The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Fixing America: Essays on Domestic and Foreign Policy by James Matthew Sawatzki

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Fixing America: Essays on Domestic and Foreign Policy by James Matthew Sawatzki https://www.amazon.com/Fixing-America-Essays-Domestic-Foreign/dp/1958877506 Fixing America: Essays on Domestic and Foreign Policy offers original insights and pragmatic solutions to intransigent and entrenched political issues domestic and foreign. The work provides new analysis which correctly identifies root causes of policy failures; and suggests practical, and potentially effective solutions to solve them. This work, intended for educators, students and citizens engaged in politics hopes to move the nation forward, and bridge divides. Fans of Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, David Brooks or Robert Reich will discover a new and like-minded voice. James Sawatzki is a retired public- school teacher still trying to promote citizen engagement and social justice.

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but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from Books to Lifemarketing.co.com. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. David Amazing man on the show, we're talking about his latest book.

It is called Fixing America. Essays on Domestic and Foreign Policy out January 30th, 20, 24 by James Matthew Swatsky. So we're going to get into it with James. and talk to him about his book and insights and all that sort of good stuff, yada, yada, yada. James is a Tacoma, Washington educator with over 38 years of experience. He received the 2014 Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching History, the 2014 Washington State,

Patricia Bering Teacher of the Year Award, and the 2005 Gilder Lerman Institute's Washington State American History Teacher of the Year Award. He is also the founding board member of the Washington State National History Day. Welcome to the show. How are you, James? Oh, live and well. But I got to tell you, first, I wish I was the billionaire being interviewed. Oh. Well, you know, maybe you're just on the show to work your way up next time you show up it'll be a billionaire.

Well, I'm going to take a lot of book sales. And the other thing is, so am I allowed to curse on this show? Yeah, just a little bit. Try and save it until after the first five minutes. minutes, YouTube, watch it the first five minutes. Give us your dot-coms. Where can people find you on the interweb, sir? My dot-com is currently under construction, as I was instructed by your producer two days ago,

and it'll be up there as soon as I have it. I had one before by Little Laps. It was with the Go-Go Daddy, and it just didn't seem to be getting any emotion, and I figured it's not worth the monthly fee. But bookrights.com is going to put one up for me, because they're going to be producing my second book, which is Portuguese experiences about my life since I've retired to Portugal. All right.

That should be fun. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside the Fixing America Essays on Domestic and Foreign Policy. My lesson plans. This is essentially my lesson plans teaching American history, civic and foreign policy over 38 years. and be it's not that thick and the reason is because as a public school teacher I knew I had to get to the point right away in order to maintain the attention of the children and definitely give them a you know some kind of big picture evaluation which is one of my specialties has been ever since I started education it's big big picture There you go. Big picture. Let's see if we can't fix America with some of the things you've discussed here. Give us some samples. And you talk about the book, I think, is designed for fans of Nome Chonsky, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, or Robert Wright. Noam Chomsky was very actually positive. I had actually written this entire book because a bunch of essays and feature essays. I was trying to get published at the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune.

or the Los Angeles Times or Washington Post. And I wasn't getting any responses from anyone. So I finally wrote to Chomsky because I knew he used alternative media all the time. And I thought, Professor, can you tell me where someone might want to publish this? And he wrote me back a very nice email where he said, well, I'm now an emeritus professor. I don't have any teaching aids. and I'm not quite sure, but I think you've done some interesting work,

which is why he's on the cover, because he was very encouraging for me to continue on and turn it into the work. That's really amazing. You've got that sort of, and that's on the cover of the book, of course, that blurb. I chose the two best words. So now, examples of maybe some of the insights that you have on foreign domestic foreign policy, that we can maybe utilize today. There seems to be some things in politics that seem to be a little disruptive nowadays.

How can we maybe improve on some of the things that you talked about in your book? Well, like my good friend who reviewed the book said is it's not a cookbook, and it's more just a series of seminars of topics and my take on them. So Flynn and other conspirators ought to be stripped of citizenship. Supreme Madness. Michael, now Michael Flynn, do you mean the previous general? Yeah, who's a traitor to his country. Supreme Madness, the Taliban United States Supreme Court, which is basically now a religious right court.

The Roman Catholic Church pagan birth control and abortion dogma, which I am a Roman Catholic practicing, but the fact is that the church, St. Thomas Aquinas, actually based on. the theory on the work of Aristotle, who was a pagan, open letter to Justice Clarence Thomas, one Celtic to another, on why, you know, he needs to lay off. He's going to lay off getting the free RVs or what's the RVs for billionaires that buy in his boat? Control women's bodies.

Oh, yeah. Possession. I know his wife is into some of that, too. Well, he's very Catholic too. and they have no trouble pushing their beliefs on innocent civilians. Yeah.

Open letter to, I'd say, solving homelessness and one easy step. Basically, I give Finland's method. Oh, can we review that? That sounds like an interesting thing to talk about. Yes. It's, let me get past here.

I just saw something today where the state of Utah and I think in joint with the federal or maybe they're just doing on their own, but they're doing some sort of weird thing where they're going to try and house all the homeless at a warehouse. They're building it as a way they're going to make a kind of utopia living space for the homeless. Well, that sounds nice. I guess some of the critics are saying it's more like a prison they're putting him in. So maybe a thing you can go there but you can't get out.

Maybe if you're homeless. The question is, is there a fence around it? I wasn't aware of what I was doing. I'm not, I'm not too sure either. I didn't get into it. I just saw the article cross my path and I bookmarking my brain. What England did was basically guarantee housing first, which has been tried in other major cities. And in fact, there was a major successful effort led to just get veterans, Vietnam veterans housed,

by giving them housing first and giving them therapy and allowing them to, you know, allowing them to, sober up, clean up, get a shower, and reestablish themselves in the real world. And that's basically what Finland did, is just say, all right, everyone gets housing. And now let's let them recover from whatever trauma they're dealing with. Yeah. I mean, if you don't have basic shelter, it's a little hard to perform other functions that contribute to yourself in society at the same time. Well, basic shelter includes, one, the ability to have a Brett's room and a shower. Yeah, it's always good to have that.

Yes. Yeah, that's what I find. Especially in the morning when I wake up. But, you know, some of these basic needs, and there aren't so many of these people that are homeless on the streets. I'm exposed to a lot of homeless because I do a lot of photography. And I usually wander downtown on day shoots. Okay, where's your hometown?

Dallas? Las Vegas. And then also, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And there's a lot of homelessness in Las Vegas. Yeah, both there in Utah. And, and so, you know, I'm usually downtown in wandering the streets.

And so usually there's a skid row, usually somewhere in an area. L.A. has, you know, its infamous skid row. And so, yeah, I end up dodging homeless people because, you know, some of them, they have a lot of mental issues. Oh, yes. A third of them have mental issues. A third of them have drug issues. and a third of them were just poor. And Ronald Reagan, President Ronald Reagan, did us no favors

when he basically said, okay, let all the mentally ill out of the prisons, you know, out of their centers, you know, to wander the streets on their own. That's treating them with any dignity at all. And then they just put a lot of them in prison. They move from, you know, the liberalism of Reagan, and destroyed all those. I mean, when I grew up, there was places that were state-sponsored, maybe federal-sponsored,

but there were places you could send somebody that was having trouble emotionally. And, you know, I mean, I think you, if you remember the movie, One's Full Over the Cuckus Nest and stuff. But a lot of those are around. I mean, I remember some of my teenage friends were having trouble. I'm not sure if they were fully unstable or if they were just being rebellious teenagers, but they would get locked up at the mental health facility. And, you know, I mean, it was a good thing.

And, yeah, when Reagan took office, it was part of the racist agenda that they had to take away rights or services for poor people and people that were suffering. I remember we had, we've had people on the show that had parents that were black that had trouble with alcoholism. And alcoholism is an addiction is a horrible disease. And they were managing it. They were able to work because they had government support to help them. And as soon as Reagan took away those resources, and then, of course, increased the police state, they ended up in prison. And now we have this giant prison network that's been built. So I used to tell my students about social capital, about it's important to have a support network in various parts of society.

And I was born into social capital. I am the 11th child of 13 children of a Catholic family And so I always had siblings around And I was kind of astounded when I went to school, Catholic school And found that there's people with only a couple siblings I said, how do you do that? How do you not have a basketball team, two basketball teams to play in the driveway? I mean, I just had that drying up

Yeah, Utah's kind of the same way. They have huge families here. But yeah, when you say social capital, let's lay a foundation of definition of that because a lot of people don't understand so these things. I used to tell my students that I'm going to use Swatskypedia. And so social capital is essentially the concept that you are provided for, you are connected to people who love you and will help provide for you in times of crisis. I learned the phrase when my daughters went to school to what was it called something white male,

privileged white male. A white male, which occurred to me, yeah, actually I am. I am a privileged white male. I came from a family that never failed to feed me, and they at least allowed me. me to continue education, and I pursued my career, and I went into professions that I was very good at. That's social capital, the ability to reach out to someone in terms of chaos and crisis. Yeah.

A lot of people don't realize that this is an important thing that society has help that it can give to people that struggle. You know, I remember talking to somebody about bankruptcy. and why there was a bankruptcy court. And I was like, why do people get to, you know, because when I grew up, there was a very rich. One of my friends in high school was his father was very rich and inherited a huge insurance company in California.

And he would invest in these mines throughout the country for mining stuff. And he was constantly going bankrupt with the mines from the investments he'd sell. And so we would go up to his house. and he would have this huge kitchen with an island in the middle, and they would have these bankruptcy notification papers that would have to go out to the investors. And we would compile them. We would go around and, okay, page one, page two, page three, page four.

And so I would help him out, and I think they'd throw us a few bucks. But I would just be like, how come I always are your dad helping him with the bank? I mean, how do you keep filing bankruptcy all the time? So I was always curious what that was about. From memory, and you can check me, fact check me on this, Donald Trump has gone bankrupt three times. And one of the running casinos have got, how the hell do you go bankrupt running a casino? And his father bailed him out once from the Atlantic City one by going in purchasing $4 million chips. dollars with

legally. Yeah, and then just never used them and took them home. So that was like a $4 million illegal loan from dad. He got in trouble for that too. I mean,

yeah, he... Oh, by the way, that's social capital. That's social capital. And so finally, somebody explained it to me, I read it somewhere that the reason we have a bankruptcy courts and the reason we have welfare and support for the poor is you can't throw people away.

if they make mistakes and people are going to make mistakes or they're just going to come across, you know, things are going to happen to you in life. I've had my cathartic moments in life that have destroyed me financially, destroyed me personally. You can't throw people away and you have to give people the opportunity to recover. Also, it's bad for capitalism not to allow bankruptcy. Exactly. Because you're never going to get a second start and you're not getting another active, productive, perhaps. productive entrepreneur.

I mean, it's just, you know, I mean, come on. We used to use stocks and we used to have debtors prison. And,

you know, thank God for the next. I think you're locking up on me, James. James? James? Oh, here I am.

Hi. Yeah. Can you make sure everything's closed out on your computer that could be running in the background, maybe?

We're definitely. I definitely have some issues. So I lost about two, three minutes here. Oh, you know what the problem is, is I'm on Firefox, and I was supposed, oh, God. I think you're fine. So let's just keep going. Yeah. That's working.

Just close any tabs or anything else that might be running on the computer program-wise. I'll be working on it. Hit this out, I assume. Yeah, we'll cut it out. No, no, no other difference. So, you know, one of the things I found, I'll fill in here for you a little bit. One of the things I found was, and so people need that.

You know, when I, I've traveled to other countries where they, they don't really have a dentist's prison, but they do have, if you fail a company and you fail investors, you have to repay those investors. And like you say, it makes it really hard to start a new company and try again, you know, and I've had companies that have failed. But being able to, you know, market off as a failure and retry again has made money for other people and you know me and and so it you know people need that and you know some of these nuances that go on in life right now where they claim that there are people that are you know just getting

rich off the program of free you know there's always going to be a little bit of fraud there's always going to be a little bit of abuse in the system and the system needs to police itself but for the most part you know people people are you know the guy who's homeless on the street who the hell is he ripping off he's on the street he's just trying to get by day to hour minute to minute yeah he's not he's not driving a rolls royce there by the way i had students who did drive a rolls royce uh and i had students who were living day to day in various housing going couch to couch and it all had to do with who their relatives were The guy who is the largest automobile collection on the planet is, I think it's Harold LeMay of Pierce County, Washington, who has kind of an almost monopoly on the garbage system.

And he and Jay Leno used to compete for, you know, prized classic cars. And eventually, a former student of mine said, well, let's go ahead and build the America, what they call America's Car Museum. in Tacoma, Washington State, and just populated with some of grandpa's cars. But he came to his senior formal picking up his date in a Royals-Royce Silverado. Oh, wow. So if your grandpa has that kind of money, well, then you get to impress your date. Yeah. I guess I'm in the wrong business.

There you go. Is it a garbage, perhaps? I, I, I, I, I, I, we do a lot of garbage on the show. I say a lot of garbagey things, I suppose. I don't know. Uh, so what are some other examples in your book that you talk about in the essays? Oh, geez. Okay, going on.

Let's go back to the start. I'll just go through the titles. Overhauling college education programs towards effectiveness, a modest proposal of education reform. Mm-hmm. And here's my solution to immigration, aka. undocumented workers, just open the borders. Let all who wish to be Americans in without limits.

Let's talk about that. We've had one gentleman on the show who believes that we should do like China does. We should have one billion Americans. I forget his name, but he was head of a big meeting. Well, we can handle it. We can more than handle one billion. The problem is we don't reproduce anymore. And my general concern doesn't reproduce anymore.

What does reproduce is immigrants, which leads to a certain amount of xenophobia and the phrase the browning of America. A quarter pound, apparently in 25-50, that's right? Yeah, something like that, something in 2035 or 2050. I thought about this is going to be the tilting between white guys like me and people who are more mixed race or more darker skin or more South American or more Asian or more whatever people who are xenophobic about non-whites consider brown. Yep. Some people call that the Great White Replacement that kind of a... Oh, yeah. Oh, God.

That sounds even worse. That's even worse phrase. Yeah. I mean, that's what the people who... have the issues with racism and what you call it, the Great White Replacement. You know, it's just a, I mean, I think you can, I don't know what the stats are on people.

I'm just, I'm just spitballing this off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure are whites really the dominant race? I think it's by 2050. But no, I'm talking about the whole world. Oh, no, nowhere near. Yeah, nowhere near. So why are we being such silliness about America? Because we're the most civilized, and we invaded the Philippines to take care of our little brown brothers and fought in early Vietnam after the Spanish-American War when the Filipinos said, oh, you're here to save us.

And then they said, no, you're here to conquer us, just like the Spanish did. And yeah, then we did. We killed 100,000 of them before they surrendered. and decided that they would agree to be, you know, kind of a territory of the United States. You're talking about Guam? I'm talking about Philippines. What year was this?

Oh, this is like just after, actually during the Spanish-American War of 1898. You know what the Spanish call it? Hmm. The War of U.S. aggression. Really? Yeah. They're probably Iraq calls it. You know, it really was.

Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, who was only the vice, you know, Secretary of the Navy, when the Secretary of the Navy went home on a Friday, and the President of the United States is out of town, Teddy Roosevelt called Dewey, Admiral Dewey, in Hong Kong, and said, sailed to Manila Harbor and take out the Spanish fleet. Wow. And, you know, you know, Teddy Roosevelt was. certainly a man of ambition and he was certainly not unwilling to take charge even without authority. What are some other aspects of the book we want to tease out or maybe favorite stories that you found that you're kind of your favorite stories to tell in the book? Well, I've got, okay, the one that I get criticized on most is solving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Oh, that's a tough one. Yeah, well, I at least thought we'd go back to basics with the two-state solution.

And then Jerusalem was the sticking point when Clinton was president and trying to get, you know, because Israel wouldn't allow Jerusalem to be, have East Jerusalem be part of the Palestinian, you know, capital. And so my theory was, all right, how do we get out of the state? box. And I said, well, what if Jerusalem just becomes the first international city where no nation gets to own it? And all religions get to be there. And, you know, this could be one of those long-term UN peacekeeping jobs. That would also require that Israel cooperate. Now, the solution of that is simple. The number one donor

to Israel every single year in the multiple billions of dollars is the United States of America. And at some point we just have to say sit, behave, lay down, stop.

But that would require Congress to have a spine. And it would require the politicians to take on the considerable Jewish lobby in the United States, which has actually more residents than Israel does. So with your solution, you provided this book in

2024. What do you think about the kind of, I'm not sure if we're at a solution phase, but what do you think about where we're at now? Well, the genocide in Gaza? Yeah. Well, I mean, everything, kind of what's been going on with you know, there's claims that they might turn into some sort of resort. Well, that was Trump's fantasy,

but because, you know, the man only thinks in terms of real estate. And he doesn't think in terms of ethics or morals or values. I mean, it's three times. And, you know, he's only delivery. As I say, he's the transactional president. What's in it for me is the first thing that he always asks.

So, you know, it looks like they've gotten, I believe they've gotten the October 17 hostages, at least the ones that are still alive. Yeah, the ones are alive. And the rest have to be found once they clear the rubble. Oh, wow. Wow. Which is Israel killed half of its own hostages. I know they killed one group of hostages they found.

The hostages either liberated themselves or they've been, I think they've been left. And they were like, hey, we're free. and the Israelis came on upon them and killed them and that's what's unfortunate i didn't catch that day yeah that was a that was a small group of them they find i think four or five three or four um well that's just ironic as heck isn't it though i mean you think you're free and you're saved and and they shoot you your own country kills you yeah oh it's a welcome it's a it's war is hell i guess we can say well that is what i've heard and i've had the good luck of never having to have served in the military. I did serve as a civilian employee for the

Corps of Engineers in Public Relations, but I have two brothers who were in the Vietnam War. One earned the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. He was the only person to survive from his platoon over a night of attacks before he was evacked and he already had shrap no wounds. yeah the good news is he was shipped to hawaii for treatment where he met his wife who was a nurse and bonnie made excellent chocolate chip cookies and and let me ask you this one of the things you talk about your book and this is really important because i see so many people right now that don't know civics that don't understand the constitution that don't understand the federalist papers or the federal's papers and why they were written or the anti-federalist

papers yeah are you talking about project 2025 oh well i'd say that's the anti-anti-u-us government papers that's right much pretty much so why is civics important why is it important to teach so aristotle defined you know somewhat scientifically uh all living things on earth And his definition of, and this is ironic, because way too often in my life, in my students, and the parents I've met, and even in casual conversation, people say, I hate politics, I don't want to be involved, I just want to be left alone. And Aristotle actually defined humanity as Zoe Politicon. literally the only animal that does politics.

So as I used to tell my students, if you don't want to do politics, do you want to be a cow instead? So why a cow? Well, it's a mammal. And they know what one is. I taught what was originally a rural community, so they knew what a cow was. And then it slowly, of course, became expansion of South Tacoma

and, you know, walled, you know, development zones and, you know, stretch malls. Anyway, a lot of the farmland went away over my 38 years teaching there. Yeah, most definitely. We've kind of moved away from a lot of that. It's really interesting what's going on there. A couple more questions that I had for you I wanted to ask.

What do you think about the international tariffs that are going on right now? Okay. Now, what I've said on my other YouTube interview was I so wish I had written a chapter on tariffs because of the stupidest economic idea ever and both liberals and conservatives and libertarians agree. But who knew we were going to get Trump back? Yeah, so on this then. Yeah, who knew? I didn't.

So what do you think is dumb about the tariffs? What in particular in general? All right. Actually, what's dumb about tariffs is what's dumb about wars. As I used to tell my students, when we moved from markettelism to capitalism, you know, and Adam Smith wrote the big book for the king about why capitalism is better and why specialization and trade is better

for production and for wealth of the nation than, you know, attacking the French and trying to steal their cargo or attacking Spanish and trying to steal their cargo. Basically, the days of pirating, you know, we're over. And the thing about war is capitalism depends upon repeat customers. And the worst thing you can do is kill repeat

customers. Yeah. It's bad for business. That's what I've found. Judge says I can't do that anymore. Yeah. And, you know, it's really, you also talk a little bit in the book is why the USA continues to punish Cuba.

Yes. Obama tried to loosen it up a bit, re-engage. I mean, come on. We had reproachment with Russia before Putin. We had the approachment with Vietnam, for God's sake, which probably made this suit. And we had reproachment with China under Nixon. So why the heck are we still beating up on Cuba? and the reason is is because of Florida that's one of seven important swing states

and third generation of Cubans who under Astros Revolution were basically banished to Florida and they're still angry and they want their property back well

get over it you lost they're still grinding that axe from 1965? What is it? Let's see. Let's see. With 62. 61.

It would have been during Eisenhower that Cuba was in New Yorker, right? Because John of Kennedy inherited that. Yes. 65 John of Kennedy took presidency, or was it 63 or 62? 63. Yeah. Okay, now you're messing with me, man.

I'm just trying to remember. I'm flip on. So one of the complaints that teachers make about kids in the classroom is they're using cell phones during the classroom. And I looked at it and I said, well, this is an opportunity for me. As I tell them, I'm only right 90% of the time from memory without notes. So call on your phones and fact check me on that. So audience, call your phones, and fact-checked me on the actual day of the Cuban Revolution. Yeah. Cuban Revolution, 1959 may have been when it started.

It ran from July, 1953 to January 1st, 1959. Excellent. When they overthrew the government of Batista. Now, tell me you're using Wikipedia. I just Google it. Okay. Because I actually Let kids use Wikipedia too

I said First of all I know many professors University of Washington And every one of them uses Wikipedia For quick And I said You know what

I used to tell my students Wikipedia is a fine first source It should never be your last source Yeah you always want to double triple check these days especially with AI and all the other shit that goes on. What was some of the other questions I had for you? You talk about why the Kardashians are, why are the Kardashians more famous than Elizabeth Warren?

Why is that? I bash that a lot. Who, by the way, should have been the nominee instead of Hillary Clinton? Because I think Elizabeth Warren would have won. I think she thought about it at the time, if I recall. She went in the primary. There was, oh, yeah. You know, the Democratic elite, because there were like all these superdelegates, more or less, steered her out after she didn't quite catch on.

And I think she was the only one who knew how to understand Trump and take him on. And by the way, she was also my hero, going back to an earlier topic, for her work on bankruptcy law and on creating, you know, an agency to protect the interests of. the interests of individuals and families against, you know, corporate exploitation. Moreover, she is a very cute dog Bailey. But I will add to that, that she herself was a survivor of bankruptcy in Texas. That's when she became interested in economics. Her parents were bankrupt, and all of a sudden, you know, they were, were no longer living the quality of life they had been living, and that's what drove

in economics, and that's what they were to specialize in bankruptcy law. When I think you're talking to the book, do you think that progressivism will triumph eventually? It seems like we're zigging and zagging as President Obama has said it. Okay, knock on wood. I have a wooden table here. Okay, first of all, if you're going to deal with a school teacher who's dedicated his entire life to the service of the community and the service of children and their parents, then you're going to deal with a guy who's fundamentalian idealist.

Even my conservative brethren, and there are many conservative teachers, by the way, they're not all liberals, and there's many libertarian teachers, believe it or not. And by the way, some of the best teachers I ever taught with were ex-military, if only because they had 20 years' experience of discipline, and they got a good education, a lot of the way. And they also understand the importance of discipline and practice. Yeah.

So where were we? Hit me with the rest of it. We were talking about the Kardashians. Why the Kardashians gave us some more worse than. So bread and circuses. Now, that's the old phrase from the days of Roman Caesars is that give the people

bread and give the people circuses and you will keep them passive. Well, Karnassians are circuses without bread, but they're used the public airways, by the way, to basically make a self-promoting, quote-unquote, reality TV that we both know really isn't reality TV. Yeah, they're all scripted. And so it's, what was the phrase back from the 60s? the boob tube.

The boob tube, yeah. Yeah, TV was the boob tube, which has a wonderful double connotation, both of talking to idiots and sucking on a breast. So it's a great double connotation. And I think actually most of reality TV, which unfortunately is extremely popular, or as I call a non-reality TV, is people having the guilty pressure of watching other people be mean to each other. Yeah, that's kind of, maybe that's why we're, we have these people now that are mean

to each other and they feel that, you know, they should, you know, they laugh at people who aren't getting SNAP benefits right now. I've seen people just laughing and goading at people like, ah, ha, ha, you're going to be poor and hungry. and you just think of, you know, there's children that, I think it's like, I think I saw 80% of the people who utilize SNAP benefits are children. It goes to support children and their food and food insecurity. Who the fuck would laugh at that?

Is there fraud in the system? Yeah, there's going to be some fraud, but that doesn't mean we need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Yeah, no, in this case, the literal baby out of the bathroom. Oh, yeah. You know, it's always funny, Republicans are always like, we're against abortion, and the child is so important, but, man, they sure want to forget about them, and give them nothing after they're born, you know? Yeah, that's right from that to rugged individualism. Yeah, pick yourself up by your booty straps.

Boot straps and make it work, even though you might be in a society that represses you or red-lined you, et cetera, et cetera, and tries to subjugate you where it can based upon race or other conditions. So as we go out, give people a final pitch on on why they should pick up your book, how they should find out more about you. Maybe we can get a plug in for your other books as well. I'm on Amazon. I have a website in development. Google James Matthew Swatsky on Amazon, and I come right up. You have to use the word Matthew because some other guy names James Swatki published before I did.

Believe it or not, there's two of us on the Internet. And progressivism. Ultimately, progress happens. I mean, what was it? Martin Luther King Jr. said, you know, the curve towards justice is long, but no, it's not right. That's not the quote. It's the curve of history bends towards justice. And given the fact that we started as a colony under King and with a government that was across a notion, and then we developed our own little state and local governments who then organized themselves into a rebellion, which then eventually led to, well, the war of 1812, and then eventually led towards the Industrial Revolution,

and the Industrial Revolution transformed the United States from an agricultural country into mass industrial empire. And then the World War I and World War II of suicidal aspects of imperialism in Europe, the United States came in the same. second time, eventually, and basically helped the British take out the Germans and the Japanese. And then, and this is like first time in empire history anyone has ever done this, we rebuilt Japan after writing them a constitution, which actually MacArthur himself wrote, and the lend lease to

Europe. And on the one hand, it was like the greatest act of charity of a conqueror in the history of humanity. On the other hand, it was also an act of self-interest because the only country with industrial capability immediate after World War II was us. So the money that we all invested over there had to come back to us to buy the products to rebuild the manufacturing in Europe. And that was essentially just the Franklin Delano Roosevelt version of, you know, of, you know, pump private. We're basically pumping our money out, so we'll get pumped back in and get the whole economy going again, which allowed us after some fall starts to, you know, have the largest economic expansion in the history of the United States in 1950s.

60s, 70s. Yeah, we made sure to, I mean, and that worked for a good 80 years, 35 years. Yeah, well, until Reagan decided to, you know, cut taxes for everybody and, you know. You mean the rich? Well, yes. I'm still waiting for my trickle down economics. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You and me.

So as we go out, thank you very much for coming to show, James. We really appreciate it. Appreciate you hosting me. Thank you. I hope this comes out well in post-production. I think it will. Usually things do better because we put some sound filters on everything

and then put the book on the cover so it should. Folks, order of the book where refined books are sold. It's called Fixing America. Essays on domestic and foreign policy out January 30th, 2024. Thanks for audience for tuning. Go to goodrease.com Fortress Chris Foss. YouTube.com,

Fortress, Chris Foss, 1, on the TikTok and all those crazy places in it. good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. Mr. Vaugh.