Hour 3: Culture war in America heats up

The Mike Broomhead Show, KTAR News, 923, and the KTAR News app. All right, as we're watching the economic pressure that's happening from oil prices jumped up again this morning, about three and a half, a little over 4% today across the board in both indicators for the futures for both Brent crude oil and for West Texas intermediate crude oil. We look at the WTI because that's our oil. And that has jumped also a little bit over 4% today on the questions of what's happening in the Middle East. And this is changing on a daily basis. There is a lot politically here that is going to be on the line. for not just the president, but for many other people. So the questions about the U.S. economy, how it's connected to inflation, the CPI numbers are coming out this week. We are going to see a little bit later this week. the consumer price index, how elevated will it be because of oil prices? What areas, what other indicators are we seeing increase in prices? We know that food remains very, very expensive. So it's all connected to what's happening in this geopolitical world. The president of the United States has said, and this is where you can agree or disagree, but he's been pretty emphatic. So is his administration. that if we are going to, and they believe we will see peace in the long term, that the Iranians can never have a nuclear weapon. And we've got to do everything we can to ensure that they don't begin to rebuild. And when it also comes to opening the Strait of Hormuz and making sure that no damage can be done. So there are battling opinions on this on the U.S. ability and the Iranian ability militarily. And so when you look at it that way and you say, okay, what can they actually do? I played this earlier. I want to play it again. A reporter asks the president about threats. that the Iranian regime is making against American companies in the region. And the president wants to know what exactly they were threatening. This is an interesting exchange. Mr. President, the Iranian government threatened a bunch of U.S. companies today in the region, including Google, Apple. With what? What did they threaten them with? Pee-B guns? They don't have much to threaten. My question for you is, are you... I don't know. I mean, what are they... You made a save... What do they threaten them with? I don't know. Tell me, how did they threaten them? Well, all I know was that they threaten them, sir. What does that mean? Fair enough?

He said something nasty? Is the government in touch with these companies? Are you helping to backstop them? You don't even know what the threat was. What was the threat? I haven't heard it. What was the threat? Did they say they're going to blow them up? They're going to hit them. You know what they're not going to do? They're not going to hit them with a nuclear weapon. Is it something you're concerned about, sir? No. No, and he says, no, he's not concerned. And so that's the question I have. I understand politics in America. If you disagree with us being in the Middle East, if you disagree with this, I get it. And we can debate whether or not it's a valuable thing. What we can't debate is the facts of what's actually happening. They have no air capabilities. We can fly over Iran and we can drop bombs. We can do whatever we want. And they have no ability to stop us whatsoever. In the Strait of Hormuz, they still have the ability to do damage. They have drones. They have missiles. But what they have left, and you look at how they've been behaving with the indiscriminate bombing of things. They've got the Houthis now that are harassing the Saudis. Long term, they can't win a protracted fight with us. But how do we get commerce going? It looks as if the White House is shifting and saying, we control the Strait of Hormuz. We've got a blockade in place. They've turned, I think they said, 55 ships around. that they are not allowing any commerce from the Iranians whatsoever. And the stranglehold that it's putting on their collapsing economy, they believe eventually is going to force them to do something. In the meantime, as good as our economy is on a world spectrum, it is not nearly as good as it should be. And a lot of that has to do with the inflation that the American people are pushing back and saying, we don't want to be the ones that foot this bill. So that's the battle. That's where we are in this country. I'm supportive of the effort, not because Donald Trump is president, but because I've been watching every American president try to deal with the Iranians for decades, for close to half a century. And nothing has worked. Economic pressure hasn't worked. Economic easing of pressure hasn't worked. Negotiations, diplomacy hasn't worked. And they continue to threaten. And then they continue to act out on those threats throughout the world. And it's only going to get worse. The ability to make cheap drones and make them deadly. We saw what happened in the opening salvos of this conflict. What they were doing was they were not only were they going after American military assets, which is what we were going after, Iranian military assets. They were firing at their neighbors. They were firing at anything they could go with an overwhelming force they thought. We were able to thwart those attacks. So now what? If they don't have the capabilities, but they do have the desire, what they've shown us in the past are two things, in my opinion. Number one is they have a huge appetite. for suffering of their people. They have no problem making their people suffer. Where in the U.S., the political pressure of suffering, a different level of suffering, but suffering, higher prices, elevated grocery prices, elevated gas prices, many people just barely keeping up with what they need to to pay their bills in America, that's a real suffering. I'm not diminishing it, but it's different than what their people are enduring and what they've endured in the past.

And they have got this huge ability to say, we're willing to do that to get to our objectives, which is to wipe out Israel and to wipe out the Western world if they can. Any one of their enemies, even enemies within their own faith that disagree with them, this theocracy thinks violence is the only answer. And there are many leaders in the IRGC that are not going to walk away easily from a fight if they believe they can keep on fighting anywhere. That's just one of the areas that they have proven to be that they have a huge appetite to allow their people to suffer. The other thing that they have proven is that they have a desire for violence. That violence is the answer to them. It's something that's kind of foreign to the United States. Although we do act violently. We act with the strategic precision in every chance we can. And we also act violently until we don't have to and then we stop. This is part of the rub. This is part of the internal, I guess, anguish that's going on within the administration. is that they're dealing with the school of thought that says, let's pressure them economically, let's hold off on the military action. In the meantime, the Houthis continue to harass and bomb the Saudis. The Iranians are making threats. We know that they've already tried through hackers to get at our water system. It's another thing we have to talk about. The leveling of the playing field when it comes to... our internet and our grid, that everything being controlled by computers as it is, we know Iranian hackers going after water. And if they can control our water, the damage they can do with never setting foot on American soil. So we know that these internet attacks and the federal government's been warning against these with local municipalities and state governments, where are we on this cyber warfare? That to me is another big issue. Because if we think that just being the number one superpower militarily means we're safe, we are falling asleep at the switch. I guarantee you that there are experts in this, that are experts in the grid technology, experts in cyberterrorism from the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that are watching this every single day. And if there's an area that they are closer to having a level playing field with us, it certainly isn't militarily. It certainly is in this world. So we've got to be diligent on every front. And then it's my belief that the only way that they are ever going to make a good faith move is when they have no other option. The delay tactic. If you look at what's happening, they did it again this weekend. Everybody gets close to a deal. They've agreed in principle in a couple of areas. And then all of a sudden, they come out with new demands. They want economic relief. They want some kind of payout. That wasn't part of the deal that when their negotiators were agreeing. They've changed once again. They have changed the rules.

And this has been a tactic of theirs for decades and not just theirs. Hamas did this. Hezbollah does this. The Houthis do this. That when there comes time for a negotiation, they say one thing. Once there is an agreement made, they come back hours later or a day later. And they say, no, no, no. In addition to that, we want this. You wouldn't do this in any other negotiation. You'd walk away and say you're not negotiating in good faith. You are wasting my time and you're wasting your time in an attempt to make me look bad that when I walk away from this negotiation, it's going to be my fault. And the U.S. just can't fall for it anymore. It's got to be something that we stand strong on and we don't allow them to do this to us anymore. Period. Period. Period. It's just something. It's just amazing. All right, what we're going to do in a moment. We're going to talk economic policy. Before we get there, I want to remind everybody, we have a new at your fingertip, better than ever app. The KTR News app has been redone. It's been revamped. It's got a cleaner design, and it's the news you can trust. If you haven't downloaded it, download the news app. If you have downloaded it, update your news app. It's easy to do, and you're going to love the results. Coming up in a moment, we are going to talk about the economic policies inside the U.S. We'll get to this here in just one moment.

Happy Monday. Megan McCain will join us live from Washington, D.C. as the battle over the street of Hormuz heats up. And how will these economic headwinds impact the midterms? Join us for Mondays with Megan at 3 on outspoken with Bruce and Gatos on air online and on the KTAR YouTube channel. All right, let's talk about this. The economy and what direction we are headed. We talked earlier about hospitals as the plan from the DSA candidates. And I've got to say this. Listen, I'm... We can talk about political differences. I don't demonize anybody. I just think that DSA, I think any form of socialism is wrong for America. Although I can understand why younger people love the sound of it because in theory it sounds like, hey, listen, we're going to have wealthier people pay a little bit more. And then working class people are going to live a little bit better. And that isn't that really what the America is all about. It just never works out that way. The other part of this is the jobs report that was out that we're hearing the negativity. And there's no doubt that they. are negative, but there are areas of our economy that are growing. And I want you to hear who I think when it comes to the working class, there has been no, somebody once said to me that I'm like the Mike Rowe of Arizona. That is probably one of the biggest compliments I've ever gotten. I think he might be insulted, but I think it was one of the biggest compliments I've ever gotten. And Mike Rowe is doing an interview, and he's talking about the workforce. And this is Mike Rowe talking about politicians being worried because of people in the workforce. We had $1.1 trillion in outstanding student loans when you and I talked last. Now it's $1.8 trillion. Most of that's held by kids who either started a four-year degree and dropped out. or who got one and statistically aren't working or not working in their chosen field. That's a bad number. Meanwhile, we've got $400,000 jobs in construction right now, twice that many in the defense industrial base. It's bananas. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure believe me completely, but not a week goes by. when I don't get a call from some CEO of some consequential company, some of whom you mentioned in the monologue, or an elected official, governors mostly. And they're freaking out. Like they've done the math for every five tradespeople who retire to come in. Yeah, and that's the world we're in. I was the beneficiary of a lot of this in my day. 1985 was when I really entered the adult workforce. I turned 18 in June of 1985, and I started immediately after my birthday as an apprentice or a helper, electrician. And that industry served me well until I got into this industry. And so I'm a huge trades advocate. But I want you to listen to a little bit more. The NEC director, Kevin Hassett.

talking about the economy and the jobs, and where some of the job improvement is going on right now, this isn't a defense. It is there are areas that are growing that we should be paying attention to. Yeah, I think that one of the things we're seeing is that these jobs numbers are getting revised left and right. You can remember over the last couple of years, there were millions of revisions. And the bottom line is that if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming. As an example, there are 83,000 construction workers building factories right now. That's the number that we've... never seen before. So let's stop there for a moment. 83,000 workers building factories in America. Those will be jobs that won't require a college degree. I will be on being totally honest about my life. I regret that I don't have a college degree now. It means more to me now. And I would love to have that work. I will put my skill set up against anyone, but I did not have the discipline as a young man. to do the coursework to earn a degree. And anybody that has, I have the ultimate respect for. This is not speaking against college degrees. But I am also an example of success, meaning I've supported myself and I've never been unemployed, in a trade where I didn't need a college degree. I went to schools and specialized training, but I did not have a degree. I've never been saddled with student loan debt. So here we have... Mike Rowe talking about all of these young people that went out and did what they were told and they got a college degree. They can't pay off their debt. They can't get a job that pays enough. There's another side to this. Right now, there's 83,000 workers building just factories. What about if we were to take young people interested in this and get them in that pipeline a little bit sooner? Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the lowest they've been since World War II. There are more job openings than there are unemployed workers. There are all these things that suggested the numbers that have been really strong. And when it didn't come out strong, we sort of dug in and we saw that the two things that made it negative. One of them was a reduction in government workers. And it was mostly teachers. It states, you know, taking July off. So let's just talk about the U.S. economy. And the side of this is we're talking about DSA candidates becoming more and more popular. Americans vote with their wallets. And when you are told as a young person entering the workforce, the chances of you buying a home in your 20s is almost zero, that living the American dream is going to be harder and harder, that paying off your student loan debt. is going to be more and more difficult. You did what you were asked. You did what you were told. And then you start hearing about the people that are making a bunch of money. The Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate who wants higher taxes when he was asked about free health care. He said, what about health care CEOs making $20 million a year to a young person that thinks maybe I'd like to start a family? I certainly would like to have a career. I'm not making enough money to pay my student loans, but these guys are making all that money. Of course, class warfare tickles your ears. to hear there's a way to defeat class warfare. Fact is, it doesn't work.

It doesn't work. And as a young person, I look back on my years of struggling where I didn't make a whole lot of money. I started out at making somewhere in the neighborhood of four bucks an hour when I started as a tradesman. But I worked my entire life and was never unemployed, ever. And I made a nice living as I got older. And now you look at what skilled trades people are making. And there is a world out there for people in the U.S. economy if they go and look for it. And I just hope that we are going to stop looking at democratic socialism and the government is going to fix what ails you because I don't believe they do. And that's maybe where you and I disagree. If you ask me, do I trust a CEO and a board of directors in a major corporation more than I trust an elected official? I will tell you I will trust the working person and the business owner 100% of the time. I would trust them more. Coming up, we're going to talk a little bit more about what's going on in the world of... laws and how it's harder for you to own and keep your home. We'll do that here in a moment. But I want to remind you, since we're talking on this topic, there's a special education series that's happening, looking at why we have so many teacher vacancies in Arizona. You can read the special coverage at KTAR.com. You can listen every morning on Arizona's morning news, 92-3 FM on the app or the KTR YouTube channel. Our own Shira Tanzer has a great piece. She'll be joining the shows throughout the week. We are going to talk a little bit more about all of these things. Next.

Ladonna here, it's Tech Tuesday, and we will talk to Mashable Tech editor Tim Worth. A state that contains less than 1% of the U.S. population is really going after Facebook. And I do mean it's money. Find out more tomorrow morning from 5 to 8 on Arizona's Morning News. And be sure to catch us on the KTAR YouTube channel. There's no secret if you listen to the show. I've talked in the past. I'm not a big fan of HOAs. There's a lot of things that I think in theory sound really good. Labor unions are one of them, and some labor unions do a very effective job. I would say the police and fire public safety unions have struck a balance. And I don't know about the rest of the country, but I can tell you here when it comes to the Phoenix PD and what plea is their union. When it comes to the firefighters union here in the greater Phoenix area in the valley is. we call it. I've watched what they've done that when in the past, when the Great Recession hit everybody across the country as hard as it did, Arizona may be harder than anywhere else as a state and locally. The city of Phoenix was in big financial trouble. And this is when I gained the ultimate respect for the police and fire unions. And I'll tell you why I'm setting this, setting something up here. They went to the table with the city of Phoenix. And they sat down with the mayor at the time it was Phil Gordon and with city council. And they negotiated. And they wanted to make sure that none of the current Phoenix firefighters or Phoenix police officers were in danger of losing their jobs being laid off. So they came to an agreement where they gave back real compensation, real money. They conceded a lot of money so that the city could balance its budget with the assurance that their current members wouldn't lose their jobs. There's the balance. They were protecting their members and they were doing what was needed for the city. Now, I would also say later on, they kind of were on the losing end of getting this compensation back, but that's a whole different argument. In my opinion, there, that's the way a labor union is supposed to run. When you're looking out for your members, but also the betterment of the company or the association or whatever, I think labor unions do a good job. Labor training for the trade unions is excellent. But I'm not a big necessarily a fan of them. In theory, they're a great idea. In practice, not always. Same with an HOA. Homeowners associations, in theory, are a good idea. We're all going to agree to live by a certain set of rules so that we live in a beautiful place and it stays beautiful. But what it turns into is a nightmare. I've had my own nightmare scenarios with them and you can send me all the messages you want about how great the HOA you live in or that you manage is good. But it doesn't. We just had a national story recently. that more and more homes are being foreclosed on because HOAs aren't getting their dues, their HOA fees, and so they have the ability in the contract. When you buy a house in that neighborhood, you've got to sign into those bylaws that you are going to pay those fines or pay those dues or you're going to get foreclosed on. In Arizona.

A new Arizona law prevents HOAs from foreclosing on homeowners until they owe at least $10,000 in missed assessments. Because there have been cases where HOAs are suing and foreclosing for $1,200. Homeowners now have 18 months to catch up on late HOA payments and increase from previous one-year time frame. Despite the foreclosure limitation, HOAs can still pursue other collection methods like wage garnishment for unpaid assets. So new this law ups it to $10,000 and gives you 18 months to pay it back. No one should lose their home because they painted their front door the wrong color of top and they got a fine. And if you think that that's an exaggeration, I can tell you from personal experience, it isn't. That when you get, and not all of them, there are some people that just want to be, we want to know that you are going to do the right thing, that we're not going to get out of control. You're not going to park a disabled vehicle in front of your house. But you know, in the city of Phoenix where I live, there's no HOA. But in the city of Phoenix where I live, they do have neighborhood services. And if you let your lawn get out of control, you're going to get a notification from the city that if you don't fix your yard, we're going to have somebody cut it and you're going to get billed for it. If you have a broken down vehicle, the PD will come and knock on your door and say, that vehicle has got to be moved off the street. We can't have that trash in our neighborhoods. But all of this stuff, and I'm sure it happens in some cases where I don't want somebody painting their house purple in my neighborhood because it makes my property value go down. All of those things. What it turns into. And it's happened to me is you have people that are enforcers. And who wants to have to go to an HOA meeting to defend the fact that you parked in the wrong spot? And there are two things that happened to me in an HOA, same house in a rental house I had. We put up one of those rubber made sheds in our backyard, put them together pretty easily, just a small shed. The roof of the shed was evergreen color. It was a green color. Not John Deere green, not fluorescent green, but it was green. We were told we had to take the shed down because you weren't allowed to have that color over the top of the fence line. So I had to take the shed down. We had to get rid of it. Secondly, I backed into my driveway and I'm not exaggerating. By less than one inch, the tires on my vehicle were hanging over the edge of the driveway into the rocks next to my driveway. I got a ticket from my HOA for parking in the rocks. Those two things actually happened to me. And so this was a guy in a golf cart that was probably wanted to be a cop at one time in his life that decided that he was going to be the enforcer in the neighborhood. Now, I had to address that issue.

Who needs that problem? But that was nothing compared to families that find themselves in a financial bind. And so what they don't pay as an HOA fee or they don't pay a fine that they get because right now they're trying to put food on the table or whatever. And for a very small amount of money in a very short period of time, now it's been one year, they're getting foreclosed on. That they are going to court. These HOAs are using them, setting an example and taking them to court. So as much as I hate that the legislature gets involved in a lot of different areas that they don't necessarily need to get into, this is one of them that I think is of such a great thing that they got involved in. If you're an HOA board member, you can send me all the emails you want about the greatness of yours and how great it is and people love it. And you may be 100% correct. But I have heard so many nightmare stories from people with HOAs. They become power hungry people, bureaucratic institutions that now I'm glad the legislature. The legislature wouldn't have addressed us if it wasn't a problem. Are you kidding me? The state legislature? They're not going to get involved in the problem that doesn't exist. All right, I want to remind you, the Amazing Arizona's podcast brought to you by Resolution Copper is available. We have got three years worth of stories, a little over three years, with a brand new season starting very, very soon. Please check out the amazing Arizona's podcast. It is something we're very proud of. It's great stories from right here in the Grand Canyon State. Available at KTAR, the YouTube channel or KTAR news app or anywhere you download podcast. Hope you'll check it out. Coming up in a moment, it's the culture wars in America and how public health and culture have been clashing. We'll get to that here in just one moment.

Mike Broomhead, KTAR News 923, and the KTAR News app. All right, the culture war in America. This is such a fun topic for me. I, just to be totally candid, I've never watched a WNBA game, never watched a game, but I have become a Sophie Cunningham fan. And she got brutally hammered in a game, a penalty that should have been a crime. And there's some former ESPN announcers that are saying she should have been the one thrown out of the game. The reason why all this is happening is because she's defending girls in girl sports, making, say, in biological males. So this is turned into either this is going to be the most brilliant marketing strategy for the WNBA ever by the way they're handling it or it's going to burn the league to the ground because now two former NBA players are now identifying as females and saying they want to play in the NBA. I can't wait to see how this turns out. But it's more serious than this fight. The director for the National Institute for Health was on CBS this weekend with Margaret Brennan on Sunday. And they had a clash over the distrust in America for health experts and for the government. So I want you to hear this little bit of this back and forth between these two. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. called the COVID vaccine, the deadliest vaccine ever made. That is misinformation. And we're not being clear about that. And I think that is dangerous. Wouldn't you agree? The Biden administration censored people and said, look, you can't even talk about COVID vaccine arms. Yeah, and I'm talking about why you have the kind of. distrust that's led to the kind of sort of problems that you're talking we're talking about earlier in public health that distrust was not caused by President Trump it wasn't caused by Bobby it was caused by a lot of sort of really fundamentally yeah but often spread by the government itself regarding natural immunity closures of schools closures of mask mandates people lost their jobs because of these vaccine mandates that didn't make any public health sense 100% correct. Once again, remember, there were members of the military that lost their careers. They were thrown out of the United States military because they didn't want to get the vaccine. Let's not let me go further with this. You may not remember this. I was reminded of this and I want you to hear it. This is how people that said, I don't want to get the vaccine. I don't think it's safe. I don't want to put it into my body. I don't think that it's going to make the difference that the government says it's going to make. I don't think it's going to stop the virus and the risk.

doesn't outweigh or does outweigh the reward for me, so I don't want to do it. This is Jimmy Kimmel. Dr. Anthony Fauci said that if hospitals get any more overcrowded, they're going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU. But that choice doesn't seem so tough to me. Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right on him. We'll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy. One. That was America. 2020, 2021, that's what we were. Now, I will give Jimmy Kimmel a lot more grace than he's ever given anybody that's disagreed with him. He was buying every word that Dr. Anthony Fauci and everybody else that was involved with the COVID vaccine, he was buying every word they were saying. When the president of the United States comes out and says, if you get the vaccine, you can't spread the virus, people believe if you get the vaccine, you can't spread the virus. We lost huge parts of our economy. I have friends. I have friends that at the same time, they owned a gym and a hair salon. Take a guess what happened to their livelihood? When this first happened, just to give you an idea, you may remember this, Mountainside Fitness, Tom Hatton, Mountainside Fitness, Tom and I have become very close friends. He's a guy I admire so much. When COVID first happened, they closed because they were told to close. Not only did he keep his employees on and pay them. He opened his gyms up to be testing centers. He then cooperated and came up with the groups of people that came up with the idea of how do we reopen safely based on this national data. And then after they were reopened, they were shut down a second time with no warning and no consideration. So the national conversation about this was a flawed conversation. And this is the culture war that's going on in America. So you've got CBS News defending itself when why don't they admit they were wrong? Why don't they admit that they should have been more skeptical? If they had been as skeptical of Dr. Anthony Fauci as they are of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., maybe things would have been a little bit different. I've never wavered from the fact that they were doing the best they could with the information they had, but we were told things to be facts that were opinions. And America deserved to know that they were opinions. And Dr. Anthony Fauci's journal shows as much. Dr. Anthony Fauci didn't want people to not get the vaccine so he didn't give them all the information so they could make what would be an educated choice. It was an indoctrinated choice. And the United States media largely went along with it. Every single network, most of the cable news networks, and anybody that dared disagreed and said, I don't want to get that vaccine was demonized. Jimmy Kimmel said you should die. You shouldn't be served if you had a heart attack.

Has he ever apologized? Has he ever admitted? And that's all America wants. You want to talk about misinformation. Okay. It goes both ways. And we don't see it both ways. And I'm not giving up on this. And neither should anybody else. Neither should anyone else. What we're going to do just after 11 o'clock, we're going to go back to the economy is now once again the Iranians have moved the field goals. The goalposts, and they now are making a list of demands that they absolutely know are never going to be abided by. If they are not ready for peace, are they ready for war? That's been a question. And what do we do next to end this as quickly as we can? So what should happen? We'll talk about it. Next.