market economy because everything is a voluntary transaction and of course everybody's trying to make as much money as they can but that's subject to competition So they can't just charge $1,000 for a TV that somebody else is charging $500 for. Nobody will buy the $1,000 TV unless it's a heck of a lot bigger or better. But in an economy without a price system, there's no way not only to set the price of the TV, but to tell you how many TVs you should produce relative to how many cars you should produce. So it's a system that... It ends up being powerfully inefficient, but it always ends up depending upon command. And then the people who are in command are going to take everything for themselves. That's how it always is. Always right. They get the steak. They get the fillet and we get the... Trimmings. Yeah, trimmings. By the way, let me say something about that. I was... Do you know why when an animal is out in the field, it's called a cow, but when it's on the plate, it's called beef? When it's out in a pen, it's called a pig, and when it's on your plate, it's called pork. Do you know the origins of that difference in terminology? At least though we have a teacher. wanting us to know something. That's enlighten us. Okay. The answer is that when it was out in the field, it was being raised by Anglo-Saxon peasants, and they used their own Anglo-Saxon language. When it was being served to the elite, they had come over in 1066 from France.

And language like beef is from Booth. And Booth ultimately came from the Latin. Pig is Anglo-Saxon. Pork. By the way, that's what. And to get a kind of, to continue on this, if you want to think about how the elite made. this common language, denigrated the common language. Think about the word for sex copulation. It's latinate, right? Now think about what the Anglo-Saxon word is. And of course, the Anglo-Saxon word is considered a curse word, right? So this is, we're not entirely immune from this. This is kind of built into it, but we don't have, unlike medieval England or France or whatever, we don't have a hereditary elite. And that's a big part of the anger that you see on the East Coast. from Yale and Harvard and Princeton. Because they were the old elite and they have been displaced. Well, now we're going to see the same pattern once again that we began to see in the 2020. I remember when leftist mayors, like Lori Lightfield, were in panic that they would be trashed and attacked by the hard left. Yes, yes. And they had nothing to say. They couldn't fight. They didn't know what to say. We'll look at Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are in that position now. All the candidates that Hakeem Jeffries sponsored in New York lost to candidates at Zohran Mamdani. supported Chuck Schumer is dead man walking. You know, by the way, the interesting issue there in the Congress, if the Democrats win the House, which is widely but not universally predicted. If they win by a lot, then Hakeem Jeffries could be not only elected speaker, but have a fair amount of power, at least within the House. But if it's a narrow victory, they're going to be on the order of 20 or so, very hard-left, really neo-Marxist members of his caucus.

And he won't be able to get around them any more than Republican House speakers were able to get around the Tea Party. Well, they adopt, they destroyed the Tea Party by adopting it. But they got Livingston and other people, so-called rhinos. to lead the tea party and marshal them and uh The Republicans never, Tea Party never recovered from this. Well, to the extent that the Tea Party is really about. It's a populist thing. Yes, to the extent that it was about lowering taxes and so forth, those are standard Republican thing. But the populist movement in both Republican and Democratic Party really. removes the guardrails of the constitutional democracy. I mean, the Democrats want to, would like to make Puerto Rico estate and Washington, D.C. estate. They would like to pack the Supreme Court. I mean, there's all of these. It's not just that. They're all bad ideas. They're really a wrecking ball to the constitutional structure in order to achieve immediate outcomes. What should we do with Puerto Rico, though, Charles? Should we cut them loose? Does that make more sense? They're rather underrepresented. It turns out that when you put the vote, when you ask Puerto Ricans to vote, they actually prefer the current status. And they don't want to become an independent state. an independent nation. And the reason for that is that they're hugely subsidized by the United States. I mean, we pay a lot of welfare, in effect, to individual citizens. That's why we bought them. Yeah, it was just, it was a mistake. But, and we, we avoided the mistake in Cuba, right? We, uh, there was a debate about whether to take Cuba. Yeah. There was a debate about Cuba before the Civil War because the South wanted it to add another sort of slave-owning area. But it does trouble me that the poem that says the center will not hold. And I think that the problem is for the problem is that this rise of

Populism knocks down all these guardrails. And the main logic, when you see this Save America Act that Trump is pushing, would eliminate the Senate filibuster. It would basically turn the Senate into a clone of the House, right? Where it's... and would be a fundamental change in how things work. But it seems to me that the best argument for it is not, oh, the Save America Act, even though I think it is absolutely reasonable to ask people to somehow prove that they're an American citizen to vote in an election. Yeah, I'd like to see it. I'd like to see it. But also with a system, much like we do, you know, selective service, that everybody, every citizen then gets a voting card and when they're 18 and it's a picture and an ID and it's them. And they renew it every five years, whatever, because that's how you protect yourself. And it's, I want both things. They don't want this. Well, we want the rule because the rule will be used to cut people out and make it harder. I mean, that's absolutely true in our history. So. How do we not compromise this stuff? What is happening in our country that nobody can come to common sense? You've got a situation in which if you vote with the other party on almost any issue, there are a few issues in which you can do a traditional log row. You get an agricultural bill through usually because the Democrats want the welfare aspects of it and the Republicans want the subsidies to farmers. So you can occasionally get things through. Some common sense. But, yeah. Does that include, uh, corn for wild pigs? I don't think so. I'll try it. I'll tell you what it includes. It includes ethanol. Yeah. And that is just ludicrous. But you can't get, you can't winter. a Republican primary in Iowa, presidential Republican. If you're against ethanol, right, it's a subsidy to farmers. Or Illinois, it's my thing. By government subsidy, don't you dare touch it. Yeah. Yeah. I think the wild hogs are doing okay on their own. The numbers are insane in the Midwest. Oh, you checked it up? Yeah. Nine billion. Just remember, it's the mascot of the University of Arkansas football and athletic teams. They have the racerbacks. They'll kill you if they find you. They will. I'm going to go camping in Missouri or Iowa. I'm not by yourself. Now without a gun. Don't protect yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the bacon comes for you. Even a gun, you have to, well, you know, if you can't, if you're not a good shot, it's not going to work. You're some bare bangers, maybe. You just make them angry. The other thing I found about Texas is that it is just remarkable. The major minority group here are Hispanics. And the amount of, Hispanic entrepreneurs that run so many of the things. It's just remarkable. And in my particular area, there are huge numbers of South Asians who've come. to work at Tesla and in the high-tech industries. I don't know how many are citizens versus H-1B holders, but it's an ethnic mix in this area, but a very different ethnic mix than you see in some of the northern cities. Now, Chicago actually has more Hispanics than it has African Americans, but it doesn't have more Hispanic voters. than it does African-Americans. Because we call them differently? No. Well, for two reasons, I would say, John, but you may have a better take on this, and Jeff, you may too. The first reason is that some of the Hispanics are not here legally, but I think the bigger reason is that African Americans had been organized as a political group for almost a century. They were organized. even under the old Chicago Daily Machine. And before the Daily Machine, there were... There were people like Alderman Dawson who ran the black area, just as there were alderman who ran the Jewish area, and there were Alderman who ran the Italian areas and the Greek areas and so forth. These were all well organized, and the Hispanics have not been around as long and are not nearly as well organized. They were organized on the basis of lighting up behind the truck. on election date to get your turkey. When you got your ham, you knew what you had to do. You had to vote. And if you didn't vote, you didn't get another ham the next time. Right. Or you didn't get the job or you didn't get that. Right. I talked also to, in red, about how the old Chicago machine worked back in the days when it was really working. Yeah. And they had, um,

They had people down at the block level who would go house to house. And they weren't just going house to house. to say, I want you to come out and vote for Joe Blow or more likely Joe Bolonski, they would go into your house and ask you what's on your mind. What do you want? What do you need from us? And often what you needed was a new garbage can or there was a pothole. So there was a feedback element. And then you would be told, I'm wanting you to vote for our guys, and we can make sure you'll get that, and then they would hand them a sheet with who to vote for. But the main point, and then if I was in charge of my block for the Democratic machine, I would be held responsible for the vote that came in from my block. And it was easy to tell how people voted. If they went into the booth and came out in five seconds, they had pulled the Democratic lever. I didn't want them in there for a long time. One of the most, one of the famous stories is of the 10th Ward Precinct Captain, Yukon Muschola. I've never even heard of him. Tell me the story. He was a wrestler, a pro wrestler. Okay. And, uh, And he was, you know, he made a living at that. And what he didn't like is when he would take a voter to vote. Yeah. What he didn't like is to see them shuffling their feet. Oh. Oh. You're behind the booth, you're at the booth, and he could see the feet. He didn't want you shuffling because he didn't want you to go Republican or Democrat. He just wanted both feet planted, pull the lever, and get out. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, there was a very famous book written about the Chicago political machine. Rickoff? Yes, Milton Rakoff. By the way, Milton Rakoff's son is one of the most distinguished historians in America at Stanford University, historian of American Revolution. But,

was in political science and university of Chicago getting his PhD, and he wanted to write about the machine. And Chicago sociology in particular believed that the way that you did these things was you, you sort of, it was almost like the way they do anthropology. You lived with the natives. And you saw how the natives cooked their meat and killed their animals and planted their porn. And he what native, didn't he? Yes. And he decided, he was told by his advisor and he decided to do it that the best way to learn about the Chicago machine was to volunteer and to actually work inside the machine. Not to be, not to, you know, wear a wire for, like, It's just happened against Gavin Newsom out in California, or happened against a lot of Chicago people, but just to volunteer for the machine. And he goes and he asks the local ward healer, the ward boss, can he, in Hyde Park or whatever, can he volunteer? And this is just incomprehensible. to the ward boss, and he asked him, what do you want? We don't want, nobody, nobody said. You know, like, do you want a job in, do you want a job in streets and sanitation or what do you want? And he says, I don't want anything. I just want to, you know, volunteer. And he says, who sent you? Right. Who's asking? Who sent you? So it should be. somebody who's well connected and, you know, reliable member of their machine. And he says, well, nobody sent me. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm just here to volunteer. And the title of his first book was from the answer the ward boss gave him, which was, we don't want nobody, nobody sent. I'm sure the publisher, when they read this stuff, they thought, we got to. We got a gold on here because, I mean, every, like Jack Parr and all the different talk shows in those days, one. Yeah. Bilt Reik on, everybody won in the bus. Yeah, we don't want nobody, nobody sent. And it's the perfect expression. I mean, I'm sure that if you volunteered. to work for the Chicago Teachers Union in an election campaign, you would get that basically the same answer, right? Right, like I keep volunteering for Tony Breckwinkle and she doesn't take me.

I don't know what. By the way, Tony was my next door neighbor in a small apartment. We had small apartments next to each other when I first moved to Chicago in the late 70s. Tony, Tony's husband at the time, they were married for many. Yeah. Had the best name, Zeus Preckwinkle. That's a powerful name. Well, she was a member of that old liberal do good. It was IVI, IPO, the old independent voters of Illinois, independent precinct ordinance. Yeah. Do you, and you, you may not know this, Jeff, but when back in those days, when you were elected. to the state legislature from a particular district. There were two from the majority party and one from the minority party. Good old days. No, I mean, it was set up specifically that way. I assume that downstate there were two Republicans and one Democrat. Is that how it worked, John? It was about not concentrating power. Yes. And it was about, I guess, freedom in a way. And it was basically destroyed by none other than Dick K. You remember Dick K? Yes, from a Dick K from UIC, University of Illinois and Chicago. Yeah, and he was on NBC and he did a series of pieces about how piggish, piggish they were. How many members were down there. We had too many members. Yeah. They wanted, he thought that if he could get the numbers. caught down. Yes. And you know what happened? Who would take advantage in that? Mike Madigan. Right. Dick Kay was NBC5. Yeah. And I was mixing him up with Dick Simpson, but it was a big gas bag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was interesting. There were a lot of members, but the, this sort of. two and one system ensured that there was a kind of moderation in the legislature which ended when that system ended that's why we need these kind of guardrails in the system there's a there is i'm trying to remember who which great political philosopher said this and it was about tearing down fences out in a rural area and a statement was don't tear down a fence

until you know why the fence was put up in the first place. And it's really true. If you're going to change all these rules in the Senate or the number of people in the Supreme Court or what people speak. Right, exactly. Yeah. remember why the fence was put up in the first place and what purpose it served because I mean that's what happened with the Chicago with the Illinois legislature and look at the trouble we're in in Illinois. That's the theme of Jonathan Turley's book, John, we were talking about last week, The Rage in the Republic. Do you know him, Charles? I wish I did. Me too. He's from Chicago. He's from Chicago. He's a Chicago Catholic boy, I think, went through the parochial schools and so forth. And I would love to meet him. I think he's a very sensible guy. He is. I'm halfway through the book, Rage in the Republic, The Unfinished Story of the American American Revolution. And that's essentially the premise, Charles, is the nail that there is that don't tear down fences unless you know what they're for. And the idea of getting a revolution is great. And then you build your fences. But you can't tear down your fences after your revolution because it's protecting you, right? It's protecting all of you. Yes, yes. And it's a great read. I recommend everybody, especially in light of what's going on now. But I'm halfway through efforting trying to get him on to talk to us because he also reads it. It's a very soothing read. I would love to join you or to connect you up with him. I want to say something actually about the 200th anniversary. because, and contrasted to the 250th. Sure. My sense of the 200th was that... We were coming out of a very dark period. We were, it was in 1976, we were, we had gone through Vietnam. We'd just gotten out of Vietnam as losers. Nixon had been booted out, but before him, his vice president on corruption, Spiro Agnew. What a fool. Yeah. The, the Kennedys had been killed. Martin Luther King had been killed. So we were, and we had Gerald Ford as a kind of what Lyndon Johnson used to talk about legislation.

To do the legislation, what you did to hot coffee, you'd put it in the saucer and let it cool. It was called saucered and blowed. And Gerald Ford was saucering and blowing this overheated time in the Republic. But I was very fortunate. My thesis advisor. I was getting my Ph.D. I just got it at about that time. But my thesis advisor had a house that was right on Lexington, Massachusetts Green. And Lexington and Concord were where the first battles of the revolution took place. And so I saw a reenactment on our 200th anniversary at the spot where things really... began. It was really touching. And I feel like the story this year is the contrast between Trump at

The underneath the carvings of the president at Mount Rushmore and Zohran Mamdani saying how awful the country is. Yeah, he looks to know what he's talking about. I got into an argument the other day with a very left-leaning group. who was making the case that the discussion was, the premise of this discussion started as, why aren't, why isn't the world talking about what's going on in other places where genocide has been absolutely proven and we know what's going on? And the example was, you know, the Uyghurs, Uyghurs, Uyghurs, in China, you know, this Turkic Muslim group that's been, for the last 20 years at least, you know, have been, have been systematically wiped off the planet. You know, their culture. Everything. Right. And everybody looking at it says, well, we only see a little piece of what's going on and it looks like a genocide. So we've got to assume it's a full blown genocide. My point is that I'm making that argument that, you know, this is, it's because people are interested in. You're being used. And these idiots are like, what? How can you say that? How can you say that's worse? And I'm like, wait a minute. You're trying to find there's a worse terp, a more bad genocide. That's where we're coming from. That's the, we have to get to these people that they don't even have a base level understanding of what's bad. I mean, that's, I almost, I was so depressed after this conversation because I couldn't get it through to them that. The intent is the same. If you're going by the fact that you're saying Israel is creating a genocide, then how can you say one's worse than the other? What does that say about you as a person saying that this group is getting more attacked than that group? And I don't know how you can even begin to alter that. I do find the kind of knowledge of the world. combined with very biased reporting, sort of weak knowledge, biased reporting, really make a toxic mix. In that regard, these TikTok videos of Europeans coming to America for the World Cup are the most stunning because they realize firsthand they've been lied to. Yeah. Now, it's granted they're not going to downtown Gary, Indiana or Jackson, Mississippi, right? They're not going to the worst parts of Chicago. That's all true. But they are going into a Costco or a Walmart. And by the way, if you look at the average income, the average income in England, is lower than the average income in the poorest of the American 50 states, which is Mississippi. Mississippi has a higher average income. And that's not because there are a lot of billionaires in Mississippi or anything. It's just the average person in Mississippi.

is doing better than the average person in the United Kingdom. And this, the divergence between America, America, uh, believes in new starts. That's why all those, uh, the West was such a. an important part of the American story. You could just leave Massachusetts. You could leave Connecticut or New York. You could move and you could not only find cheap land. You could start over. Nobody knew what you were. There's an old story of... I assume apocryphal of a law firm getting started in Chicago more than a century ago. And... riding back east to see if they could get a new young lawyer to come and help out at the firm. And they were told that this particular candidate, his mother was a cabot, and his father was a lodge. And the Chicago firm writes back and said, some confusion here needed for legal purposes not breeding. And that's the American story. When I was a sophomore at Yale, one of my roommates' family had come over on the Mayflower, and the other had escaped from the Nazis. And in fact... The one whose family had escaped from the Nazis, his father was sweeping the floor in a hospital and was talking with a doctor in broken English about certain medical procedures. And the doctor said, well, how is it that you who are sweeping my floor know about medical procedures? And he said, well, I was a professor of medicine in Germany. And by the end of that man's life, the guy who was sweeping the floor, I had dinner with him. He was the head of his medical society in the state of New York. So we allow that in America and to the extent that people do anything to block this kind of upward mobility and to the extent that immigrants don't want. to participate in it, spend all of their lives denigrating what we've achieved. I think we're losing something of what made America great. Also, I think before we go on, we should realize that 53% are one of the Cato Institute come up with polls that's shown 53% of the American people.

Don't give two things about the founding of this country. Why is it? I blame teachers like Jeff Carlin. Ah. Nah, not me. Can't play me yet. Jeff, tell us about your sense. You're becoming a teacher, a science teacher. Your sense of how our public schools are doing. Well, I will be speaking a little on a turn because I am actually set up to start my... student teaching this fall and my observation in classroom live. A lot of what I've been doing is clinical, so it's, you know, simulated with clinicians who are offering similar, playing the role essentially of students with different, I call roadblocks in their education. And in that, I will say that it's, it's not. only focused on, in that vein, it's not only focused on, you know, mental disabilities or learning disabilities. It's also really focused on, you know, a holistic sense. So, you know, children who speak a different language or children who are, it's documented coming from a poor background and may not have resources at home or most parents may be working and the kids are long, that kind of thing. So it's, it's, a little more holistic, I feel than when maybe I was a kid and my parents were teaching, you know, when I was a young, a young lad. As far as the, you know, that idea that the indoctrination or that the, you know, skipping or picking and choosing of history and facts and what we know, I haven't encountered that personally yet. However, I will say, right, however, I will say that I've encountered a lot of people in the pipeline who absolutely represent that. worldview and I worry about them being able to draw a line between me because I've talked about this before. I, a teacher should not be in the role of indoctrination. A teacher should not be in the role of pushing any worldview other than explore and understand. I mean, that, that, that's what you should be teaching. Let's your kid till a kid turns 18, they should be, you should give them every. piece of information about the world and worldview to let them have a toolkit to go out and experience life and hopefully build a toolkit of common sense. But when we start with a broken common sense baseline, like the genocidal question we were talking about before, it really makes it an uphill battle to... correct that when they're an adult when they're in the real world and they're seeing things and then the world becomes too hard for them and then they fall into the trap where then well they want handouts or they want this they want someone to fix it for them and really and that's

They're the upstart mentality, kind of like you're talking about how in Austin, there's a lot of, you know, there's a second and third generation Hispanics and Latinos who are probably, you know, or blossoming, right. And it's because they had that. They had that upstart that had that mentality where I'm going to do it myself. And that is is not being taught as much. I don't think. And I thought, I think the, the people who are teaching it are. are victims of the upbringing that led them to this point. And I'm not trying to call them victims for the sympathy's sakes, but victims for understanding that their whole worldview has essentially been handed to them by people who only have one objective is to indoctrinate them. And that's unfair. And I think that's the biggest problem in Chicago. Well, whoever gets you is going to be very fortunate, my friend. Very fortunate. I hope so. It breaks my heart when I see these young people who they just don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm also concerned about seeing that the students who are really... smart and excelling, end up in, have to end up in a separate school and are completely divorced from other ordinary students. It would be nice if the students who, in your science classes, were really able to excel. will have a chance to do that, but won't be, you know, in effect, segregated from all the other students because I think that this leads to this kind of stratified society. Yeah, absolutely. As long as they don't have to worry about talking white or thinking white. See, I think that this is this sort of thing. also represents a major change. Uh, it was always an issue for the, uh, immigrant parents that their children, they, they, they spoke with a, a Italian accent or whatever, but, and they did feel to some extent that their children, who were speaking without. that ethnic accent. were somehow slipping away from them, but they didn't try to hold them back. In fact, they often encouraged them, even as they saw them slipping away. Exactly. Guys, it is so great to talk with you. Good to talk to you, Charles. Always. Thank you so much for spending your time. We'll have to get together every hundred years on the American anniversary. I think, Charles, I'd like to pitch to you a field trip for the Chicago Way podcast. We should go incognito.

to the Obama Center just so we can do it. People here can get an unbridled review. I think we should go the three of us holding hands. Yeah. And if anybody stops us, we just tell him, hey, we're here. We identify as liberals today. We should get Bill Ayers to give us a tour. Good to talk to you guys. Thanks, Charles. You too. Thank you, Charles. For Charles Lipson, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. For Jeff Tarlin, my friend and WGN executive producer. And for me, John Cass with a bad voice, an editor of John Cass News. Join us again next time for another edition of the Chicago Way podcast on WGM Plus.