Phil Harriman- Segment 1

You've counted on Inside Maine for over 20 years for smart political talk and real conversations with the state's leaders on 985 FM, AM 560 and WGAN.com. Good morning, everyone. It is 10-11 here at the studios at WGAN in South Portland, Maine. You're listening to Inside Maine with Phil Harriman. I am your host today until 1 o'clock. We'd love to have you take part in our journey as we talk about the topics of the day affecting our state and our country. All you have to do is dial 879-9-9-4-26-8-7-9 W-G-A-N. Jeremy Mixer is the executive producer. He will get you past the security protocols. And we'll let you have the floor on Inside Maine with Phil Harriman. And, of course, as always, we have Tony Randazzo, who is keeping a pulse on all the latest news. and weather and he will be with us at the top and the bottom of the hour And Tony is live. He's not, he didn't just tape it and leave the studio. I'm right here. He is in the studio. Yes. Good morning, Tony. How are you? I'm very good. And how are you, Phil? I'm great. Did you bring your partner with your little four-legged buddy? Not today. No, he's, he's at home with his sister or half-sister Wilma or their dog with Michelle, my wife, and they're going to go on some adventures today. Maybe go swimming or something. Oh, that sounds great. Well, we miss him. He's usually right on your heels. A couple of times he's running to the studio and visited you when you're in the middle of doing a show. And I'd just be like, no, wait. No, not now. Stop, not now. Well, the program of Inside Main when I host wouldn't start off on the right foot unless we went to Westbrook and welcomed Steve to the program. Steve, you've become a fixture here when I host. I'm always glad when you're hosting. Thank you. Yeah. We get along pretty well, I think. We disagree, but then I think we do okay. So, you know, whether it's lies, lies about the innocent reflecting pool Olympian or lies about Iran begging us for a deal. They're not begging for anything from us. Or lies about stopping inflation and lies about endless. stopping endless wars. Those are bad enough, but the blockbuster lie going into November Phil is that we really have a choice between capitalism and socialism because we have no such choice, and I'll explain why now, between huge corporate subsidies, endless wars for profit.

which are really just government make-work programs for billionaire, defense contractors, CEOs. Very expensive make-work program for those billionaires. Socialism is already our dominant economic model here. Corporate socialism, which the Democrat Socialists, ironically, are attempting to fight. in a fight to give taxpayer wealth back to the taxpayers, not to beg them, not to these mega billionaires. So who's the real commies here? You know, the billionaire Epstein class, and I'm almost done so the billionaire Epstein class are the worst of the frigging worst, not hardworking immigrants with no criminal records. These immigrants that are being detained illegally, they have no criminal records. We need them to fill skilled labor here in America. These immigrants are scapegoats for the sins of the Epstein class. End of story. Have a nice day. Thanks, Steve. Wow. I thought we might at least have a little bit of a give and take. He's got some place to go, I guess. I would have to grant you that there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical, critical. If you're on the anti-Trump stage, this just fuels the rage that they have to resist. at any opportunity that presents itself. And I would grant you, Steve, that the political insiders today are that you can't tell the difference between the legislative results of the past. say eight years. Prices continue to be high. Uncertainty continues to abound. We hear one president say the border is secure, and another president say we've got all these millions of people here who are here illegally. You can call them your neighbor. You can tell them our friends, our community members. But there's millions of people who are here. violating the law. And to tie the Epstein class, whatever that means, to the conversation about people who crossed over our border illegally, is really, for me at least, a bridge way too far. Okay, let's go to Tony and Stanis and welcome Tony to the floor. Hi, Tony, good morning. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah. I agree with your last comments, Phil. I mean, how you tie those two together is beyond me. And the fact is, is that Democrat socialism in Europe, if that's what you want to call it, all it has done is the tax rates are so high.

in the countries of Europe, that people don't have children. They can't afford to have children. So as a result, what they've done in Europe, and they've allowed it to happen as an answer to the fact that they realize that no one's having children, the birth rates are ridiculously low in all of those Western European countries. is they've allowed an influx of all kinds of other people that have come into the country that don't share their values, that don't share their culture, that actually hate their culture, their progressive culture, and their progressive ways. And they're dealing with it. They're trying to deal with it in Europe. And they realize now, even Henry Kissinger said and all these other intellectual, so to speak, in Europe have said, we made a big mistake, a huge mistake, letting all these people in. They don't like us. They don't want to come into our culture. They want to change who we are and what we are as countries. And there's a huge pushback in Europe. And we're bordering on the same kind of problems here. So the answer of democratic socialism or socialism in the way that Europe and the way that Bernie Sanders propagates it is high taxes, low birth rate, and you have to bring in people that are poor. and that are looking for jobs, menial jobs to support what you're doing. And it's a recipe for disaster. It's a blinding glimpse of the obvious to me, Tony. Everything you just said, in fact, in the U.K., in England, they are sending out more money in welfare payments than they are collecting income tax revenue. Think about that. And to your point, rather than coming in, like, you and I couldn't go to Germany and become German. We couldn't go to Japan and become Japanese, but a German or someone from Japan could come to our country and become an American. And how do you do that? You understand our culture. You speak our language. You adopt as a guiding principle, our constitution, the rule of law, our way of government. And that's not what's happening today, which is why I think in part... There is many who are disillusioned because they have come of age. They're deep in student aid debt. Their guidance counselors and professors told them that they should spend all this money to get a degree in a subject matter that they can't support themselves and they're disillusioned. And then you have another group of people who've come here and just basically transferred their culture to America. And it's almost...

pardon the expression, but it's almost tribal. And how do you get past that and unify us as, hey, we speak English, we have a constitution that everyone should understand and live by. And that's not happening today, which is why the Democrat, socialists, in my view, are gaining momentum. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I just think that if you're going to use Europe, which Bernie Sanders does, as an example of Democrat socialism, well, you're a couple of generations through now, and it's completely and totally falling apart. The French hate the immigrants in their country. The German people hate the immigrants in their country. The actual English, most of them don't like the fact that these people have come in. They won't accept their culture. They won't accept their way of life. And the police have to stand down in those communities. It's unbelievable what's happening over there. And that's why you had all these Europeans come over here during the soccer, you know, they all think America's great. The way it is kind of like. Right. I mean, if we're that bad, then why aren't these people coming over from Europe saying how horrible our country is? And they're not. I mean, there might have been a few, but they all think, this is great. This is freedom. This is wonderful. And I do not. The last thing I want to do is export into our country what Western Europe has done. It's a disaster. And this is just the beginning. It's not going to end. It's going to end badly, I think, in those countries. Tony, great call. Thanks for joining us. Look forward to having you back again. If you're so inclined to join the conversation, all you have to do is dial 879-9-26-879 W-G-A-N. We're going to go out to Sarko and welcome our friend Ethan to the program. Hi, Ethan. The floor is yours. Hey, Phil. Thank you. Welcome back to the show. I was beginning to think it was the Sean Moody show. No, actually, I was, I had a conflict. I was supposed to be the host on third weekend in July, and I was trapped in, I shouldn't say trapped. I'm happily emcee part of the Yarmouth Clamp Festival events. So anyway, he took my place. You might have been trapped in traffic over there for a while. But, hey, you know, I just wanted to call in and listen to the governor's speech. Our singing governor, how about that? Yeah, she can sing all she wants. She's not going to change any. She's not going to fix anything here. We know that. It's cringeworthy. And Steve is not wrong. And this is what I'm calling about. All governments, I believe, turn to tyranny eventually. They get used to taking your tax money and they get more and more power and they don't realize really what they're doing. The immigration thing, everyone should be able and not afraid to say that they don't want to be flooded with immigrants. And Spain is the same situation and weaponized migration. Weaponized, I say.

because they're using it as a weapon is no faster way to destroy a culture than to invade it with a foreign group that you now have to take care of. But I'm not picking on any individuals here. So that's what I mean by we shouldn't be afraid to say it. But government will look, and this is, it's very important to point this out because we have been taken over in this government by. Who's benefiting every time Trump does something? Who really benefits? It's not the American people. And I believe he's doing everything for Israel, whether it's Gaza or a war for, you know, really the Iran War is not a war for America. It's a war against Israel's enemies. So we have to start, and look, I'm not trying to sound like Candace Owens or Dan Bilzarian or whatever he is. And that's the thing, too, is the hate, the anti-Semitism has been growing, and I think that's intentional because the biblical stuff says we should, we should, Israel should have a bunch of enemies. We need to be able to call out the situation. As I said, without putting down any individuals or we're never going to get past the propaganda that big governments put forward. As you and I know, the media is the propaganda wing of the military industrial complex. You know, that's what, do you, would you disagree with that, Phil? Well, I wouldn't call it the industrial military complex. I would say that the media aids and abets, the growth of government. And I would point to the unelected, unappointed, generally unaccountable people who work in these various departments of government, who write rules and regulations that determine. In your profession, how much regulatory stuff do you have to abide by, Ethan, that your representative or senator never voted on this stuff? You don't get to go to them and say, hey, can we make an exception here? They walk in and tell you how it's going to go. Well, whether it's COVID, which was nobody voted for that. Nobody wanted to be. to have gain of function, or dangerous gain of function, DGOF, they call it now, to be locked down, to have your businesses stolen, to be forced out of your job. And the same thing goes, my last thought on this, Phil, is that the CIA, you talk about unaccountability, and you don't know anything that they're doing. And that is, that puts the fine point. That government is unaccountable now, and it always goes out. And it's going to have to come back to the we, the people, whether it's left or right. We're going to have to. Yeah. All right. I've got to get back to work out here before the sun, before the great heat thing in the sky starts beating, beaming and beating down on me. Okay. See you, Ethan. Thanks for the call. Thank you. Yeah. You're listening to Inside Me, and I'm your host today, Phil Harriman.

I just want to round out Ethan's comment about the role of government and the influence of the media. And all you have to do is to look back on at the height of COVID. We were celebrating as heroes, nurses and doctors and policemen and firemen and first responders. And then some government decision was made that said, now, if you don't take a shot, you're fired. You're listening to Inside Maine with Phil Harriman.