Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you
want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live
stream my daily show prep with all the links, become
a patron, go to dpeakclendarshow dot com, make sure you
hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right
to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so
much for your support. All right, so I have been
accumulating just a sort of a program not even a programming. No,
we'll call it a peek behind the curtain. How I
do my show prep is I will see something and
then say something. No, I see something, and I will
like bookmark it. If it's a tweet, I will grab
the link. If it's on a website, I throw it
into a document, a Google dot comment, and then I
will come back and if there's anything that I come across,
you know, if it's something that's like pertinent for right now,
I will pull it out and it goes right into
today's stack of stuff, right into Pete's prep pile, as
I like to call it. So that's for the stuff
that is of expiring value something that should be talked
about immediately. But over the course of days, I will,
and sometimes weeks or months, I'll accumulate a bunch of
different stories that end up being lumped together, and then
you get this fuller picture of a particular topic. So
today's show is going to be some of that stuff.
And it was prompted by a piece, well several pieces,
but the big one dropped yesterday or sorry two days
ago by Rod Dreyer, who is an American conservative writer, editor,
and journalist. Writes about religion, politic culture ideas. He has
worked for publications like The American Conservative. He has worked
at The National Review, the Dallas Morning News, the New
York Post. He's written several books. So he had a
very very lengthy piece. It'll take you almost an hour
to read through the whole thing, and he's got it
at his sub Stack newsletter. I'm not going to be
able to go over all of the points that he
raises in that piece titled what I Saw and Heard
in Washington, because he just returned to his He lives
now in Budapest, I think, and so he had just
returned to Budapest after spending three days in DC, had
meetings with all these you know, Washington Conservatives and Republicans
and maga people young and old. He dined with I
think Orbon and the Vice president was there and met
the family and all of that. So he did a
big write up on his visit and what he came
away thinking, and in a sentence, it's not good. It's
not good. This is more of a cultural conclusion. But
I'm going to start with something that animates part of
what we are seeing. And this is a very large topic. Okay,
so there are elements A and I welcome your input
on all of this stuff because this is going to
be h There are going to be various issues that
are hit upon in Drere's massive write up, and every
one of these different issues are complex, but they are
all sort of in this ball, if you will, or
under this heading of what's happening inside of the Right.
This gets to the arguments involving the quote woke right.
Israel is in there. The zoomers, the young zoomers or
zoomer cons These are the younger generation that's now working
in some of these you know, young professionals. They're in DC.
It gets into housing, it gets into economic opportunity. It
gets into the way the left has corrupted the institutions
and largely created this reactionary groiper nation, the Nick Fouentes,
Tucker Carlson, Candae Owens fight with people like Ben Shapiro. Right,
So all of this gets swept up in Rod Dreer's piece,
and this goes beyond politics, all right, And so like
I urge you, I might have to say this multiple
times for people that pop in and they didn't hear
all of this. I urge you as you listen to
these various topics to try to divorce some of the
political arguments and personalities, right, and just think in terms
of the macro at a cultural level. One of the
guys I like to listen to when he puts his
podcasts out is Andrew Claven and he does this podcast
it's called Clavin on the Culture, and his most recent
episode that he did, he was talking about how, and
he has said this before, but he mentioned how like
all of his colleagues at the Daily Wire, guys like
Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro, that they were all
they were all pessimistic about Donald Trump's ability to win reelection.
But Claven wasn't Claven was the only one saying, Oh, yeah,
he's gonna win. He's gonna win. And he's like, and
I knew this because I don't follow the politics and
the polls. I follow the culture, and what he saw
in the culture indicated to him Trump was going to win.
So let me start with housing. I have been saying
for a long time, and I know this comes up
in different ways in different stories along the way, which is,
oh no, here's another apartment complex that's getting built, right,
and I'm tired of all these apartment buildings going up.
You've heard it said in Charlotte, You've heard it said
in well like every city. Basically, I think, well, that's
not dying. Too many apartments, more luxury apartment's, more apartment
buildings going up. What about the traffic? I hate all
of the apartment buildings, right, We don't need more apartment
buildings than people go out to the city council meetings
and they try to block all the apartments from being
built and all of that. There was an analysis run
by J. Parsons, a real estate economist, and another guy
named Barrett Lindbergh, co founder of Savoy Equity who basically
took the data and the analysis from Parsons and then
blasted it out to his you know, tens of thousands
of followers or hundreds of thousands on Twitter and gave
a deeper analysis of it. And here's the headline. Is
that in the apartment market right now, the cheapest, oldest
apartments are getting crushed. But that's only happening in city
that have just delivered lots of new apartments. And if
you just think about it, it makes some sense if
you have an understanding of how this kind of supply
market would work. Right, the more you build, and you
build luxury apartments, then people who can afford those move
into those, and they clear out the second tier sort of.
So you know, your luxury apartments would be class A,
your second tiers class B, and then your class C
the oldest, cheapest apartments, right, people move out of those. Well,
when people are moving out of those, what happens The
landlords need to fill them. So what do they do?
They drop the rents, And that's happening. Here's a great idea.
How about making an escape to a really special and
secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a quick drive
up the Mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection.
Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, honeymoon, maybe you want to
plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together
for a big old reunion. Cabins of Ashville has the
ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your
loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within
the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest,
their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of
the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Asheville and the
entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the
perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all the local
attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills,
outdoor tables, and your own private covered porch. Choose from
thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a great lodge
with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the
ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have
pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight, three
six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there
is to offer at cabins Offashville dot com and make
memory that'll last a lifetime. You've heard me say, you know,
for a long time now the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution. But now the revolutionaries
are embedded not just in the political left, but they're
in the political right. Although I don't think they are
of the right politically, but they have embedded themselves over there.
And the common goal between these revolutionaries on both sides,
this is what's also referred to as the horseshoe theory,
where you know, it kind of goes like the two
prongs of the horseshoe. You know, it's like this this
sea shape, and the edges, the ends of the horseshoe
bend back towards each other. Right, they their common purpose
is nihilism in the form of tearing down the current
civilizational order because they believe it's a failure. They believe
it to be a failure for different reasons. The tactics
are the same. This is what James Lindsay has been
talking about for like two years. Charlie Kirk recognized this
as well. But it's nihilism. You've heard the term blackpilled.
That's what this is also. And so they look at
the current order and they say, this isn't serving us,
this isn't conserving anything, this isn't helping me. And on
the right, quote unquote, there is this nihilism in that. Well,
the liberal order, the post World War two liberal order,
was insufficient to ward off the transgressions of the Marxists.
So we now have to burn it all down because
it's become so corrupted by the Marxists. Some people just
want to watch it burn. Those are the true nihilists.
Those are the gropers. By the way, in my view,
they're just nihilists. They're not seeking to build anything. I
don't even know if they've thought it through that far.
But one of the big complaints that they have is housing,
and because of policies like zoning policies, regulatory burden, nimbiism,
the not in my backyard stuff, I don't want you
to build anything. Right then, and you hear it like
I hear it all the time. Just go to your
neighborhood Facebook group or the next door page or something
right your HOA meetings whenever there's a rezoning and oh
my gosh, there's going to be some apartments built nearby.
It's going to increase traffic. I always tell them you
are traffic. You live someplace and there was no traffic
here before you lived here. So anyway, the data on
class apartments, these are the cheapest oldest apartments, Class C
or C class because I know on radio it probably
sounds like I'm saying Class A, but I'm not. I'm
saying Class C. Okay, they're getting crushed right now. In
Denver the rents are down almost fourteen percent. In Naples,
Florida down almost fourteen percent, Austin down thirteen percent, Phoenix
down ten and a half percent, San Antonio down seven,
Dallas down six and a half. And all of those
cities have in common. And there are more Ashells on
the list too. But as somebody pointed out to me
last night, that there are a lot of people that
moved away. So but all of these other places, they
all have recently absorbed a massive wave of new apartments,
and in cities that did not get this kind of
a big supply wave, the sea class rents are actually rising.
Twenty cities saw their sea class rents go up more
than three percent nineteen of those twenty cities had supply
below the national average, So it's basically musical chairs. Think
of it like that. When a brand new luxury apartment
opens up, where do the renters come from? All? Right?
They move up from slightly older apartments. Those apartments now
have vacancies, so they drop their rents to compete. That
pulls in renters from the even older apartments, and down
the line it goes. Eventually it hits the oldest, cheapest
apartments at the bottom. And here's why they get hit
the hardest. People living in class see apartments are already
spending a huge chunk of their paycheck on rent. To
fill the empty units, landlords have to cut prices a lot,
sometimes enough to attract people who could not afford market
rate apartments before. So it's like a waterfall effect. Right.
But here's the important part, says Barrett Lindbergh, This proves
that building new apartments, even the luxury apartments, reduces rents
all the way down the spectrum. If it was just
an affordability crisis, would see the CEA class rents falling everywhere.
But we don't. In high supply cities and low supply cities.
We would see the same thing, but we're not seeing that.
We see a perfect split. If you build lots of
new apartments, the sea class rents fall. If you don't
build a lot of new apartments, those sea class rents
go up. New supply at the top creates relief at
the bottom. Also, he says, wages have been growing faster
than rents for three straight years. More people can afford
apartments today than before. The bottom line, this is what
happens when you actually build housing. Supply works, right, This
is the market sending the signal. This is how you
reduce rent prices. You have more supply. But for some people,
they won't believe this because they have been lied to
for so long by people that they used to be
able to trust or were told that they should be
able to trust. And also they have a higher standard
of living and a higher expectation and the lack of
gratitude for the things that they do have. All right,
if you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too, And you've probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because
it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've
been so impressed with ground News. It's an app, and
it's a website, and it combines news from around the
world in one place, so you can compare coverage and
verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground,
dot news slash Pete. I put the link in the
podcast description too. I started using ground News a few
months ago and more recently chose to work with them
as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how
stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature
shows you which stories get ignored by the left and
the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news
slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen
percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to
get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not
only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News
as they make the media landscape more transparent. It's a
Pete tweet from Trent who says apartments are going up
around Ashville. It wasn't just Helene causing a drop in rent,
but that is a factor. Yes, I agree. I think
that's what I said, because, yeah, when I was there
for you know, the eight years I worked in radio
in Ashville, I covered a lot of these fights over
you know, new apartments going up, and people on the
right and the left. It was like the only bipartisan
thing that they could agree upon, which was we don't
want more apartments. It's like, well, that's how you get
prices to drop, Otherwise they just keep going up and
up and up. Also, I've noticed the NIMBI people in
Ashville screamed the loudest about housing prices, but also scream
the loudest when you try to do something to fix it. Yes, exactly,
that's the problem with the NIMBYs. Not in my backyard.
It's not even just my backyard. It's it's not anywhere.
I don't want these things built anywhere anywhere where I
can see them anywhere that I can that I have
to pass on my way to work or whatever. So
Will ricci Erdella is the managing editor of politics at
Fox News, and he had an interesting right up the
other day that folds into this discussion too. It's whether
or not a family can live on one income right now,
Obviously that income amount is going to matter if the
one breadwinner in the family is just making twenty five
thousand dollars a year, Like, no, that's probably not enough,
you know, But if you're at you know, the median salary,
you're making forty five to fifty five K. If you're
in the middle class, which is, let's say fifty to
one hundred and fifty thousand a year, but that's for
a household. But somewhere in that range, you can actually
do it because inflation adjusted, that's what people made. In fact,
another stat I saw last night was that the middle
class has declined as a percentage of the total population. However,
it's because the the upper class has grown from like
five percent to over thirty three percent, So there are
more people earning more than one hundred and fifty thousand,
and that is adjusted for inflation, and it includes all
of the common expenses. The lower class has also shrunk.
So you have this movement up right now. And I
will say this person, inflation is real, and I have
felt this. We were talking about it last night. Christie
and I, like, we used to go to the grocery store.
We get the same stuff all the time, basically, and
it's usually about it was about four years ago, five
years ago, it is about one hundred to one hundred
and fifty dollars per trip. Now it's pushing two fifty.
So like, thanks Joe Biden for all of that. That's
why they call it the silent tax inflation. Anyway, back
to will Richie Ardella's piece, can a family live on
one income today? Yes? But not today's lifestyle on yesterday's budget.
For example, what size house did you grow up in?
I've talked about this before. What size house did you
grow up in? Right? From fifty years ago, most people
were probably in about a one thousand square foot home,
not a twenty five hundred square foot home as today.
They had one car, probably a used car, not two,
not three, not four new least right, one family phone
just a landline. That was it. No smartphones for every
person in the family. One TV, one in the whole house,
no subscriptions, no cable, just antenna, no microwave, no central
air conditioning, home cooked meals, no dining out, no childcare,
one parent stayed home. Public schools only local sports, no
travel leagues. Right, you played on your school team like
that was it? Those were the options available. You either
made the team or you did not, And that means
you did not play basic health insurance. You would have
to pay for your dental and any extras out of pocket.
You had simple clothes. I would get hand me downs
from my brother or a cousin who was older than me.
Thrift toy stores, sorry, thrift store toys. Thrift store toys. Yeah,
I mean back when I was growing up, like, it
was not like you know the stuff that you get today.
We weren't getting six hundred dollars xboxes for Christmas, you know,
and rare vacations, but little debt. That's how most families
lived for decades, and they raised kids, built communities and
made it work. Now, there's one thing missing in his
analysis here which I always feel the need to throw in,
which is post World War Two, the rest of the
industrialized world was flattened, right, So the United States enjoyed
a boom that we are unlikely to ever see again
because again the rest of the world was flattened. We
did not have many competitors out there. We were it,
so we enjoyed all of that prosperity. And as the
rest of the world rebuilt after World War II, now
we had more competition. Remember the Japanese, they were buying
everything like Oh, they're just bought Rockefeller Center. We're going
to be taken over by Japan and all of this.
So his argument is that the issue is not that
you cannot raise a family on one income. The issue
is that we have inflated middle class to mean upper
middle class. Luxuries, two cars, two iPhones, dining out like
all the time, Amazon Prime and all the other subscriptions, orthodontics,
soccer trips, Disneyland, a home office with Wi Fi like
all of these things. We consider this to be now
middle class. And if you don't get those things, now
you have resentment and envy. And I feel like, well,
I know that the antidote to resentment and envy, which
that's what Marxism is, is gratitude for what you do have.
But for me, being a gen Xer, I came up
and we were not wealthy. We were middle class, and
we came up at a certain middle class standard of living.
And when I talked about it, when I went to
college and I was in a dorm room, it was
cinder block walls, tile floors, you know, a twelve x
twelve room, Like that's it. Now you go to college
and you got like luxury apartment status, and so kids
who come from a quote middle class which is actually
upper middle class luxury lifestyle, then going to college and
maintaining that lifestyle, then getting out of college, now it's
like reality, real world. Yeah, you've got, you know, four
roommates living in some nine hundred square foot house and
you're struggling and it's not so nice, and you don't
have the grande countertops and the stainless steel appliances, like,
you don't have that standard of living that you used
to have. So part of this is expectation and when
you are disabused of this notion that this is how
normal middle class people live when you actually enter the
you know, the real world, that breeds this resentment and
this envy rather than seeing the gratitude that my parents
were able to provide this lifestyle for me when growing up,
but now I have to make it on my own.
Which is another component of this, which is teaching kids resilience,
and we don't do a good job of that. This
is the bulldozer pairing kind of approach, right where you
just clear everything in front of your kids so they
have no challenges or obstacles to overcome. And then the
first time they encounter resistance or an obstacle, they fall
to pieces. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us
make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us
to the people of our past while transcending generations. They
help us process the meaning of life and our stories
are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with
Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in Minhill, North Carolina.
It was the first company to provide this valuable service,
converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows,
videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at
Creative Video will go over all of the details with
you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them
off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in
a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones,
videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays,
or just your family stories all told through images. That's
what your photos and videos are. They are your life
told through the eyes of everyone around you and all
who came before you, and they will tell others to
come who you are. Visit creative video dot com to
do so. Here's z a text from Trollia mctrollerson. Come on,
Trump said inflation was gone and the price of groceries
all came down. You must be lying. No, the inflation
spikes that we saw under Biden have not been erased.
That's the problem. So when the prices come down, they
come down to where that last inflationary spike was and
they're not even coming down. I mean, they've stabilized the
inflation rate. What was the inflation It was something like
two and a half percent or three percent, something like that.
That's the normal rate of inflation. The silent tax driven
by monetary policy and the reckless borrowing that we've been
engaged in for you know, the better part of the
century and the existence of the Federal Reserve and all
of that. But yeah, No, the problem was the massive
infusions of new debt from the the ARP that Democrats
ran through, right, the ARP, but Republicans voted for it
as well. The COVID bailouts, like all of that spending
the build back better, right, all of that spending trillions
of dollars in new spending that we don't have that
drove inflation up by double digits during the Biden administration.
That has not been erased. It has not been erased.
And to Trolley's point, here, Trolley the troll like, that's
to their point. Trump and the Republicans are going to
get wiped out in the midterms if they cannot address
these economic realities, at the very least, the perception that
things have not gotten better, right, They got to get
prices down, Rodney says Pete. All of this can be
wrapped up into one sentence, living outside your means, living
beyond your means. Yeah, you can't work part time at
Starbucks and live at Lake Norman. But today's young crowd
wants that, and they want others to subsidize it so
they can do it right. It's an unrealistic expectation that
people have about the amount of work that they have
to put in in order to realize the benefits and
the amount of time it takes. We are an instant
gratification society. Now that that's part of the expectation problem too.
Seven oh four Numbers says, interesting how even in the
same family, some children have a sense of entitlement and
others do not. Personality must play a part, that said,
I think public education instills a sense of entitlement. Well yeah,
and they are told, you know that the reason why
they are where they are is because somebody else put
them there or is keeping them there. That's part of
this as well. This gets to this lack of gratitude.
It gets to the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, this TIV
personality trait, and when you start seeing yourself as victimized,
it becomes almost impossible to ever break out of that.
People are not being taught that any obstacle is there
for you to overcome. They're being taught that if there's
an obstacle, that's somebody more powerful than you put it
there to prevent you from succeeding, rather than saying, oh,
here's an obstacle, I'll find a way over it, around it,
or through it. Will Richie Rodella, managing editor of Politics
at Fox News, real quick, just to finish his piece
up here before the end of the hour. In nineteen
sixty one, income worked because expectations were lower, families were
more self reliant, and debt was not a lifestyle. You
want one income, you can probably do it, but you
have to live like the people who actually did it.
Not poorer, just simpler and more deliberate. The people of
the past did not have a choice, but you do also,
I would add to that, and that's the conclusion of
his piece there. But I would also add that the
people who were living that lifestyle believed that they were
better off than their parents before them, because they were
in many cases the material goods that they had, that
standard of living, it was better. And thank you. Mark
email to Pete at the petecleanershow dot com. It's bananas, Pete.
That's the acronym build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. They're
called bananas. You have more control over what your neighbor
does with his land then you do with your own.
Not that you own any land really, it's all loaned
by govcoke. They let you rent it. In this case
they call it property taxes. Right, and Tom says, Pete,
you forgot to d walking to school in the winter
in three feet of snow uphill both ways, right with
new and Tom with newspaper wrapped around your feed for shoes.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
without your support and the support of the businesses that
advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support
them too and tell them you heard it here. You
can also become a patron at my patreon page or
go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much
for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.