Heartland Journal Podcast
Heartland Journal Podcast EP227 Ted Rall Interview & More 7 10 24
Joining us is author, cartoonist and political pundit Ted Rall to share about his work as a columnist and cartoonist and to discuss with Steve the latest political goings on of our day. To read his blog, enjoy his cartoons go to https://rall.com If you like what you hear make sure to subscribe to the show and share it with your friends. You can find us at http://heartlandjournal.com
- Duration:
- 59m
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Heartland Journal's podcast. With your host, Steve Abromowitz, editor-in-chief of heartlandjournal.com. - Howdy, y'all, and welcome back to the show. I'm Steve Abromowitz, and this is the Heartland Journal podcast. We are focusing on our nation today with always an interesting person, making a positive change in our community, in living color. Welcome to our People on News, where I interview people who are making an impact and are lovers of truth. Today we are talking with special guest, Ted Rall. Frederick Theodore Rall III, on August 26, 1963, is a columnist, syndicated editorial cartoonist and author. His political cartoons often appear in a multi-paneled comic strip format and frequently blend comic strips and editorial cartoon convention. Rall's cartoons appeared in approximately 100 newspapers around the United States, Revenge of the Last Key Kids to Afghanistan and Back, Silk Road to Ruin the Anti-American Manifesto. Rall also writes and draws cartoons for Sputnik International, a news website, appears regularly in Rolling Stone, Time of Fortune and Men's Health magazines, as well as Mad Magazine, nice to read that as a kid, and were, for several years, the most reproduced cartoons in the New York Times. Rall considers himself a neo-traditionalist. His focus is on issues important to ordinary working people. He keeps a sign asking, "What do actual people care about?" But also comments on political and social trends. Hi, Ted, thanks for pulling away from your show. Final Countdown with Angie Wong to come on my show. How are you today? - It's so good to be on the other end of this, Steve. It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me over. - I do enjoy coming on your show. I do enjoy it. It was a little bit later for my show than it is for yours early morning, but New Yorkers can handle it. You're still in New York? - Yeah. - Correct, yep. - That's right. - You began posting cartoons on New York City streets. Tell us how your career started and led you to today. - Well, it's a long story. I'm 60 years old, and it started when I was 14 years old. I won a state cartooning award in Ohio. The local cartoonist for the Dayton Daily News, Mike Peters came to the school and to give it to me invited me to hang out with them. It's not like it sounds. They were so late. No, back then, that kind of thing was totally okay. And he showed me a lot about cartooning. And so I got my first editorial cartoon in a real newspaper when I was 15, went to college, worked for the school paper in college, the Columbia Daily Spectator. And then I kind of had a long and winding road to finally end up in syndication. It wasn't until 1991 that I landed at San Francisco Chronicle. And that was after the incident that you talked about where I was really desperate because I drew cartoons that looked very weird at the time. They didn't look like everybody else. My style just wasn't the same and nobody wanted to run me. So I started, I ran into Keith Herring, the pop artist of the 80s, very famous guy in the subway. And he said, "I'll just take your stuff to the people." You never mind the gatekeepers. You know, just like, you're in this population center. Put the stuff up on the street. So I did. And I started, I did that for a couple of years until I started getting noticed. And then ultimately I got arrested for doing that. And that's really what broke my career 'cause the New York posted a big spread about it. I ended up getting some more, some real clients out of it. And then it sort of slowly built. And I was doing cartoons for the syndicate. I ultimately got up to 140 papers at one point before the whole newspaper meltdown thing started, you know, about 20 years ago. It's been slowly ebbing out, you know, like all of a sudden transition to the internet, started a syndicated column, started doing graphic novels. You know, you have to diversify. You know, it's funny 'cause drawing graphic novels was a full-time job, you know, 30, 40 years ago. But now it's just one of many things that people like me do. Drawing syndicated column used to, I mean, cartoons would have been a full-time job writing a column, doing a radio show. But now it's like everybody cobbles together, living from all these different things. And I've been, you know, I have to admit, when I was young, I dreamed of just working at a paper, you know, in a corner office, looking over the parking lot of the newspaper in Korean or whatever. And that would have been great. But the print newspaper environment just collapsed. And so I had to adapt and adjust and pivot and do other things, but frankly, it did force me to end up doing stuff like radio, which I love. So, you know, it's not all that. - Yeah, I'm old enough to actually remember your stuff in San Francisco Chronicle features 'cause I'm from the Bay Area myself, a little bit younger than you. And so that was fantastic. Was that the heyday for cartoons, the old-fashioned draw it by hand? - Everybody has like a different view of when the, you know, the Golden Age was. But certainly I would say the beginning of the end was the 1990s, when you started noticing that newspapers were tiring staff editorial cartoons and many more, and when they did, it would be they'd poached someone from another paper rather than hire someone young or someone new. And also at the same time as newspapers, you know, we're having more trouble making ends meet, they became more small-sea conservative, less willing to take risks, less willing to, you know, to sort of take chances on anything that was unusual or might get letters from advertisers or angry readers. It was, and so they became much more siloed and we're in the environment. Now, I mean, you know, it's hard to believe, but like, you know, I worked for the Wall Street Journal, you know, it's a conservative editorial page, but they needed some lefties like me, you know? And then at the same time, people who were working for like liberal editorial pages like "The New York Times," they needed to bring some conservatives in. Now there's no pretense of that, right? I mean, everything is completely segregated and walled off. And you know, it's, I don't know that it's a good system. I don't even think it's good for the papers. I don't think it's, you know, I don't think it's appealing. I think a vibrant page has some opposing views and there's some back and forth and, but that's not, that's just not how it is now. - In my old newspaper, Mill Creek View, I wrote some pretty edgy commentary and we'll get letters, but the most hate mail we ever got was for AF Bronco cartoons. I always found that person. It's like, come on guys, it's a cartoon. What about what I just said over here about Ashley Biden's diary or something? But anyway, if you had to define your style of cartoons, what would you say like neo-classic or modern liberal, like what would you say? - Well, I mean, stylistically, it's definitely kind of a bit primitive, right? I mean, very simple, stripped down drawings. You know, it's not quite as simple as say the Simpsons, but it's not complicated and, and through through, like a lot of traditional sort of cross hatching editorial cartoons. You know, a lot of those people are better artists, it's better draftsmen than I am. But I think an abstract look, you know, allows you to focus on the idea more than on the art. And it also, you kind of focuses there. It also, it reproduces more easily down to like, where people are really looking at cartoons now, which is on these little phones. - That's right, yeah. - You know, when you're drawing, you gotta be thinking, this person might be reading this thing two inches high, maybe an inch and a half. So, you know, a lot of detail doesn't fit. - Yeah, a lot of pink colors and bright colors. Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes. I mean, that was the reason for print newspapers when I was young, obviously not, didn't want to read the news about healthcare or Nixon. They're almost all gone now, mine's still standing, but whatever, do you like the age of internet for distribution or do you miss the smudge of newsprint? I mean, I used to press into silly putty the Sunday ones because they were in color. - I mean, full disclosure, I would completely de-invent the internet if I could. I mean, I guess we wouldn't be talking and doing this now if I could do that. The barrier to entry was much higher back then. So, it was less small, de-democratic than it is now. I mean, really, truly anybody can draw a cartoon or write a blog or post a meme and it'll be up and out and potentially go viral overnight. I mean, that can happen now in a way that never could happen. You had to get past an editor. I used to always say, I was read by tens of millions of people but I didn't care about them. I cared about my 140 editors who decided whether the tens of millions of people read my work. And I think there were pros and cons to that. I think what's been lost is communal culture. I mean, there are literally top rock stars or rap stars. I mean, I actually don't know that I've ever heard a Kanye West song, you know? And he's super famous. I'm not sure I've ever heard a Taylor Swift song and I'm a big music person. So, it's like, I mean, there's no way in the 60s that you didn't know who the Beatles were. It's not possible. And we've lost that sort of everybody looked at the CBS evening news with Uncle Walter, everybody got the Sunday paper, everybody read Art Buckwald's humor column, everybody read Garfield. We've lost that and it means that we have less in common with each other as Americans 'cause we're absorbed, everything's different. It used to be like, you didn't have to be into country but you knew who Johnny Cash was, you know? There's just no doubt about it. You knew who Buck Owen was. There was a communal culture. Yeah, yeah, I used to wait for the paper, clip it out and then clip out the Sunday one and stick them all into photo albums. So it was like pre-graphic novel days. I made my own, you know, Wasserman, who did Calvin-- I did that. I did that with the far side because when I was in college, the New York all has a reputation of being wild and crazy but I went to college in New York. New York papers were very conservative. So they were one of the last papers in the country to pick up the far side. So I had my mom cut out the far side and mail it to me and I would cut it out and put it into a book. Now you can Google it and it'll be right there. You know, here's my question. Wasserman, who did Calvin, he disappeared. He kind of did a catch on the right thing. His birthday was Monday. I loved Calvin but he never did a movie or an animated cartoon TV show. Garfield has. Have you ever considered that? Oh, well, it's not like, I'm a total hoe. Anybody who wants to make a movie of myself, call, operators are standing by. Yeah, you know, I know a lot about it because Wasserman, you know, of Waterton, Bill Waterton and I are both at the same syndicate which used to be called Universal Press and the Kids. Now it's Andrew's McMills Indication, same company. And Lee Salem, who was the late great editor who signed both of us, him earlier than me, told me the whole story about, you know, Waterton. He was definitely, you know, a bit of a recluse, I think it's fair to say, didn't want to be a celebrity. He really worried that a movie would not do Calvin and Hobbes right, that they would do it wrong. It would be messed up. He wouldn't have creative control. And just for that reason alone, he didn't want to do it. You know, Sparky Schulz, who, of course, Charles Schulz to outsiders of the business. He was, you know, he had a lot of creative control. And I always think, you know, Waterton could have negotiated for that. He obviously just didn't care. You know, for him, he's like, this is where I wanted to run. And there are a lot of creators who are like that, who are very like picky and persnickety and they just want to do, I mean, you know, when I was a, I used to be a syndicate executive at United Media and I was talking to a guy who drew a comic strip called Perry Bible Fellowship. Great comic strip. And I was like, you know, if you do a daily strip for me, I'll make you rich. He's like, I don't want to be rich. I live with my mom and the basement of State New York. I just want to do one strip a week if I feel like it. I'm like, come on, please, please. And he did, I mean, you know, he just didn't want to. And you've got to respect that because it's this, that's the step brain that's selling you things you don't want to hear. He's also the brain that's making this magnificent comic strip. So, you know, you just have to like, you have to take the two things together. - That's exactly right. That's why I like having you on. And so since we don't have hours to talk, I do need to get into your political background because you are a political guy. You do have a political show. I guess I first noticed in 2009, you had actually called for Barack Obama to resign. This is pre-cancel culture, pre-consolidated hands in media where they would hear this and see it on your Instagram and you're instantly fired. But you asked Obama to resign as President of the United States because quote, "The gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory." Was there a blowback for you on that? What made you decide, 'cause if I'm not mistaken, you are a gentleman of the left, what made you decide to call it like you see it and go against the regime at the time? - Well, right now we're seeing an environment where once again, Democrats are having trouble hauling things as they see them vis-a-vis the president. And Obama is still a sacred cow in the Democratic Party more so than ever, really. And at the time, I've always thought calling them as you see them is your job, whether you're a political cartoonist, a pundit, a writer, a podcaster, a talk show host. I mean, that is your job. And if you're not honest about your takes on things, then you're useless, right? I mean, it's like, why should anyone listen to you? I was reading today, in The New York Times, George Clooney has a piece calling for Biden to step aside in the race. And he said that every politician, every Democratic politician who's talked to agrees with him that Biden needs to step away. And but not one of them is willing to say so publicly. And I know it's different calculus for politicians, but pundits should not be politicians. You know, we're supposed to be the person who says the emperor has no clothes. - Amen. - And so if we don't do that and we should, and either you don't get credibility if you don't sometimes go after your own side when you think they're messing up. So, and you know, they mess up. I was very, I found Obama extremely disappointing from the standpoint of a leftist. And you know, if he had, I guess the whole thing I was trying to expose was that he was not what people thought on, including progressives. And they, you know, I think a lot of people, quite frankly, they're like, you know, he's a black president, therefore he must be a progressive. And it's like, no. I mean, Condi Rice wasn't a progressive. You know, I mean, it's like Colin Powell wasn't a progressive and that's okay. - I love that you're willing to talk like that. Maybe it's because you're now in your 60s and back when you wrote that, you're in your 40s and kids today, they have everything to risk. And you're maybe on the other side of that. But Clooney, I did not hear, you had a very high profile fundraiser for Obama or for Biden just a couple of weeks. So I did not hear refunds were coming either, but that's okay. In 2016, so fast forward 15 years, 17 years, you wrote an article. Why lives in lefties must unite to topple Trumpism? And it was called a manifesto to topple Trumpism. And less than a year later, you wrote in May, 2018. Okay, so was that two years later? You wrote in the Wall Street Journal, wow, congratulations. The left weights for Godot are molar, resistance types crave impeachment desperately, but can't be bothered to do much of anything about it. By Ted Raul May, 2013, 2018, where you predicted that Mr. Trump would not only finish his term, but win re-election due to the divisions within the Democratic Party. What changed your mind and let me just say, I think you were right. And he did win re-election, even though the guy there now is a Trump. - Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, I guess hopefully my two wrongs, my right cancels my wrong. I obviously Biden won in 2020, but I did say that Trump would win in 2016, as early as February of 2016. I really truly believed that the divisions in the Democratic Party are a real thing. And I think it's fair to say the 2020 election was a singular moment because of the COVID lockdown. I gotta say Donald Trump would have won that election if not for two or three factors. Number one, running away from Operation Warp Speed, bizarre. I mean, there's no one who could say that President Hillary Clinton would have approved that as quickly. The Democrat would have been more cautious before approving a vaccine that quickly. They're more into regulations. I mean, you can make the argument for that or against that. But that's just true. That rollout saved many, many hundreds of thousands of American lives, maybe millions. And for Trump not to take credit for that, in fact, to run away from it was political suicide. And I think he would have, I think honestly, if he'd taken that credit and just said, look, I made it available to everybody. I don't think it should be forced, no mandate, which is by the way where I stand too. You know, it's like no one should be ever forced to inject something into their bodies that they don't want to. But I was all about it 'cause I have lung problems and I've had like eight boosters. I love that vaccine. But the point is that like, but I mean, I think that also there was the issue of, you know, he told people don't vote in drop, using drop boxes, don't trust mail-in ballots. It was a pandemic lockdown, people, and it's more convenient. I mean, my advice, my free advice to Republicans is if you can get people to vote for you, even if they're voting the way that you wish they weren't voting for you and you don't make sure they're gonna count it, better to tell them to vote than to not vote, you know? And maybe it'll get counted. I mean, if you tell me- - That's a good point because in 2022, there was a snowstorm in Pennsylvania on election day and had they been into the early voting things, get it done as soon as you can, they may have gone a different way, you're right, ultimately. But some of those things I have to disagree with, but I'm not gonna fight with you on this show 'cause it's about you. But this is serious stuff and nobody likes the current state of the country. You can look at the polls and kind of sense that. And even the late night comics, they're not funny anymore, but they've just started to bring out, you know, some Biden's kids, if they feel like it. Kimmel, not Kimmel, the NBC guy who took over for Carson, whatever's their name is. - Yeah, I was really good at that. - Just give me one with the alcohol problem. Yeah, okay. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Anyway, they're all just sad clowns really, when they're not allowed to say anything unless they're told to, like you said, kind of the editors, how do you keep your sense of humor being around yucky politics so long? - Well, I mean, sometimes it's true that like, especially in American culture, humor as well as revenge is best served cold. I mean, if you look at some of the most successful comedians in, you know, people like Carlin, or even like Bob Hope or people like that, they're having like a ride, roll, dry, you know, approach to humor works really that better. I'm also a dual national through with France, my mom with French. And so I have a lot of familiarity with the French approach. In France, you know, you can be a cartoonist or a stand up comic and just be like, "I hate this person, they're terrible." Everybody, you know, and that's okay. It doesn't freak anyone out. In the US, people don't like that. It's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, chill, dude." And so, so like, I find that whenever I've kind of like lost it, like during the Bush years, I got really angry and I look back at that work and I'm like, "Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here." It's like, I might have been right politically, but you know, the job is about delivering the message in a way that people might be receptive to, especially people who disagree with you, that all you really want is for people to be like, "Yeah, I never thought of that." And it's like, you know, you don't necessarily need them to be like, "Oh, you're right. "I will now change my voter registration "because of this cartoon I read." That's not realistic. But you can move the needle a little bit over time and I feel like it was really, you know, it's a lesson that's sometimes needs to be relearned. Right now, I'm really, really angry at my fellow Democrats because they're acting insanely stupid on purpose. I mean, they're literally telling the voters who already decided three out of four of them years ago that they didn't want either Biden or Trump to be the nominees of their respective parties. But let's focus on Biden right now. And they've been saying, you know, I've been saying for four years, Joe Biden is senile and like, you can tell. And there's, you know, it's kind of like, I know because my mother had Alzheimer's and I'm like, that she had dementia. I know what dementia is. I was around people with dementia day after day after day. I was her sole caregiver. I know dementia when I see it and so do most Americans. You've ever had to deal with this in their families. And so, you know, you're literally, you have these democratic opinion makers trying to say, nothing to see here. He's just old. It's like, no. - Sharp as a tag, sharp as a tag, sharp as a tag. - Yeah, or when he's not, or in private, he's great. It's only in public, but he's not. I mean, first of all, the job is in public. You know, communicating ideas is the number one job of the president. You know, so the whole point is they're insulting us, but on top of that, they're wrong. And this isn't gonna work. And these efforts are doomed. And while they're wasting time, the Democratic Party could be lining up around another nominee. And they're messing around. I mean, Biden's not gonna be the nominee, you know, and he's just not. He's not, not by November, he's not. So it's like, you know, the only question now is whether he has to resign. I think he ought to. I think he should be not president one more minute. You know, I think he's not fit to serve. And for Democrats to pretend that otherwise, it's like, it's gross. So I have to be like, find a way to back off and be like, okay, okay, calm down, Ted. And come up with like hilarious, kind of like drill. Find the absurdity, not the, not the, I mean, look, these guys pulled off a coup d'etat against for the last four years, they have installed a stuffed mannequin into the Oval Office. It's been weekend at Bernie's for four years. I don't know who made the key decisions in the Biden, in the Biden White House. I don't know who did the inflation, who was for the inflation reduction act. I don't know who told Netanyahu, we're behind you 100%. I don't know. And like, I feel like we should know these things. And so, you know, when you kind of like, certainly not for somebody that ran as the most transparent administration in history, they're not telling us anything that happens after five o'clock. Yeah, exactly. And their main brief is that look at Donald Trump, he's anti-democratic. Okay, so Donald Trump attempted a coup d'etat on January 6th, arguably. Okay, but this was a successful coup d'etat that they pulled off for four years. And they think that they get like James Clyburn thinks that after he kneecapped Bernie Sanders and then installed Biden, that like, and then basically knew that for all these years. And like, he thinks like all these, they think they still get to run the show and be king makers, hell no. And so, you know. Just yesterday he said, "Riden with Biden," after they had their little meeting. All right, let me shift here slightly and we'll get back into that because I know it is very passionate. But your wife, she is, I believe, New York art editor Francois, how do you say you're lasting? That's not my wife. Oh, it's not, I thought she would. She's lovely. I'm unmarried. That's, you're thinking of France was Moulie, who... I was. I thought she's married to... The cartoon editor at Raw Magazine. Okay, not you. Art Spiegelman. Yeah, she's married to Art Spiegelman. The far more famous, far richer cartoonist, who did the graphic novel Mouse. Yes, okay. And there was some, okay, now I get it 'cause you had some interesting things to say about Miles back in the day before he tried to take it off of the libraries. Quick comment on that. Well, you know, it's like, if someone wants to look it up, they can just like Google Village Voice, Ted Roll, Art Spiegelman, and you'll find the whole contraton. It was a big controversial thing. Basically, look, it was, I wrote a negative, essentially book review about a retrospective about Spiegelman's work, and it blew up beyond all belief. It ended up being lawsuits and all sorts of stuff came out of it. And, you know, I mean, I kind of feel like cartooning ought to be as mature as, say, you know, not as a fiction literature where you can have, you know, like really robust dialogue between, say, you know, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, where they hate each other and you can have like literary feuds, and it should be okay. We should be able to criticize each other. But the truth is that a lot of cartoonists are man children and women children, and, you know, they're not like real mature, and so they don't, you know, what they would like to do is stab each other in the back over drinks at comics conventions, but they don't want to, they're not willing to say the same exact thoughts in public, you know, in a magazine the way I was. - I went to a forum once at UCLA and the two guys, Trey, and I forget the other guy's name from South Park were there and somebody asked, "Where do you get your inspiration?" They said, "Acid, acid, acid." So yeah, of course. But being in the arts and entertainment business so long as you have, how do you feel about cancer culture in today's Hollywood? I mean, it's always been there, but this is different. What do you think about it? - Yeah, and cancel culture. I want to be clear here, you know, as a left winger, I have often been attacked by right wingers who were seeking to cancel me and sometimes succeeded. You know, for example, during the Bush years, when I was doing stuff against Bush and against the war on terror, against the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, you know, I had people that use really some pretty despicable tactics to try to get me canceled. And, you know, I don't think my experience was unique by any means. Now, it's the left that's doing it more, particularly on college campuses, but not exclusively. I mean, you know, we have, like right now, the Palestine protesters are, you know, being banned from job applications, for example, by certain, like a big law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell just announced that they're screening out pro-Gaza protesters. I think, and I have said this for a while, that political expression should become a protected class of speech under employment discrimination statutes, just like race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. And so, I mean, I don't think someone who, like, this has actually happened. Someone who has, like, a bumper sticker for a president of the United States, parks their car in the parking lot, and then they get fired by the boss who sees it. They haven't talked about politics at work, they haven't mentioned it at work, they're not bothering any coworkers or customers at all, and they get punished, that's wrong. Your politics are your own people after January 6th, who were docked and also lost their jobs, that's wrong. I would even go so far as to say the people at Charlottesville who got docked and, you know, guys serving pizza, I don't care if he's a racist, you know, it's just, don't spit in my pizza. You know, I mean, that's protected speech in the US. And so, cancel culture, I hate it. Look, it's so simple. People like you and me, we need free expression and the ability, we need a lot of space to say things that are dangerous and to mess up, and say things that are maybe even wildly construed as offensive and maybe even immoral. We should be able to do that. We need to be able to do that. Otherwise, we can't function, we can't have, I mean, I was thinking, I mentioned George Carlin. I had a friend who told me that she was a huge fan of his until he told one joke about abortion. And she said, he was dead to me after that. I'm like, so wait, you're telling me that you loved George Carlin, you bought his albums, you saw him in concert, you must have heard thousands of George Carlin jokes, and he was awesome. But one joke, let's just stipulate that that joke was completely wrong-handed and evil. And, okay, but the guy's batting, nine, nine, nine, nine. And you're like, nah, that one joke, he's dead to me. I'm like, well, no one can possibly survive your standards, right? You must not eat at a restaurant 'cause if they have that one in a thousand times that like the coffee's a little cold, you're never gonna go back there. I mean, that's just like comedy, satire, especially political satire, it has to have the space to be left the hell alone. I mean, you're free to say that, like, use your own speech to counter it. But I mean, truly, like, if you're giving a speech on a college campus, I don't care if you're far right, far left in between, nobody should be shouting you down. If they have something to say, they can confront you during the Q and A, and you should you owe them a vibrant back and forth. But, you know, I'm a, I totally am a free speech absolutist, I mean, you know, really to a fault. - Jerry Seinfeld said something very similar. So let me ask you this one, and for the sake of time, I'll try to frame it correctly as best I can. So, there's a joke that goes around that says, you know, the left can't mean, the right kind of owns the meme space. Do you feel the Democratic Party, they're just not funny. They don't have a sense of humor. They're all about abortion and death, and Gaza and terrorism or whatever. Is it the same one you called out when Obama was present and now led by Biden? And is it enough to make you a long time liberal, an independent or even more a libertarian or maybe even a Republican, you know, the new platform that they just came out with, it's pretty generic, no abortion in there, less God, no debt statement or gay marriage stuff anymore. Could it win you over like PJ O'Rourke kinda? First of all, I'm always open to, you know, whenever I hear an argument, I think to myself, nothing is more exciting than hearing an argument that changes your mind, you know, where you're just like, God, you know, I never thought of that. And that is great. It doesn't happen very often for me 'cause usually I've thought things through pretty thoroughly. Look, I have found, and I've said this a lot, there's a lot to admire in libertarianism, and there's a lot, and I think, you know, I am not one of those people who thinks that Donald Trump is an idiot or that he's an existential threat to democracy anymore than the Democratic Party, especially nowadays. Would I become Republican? Look, let me put it this way. I would need to see some major changes. There are things I like about Donald Trump, like for example, his skepticism on foreign military adventurism, you know, the fact that he was willing to negotiate with the Taliban after 20 years, when no other president, Democratic Party, Republican was willing to do that, and he ended the war. And I'm glad that Biden followed through, albeit, you know, in competently in terms of the execution, but obviously. But, you know, I'm glad that we're out of Afghanistan. We shouldn't have been there in the first place. It was 20 years too long, that was great. I'm glad that he was willing to talk to Kim Jong-un. I'm glad that he's expressed a willingness to talk to the Ayatollahs in Iran. That's great, you know, that is, you know, talking should not be a reward for behavior. Talking is talking, everybody should talk. Churchill said better to jaw-jaw than to war war. We should, so I like all that. But I would really need to see Republicans care about the poor, about the sick. I mean, you know, there's some big holes, like, you know, Trump promised us some sort of better improvement over the Obamacare, which is a really crappy system, but it's an improvement over no system at all. So, I mean, you know, considering that Obamacare was, came out of the, ran a think tank, you know, I mean, certainly, somehow it feels like Republicans should be able to work on this, and they don't seem to care, or, and they don't seem to care much about poverty or homelessness, it's sort of like, well, Mitt Romney and John McCain to Republican presidential candidates both gave us that policy, because we've created Massachusetts and the other one gave us the final vote, yeah. All right, so you have a new book. 2024 Revisited, came out on paperback May 13th. The future is now. 2024 Revisited is a time capsule and a fun trip into retrofuturism when Bill Raw, what did Bill Raw get right? What did he miss? What should we have seen? Oh, sorry, yeah, my bad. What would, what should we have seen coming? So tell us about your new book. It's my new old book. So in 2000, I put out 2024 in black and white, and because my publisher didn't want to spring for color, back then color comets were expensive, especially for graphic novels. So I was like, oh, we can't sell this thing for like 30 bucks, no one will buy it. And basically it was a parody of George Orwell's 1984, and the thesis was that the Orwellian idea of a totalitarian state that was telling, watching everyone all the time, was not gonna be as accurate as a state where we all oppressed ourselves by our total stupidity and addiction to our dumb devices and constant like search for entertainment. Now, I think I got that right. Bear in mind, it was 2000, it was seven years before the invention of the iPhone. Hip people had a flip phone, but you could sort of see it coming. And so there was, so basically I was always upset me that like my publisher didn't want to reissue it. So finally, I got the rights back, clogged the rights back, updated it, did it in color, the way it got intended, and basically tried to go through annotate, what did I get right, what did I get wrong? I got some things wrong for sure, but I think I did pretty well. And in terms, it's still true. I mean, as Edward Snowden showed, the government is spying on us. They are looking at us through our TVs, literally, and listening to our phone calls and all that. They are doing that, but that's not really what suppressing us, right? It's our inability to focus, and our consumerism, our obsession with stuff that is really not important, text messaging, all that stuff, all that drama, that's getting in the way of what's important. - And like you said, you don't have to bat a thousand, you'd bat 333, you're getting the hall of fame. So you all can pick that up on Amazon or wherever you buy books these days, about 100 pages. You also predicted a media environment developing where no journalism could be trusted. Chris Cuomo was out telling people he didn't really mean it when he said get vaccinated or go to jail like his brother, the actual governor, lawmaker of New York did. That came true, right? Can't trust the media. - That did, yeah. Well, that did come true. And you know, I mean, the thing that got me focused on that is that digital media is inherently fungible and mutable. I mean, you literally, I mean, let's say you post a blog, like I'm a blogger, let's say I post a blog, a blog entry to my website. - It changes. - If I was to say I get something wrong, there's no one that can stop me from going back in and fixing it and making it look like I was right all along. Now, I don't do that because, first of all, who has the time and I don't really care, but it's also because it's wrong. And if I get something wrong, I would rather do an old school and do a correction at the bottom and say, "Oh, I got the above wrong," or put a bracket in or something, but I leave the original mistake in there so people can see it. But the New York Times, for example, they don't do that. They update the same story, they publish a story that actually appears in their print edition, and then they change it while it's online. They change the headline all day long in order to get more clicks. They change the URL to get more clicks. They'll change the facts. They don't say, "Oh, we screwed up," unless they get called out and threatened with the lawsuit and they might mention it. But the point is, you can't trust that media because they're saying, "We reported this, and it was right all along." And it's like, but you know it wasn't. I mean, I saw Biden back in the 2020 campaign doing a CNN town hall on COVID. It was Anderson Cooper feeding questions from the audience about COVID and how the government was responding to it. Biden was every bit as adult as he was during the most recent debate with Trump. He was a disaster. I couldn't believe it. My jaw dropped. This was 2020. - Remember what they're standing next to each other and he basically had to feed him the answers, yeah. - Yeah, and the thing, if they were thoughtful, questions, they were nothing adversarial at all about it. And nor did it necessarily need to be adversarial. It was like, we're informing the public, here's the present, or the future present. Anyway, I checked the archive the next day 'cause I wanted to put it out on my socials. It was scrubbed. Every other little clip was there, but there was a big space and then that space disappeared. It was gone. It was memory hold just like in 1984. I mean, that's the world we live in now. That's reality. No one could put the toothpaste back in the tube. That's it. And so people know that and it's toxic. People don't trust the media. They can't trust the media. They shouldn't trust the media. - Which is why I love podcasts. So tell us about your two podcasts and Angie, do you get good guests? You can trust or do you have to listen very carefully to suss out the truth from the fiction? - Well, well, we've had you on the show. - Yeah, I'm on the truth of that. - The final countdown on Radio Sputnik. It's a Eastern time, 10 a.m. to 12 noon, but you can stream it after the fact on Rumble and X Spaces or just go to my website, rawl.com. And yeah, and then the other one is the DMZ America podcast where conservative cartoonist Scott Stantis, who also happens to be my best friend, he's the cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune. He and I have really spirited but friendly conversations about politics. We agree about a lot of things, but we also really disagree about a lot of stuff too, like capitalism, I mean, he's a big capitalist. I'm not, he's very pro-Israel, I'm not. So it's like, but it's great 'cause we're not screaming at each other or calling each other names or anything like that. - And 'cause I think Crossfire was one of the most downtrodden things of our slouching towards Gamora of all time. So it's good that you guys don't yell at them. - Yeah, we were kind of reacting to that. And anyway, we always had such good conversations we thought about politics. Why not share them, you know, with the public and see if anybody cared. And so, yeah, in terms of the final countdown, I mean, Angie and I definitely get a lot of guests. You know, look, everybody's biased. You, me, Angie, everybody, including the guests as well. And sometimes people are not even aware of their biases. So, you know, we try to correct, we let people express themselves, express their opinions. I'm not gonna sit, you know, if they say something that is not true factually, we will try to call them out and correct it. But we're not like in the business of, you know, arguing with their opinion. It's like, you know, if you express an opinion, wherever it is, it's like, well, you know, you can express your opinion. The listeners are smart. They'll, you know, they know an opinion when they hear it, it's an opinion talk show. You know, it's like you can generally tell this person's, you know, a Democrat or whatever. It's like, so judge accordingly. But if they, but you are not, that won't happen. You're not gonna title two or better. - Right, it's so much better to air out both sides and let the audience decide versus what you said with Anderson Cooper, kind of spoon feeding the old man, what he was supposed to have said, because he already knew what he was gonna say and it's all scripted, that's terrible stuff. So, okay, so we're almost out of time here, but I wanted to ask you this. So, you have a lot more books than just this new one, Trump, Snowden, Bernie. I wanna know what your favorite one to write was, but someone going by A-strong had this to say about political suicide. That's the name of your book. "For the Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party" by you. My husband read this and was laughing quite often due to its content. I was next to pick it up as my interest had been stuck with a stick to see the contents of this volume. I agree with some of Ted Rawls' political opinions, but not all, and that's cool, as his experiences are vastly different from my own, so we should, so why should we agree? My husband enjoys the cartoons of Ted Rawls' "Mucho", but I prefer the text of the book way more than his graphic works as there is a certain bite to Rawls' text that stands out. What do you think of, I guess, Mrs. A-strong's review of you and what's your favorite of those books? - Well, you know, I mean, part of the reason that you can do, that you can write, Andra, is, you know, it's two different media and she's in a great example of the advantages of expressing yourself in a variety, a diversity of distribution platforms. So, you know, I'm glad that she and her husband were able to find something useful in my work. You know, in terms of my favorite, it's hard to say, but probably the anti-American manifesto, not only is the title, but the contents are downright dangerous. And, you know, it's like a, you know, it's like a bomb. I can't believe, I mean, and this is the part where I really am sentimental about the American system and its potential. I mean, to live in a country that lets you print something like that and not send you to prison is special. That's not true in a lot of other countries on the planets. And I would not want to lose that, you know, to be able to be so adversarial, even against your own government, you know, to quote a Marxist friend of mine. We were, she's a cartoonist, we were both complaining about getting passed over for awards. And she's like, Ted, are you kidding? Like, if we were in power, and like, they were criticizing us that way, we would send them to a main foreign farm. And I'm like, that's true. So, she's like, so they don't give us an award. They're not killing us, that's pretty good. So, you know. - Awesome, you know. You can find that on Amazon too, folks. 12 bucks, total bargain, Kindle editions too. Just curious, last question. Young people under 30 for the first time ever are plus one with Republicans according to the Pew, which is not exactly a far right outlet. More astonishing even, under 26 and registered to vote, the ones that matter, are plus 30. Do you think you might change your humor direction towards maybe some of those younger, more conservative folks? Are you gonna stay true to yourself? - Well, I'm gonna stay true to myself, but I definitely, look, I always like to have younger readers, you know, younger readers are the future. And, you know, obviously, that's where the revolution is. It's surprising. I think that is a lot, there's a lot, there's a perfect storm there. Democrats are messing up in a big way. The fact that this is true, I think there's a lot, big reaction to woke culture. Also, generationally, the people now in their 20s, these are Gen Z, they're different from the millennium. The millennials were really politically correct and, you know, into identity politics. And Gen Z are the children of Gen X and they're edgy and they kind of just don't care. I mean, I think when you're born into a world where you're told, hey, the world might end due to climate change by 2050 and you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, that's in 26 years." You kind of like don't have much room for nonsense. Or, you know, I think the old radicals like Bernie and Nancy, they forgot that they hated the man, now they're the man. And so the young ones who you just described are like, "They're the man, I like conservatives." All right, Ted. Well, thank you for your time. It was really fun. We could do this all day long. We have a lot to talk about. But I'd like to have you on again sometime. But so, tell everyone we're being good, thank you. Tell everyone they can go find out more about you and follow your social media and your shows. Sure, so just go to raw.com, R-A-L-L.com and if you're pretty much get to everything, you can also go to gocomics.com/thedraw and you could, the DMC America podcast, just Google it and same thing with the final countdown on Radio Sputnik, just Google it, it'll come right up. Fantastic, all right, thanks again. Hi, this is Whistle, we're on the Heartland Journal podcast. (upbeat music) - Producer Steve, what'd you think of our guest, Ted Rawl? - Oh, I like it. It's interesting, I'm an artist and I'm a writer, I'm a creator, hint. I've got stuff sitting in the wings that I've created, some art pieces that I'm gonna start posting on my sub stack that are gonna pretty much cover everybody's feathers. I'm just gonna let it go out and I've had people, I had a long time person that I was involved with and I wrote something about the security state and he says, "Man Steve, you've really changed a lot "from when we used to get together." I go, "Yeah, I have changed a lot." I wrote a whole book about it. But I said, "That's fine, we'll part." And then I've written a lot of good stuff that's very positive, uplifting, inspiring. But I have two sides of me, I have like what he was saying, there's times when you just wanna cover something and you're just gonna let it go. And I am thankful that we live in a country where we can, for the most part, express ourselves and not go to jail for that. And you and I've talked about this before. You know what, if you don't get in somebody's sandbox, they're gonna leave you alone. January 6th, you weren't too smart going there in the first place and you and I both agree, no one should get arrested. But you went into their sandbox, you went on their turf and you opened the door for you to deal with what they're all dealing with. On the other hand, we're sitting here behind a microphone and we're just expressing our views and we're not telling anybody, we're gonna come after you, we're just expressing our views. - And I love that. - We'll still have the right to freedom of speech until they take it away completely. But have you, I've been doing, I did a lot of homework because of July 4th on the last show and I kept going, I wanna just carry that forward a little bit today. But have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence? - I think, did Ted, Paul Harvey I think did something on that, but go ahead, explain a little bit. - He might have, he might have, he was his patriot. But I think this is hugely important to remind us, there is a cost to be brave to your point. It's not free to be a hero, in fact, it can cost you everything. You might not even live to see the benefits of what you did when you did the right thing, but if it's on the right side of the truth in history, it will pay a dividend. So here's what happened after the 4th of July, 1776, like now only 248 years ago. Five signers were captured by the British as traders and tortured before they died. 12 had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the Revolutionary Army. Another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. They signed and they pledged their lives or fortune and their sacred honor and they meant it. What kind of men were they? 24 were lawyers and jurists. 11 were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners. Men of means well-educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. Carton Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ship swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts and died in rags. Thomas McKim was so pounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers were both looted the properties of Ellery, Climber, Hall, Walton, Gwynette, Hayward, Rutledge and Middleton. There's a cost, right? At the Battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr. noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. The owner quietly urged General George Washington to open fire, blow it up. The home was destroyed and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife and she died within a few months. John Hart was taken from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his grist mill were laid to waste. For more than a year, he lived in forests and caves returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later, he died from exhaustion in a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates. Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild-eyed, rabble-rowsing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight and unwavering, they pledged for the support of this declaration with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence. We mutually pledged to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors. Michael W. Smith wrote that. Grammy award-winning multi-platinum singer and songwriter, Grammy award-winning multi-platinum singer-songwriter, as I just said, who we played for you yesterday because I forgot about that and it was supposed to be today. Now you have to go back and listen to yesterday's show. And in a few minutes remaining, I just wanted to remind everybody of another patriot who did exactly that, sacrificed everything for the greater good. This was a letter that was written addressed to King. In view of your low-grade abnormal personal behavior, I will not dignify your name with either a mister or a reverend or a doctor. And your last name calls to mind only the type of King, such as King Henry VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast. King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own, but I am sure they don't have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repent, you are a repeat. You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act as you do. Clearly you don't believe in any personal moral principles. King, like all frauds, your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You even at the early age have turned out to be not a leader but a desolate abnormal moral imbecile. We will not have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character, and thank God we have others like him, but you are done. Your honorary degrees, your noble prize, what a grim farce, and others' awards will not save you. King, I repeat, you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually chaotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil, and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat, no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished. You will find on the record for all time your filthy dirty evil, companion, male and female giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities and some of them to pretend to be ministers of the gospel. Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness. It is all there on the record. Your sexual orgies, listen to yourself. You're filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record. You have been on the record. All your adulterous acts, your sexual orgies, extending far into the past. This one is but a tiny sample. You will understate this. Yes, from your, I can't, that's blurred out there. Evil playmates on the east coast to blank and others on the west coast. And outside the country you are on the record. King, you are done. The American public, the church organizations have been helping Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are, an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done, King. This is the end. There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is? You have just 34 days in which to do this exact number has been selected for a specific reason. It has definite practical significance. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is barred to the nation. Kill yourself. You know who it is from? - No. - The FBI wrote that to Martin Luther King Jr. - Wow. - Public information. You can Google it yourself. Stay tuned for my thoughts for the day. (upbeat music) ♪ Sing the song about the heartland ♪ ♪ The only place I'm feeling home ♪ ♪ Sing about the way you're good man ♪ ♪ The words until the day light's gone ♪ I know that was a little bit heavy, but time for my quotes for the day. Before I share and remind everyone to subscribe to heartlandjournal.com, go there and give us your email and zip code. And we'll deliver news right to your inbox for free. We had a little cyber attack yesterday, but we were quickly to rebound and the newsletter went out. So if you want to make sure not to miss us, email is the way, in case they try that again. Didn't work, could work next time. All right. Whenever I look back, darling, it distracts from the now. Edna Mode, the Incredibles. Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand, Homer Simpson. How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. Winnie the Pooh. Too bad SpongeBob isn't here to enjoy SpongeBob not being here, Squidward. Well, it's no secret that the best thing about a secret is secretly telling someone your secret, thereby adding another secret to their secret collection of secrets. Secretly, SpongeBob. Some people are worth melting for Olaf from Frozen. Disney movie 2013. That's it for this episode. Thank you, Ted Raul, for keeping politics humorous. It's always too serious and every election is the most important of our lifetime. People are gonna die. Gotta laugh sometimes to not go crazy. This is goodbye for now. I'm your host, Steve Abramowitz, editor-in-chief of heartlandjournal.com. See you all next week. Peace in our time and definitely G2G. Glory to God. Amen. ♪ Yeah, I've been dreaming of the hard, hard place ♪ ♪ Walking with a five-trees dance ♪ ♪ Where the river runs deep and the third call seems ♪ Any views or opinions represented on the podcast are personal and belong solely to the creator and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the creator may or may not be associated with in a professional or a personal capacity unless it's strictly stated. ♪ I still never get this ball ♪ ♪ From the hard land ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm from the hard land ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm from the hard land ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm from the hard land ♪