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Ben Boychuk with Chris Buskirk on Conservative Culpability

American Greatness Managing Editor, Ben Boychuk, AG publisher, Chris Buskirk, last week on The Seth and Chris Show to discuss the ways in which conservatives and Republicans are culpable for their own defeats because of their poor ground game and their tendency to engage in self-defeating intramural warfare. Have a listen:

Chris Buskirk:  Hi, I’m Chris Buskirk, he is Seth Leibsohn, welcome back to the ultimate hour of the Seth and Chris Show on the ultimate day of the week. Last hour of course, was the penultimate hour, yesterday was the penultimate day, but this is ultimate not only in the sense of final; but, ultimate, because we are joined by my friend and colleague, Ben Boychuk. He is managing editor at American Greatness and also a friend to the program. So, I think if you listen to this show a lot, you definitely know Ben. The world needs more Ben Boychuk on the radio. Right, Ben?

Ben Boychuk:   Yes. I agree. Thank you. Thank you for having me back.

Chris Buskirk:   Welcome. Yeah, it’s funny. I was laughing with Seth earlier in the show that the last time you were on he wasn’t here. But, the last time you were on, we were talking about Germany and of course, our listeners being what they are—that is smart, informed, intellectually curious, and knowledgeable—wanted to spontaneously, organically talk about German intellectual political history from the Treaty of Westphalia forward, because why not?

Ben Boychuk:   Because, that’s what you do on the ultimate hour.

Chris Buskirk:  Exactly right. Just like Dennis has the Ultimate Issues Hour, we just have the Ultimate Hour.

Ben Boychuk:   Yeah, that’s right. No, it’s good. Do I have to make another joke at Seth’s expense, or?

Chris Buskirk:  Well, since he just skedaddled out the door, I think you should.

Ben Boychuk:   I’m just … What can you say? I miss him.

Chris Buskirk:   Well, you can say anything. He’s not here to defend himself.

Ben Boychuk:   Yeah, that’s true. Listen, I wish him well. One of these days we’ll catch up.

Chris Buskirk:   Alas, poor Yorick! Alas, poor Seth! Ben, what do you think about … I’m just going to cut right to it on the healthcare thing and McCain. We’ve been talking about it here on the show for the past two hours almost. I thought we were going to do a little bit of it, but we’ve been taking calls non-stop. And, for people who are on hold, I am going to go back to the phones here in a little bit. But, I wanted to definitely have Ben weigh-in before we start taking calls again. Ben, I have to be honest with you. I am a little bit surprised that McCain came down on this this way, not 100 percent by any means—because, my suspicion always was that his real motivation was to undermine Donald Trump, not to do what’s right for the country or his constituents, or to keep promises, or any of those quaint notions we have about politics or any of those sorts of things.

But, Lindsey Graham is the sponsor. This is … Lindsey Graham and John McCain go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Ben Boychuk:  Or, something. I think his dislike of Trump seems to trump everything. I’m sure you’ve read the statement that McCain issued from his office and I’m sure …

Chris Buskirk:   Yeah, some things you can’t un-see Ben, and that’s one of them.

Ben Boychuk:  Right. So, he’s making a procedural point. He’s saying, “I cannot in good conscience blah, blah, blah. Because, we should be doing this in regular order and so on and so forth”.

Chris Buskirk:  Uh-huh.

Ben Boychuk:  I would say one thing slightly sort of in defense of … I mean, look. It’s not a great bill. Nothing that the republicans have had to offer on healthcare reform this year has been very good. They couldn’t manage a straight repeal and their replacement ideas have just not really been wonderful. But, what they are, what they would do and what this bill would have done, it would have initiated the process where they could … If they can’t do it in one fell swoop …

Chris Buskirk:  Do a piece meal.

Ben Boychuk:   They could do a piece meal, they could do it incrementally, they could do it in 12 steps instead of one. And, that’s certainly better than what we’ve got now, because Obamacare is a disaster.

Chris Buskirk:   Obamacare is a disaster. That’s right. Not that anybody in Congress would know, because they’re exempted from it.

Ben Boychuk:  Right. Yeah. No, that’s right.

Chris Buskirk:  I’m with you on this, Ben. I don’t love this bill. I’m not even sure I like this bill. But, it is still the best thing we’ve got and it is an improvement. I was saying on the show earlier, I don’t call this bill, just because I feel like I’ve got to be intellectually honest with myself, I don’t call this bill an Obamacare repeal, it’s not. But, it is an improvement and there are things to like in the bill. There’s just not that many. It’s a very thin bill, but as you say, it would signal that Republicans a) can accomplish something, they’ve accomplished nothing so far in Congress, anyway. And, it would also signal that they’re serious about handling the debacle that we call Obamacare and they’re not.

Ben Boychuk:   No, they’re not, especially the Senate. The Senate is useless. The House at least had some …

Chris Buskirk:   No, that’s right. Agreed on that.

Ben Boychuk:   The House made a good effort. The Senate is disastrous. I wish that … And, you would know this better than I do, because you’re in Arizona and I’m not. I don’t understand frankly, why McCain hasn’t left the Senate to take care of his health. He’s got a malignant brain tumor. He’s had to have chemotherapy. Why … I’m not sure he’s even doing the right thing for the country by remaining there. I think he needs to for the good of his health and for the good of his constituents, stand aside and let somebody else do it.

Chris Buskirk:   Right. Look, I agree with you. We hear that all the time. And, it’s a tough thing to talk about, because for the obvious reasons, but nonetheless, these are matters of national importance. Right? And, so people need to subsume their personal desires, wants, sensitivities beneath that. Because, that’s what happens when you enter public life. Particularly, when you enter it at that level.

Ben Boychuk:   Right. Now, that said. And, I know we’ll be taking calls on this later. That said, we have a piece coming up we’re going to be publishing on American Greatness, amgreatness.com tomorrow that makes a point that sounding off about how McCain has betrayed us yet again isn’t necessarily … It’s an understandable urge and instinct, but Americans on the right in this country have been out-organized and just out-run on social media by the Left. The Left in its organization against any Republican plan to undo Obamacare, they’ve just been running circles around the Senate and Congress and the conservative movement in general. And, the Left has just been … They had … They’ve just been lighting up Twitter and Facebook. They’ve had excellent organization. You could text a number to a particular organization and they would automatically send a fax to Congress, to your member of Congress, to your Senator. They’ve got this thing locked down.

And Republicans, meanwhile, have been hard-pressed to make a straightforward case, to make a case that really moved or could move public opinion in their direction. So, you’re seeing all these polls that have come out today, The Washington Post poll and there’s been a couple of other polls talking about how the country is opposed to this bill. This bill, which nobody had heard of a week ago, but the organization in opposition to it has been so effective that people think they know enough to oppose it. I mean, it’s kind of crazy to me.

Chris Buskirk:   I saw the Washington Post poll, Ben, and I thought, “This means nothing.” In a sense, what I thought of was you know how Jesse Watters on Fox says he thinks it’s the typical man on the street thing, where you go like, “Oh, did you know we’ve got George Washington coming in the studio today. Would you like to join us and talk to the first president?” “Oh, yeah. I love him! He’s great!” People don’t know anything about this bill. You and I do this for a living and I would be hard-pressed to get deep into the details on this bill and I’ve looked into it.

Ben Boychuk:   Sure. And, a lot of the things that people are basing their opposition on are simply wrong. It’s incorrect.

Chris Buskirk:   It’s kind of like … Did you see the Jimmy Kimmel clip when he was sort of going off on his diatribe about this bill a couple days ago?

Ben Boychuk:  This is exactly what I was going to bring up.

Chris Buskirk:   Yeah, go ahead.

Ben Boychuk:   Because, the whole thing is about pre-existing conditions has become sort of the mantra. Anything that the Republicans do to change, repeal, modify, tinker with, tweak Obamacare means you’ll never get covered for pre-existing conditions ever again. That’s not true.

Chris Buskirk:   No, that’s not true at all.

Ben Boychuk:  And, Kimmel, I was chatting with our friend and colleague Julie Ponzi yesterday about this. Americans are hanging on the words of an ill-informed late night comedian about how to think about healthcare? This just shows the extent of which I think that the Republicans have really fumbled this issue. They’ve completely fumbled the message on this and the argument.

Chris Buskirk:  Ben, if Republicans in Congress weren’t fumbling an issue, they’d never touch the ball.

Ben Boychuk:    Right. Good enough.

Chris Buskirk:   Alright. That’s the music. We’re going to run to a break, then we’ll be right back with more of Ben Boychuk, Managing Editor of American Greatness. You can see what he is writing. You can see what American Greatness is publishing at www.amgreatness.com. We’ll be right back.

I am Chris Buskirk, he is Seth Leibsohn. Welcome back to the Seth and Chris Show. That was Blondie taking us back aways. This is Ben Boychuk. He’s our guest for the hour. He is also the managing editor of American Greatness. Ben, this piece that we’re going to publish tomorrow I think is interesting. Is there a prescription offered within the piece? We get out-hustled, we get out-organized by the Left. They are better at legislating than we are. When I say we, Republicans, conservatives, generally. It hasn’t always been that way. There was a time in our lifetimes when Republicans knew how to get organized and to legislate in Congress. What’s the way forward?

Ben Boychuk:  One of the recommendations that the piece makes and the author is a fellow by the name of Nathaniel Wright. He’s written for us from time to time. He says, “Really what you’ve got to do, it’s right there in the resistance tactics, there’s something called the Indivisible Guidebook,” which we’re going to link to from this story. And, he says, “Look, it’s just as useful for conservative activists as it is for leftists if we choose to use it. The tactics are all perfectly legitimate tactics for organizers on the right to use as they are on the left.” The one thing that we have been sort of inconsistent … You know, the tea parties were good examples of where grassroots activists could really get out and get things going. And, that simmered down some. In part for some legitimate reasons. Tea parties have kind of focused more on certain elections, getting certain politicians elected. They would have … I think in some areas a little bit more robust at getting local folks elected, but we had the tea party election a few years ago and we got some decent folks elected to the House and the Senate.

But, in terms of keeping that enthusiasm up and keeping it high, it’s often easier to organize in opposition than it is to organize in favor of something. So, conservatives are nothing if not really good at opposing stuff. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t govern so well. It’s because we want less of what government does, not more of it. And, so we tend to … We mount effective opposition and we’re not so great at …

Chris Buskirk:   I would say maybe we mount loud opposition. Effective I’m not so sure about.

Ben Boychuk:   Well, yeah. That’s a fair point. That’s a good correction. And, so. I go back to what we were talking about before the break. The Left when it came to mobilizing against really any Republican proposal to tinker with Obamacare, doesn’t matter what it is, they’ve got their talking points. They’ve had their protestors showing up at the town halls and just scaring the dickens out of these elected officials who are easily scared. And, they’ve cowed them, really. Certainly the Senate has just been utterly stymied. And, so when as you pointed out in the first segment, where McCain isn’t even voting for his bosom buddy pal Lindsey Graham’s bill. It’s really quite pathetic to see.

Chris Buskirk:   You may not have tracked with us just being outside of Arizona, it was bigger news here perhaps than elsewhere, but maybe you did. When McCain, as I like to phrase it, voted to retain Obamacare two months ago, the rationale that he gave at the time was that Arizona’s governor, Governor Ducey, basically told him to do so. He said that he was opposed to that bill and that was true. Ducey was out in public opposing that bill, which by the way is better than this bill. It was a little closer to an actual repeal. Not a real repeal, but still. It was a better bill. Ducey opposed it, McCain basically tried to pin it on the governor saying, “Oh, you know this wouldn’t be good for my state. My Republican governor told me so. So, I voted against it.” Okay. I don’t believe it, first of all. But, okay. If that’s your rationale. This time around, Ducey’s out in public saying, “Yeah, this is a good bill. Support it.”

Ben Boychuk:   I hadn’t heard that.

Chris Buskirk:   Yeah, I know. There’s these serial lies and that’s why for the past two and a half hours, we’ve had full phone lines on the show, because people don’t like being lied to. Especially about something as important as this. If you say, “Look, I want to see the marginal tax rate of 15%” and you vote for a marginal tax rate of 22.5%, people are like, “Oh man. That guy.” When it’s something about, “Oh, I can’t get healthcare anymore” or “My deductible is 10 times what it used to be and my premium is three times what it used to be, and I can’t get to the doctors I want.” That really hits people where they live.

Ben Boychuk:    Right. And, this is part of the agony of this debate is that there’s a decent argument that this particular bill wouldn’t do all that much for premiums, but it would … If you’re tinkering around the margins, all you have to do is get something passed that’s marginally better than what we’ve got now, because what we have now is really rotten. Get something passed that’s marginally better than that and then you work from there.

Chris Buskirk:  You go from moving in one direction to moving in the other direction. That’s important.

Ben Boychuk:   Right. And, yes, as McCain said in his statement today, yes, it’s one-fifth of the nation’s economy. Yes, there are inherent risks in future Congresses and future administrations monkeying around with whatever they come up with. But, really what you want though … First of all, that’s kind of what legislation is supposed to do. It’s not always one and done. It took years, it took decades to put in place the Medicare and Medicaid system we have now and that’s partly why it’s in such dire need of reform. It’s going to take time and the excuses—as  you were talking a minute ago about his—I almost kind of can imagine McCain or someone from his office saying, “Well, that was two months ago. This is now.” It’s whatever is expedient, but that works both ways, Chris. Whatever is expedient to oppose it, there’s also some expediencies in supporting it. And, again. As long as they can get something done, that’s better than nothing.

Chris Buskirk:  Yeah. You know, Ben. What I think … I think people are smart. We see that all the time. People are smart. They have common sense. It’s tough to pull the wool over their eyes. People understand pragmatic politics. They understand prudence in politics. But, when they smell a rat, they smell a rat. This just sounds like somebody who’s not operating in good faith. And, that’s what really drives people up a while. That’s what drives people crazy. It kind of goes back to the tax thing. Okay, you want a 15%, you got 22. Alright, you kind of split the baby. This is different than that. This is somebody who just does not appear to be acting in good faith.

We’re going to go to a quick break, when we come back we’ll take a couple calls. We’re going to stay with Ben Boychuk for the remainder of the hour. He is the Managing Editor of American Greatness. You can find his work at amgreatness.com. We’ll be right back.

I am Chris Buskirk, he is Seth Leibsohn. And, this the Seth and Chris Show. We’re joined by Ben Boychuk, Managing Editor of American Greatness. Friend of the show. Friend of mine and a Renaissance man. You can do it all, Ben. You can do music, too. I happen to know this. We don’t ever do it, but you can do it.

Ben Boychuk:  Yes, I can. I used to play drums, too.

Chris Buskirk:   See, I did not know that. I did not know you were a drummer. Okay, so. Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa?

Ben Boychuk:  Buddy Rich.

Chris Buskirk:   Yeah see, I think so too. Seth and I have done this before. We both agree Buddy Rich, but not a pleasant person, by the way. I don’t know if you’re aware of this. Had a terrible reputation in show business.

Ben Boychuk:   Oh, yeah. Have you heard the audio? There’s a piece of audio that’s gone around for years and years and years. Like, decades. One of his band members recorded it secretly of him just berating, just tearing into his band about a variety of things. Apparently, it was a union beef or something. But, yeah. He was not a pleasant man, but what a great drummer.

Chris Buskirk:  Not a pleasant man, but what a great drummer. That’s the epitaph for Buddy Rich, I guess. We played him in the bumper music quite a bit. I love Buddy Rich. I did not know that you were a drummer. We’ll have to take this subject up at a later date where we can run the music part of this show at greater length. In the meantime though, we’ve got a bunch of calls. People who want to get in on the McCain discussion. You up for it?

Ben Boychuk:   Oh, sure.

Chris Buskirk:    Let’s take Hal in Prescott, Arizona. Hal, how are you? Thanks for holding.

Hal:   I’m very well. Hey, thanks for taking the call. Great show.

Chris Buskirk:  Thank you.

Hal:   Just had some brief comments. You know, in 2012, my insurance premium was a large cable bill. I still have the same politically incorrect non-Obamacare policy and it’s a small car payment. My brother has an Obamacare policy that’s a year old, his premiums are rent plus deductible. It’s ridiculous. So, thank you, John McCain.

Chris Buskirk:    The premiums go up and in exchange for paying more, you also get to have higher deductibles and bigger co-pays and fewer doctors who want to see you.

Hal:   Yeah. It’s a disaster and it’s probably going to take decades to unwind it, quite frankly. Which, kind of brings me to my next point. You guys are familiar with the essay The Flight 93 Election? Well, I would suggest we have a flight 93 president. We need a flight 93 Congress. And, I think this is how we engage ordinary people in opposition to this establishmentarian nonsense. And, the question you ask these clowns who are in Congress is, “Will you exempt yourself from the rules you make for us?” And, if they say yes, they get primaried.

Chris Buskirk:  Right.

Hal:    And, if they say no, you say, “Hey. Here you go. You’re with us ordinary folks out here who are working hard and pulling the wagon. We’ll help you out.”

Ben Boychuk:   The only thing I would add to that is trust, but verify. ‘Cause, you know how it is. These guys campaign one way and then once they get in, they act another. And, they always have plausible, if completely unscrupulous excuses.

Hal:   They grow in office.

Ben Boychuk:  Right. And, the guys who take the term limit pledges who end up staying for 25 years.

Hal:   That’s how you know how you get rid of them. Oh, you went back on your word? Guess what? You’re done. We’re not going to support you anymore. And, we’re moving on. And, maybe have some protesters outside their house or something like that, ’cause that’s what the liberals do and they’re pretty good at it.

Ben Boychuk:  They are. They’re very good at it. I think one of the problems with politics in general and one of the … I think it tends to afflict our side more than it afflicts theirs is short memories. Short memories and short attention spans in some ways. The benefits of incumbency and once they get in, it’s very hard to get them out and I just … We need to do better at staying on top of these folks. So, I agree with you. I’m just adding a little shade to it. I think that’s right.

Hal:   The hardest part is how do you keep people engaged? And, what we need are some entrepreneurial people to start thinking about these problems. ‘Cause, they have a lot of people who do this for a living. That’s their sole reason for existing as opposed to me who actually has a real job. So, guys. Great show. Thank you.

Chris Buskirk:  Thanks a bunch, Hal. I really appreciate the call. Ben, this is … Short memories, it’s like short attention span theater. Right? We have to hold people accountable. I know one of the ways people have wanted to do that for a long time is term limits. It keeps coming up again and again. I used to take a line that I know you’ve heard seriously, which is, “Yeah, we have them. They’re called elections.” I’m not sure that’s the right answer anymore. I think I’ve changed my position on this over time. Seth and I had this out on the show a couple months ago and it was like today, we wound up probably getting 50 calls within 10 minutes on it. It’s one of those things that comes up for one reason. People are frustrated with the way that the system is working now. They don’t feel like it works for them.

We’re going to have to leave it there. We’re going to come back on the other side of this break with more with Ben Boychuk from American Greatness.

Chris Buskirk:   Alright, Ben. Where do you stand on Kenny Rogers?

Ben Boychuk:   I like his psychedelic stuff.

Chris Buskirk:   Oh, the 60’s.

Ben Boychuk:  Yeah.

Chris Buskirk:  That’s not the New Christy Minstrels era, is it? That was a separate era?

Ben Boychuk:  That was … What’s the name of the band? First Edition? No, wait. Someone will know. Some caller on the line will know. But, I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.

Chris Buskirk:   Oh, yeah. Boy. So, you do know your Kenny Rogers. I haven’t heard that for I don’t even know how long.

Ben Boychuk:  I’ve got that on heavy rotation on my …

Chris Buskirk:  Do you really?

Ben Boychuk:  I’ve got a playlist for my car. It’s called, “In the car for 10,000 years” and it’s got like 1400 songs on it. And, it comes up quite a bit.

Chris Buskirk:  If it comes up quite a bit, that means you’re rotating through 1400 songs a lot. You’re not an Uber driver secretly, are you?

Ben Boychuk:  No.

Chris Buskirk:   A truck driver?

Ben Boychuk:  I don’t have that kind of time.

Chris Buskirk:   A long-haul trucker. Long-haul trucker and Managing Editor of American Greatness. There actually is something to that, right? You get out, you see the concrete. You interact with real people. You’re not at a desk in an office some place in Washington, DC. Those things would go together.

Ben Boychuk:   Right. No, no. It’s the mundane reality of it is when you live in Southern California …

Chris Buskirk:  You’re on the road.

Ben Boychuk:   Everything is an hour away.

Chris Buskirk:  Going out to get your mail is kind of like in LA Story, the Steve Martin movie where he takes his car down the driveway to pick up his mail.

Ben Boychuk:  That’s right. Yeah. It’s almost as bad as that, yeah.

Chris Buskirk:  Hey, Ben. I want to switch gears on you from John McCain and healthcare to what’s going on in Alabama. In that, we’ve got Luther Strange who is the incumbent. He’s basically the Mitch McConnell pick. We’ve got Judge Roy Moore on the other side. He’s not Donald Trump’s endorsed pick, but he really is the Trump-ist candidate, if we can put it that way. People have been calling it the Strange-Moore race. I call it the Moore-Strange race. Right, Ben? Not Ben, sorry. Bill. I’ve got a little audio here that you might recognize.

Audio Clip:  What’s happening, Luther? I’m sorry about the door, man. Did that hurt? It looked real painful when you slammed into it.

Chris Buskirk:   Yeah, Luther. Luther might be running into a door named Roy Moore this Tuesday. How do you see it?

Ben Boychuk:   So, Luther Strange has a big problem. And, that is he is sort of an ambitious, craven opportunist who accepted an appointment from the governor of the state while he was investigating the governor.

Chris Buskirk:  And, people get cynical about politics? I can’t imagine why!

Ben Boychuk:  Yeah, no. I’m sure it was all very much on the up and up. So, yeah. So, Luther Strange … So, there’s a little bit of a tension here, because President Trump has endorsed Strange and Roy Moore has the endorsement of a lot of our Trumpist friends. Is there maybe a kind of a break? Is there trouble in the family? I don’t think so. I think the president is taking some advice from some folks and the people of Alabama can judge accordingly. Strange hasn’t been in there that long, but he’s been in there long enough to know that he’s McConnell’s.

Chris Buskirk:  He’s McConnell’s … ?

Ben Boychuk:  Boy.

Chris Buskirk:   That’s the word.

Ben Boychuk:  Yeah.

Chris Buskirk:  This is something that people don’t appreciate outside of Alabama, which is this weirdness, that’s the nice word for it, that is Luther Strange. The guy took a blatant pay-off in being appointed to the Senate from the guy he was investigating.

Ben Boychuk:    Right.

Chris Buskirk:   The people in Alabama know this. The people in Arizona might not know it. The people in Maine might not know it, but all the people who are voting in this election on Tuesday in Alabama, they all know it and they know it stinks.

Ben Boychuk:    Yeah. That’s right. That’s why Roy Moore, who is no angel—he’s got an interesting checkered history—he was on the state supreme court, got kicked off twice. He’s got some baggage, too. And, as we were talking to the caller in the last segment, he’s made some … He says he’s with the president on his agenda. He’s made a lot of the right noises as far as these things go. So, let’s see what happens when he gets in there. Personally, I think one of the better reasons to … And, Moore is not great, but compared to Strange and when you read reports. Like, there was a story at CBS News saying that some sitting senators are worried that Moore might get in, because he would be “A disruptive influence”.

Chris Buskirk:  That’s almost like an endorsement in kind.

Ben Boychuk:  Exactly. Whatever misgivings you may have about him and his history, you almost kind of want to go, “Yeah, that …”

Chris Buskirk:  Oh, wow! Sitting senators think he’d be a disruptive force?!

Ben Boychuk:  Beautiful.

Chris Buskirk:  I’m in!

Ben Boychuk:  That’s right. Beautiful, where do I send my check?

Chris Buskirk:  This is one of those places where it is bizarre. The optics are bizarre, because you’ve got Donald Trump. He’s out there right now. I believe he’s still speaking down in Alabama at a rally for Luther Strange. But, I think of this as a “Do as I do, not as I say” moment. In other words, Trump is endorsing Luther Strange, but go with the guy who wants to do what Donald Trump actually does.

Ben Boychuk:   Sure.

Chris Buskirk:  Right? Go with the guy who is on board with the Trump agenda. I don’t know about you, but I think maybe winds up being a three, four, maybe even five point race. But, I think to Moore.

Ben Boychuk:  Yeah, that seems likely. And, I’ve got to say something else, too. We’ve talked about this on the air before and early on, I think after the presidential election last year and then early on in the administration. And, just to be totally transparent with the audience, that’s the motto, right?

Chris Buskirk:  Yup.

Ben Boychuk:   I was a reluctant Trump supporter.

Chris Buskirk:   You were a late adopter.

Ben Boychuk:  I was kind of a latecomer, but everything that I’ve seen so far and knowing what I know, I have no complaints, really. The disruption that Trump has brought to Washington, D.C. for people of a traditional kind of conservative temperament, they might be uncomfortable with it. But, it’s necessary. It’s so vitally necessary. And, so, again like Roy Moore to bring disruption to the Senate would be necessary, because the circumstances in which we find ourselves with a permanent administrative state … People are reasserting their sovereignty. And, that’s what Trump represents and that’s what potentially a senator Roy Moore would represent.

Chris Buskirk:  Yeah. I think that’s right. That leads me to my next question. You can hear the music, a little Buddy Rich there. You can hear that. But, in the final segment, which we’ve got coming up next, what I want to just kind of touch on is what does this mean for our politics? I don’t mean this at 50,000 feet. Depending on who wins, what is this going to mean for the 2018 race and what does this tell us about where conservatives and the Republican Party are going. That’s why everybody’s dumping millions of dollars into this race, because they see it as a signal event. We’ll be right back with more of the Seth and Chris Show.

This is the Seth and Chris Show final segment with Ben Boychuk, Managing Editor of American Greatness. Ben, I want to give you the last word here. So, kind of a two-parter here. But, take your time. What happens, I guess depending on how this race down in Alabama goes, what happens if Roy Moore wins? What’s the political fallout or repercussion of that? How does it play out I guess in the politics inside DC between now and November of next year. And, how does it play out in terms of the electoral politics of the upcoming congressional election? And, the second part is before we have to sign off, just let everybody know what’s going on at American Greatness and where they can check it out.

Ben Boychuk:  Sure. Well, as for the first, I imagine that the response inside the beltway will be abject panic, because … Yet another interloper, another disrupter.

Chris Buskirk:  The barbarians are at the gates!

Ben Boychuk:  Right.

Chris Buskirk:   No, hold on a second. They’re inside the gates!

Ben Boychuk:  That’s right. And, so. I imagine you’re going to see quite a bit of panic there. It will be interesting to see if this sort of phenomenon can be exported from the South. The South is very red, in the red/blue state divide. And, so it will interesting to see how that will go in the mid-terms next year, because … Remember immediately after the presidential election, there was a lot of talk from analysts and so forth. Like, “Oh, Trump has no coattails.” There were some other … There were a few congressional candidates, including the …

Chris Buskirk:  These are the same ones who said Trump couldn’t win, right?

Ben Boychuk:  That’s right. And, that he has no coattails. But, there were a few candidates who kind of ran in the sort of Trumpist vein of challenging sort of establishment republicans and they didn’t succeed. So, on the basis of that, the thought was, “Well, Trump is his own. He’s unique. He won’t have any sort of … This isn’t going to go very far.” Well, now that we’re seeing the administration and we’re seeing basically Trump winning a lot of these special elections or Trumpist type candidates winning special elections, beating back so-called resistance candidates from the Left. And, if you see an establishment Republican get taken out in the South on Tuesday, well then, okay. Then, we’re cooking. We’ve got a movement here.

I hear the music, so let me just say real quick … American Greatness, several great pieces this week. Check us out on the weekend. I want everybody to read that Nathaniel Wright piece that I was teasing earlier in the hour about John McCain’s betrayal, about our own culpability in this.

Chris Buskirk:  Five seconds.

Ben Boychuk:   But, lots to read at www.amgreatness.com.

Chris Buskirk:  Ben, thanks so much. We’ll talk to you again real soon. Have a good weekend, everybody. We’ll be back Monday at three.

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