The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the ProAmerica Report. Good to be together. Lots happening this week. Got a couple of great interviews coming up in a few moments. We’ll talk with author Jeffrey Stephens about his book Fool’s Errand. We’ll also talk with Joe Johnston about the Decline of Nations, his book is one of my favorites by Republic Book Publishers. All of that and more.
I hope you had a great weekend. It’s Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Please visit Proamericareport.com, Proamericareport.com. We will later this week have some more coverage of the March for Life and some of the pro life issues. There was a lot happening there that’s pretty extraordinary, and so we will get back to that.
But today I want to start the week with what you need to know. I was thinking about this last night. I was wondering how to come to the conversation and talk about it, and I’m going to see if I can get there for you. What you need to know right now is in the midst of a lot of other things happening — inflation, the supply chain problems, the stock market seems to be dropping, all different kinds of things happening — there are certain aspects of American life which continue and should worry us. What do I mean?
Well, what I specifically mean is that the federal government, the swamp, has become so big and so powerful that we don’t even notice what’s happening in terms of the transfer, not of power — that’s a big one. And there was a big rally over the weekend in Washington, DC, to say no to the mandates. Some great speakers down there. I tell you, the guy that’s amazing to watch is RFK Jr., Robert Kennedy, Jr. Because he’s such an iconic American presence, being a Kennedy. And he speaks, well he speaks about freedom and about oppression and things. It’s amazing to see.
But I don’t want to even talk about that. I’m not talking about the power over us. I’m actually just talking about money. Remember how I told you follow the money? If you do follow the money as a filter on what’s happening, a lot of things can become revealed. That’s what I want to talk about. Here’s my example.
Over in Virginia, in Fairfax County, one of the largest counties in the country, you will see if you go and look at the clips, you will see that the Virginia, the Fairfax County School district, excuse me, spent $20,000 to bring Ibram Kendi, one of the key – I don’t know if he’s an inventor, but the key promoters of Critical Race Theory, they brought him to town to speak. Paid him $20,000 for an hour. Now, actually, I think what happened was because of Covid, he actually did it by virtual. He didn’t do it in person. But the reality is it was $20,000.
But that’s not the… you got to follow the money all the way. It turns out that he got $24,000 on top of that, $44,000, because the school district agreed to buy $24,000 worth of books. Now let me explain something to you in the “what you now know” category. Sometimes when you get a speaker, you will get the speaker to come for a fee or no fee if you agree to buy some of their books.
So a few years ago, we had Brian Kilmeade speak at one of our major events in Pittsburgh and also again the next night in Philadelphia. And we didn’t pay him a fee. Instead, we bought copies of his book. And if you buy copies of a hardback book, you’re talking about, even when you get a discount, you’re talking about spending between ten and really more like $13 or $14 per book. So if you buy 100 books, you start doing the math. You buy 200 books. I think we bought Killmeade, bought 200 copies of Kilmead’s book for each event. That’s how he got paid.
And a lot of times authors, and I could tell you this from my own experience with the Conservative Case for Trump, my own New York Times bestseller, you will have a whole bunch of books you buy yourself or that are either given to you as part of the contract or you buy very cheap or relatively cheap and then you can sell them. So the Phyllis Schlafly organizations had, I don’t know, 6,000 or 7,000 copies of the Conservative Case for Trump. When we go to an event and sell it for $15, we’d only paid $5 for it. It was all gravy for us. And sometimes we go to an event and sell them for $5 because we weren’t trying to make money or even anything. We just wanted to break even and sometimes you give them away.
But my point here is, Kendi, this inventor of the critical race theory, $44,000 for 1 hour of time, for the schoolteachers of the district. I mean, this is extraordinary stuff. Now pause with me. What am I talking about? That’s one example of someone who’s a trendy academic. No. There is on EdWeek.org, Education Week’s website, a feature, an interactive feature where you can look at the over 190,000,000,000 – that’s a B – billion dollars, $190,000,000,000 that have since March of 2020 been sent from the federal government to our schools, public schools.
And so you say to yourself, well, wait, $190,000,000,000. You can go county by county and see that counties, small counties, big counties, got millions and millions of dollars. Now you say, well, it must have been for PPE, masks and gear. Well, some of it was directly, but a lot of it was given in such a way that the schools could decide their discretion. They could decide that it was anything that they deemed reasonable and necessary.
Now think about this. Back in 2010, 2009 – 2010, when Obama did the stimulus that was just under $800 billion? Is that right? That sounds high. No, it must be high. But whatever it was, inside that bill. Yeah, $800 billion, I think it was, 700 and something billion dollars. But inside that bill, the stimulus, so- called stimulus, were things like $109,000,000 for windmills in Missouri that the Carnahan family had a business that could claim.
Now, my point here is this. What the left is doing and the swamp is doing is taking tax dollars from We the People and transferring them to favored groups. So now watch – close to $200 billion since March of 2020 to our public schools. And it can be designated for anything that’s “reasonable and necessary.” Could be for training, could be for travel, could be for pay, could be for more hires, could be for buildings. Again, whether it’s needed or not, I don’t know. It wasn’t for PPE, and more importantly, a lot of it went to the teachers union’s control and therefore the teachers union’s preferences.
Now, there is an argument that we should make, a long argument, about the schools not living up to their role and not living up to what these payments were for, et cetera, et cetera. I would like to do that, too. But what I’m mostly pointing out to you right now is this is happening over and over again, where the federal government is bringing in tax dollars and paying it out to favored groups. We dodged a bullet so far in terms of the Build Back Better. Nobody even knows what’s in that, Build Back Better. You don’t even know because there’s lots of money and lots of stuff in there that was a transfer of wealth.
The infrastructure bill, so-called infrastructure bill. I think of the $1.2 trillion, I think 400 billion was for actual roads and bridges. The other stuff was for this and that and the other and this and that transfer.
Now, to finalize my point, the left does this so well. Why? Because they’re employing the people that they utilize to help them both win the elections. You know, voters, if somebody’s going to give you a job, you’re probably going to be favorable towards them. If you’re working on Senator so and so’s, Democrat Senator so and so from such and such, and you’re on a staff, you’re probably going to think highly of them. If you’re getting paid by the federal government for something that they say is important, you’re probably going to say, I like that. I certainly am not going to vote against my interest that way. That’s part of it.
The second thing is it’s expanding the reach. People end up doing things with their jobs, whether it’s regulating, influencing, managing, et cetera. And so we are living in a time where the transfer of wealth from We the People, and be clear, people that are really rich find ways to not pay as much tax because they can pay accountants. And people that are really poor don’t pay taxes, income taxes, that’s terrible. We should get them more jobs and all, but most of the people that pay taxes are middle class and they’re middle class and they’re the middle class and working class and they’re paying all these taxes and they are dealing with funding basically all this stuff, all this increase, all this largesse coming out of the government. And over time,
I’m just telling you that’s how the swamp has grown. The swamp has grown $44,000 at a time, that’s Kendi, that’s what he got paid, and $190,000,000,000 to schools but nothing’s changed. They’re asking for more money right now. What you need to know is that trendline, it’s accelerating. And things like inflation and the economy are impacted by the fact that we have the federal government spending more and more money, transferring more and more wealth, but it’s also impacting how we live together.
It’s not a good model. It’s not to say the government isn’t going to fund some things. Of course they are. But the idea that we’re going to do this kind of transfer of wealth, it’s accelerated and it’s the swamp, not one party or the other. The Democrats are worse, but it’s not one party or the other.
All right, I got a run. We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin, don’t forget to visit proamericareport.com, sign up for the daily WYNK there, because what you need to know is right here and it’s right there and we’ll be right back. Ed Martin, Pro America Report, back in the moment.
