On Friday’s RealClearPolitics radio show, Andrew Walworth, Carl Cannon, and Phil Wegmann analyze how American politics is grappling with the capture of a suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and President Trump revealing that Memphis, not Chicago, will be the next city federal authorities target for increased effort to stop street crime. They also reveal their picks for this week’s “You Can Not Be Serious?!” roundup of unbelievable headlines. After that, RCP contributor Richard Porter reflects on the legacy of Charlie Kirk and the future of his organization, Turning Point USA. Finally, Carl Cannon talks to RCP contributors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox about their recent piece in RealClear Investigations, “Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands,” looking at the demographic trend where more people are moving to smaller cities and towns. You can listen to the show weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** First, a 22-year-old Utah man reportedly confessed to his father for the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and turned himself in to police. RCP’s panel looks at where the case is going and what it means for the future of American politics, with a focus on two stand-out responses from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. “Somebody radicalized him, and we’re going to want to know how that happened,” Carl Cannon commented. “I was moved by what Bernie Sanders said, that political violence is political cowardice. There’s nothing noble about it. You’re afraid to mix it up, you’re afraid to test your ideas.” “I think Spencer Cox impressed a lot of people,” Cannon also said. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who the governor of Utah was before this happened, but my wife was very impressed with him. As a yellow-dog Democrat, she said she thought he should run for president, and Wayne Valis, a golfing buddy of mine who worked in the Reagan administration, said the same thing.” “I think everyone-Republican and Democrat-ought to heed the message of Spencer Cox and Bernie Sanders in this moment. The name-calling, the accusations that your political opponent is an existential threat to democracy-all of this has gone too far. We need to be able to have a debate without arguing that it’s zero-sum,” Phil Wegmann agreed. *** And then, at minute 7, President Trump revealed this morning on “FOX & Friends” that he’s selected Memphis, Tennessee, as the first city after Washington D.C. that will get extra attention from the National Guard federal government to crack down on street crime. Trump says the Democratic mayor and Republican governor are on board. How might it work out? “This is a similar argument to the border. Donald Trump came into office saying that you didn’t need new policies, you just needed a new president. The idea was that political will was required to fix the problem,” Wegmann recalled. “He’s saying: it’s not that the challenge is so great that a new response is needed; instead, you just need old-school, 1990s broken-windows theory policing.” “If you’re Brandon Johnson and JB Pritzker in Illinois, what you’ve basically said is you’re more willing to have young African Americans killed in your city than give Trump a victory. It strikes me as problematic,” Cannon commented. *** In the next segment, around minute 11, the weekly “You Can Not Be Serious?!” roundup of outrageous headlines that made us laugh or made us angry. Carl Cannon highlighted comments from Rep. Jasmine Crockett that “the job of police isn’t to prevent crime; it’s to capture criminals. “Policy-wise, that’s illiteracy,” Cannon said. Phil Wegmann reminded us of reporting from the Washington Examiner about a “massage parlor” in Falls Church, Virginia, that has been operating openly as a brothel with the full knowledge of the George Soros-funded county prosecutor. Andrew Walworth really enjoyed an excerpt from Kamala Harris’ new memoir published by The Atlantic where she is still saying that President Biden performed so badly at his debate with Donald Trump because he was tired from an overseas trip about two weeks earlier. *** And then, at minute 20, RCP contributor Richard Porter reflects on the legacy of Charlie Kirk and the future of his organization, Turning Point USA. “I still remember him as an 18-year-old guy sitting in front of my desk talking about his idea for Turning Point,” Porter said. “Instead of going to college, he decided he was going to reform colleges. Think about that-an 18-year-old who was already possessed of ambition and thought that he was skipping to the next stage.” “It is remarkable what an energetic, focused, visionary young man he was,” Porter said about Kirk. “By the time he was 31, he was already a conglomerate. Turning Point was the start, but he had the radio show, the Turning Point Action PAC, which was a huge success in terms of getting out the vote. This is a guy whose energy is just sort of breathtaking when you stop and think about it.” *** Finally, at minute 30, RCP contributors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox talk to Carl Cannon about their recent piece in RealClear Investigations, “Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands,” looking at the demographic trend of more and more Americans moving to smaller cities and towns. “Joel Kotkin is a fellow at Civitas, a really exciting new program at the University of Texas at Austin, trying to-really, save higher education. They’re modest about it, but that’s it. And Wendell Cox has a website called Demographia,” Cannon explained. “I won’t say they’re futurists-because they’ve been writing about this for so long. But, the future is here.” “Wendell and I have been working on demographics for years and have been making the point that most Americans are moving to suburbs and exurbs. Only university professors and reporters at The New York Times never got the memo,” Kotkin explained. “What led us to do this piece was remarkable findings from Wendell which showed that, for the first time in our experience, smaller communities were actually growing faster than bigger ones-and even rural areas. You read for years about these ‘forsaken’ places, but some of them are doing a lot better than people think.” “We looked at essentially 900 metropolitan areas in the country. I divided it into about eight categories, and among population categories of more than a million (that gets you about 57 metropolitan areas), essentially none of the categories added any population or any net domestic migrants at all. All of the gain in domestic migration-people moving from one part of the country to another-was in metropolitan areas of less than a million,” Cox added. “Right now, California has about 39 million people. It’s been the fastest-growing state going back to 1850. But the state Department of Finance is projecting they will have the same population in 2070. No growth-for 55 years. Los Angeles County is expected to lose a million people.” “The pandemic really supercharged it,” Kotkin said. “Because of the Internet-because of what we’re on right now-people are able to work, even at very high-end jobs, from remote locations. Wendell’s in St. Louis, I now have editors living in North Carolina. The increase in the ability to work remotely-even at the highest end-is real.” *** Don’t miss an episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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